Contraception
May. 12th, 2002 09:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynAbout a week ago, Prester Scott wrote about the morality, or lack thereof, of contraception in a Christian context. In response, I posited that, historically, Christianity condemned contraception because, for a variety of reasons, uncontrolled population growth was a positive good. Given that the situation between today and Biblical times -- or even a hundred years ago -- has changed radically on this front, one can argue that the moral ruling on this subject could change accordingly.
This morning, I was thinking about it from the other end: let's say contraception is immoral -- the termination of a potential human life -- regardless of circumstances. G-d wants us "to be fruitful and multiply" and this axiom applies without limitation. It follows that contraception isn't just wrong for me, but wrong for anyone, anywhere. Immorality is bad; the world would be better off if no one committed any immoral acts.
Following this, I'm trying to imagine what the world would be like if no one used birth control. Since I'm imagining a perfectly moral world (by Christian standards), I can further posit that sex only occurs between married couples
Estimated current world population is 6.2 billion. About half of those are women: 3.1 billion. It's hard to estimate how many of those women are of child-bearing age; about 1/3 of the female population in the US is between the age of 15 and 39. In Algeria, that figure is closer to half. I'll be conservative and say 1/3, and round down: 1 billion fertile women. (The preceding statitistics were gleaned from various parts of the US Census Bureau's web page. The following guesses I extrapolated in their entirety). Let's say that, of those women, 30% are unmarried, for whatever reason (too young, choosing a life of abstinence, etc. This is a purely out-of-the-air estimate, take with a big ol' lump of salt). That leaves me with 700 million childbearing-women. I'll assume that, absent the use of any form of birth control, these women have one child every two years. (This factors in the effect of breastfeeding, which makes women less likely to conceive while they are nursing. Or maybe it make th zygote less likely to attach to the uterine wall. I don't remember the specifics of the biology involved).
That's 350 million babies a year. Now I need some mortality statistics -- the mortality rate in the US is 9 per 1000, let's just double it for the world, that'd be 18 per thousand. At the end of a year, we'd have 6.55 billion people, of whom about 118 million would die. Net growth puts us at 6.432 after one year. Wold population growth rate would then be about 3.75% per year. (The real-world estimated growth rate is 1.25%.)
That would give us the world's population doubling approximately (very approximately) every twenty years. (Wow, I can remember when a teacher told me it already was! According to a 1998 Census Bureau report, the actual world population in 2050 is estimated at 9.3 billion, suggesting a doubling rate of closer to once per century. For the 20th century, world population doubled about once every 50 years.)
So, in 2022 we'd have 12.4 billion people. In 2042, 24.8. In 2062, 49.6. In 2082, 99.2. In 2102, almost 200 billion.
Wow.
I wonder if science could keep up? Improvements in agricultural techniques have allowed us to continue to (mostly) feed our current ever-growing population. But to feed 32 times as many people as we have now, we'd need to improve a lot faster than we have so far. If we put all our resources to it, could we? The earth has 197 million square miles of land. We'd have about 1000 people per every square mile of the earth...and mind you, a lot of that is in places like Siberia. Suburbia would have to go. We'd need to colonize the seas, if not other planets. Unless FTL were invented, colonizing another solar system would be even more challenging, since any colony ship would need to accomodate the ship's population growth rate over the course of the journey.
I wonder if we could make it work?
If Earth remained the only habitat for humanity...I can't imagine that I would like it by then. By 2200, there'd be over 6 trillion people. Trillion! Wow!
One thing's for sure -- you'd definitely have to posit scientific advances as not merely a good, but an absolute necessity. Either that, or go the othe way and say that famine, disease, and death are all positive goods ... because without huge technological changes, they'd be inevitable with that kind of population growth.
This morning, I was thinking about it from the other end: let's say contraception is immoral -- the termination of a potential human life -- regardless of circumstances. G-d wants us "to be fruitful and multiply" and this axiom applies without limitation. It follows that contraception isn't just wrong for me, but wrong for anyone, anywhere. Immorality is bad; the world would be better off if no one committed any immoral acts.
