Abortion and Population

[Thumpalumpacus]

Yes, I would argue that abortion could contribute to reducing net population growth. It clearly and by definition reduces the number of live births. If there are not other factors, then population growth would be reduced.

However, I was not arguing that abortion reduces net population growth. I tried to summarize my point in the last line.

Right, and it appears neither of us share that @Ahriman's worries regarding abortion leading to extinction. It's just the way you worded yourself at first that pretty much gave the wrong impression.

Let me try to lay it out better than I did before. My apologies if it's still not clear.

People often argue for abortion, in part, because of our population levels. “We don’t need the people. We have too many people." This has been a rally cry for many years. My point is that the population levels are not out of control. The fearmongering was that we would run out of resources and even space (I think of a Star Trek episode).

I strongly disagree with this. Overpopulation is at the root of several problems that individually threaten us -- the most obvious being accelerated global warming, but there are other. We also threaten the biodiversity of the Earth, which indirectly harms us too. Yes, I've read that the Earth could support several billion more humans, but the ecological cost would be enormous.

As for resources, it's not a matter of "running out of resources" (except arable land), it's a matter of what extracting those resources does to the environment.

Even if the population levels out right now, the damage we do to our environment will be ongoing and cumulative.

On the contrary, population decline is a real thing that many countries are experiencing now. An article a year ago in Scientific American stated that the US present fertility rate is about 1.7, below the replacement rate. Which, by definition, means that our population will decline. As people start dying, there will not be new people to replace them. As people start aging, there will not be new workers to replace them.

This completely ignores the fact that America draws about 1.5 million per year.

One thing I learnt in anthropology was the inverse relationship between per-capita income and birth rate.

In an article published in Nature, Myrskylä et al. pointed out that "unprecedented increases" in social and economic development in the 20th century had been accompanied by considerable declines in population growth rates and fertility. This negative association between human fertility and socio-economic development has been "one of the most solidly established and generally accepted empirical regularities in the social sciences".[40] The researchers used cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses to examine the relationship between total fertility rate (TFR) and the human development index (HDI).

Read about that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and...%20country. The topic is considerably more complex than is being presented here. But from this, it seems to me that a more equitable distribution of wealth in this world could help be a factor in reducing population without taking obnoxious steps.

That quote seemed the best one to start from. Obviously not. I should have left abortion out of the thread title, too. I only included it because that was part of the original thread.

Pax et bonum

Yeah, those are both decisions that could be questioned.