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.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

People should be using birth control because:

-There are large swaths of the world that already have too many people for the resources available.

-Infrastructure tends to not keep pace with population.

-To clarify the above, increasing population tends to strain food/water supplies, medical services, and personal economy.

-Not everyone is fit to be a parent.

Non-stupid people know these things.

Boru

1) And none of those areas include people who use birth control.
2) Work faster, then.
3) I'm not convinced that's true.
4) That never stopped anyone before.

1. Which is exactly the problem, numbnuts.
2. Who are you asking to work faster?
3. Understandable. You’re an idiot.
4. Maybe it should.

Boru

[Ahriman]

1) And none of those areas include people who use birth control.
2) Work faster, then.
3) I'm not convinced that's true.
4) That never stopped anyone before.

1. Which is exactly the problem, numbnuts.
2. Who are you asking to work faster?
3. Understandable. You’re an idiot.
4. Maybe it should.

Boru

I'm pretty sure none of those people living in those areas even want to use birth control.

[Pat Mustard]

Um.......... not quite right. Fertility is the ability to create viable gametes and conceive. I think you mean birth rate.

I think we’re both right here. Yes, abortion reduces the birth rate. It also reduces the fertility rate, which is the number of live births per woman. That’s how the UN, demographers, and others (probably sociologists, too!) who study this define it.

Again, unless you're a believer of the great replacement nonsense, why ever would you open this thread?

[Rev. Rye]

Having smaller families doesn't make humans obsolete unless if falls below replacement rate globally for generations. Our robot overlords are much more likely to render us obsolete.

Why would it even need to get to that point? That's like saying, "well, my kitchen is on fire, but I won't do anything about it until the whole house is on fire". And in this context, "having smaller families" just means, having families without children.

Strange, considering that when I wrote about it yesterday, when I mentioned "Smaller families," it wasn't just "no children." You could still have children with smaller families. There'd just be fewer kids (I didn't have a cutoff threshold in mind, but thinking about that, I guess three would have been a good maximum for what constitutes a "smaller family.")

[Ahriman]

Why would it even need to get to that point? That's like saying, "well, my kitchen is on fire, but I won't do anything about it until the whole house is on fire". And in this context, "having smaller families" just means, having families without children.

Strange, considering that when I wrote about it yesterday, when I mentioned "Smaller families," it wasn't just "no children." You could still have children with smaller families. There'd just be fewer kids (I didn't have a cutoff threshold in mind, but thinking about that, I guess three would have been a good maximum for what constitutes a "smaller family.")

And you're willing to enfore that quota, if need be?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

1. Which is exactly the problem, numbnuts.
2. Who are you asking to work faster?
3. Understandable. You’re an idiot.
4. Maybe it should.

Boru

I'm pretty sure none of those people living in those areas even want to use birth control.

The woman who is heavily pregnant with her eighth child in nine years might be interested in it.

Boru

[arewethereyet]

I am not looking to Ahriman for input on multiple pregnancies. I can't imagine anyone less qualified to speak on the subject.

[Rev. Rye]

And, hell, when I gave my three-child cutoff, it wasn't even part of any policy recommendation. It was just an arbitrary cutoff for what might constitute a "smaller family." At least as opposed to the larger families that would have been more common in the Pre-Industrial Era. In, say, the 18th Century, mothers usually had something like 5-8 children, maybe more. This was because of factors like high childhood mortality rates, and the need for a larger supply of cheap farm labour, two factors that are moot for most people these days.


And, no, I do not think enforcing a hard limit on how many kids people should have is a good idea. Even casting the morality of the idea aside, it doesn't work out as well as one thinks. Educational campaigns encouraging families to plan for smaller families would be a better idea, and, frankly, even that's not even needed these days. Especially when you consider the cost in raising children and juxtapose that with how financially strapped many people of childbearing age are these days.

[arewethereyet]

I grew up in an area where 8, 10, 12, 14 kids weren't unusual. And not just farm families.

A good friend has older siblings she barely knows there were so many years between them and the last three, of which she was a part.

Her dad was a small town doctor. Her mother joked that she got pregnant every time he was able to actually stay home all night. There were ten of them.

Five to eight was the norm.