Following this, I'm trying to imagine what the world would be like if no one used birth control. Since I'm imagining a perfectly moral world (by Christian standards), I can further posit that sex only occurs between married couples
Estimated current world population is 6.2 billion. About half of those are women: 3.1 billion. It's hard to estimate how many of those women are of child-bearing age; about 1/3 of the female population in the US is between the age of 15 and 39. In Algeria, that figure is closer to half. I'll be conservative and say 1/3, and round down: 1 billion fertile women. (The preceding statitistics were gleaned from various parts of the US Census Bureau's web page. The following guesses I extrapolated in their entirety). Let's say that, of those women, 30% are unmarried, for whatever reason (too young, choosing a life of abstinence, etc. This is a purely out-of-the-air estimate, take with a big ol' lump of salt). That leaves me with 700 million childbearing-women. I'll assume that, absent the use of any form of birth control, these women have one child every two years. (This factors in the effect of breastfeeding, which makes women less likely to conceive while they are nursing. Or maybe it make th zygote less likely to attach to the uterine wall. I don't remember the specifics of the biology involved).
That's 350 million babies a year. Now I need some mortality statistics -- the mortality rate in the US is 9 per 1000, let's just double it for the world, that'd be 18 per thousand. At the end of a year, we'd have 6.55 billion people, of whom about 118 million would die. Net growth puts us at 6.432 after one year. Wold population growth rate would then be about 3.75% per year. (The real-world estimated growth rate is 1.25%.)
That would give us the world's population doubling approximately (very approximately) every twenty years. (Wow, I can remember when a teacher told me it already was! According to a 1998 Census Bureau report, the actual world population in 2050 is estimated at 9.3 billion, suggesting a doubling rate of closer to once per century. For the 20th century, world population doubled about once every 50 years.)
So, in 2022 we'd have 12.4 billion people. In 2042, 24.8. In 2062, 49.6. In 2082, 99.2. In 2102, almost 200 billion.
Wow.
I wonder if science could keep up? Improvements in agricultural techniques have allowed us to continue to (mostly) feed our current ever-growing population. But to feed 32 times as many people as we have now, we'd need to improve a lot faster than we have so far. If we put all our resources to it, could we? The earth has 197 million square miles of land. We'd have about 1000 people per every square mile of the earth...and mind you, a lot of that is in places like Siberia. Suburbia would have to go. We'd need to colonize the seas, if not other planets. Unless FTL were invented, colonizing another solar system would be even more challenging, since any colony ship would need to accomodate the ship's population growth rate over the course of the journey.
I wonder if we could make it work?
If Earth remained the only habitat for humanity...I can't imagine that I would like it by then. By 2200, there'd be over 6 trillion people. Trillion! Wow!
One thing's for sure -- you'd definitely have to posit scientific advances as not merely a good, but an absolute necessity. Either that, or go the othe way and say that famine, disease, and death are all positive goods ... because without huge technological changes, they'd be inevitable with that kind of population growth.
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no subject
Date: 2002-05-12 09:27 am (UTC)We mostly-well-educated, mostly-affluent, liberal-democrat Westerners can do the above calculations and come up with ideas like Zero Population Growth. On the face of it, it doesn't sound like a terrible idea.
But will the people of Latin America do the same? of Africa? of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia? Unlikely.
They are mostly not educated or affluent. Their economic opportunities are considerably limited by our standards. Western-owned businesses control most of the economy of the world. Western taxpayers prop up the rest of the world through foreign aid and investment.
What's going to happen as our birthrates decline and theirs rise? Who's going to pay the bills? And there is no guarantee that the social changes required to keep the system going will happen without bloody revolution.
The other alternative, of course, is even worse: coerce/defraud the Third World into lowering its birth rate by forcing contraception and abortion on them (usually accompanied by sexual license). This is, in fact, the United Nations plan -- and a racist's wet dream, I might add.
So what's a white American Christian boy like me to do to try to stave off the collapse of Western Civilization?
Having a bunch of kids couldn't hurt.
Yes, there may be natural consequences (famine, plague, etc.) down the line, but none of us has much, if any, control over that.
I don't have complete confidence in the foregoing reasoning, but... well, what do you think?
no subject
Date: 2002-05-12 11:08 am (UTC)The planet of S'uthlam had a population problem but it was mandated by their religion. See, the Messiah's second coming meant that he had to be born, so if they stopped having kids, the Messiah would never be born. Turn that around and their reasoning goes, the more kids they have, the better the chance that in a generation will be born the Messiah.
no subject
Date: 2002-05-12 12:08 pm (UTC)Incidentally, I found Tuf's "solution" to the S'uthlam overpopulation problem utterly abhorrent. Enforced sterilization of 99.9% of the population would not only rob that portion of their spiritual beliefs, but place an enormous and inhuman burden on the remaining .1% *shudder*. It would have been kinder to make conceiving extremely difficult and rare--but still possible--for everyone. But that's another question entirely, really.