It was revealed that the woman, Nadya Suleman, who recently had octuplets by IVF already previously had 6 children (also conceived by IVF). There is some public outrage. I find this comment irksome, though:
“A number of commentators are saying a woman with six kids should not be allowed medical treatment to have additional ones, and I think, at a common sense level, that makes good sense,” Mr. Tipton said. “However, to make that work, that means someone is going to start deciding for other people how, when and why they can have children. That’s a very big step and one that we might not be prepared to take.”
Well, “someone” damn well should decide! In my view she should be compulsorily sterilized! At the very least, she should not receive any government (taxpayers’) assistance with her family, as this only encourages others. People who chose to have large numbers of children are selfish as this adds to the competition for resources amongst an already too-large population.
(I found a photo of her during her pregnancy – seriously scary! Her abdomen looks ready to explode! I shudder at the damage 14 pregnancies have done to her body.)
“Green GP refuses to help women have large families”, Times Online, 1/2. “Dr. Pippa Hayes, a Devon GP, has a conscientious objection. She believes couples should restrict their families to two children – and says she would not help to provide fertility treatment for women who want to have exceptionally large families.” Someone with the right mindset and a sense of social responsibility! In the same issue, a U.K. environmentalist, Jonathon Porritt, said that there should be incentives to have no more than two children, and those who chose to have more are irresponsible (“Two children should be limit, says green guru”). Yes, this is social engineering, but if you want a livable society, such engineering is necessary! Making the choice to have a large family should become regarded as socially unacceptable.
“One last chance to save mankind”, 23/1, New Scientist. Environmentalist James Lovelock is critical of the government attempts at being green (which I share the same cynicism for):
Not a hope in hell. Most of the “green” stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It’s not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it’ll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning. I am not against renewable energy, but to spoil all the decent countryside in the UK with wind farms is driving me mad. It’s absolutely unnecessary, and it takes 2500 square kilometres to produce a gigawatt - that’s an awful lot of countryside.
He believes that humans will eventually learn to regulate their behavior, but things will get very unpleasant before that:
I’m an optimistic pessimist. I think it’s wrong to assume we’ll survive 2°C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4°C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It’s happening again.
“Tehran’s Health Patrol”, TIME magazine, 29/1. Despite the bad press Iran gets, it seems to be doing something right with health care, including enabling women access to family planning. In this regard, Iran is more socially progressive than many of its neighbors!
Women Health Volunteers arose out of a mix of necessity and pragmatism as well as a fundamental belief, expressed by Malek-Afzali, that “women are the axis of health development and health is the axis of sustainable development.”
[…]
Perhaps the program’s most crucial success was to introduce family-planning to revolutionary Tehran, an effort that has brought down the birthrate per female, from six children to two, with the full support of religious leaders. They at first urged Iranians to boost the ranks of the “soldiers of Islam” but then promoted contraception to stop the alarming growth in population. The lower birthrate is critical to a nation like Iran as its economy evolves. About 7,000 women went door-to-door in Tehran and talked to mothers about the benefits of smaller families, informed them of the different types of birth control and handed out condoms and pills. “I must give credit to Iran’s religious leaders for a pragmatic and creative approach to family-planning,” says Dr. Mohamed Abdel-Ahad, an Egyptian who is head of the United Nations Population Fund in Iran.
“Water – another global ‘crisis’?”, BBC News, 2/2. Population growth is briefly mentioned as a factor in worldwide water shortages, but not the solution of reducing such growth!
A more populated world – and there could be another 2.5 billion people on the planet by 2050 – is likely to be a thirstier world. Those extra people will need feeding; and as agriculture accounts for about 70% of water use around the world, extra consumption for growing food is likely to reduce the amount available for those basic needs of drinking, cooking and washing.
“Planetary demographics and space colonization”, The Space Review, 2/2. There is a belief amongst some spaceflight enthusiasts that the overpopulation problem on Earth can be solved by sending off the excess people onto space colonies or other worlds. This is a foolish fantasy as:
- The development of sustainable space colonies could be centuries away – I can’t see it happening this century at least, unless there is some radical technological breakthrough.
- If the negative attitude towards regulating populations (i.e. “social engineering”) doesn’t change, then the off-world colonies will eventually face the same problems as on Earth – depletion of resources from overpopulation. So colonization is only sending the problem somewhere else (i.e. delaying the inevitable).
The very real problems of environmental degradation from overpopulation need to be solved this century if we want a still-habitable planet by its end.
