Thoughts on population control

[GothAnneGeddes]

I thought I'd start a thread on this after reading this BBC piece: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15368276

I have issues with some of the rhetoric stated there. Why is it when population is discussed, the fact that the West with its lower birth rates still consumes more resources, is rarely discussed?

Why with all the scaremongering about birth rates is it not stated that with increased industrialisation, better health care & contraception, women are better able to space their pregnancies and birth rates will fall?

There is also the issue of hideous crimes being perpetuated against women in the name of population control, is this just another example of the patriarchy interfering in women's bodies?

Would be very interested in your thoughts?

TRTM - I am not sure how tailing off benefits to large families would work. I guess it would definately tend to be linked to the number of children the woman has. Otherwise it would penalise women if their partner has other kids. Anyway would penalise children to live in poverty and without basic needs just because they are in a family of 3 or more.

So I don't think it's a go-er. I guess the other alternative if a country wants to cut population growth is incentives for sterilisation or long term contraceptive use (as they have done in India). Somewhat less coercive than the Chinese approach. Don't think its necessary in the UK though.

kickass - because the Catholic religion still holds that contraception is wrong.

Looking at the China approach, I'm not qualified to comment on the human rights issues, but I was there a few months ago and was talking to a local woman. I specifically asked about the 'one child' policy, and she was very much in favour of it. I got the feeling that it was seen as 'unChinese' to have more children than you were allowed. The current law is that, yes, basically a couple is only allowed one child. But if both parents are themselves singletons, they are allowed to have two. Also, if a rural couple's first child is a girl, they are allowed to have another child. The penalty for having more children is a fine - this means that wealthier families can have more children if they wish, but against the background of it being 'unChinese' to have more, this doesn't often happen. She accepted that in some areas forced sterilisations/abortions were still happening, but that the central government was trying to put an end to this.

wouldnt the number of children in the household be a fairer way of determining who gets the benefits rather than saying the benefits go with the woman?

TBH i think the £25k cap on benefits will largely have this effect anyway so it is limiting family size by stealth.

i think it is a pity that population growth is generally seen as someone else's problem.

Is population growth aka People Dying Less Often In Infancy really such a problem? When it comes to resources is it not a matter unfair allocation, rather then not having enough to go round?

Can we not think of which kinds of people state that overpopulation is such a pressing issue and why it suits them to say that?

I think the only way is to make it seem desirable, as in more education, etc. I can't see any form of law working...what if benefits did trail off after 2 and the second pregnancy turns out to be a multiple birth? What if a family doesn't require benefits and so has 3 or 4 children and then one parent fecks off or dies. or loses their job?

It's hard, if not impossible, to draw a hard and fast line on something that is so deeply personal.

GAG - at the moment it is unfair allocation. but surely we are heading towards not enough to go around?

FY - insurance if you want to have more. DP & i will limit the number of children we have because of population growth (1 or 2), so i dont want to subsidise anyone else doing it. that defeats the point of my sacrifice.

It's hard sometimes to really grasp it...my state only has 66 people per square mile, apparently.

There are open spaces everywhere I look, and I've always lived in the MidWest. So I know the world is overpopulated but I don't really feel it IYSWIM.

It's a bit like global warming - if it's -25C outside, it's hard to believe it's really happening.

re: religion - if you look at birth rates in Westernised countries, then even Catholics (whether the majority of the country, or individual families) are having fewer children. Which would imply that they DO use birth control even if the Pope doesn't approve it. So, really, where there are still high birth rates, it's not just because of the religion, but social beliefs as well.

It's interesting that China appears to have won the war on thinking - that people want to stick to one, maybe two, children, that that's seen as desirable. My parents were a young couple when the pill became far more common. They definitely have the idea that two children is the 'right' amount. In reality the 'right' amount will vary with every family, but we do hold ideas of what is 'normal' or 'right'. It is often difficult to unpick these ideas to see if they're logical or not.

www.chennaiiq.com/world/countries_order_by_density.asp

for population density - the UK is in the top 50, along with places like Jamaica, Vietnam & the Netherlands - in fact, it's one of the few countries in the top 50 where people expect to own their own house. It's no wonder that house prices are so high.

The impact of high house prices is massive on everyday life - incomes required, both parents working full time or more, lack of money for other important things, stress etc. I find it really hard to describe what the UK is like wrt housing & crowding without sounding ridiculous. It really puts me off the idea of returning to the UK - it's a pretty big shock every time we return, just how busy everywhere is.

So, birth rate in the the UK are a big issues, and one that politicians are ignoring.

That is strange...I suppose having never been to the UK and reading James Herriot obsessively as a child, I picture farms :)

FY - my office is part of a development next to farmland...if i look out the window right now, i see fields, trees & cows.

i think if you live in the west, its not so much the local resources you are using, its all the resources we pull in from all over the world

Yes, for sure. :) I just mean that it feels differently to me, who grew up here than someone who grew up here , for instance.

kickass that article has some interesting insights.

"To solve the testosterone problem, researchers in the mid-2000s introduced progestogen, another synthetic sex hormone also found in female birth control, into the mix. The resulting male birth control method combined testosterone implants to inhibit sperm production and regular progestogen injections to counteract the unwanted side effects in 80 to 90 percent of male trial participants [source: Amory, Page and Bremner]. But since pharmaceutical companies doubted men would go to such lengths for birth control, they pulled the plug on funding [source: Goodman]."

