Abortion and Population

[SimpleCaveman]

Hello Rev. Rye,

Is there a good reason it should just go on unimpeded? Because it just gets more and more impractical with every advance in society and medicine. …

But we don't live in those days anymore. Most of us don't live on farms that need a bunch of people to sustain it. These days, dying young is the exception rather than the rule. So any practical reason we had for having them is pretty much moot.

And these days, many people of child-bearing age barely even make enough money to sustain themselves, let alone a child.

Very interesting question. I can think of a number of reasons for population growth to be good. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that unimpeded growth is good.

Here are my initial thoughts

• A declining population isn’t good, just from a practical standpoint. Without new people, lots of business start to shut down. Baby products is an obvious one, but also schools, colleges and universities. Then, we don’t have enough people in the workforce. (We already are experiencing that) We don’t have enough trade workers to keep things running, doctors, lawyers (okay, less of them is fine), teachers, admin assistants, etc. People will consolidate and make do. Maybe we’ll eventually reset at a certain level, but we could also go out with a whimper.
  
• If we want to achieve great things, then we need new people, new ideas, new energy. I want us to go to the moon, Mars and beyond. To do that we need to have people to settle those places. We also need new people to invent new things. We have problems, like people not having enough to sustain themselves. New people with new ideas can help with that.
  

A steady population could be good, it seems. Unfortunately, our current path isn’t going this way.

Can you think of any other reasons?