Right... so it's fine for women to go to "such lengths"!

And I love this - examples of ideas for non-oral male birth control:

Radio controlled implant to block sperm flow with a click of a button.
Plugs that form sperm blockades in the vas deferens.
Testicular ultrasounds to zap sperm production for six months.
Heat treatments to induce temporary sterilization.
Rods filled with the hormone etonogestrel implanted into the arm.

Love how they are all a bit "gadgety" whereas ours tend to be quite medicalised.

Reading the conversation with interest. Thought I'd update on the whole religion thing Pope advocates spacing children responsibly by using NFP which has had huge and more importantly actually works reliably leaps forward since the research done in the 1980s. I don't want to get into a whole contraception versus family planning moral conversation but I thought I'd say this as I find that not many folk know that in fact Catholics can plan their families, and are advised to do so responsibly, with a degree of accuracy these days and that might contribute to the reference to lowering birth rates in predominantly Catholic countries.

GothAnneGeddes

I did watch the BBC clips in the end, i thought they were quite balanced and interesting and covered a lot of angles - rural-urban migration, consumption levels, aging populations. It wasn't just 'population panic' rhetoric.

All the recent publicity about demographics is because of hitting the 7 billion mark. Yes, babies not dying in infancy is definitely a good thing. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't matter whether population stabilises at 6 bn, 9bn, 16 bn(!) or more - and how that can be done in a way that respects human rights and is good for women.

In 1800 around the time when Malthus was worrying about population there were 1 billion people on the planet. It took 100 years to add the next billion - it has taken just a dozen years to add the last billion (I remember all the similar publicity around the 6 billionth baby, which was in 1999..).

Population growth is a big deal, I don't think we can just shrug it off as a non-issue.

Interestingly since this thread, the world population has gone up almost another billion. In that the time we have wiped out more species, chopped down more rainforest and just generally destroyed more.

People need to stop having more children. People that want to be sterilised, should be able to get it free, after all no one blinks an eye at fertility but the opposite is frowned on.

There is still no answer to how you dissuade people from having none or just one child. As talk is growing more favourable towards a universal basic income which, with it being universal, would also apply to children receiving one. Would that encourage people to have more children as the money side would not be as much of a problem then.

It seems clear that the global liberation of women and girls would solve this problem.

When girls and women are free to choose how they live their lives very few will choose a large family and those who do needn't be guilt tripped about it in a world where it is a genuine choice and not imposed by lack of access to contraception and freedom from sexual coercion.

People that strongly feel that the world is overpopulated, often think that wars and natural disasters are their friends in seeking to have a smaller population, whereas the fact is that wars and natural disasters are always followed by a much higher birth rate.

controlling fertility is seen as a woman's job

Well, even in a perfect society, if you really didn’t want to get pregnant, would you rely on your partnet taking a pill? Or would you do it yourself?

This is totally a minefield. Because yes, if you increase standard of living and industrialisation, you have fewer people.

But - those fewer people do more environmental damage than the many people who were there before. In fact you end up with fewer people who believe they need a lot to survive and have a consumption mindset.

I think the question is, is there some sweet spot where people feel they have enough wealt to have fewer children, while also living a fairly sustainable lifestyle?

I think it's possible - because I think it's not so much about wealth as it is about security and stability. But it's not so easy to achieve that.

Yes, a part of the problem is rampant consumerism and we really need to revaluate what is and isn't important in life. Even so, exponential human growth is not a great thing for the planet as a whole as it is a finite resource.

Missing the 800 lb gorilla in the room: Who controls the decision to have children?

When it's women, because they have income and enough social standing to refuse sex and are able to have other interests through education and work, plus when contraception and abortion are easily available, then births fall to approximately replacement levels. Since we're a few billion people over the carrying capacity of the planet, that's probably not enough, but, still, it's indicative of how solvable the problem is if women can control their own lives.

But, huge disadvantage (/sarcasm), it means you have to give up on patriarchy. You lose your servicebot class!

Alternatively, you can keep the patriarchy and (continue to) treat women like some sort of domestic cattle, and then you get all the appalling population control abuses of the Chinese system, or the sometimes milder abuses elsewhere.

That it's even framed as a problem, when putting women in control of their own lives has barely been tried, tells you which side of that divide the reporting comes from.

With you 100% quixote9.

When women are free, contraception is free (including abortion) and sexual coercion is eliminated birth rates drop. Only a handful of women would freely choose larger family size which is balanced by those who choose to be child free.

I don’t think that Western consumer levels and environmental destruction need to be related to the liberation of women to choose their own lives.

It seems illogical to me to suggest that if I had fewer shopping opportunities I would therefore want more children...

^Of course we are going to oppose it [contraception]," Father Jerome Secillano, of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines, tells me by video call.
"It is part of mandate not to allow these so-called reproductive pills…^

In an article today, about the effect the pandemic had had on pregnancy rates in the Phillipines, where the government had been working hard to reduced poverty by reducing birth rates.

Covid-19: The Philippines and its lockdown baby boom https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-55299912