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IS HUMAN REPRODUCTION JUSTIFIABLE?
By John J. Moelaert
Nothing in the world is more
precious and more innocent than a baby. Every second five children
are born and two people die for a net gain of three per second.
This translates into a net gain of 260,000 people per day or
a global increase of 95 million additional people per year (Three
times the total population of Canada) The current world population
is estimated at 6.2 billion, double what it was only 38 years
ago. According to a United Nations report issued November 7,
2001, this figure will swell by about 50 per cent to 9.2 billion
by 2050.
The biggest population increases
occur in the poorest countries and as resources dwindle, poverty,
hunger and other forms of misery increase proportionately thus
providing optimum conditions for civil unrest and terrorism.
In the so-called developed nations populations are increasing
only marginally, but consumption and pollution are at least twenty
times the rates of the Third World. No wonder the UN report predicts
the world is headed for global disaster. Despite this, several
religions, some governments and especially business encourage
people to have large families. Religions such as the Catholic
and Mormon churches see children as an effective means to boost
membership. Governments equate children with future taxpayers
and businesses see children as an effective means to expand their
customer-base and thus increase profits. All three refuse to
recognize the cause-and-effect principle between population growth
on the one hand and pollution, habitat destruction and resource
depletion on the other.
A recent Cornwell University
study predicts "an apocalyptic worldwide scene of absolute
misery, poverty, disease and starvation" if current population
trends continue. The study by ecologist David Pimental doesn't
call for merely stablizing the global population, but reducing
it by two-thirds. He warns if the world's population isn't reduced
to about two billion within 100 years Canadians and Americans
will see their standard of living decline to slightly better
than China's today.
Continued population growth will irrevocably lead to total social
and environmental collapse. It is merely an academic question--and
an irrelevant one at that--whether this will happen in 20, 50
or 100 years, but happen it will. To get some idea of the devastating
conequences of what lies ahead, try to imagine a world where
demand outstrips the supply of oil. This alone will collapse
economies, cripple transportation and inevitably lead to armed
conflict to get to remaining oil reserves. Prices for dwindling
oil supplies will skyrocket. Other energy resources such as wind,
solar, nuclear, coal, methane and fuel cells could replace no
more than a fraction of oil as an energy source. Cars, trucks,
buses, trains, planes, ships all would grind to a halt except
for some emergency forms of transportation. Food supplies could
no longer be transported to stores; most hotels, restaurants
and shops would stand largely empty and military defence would
be critically compromised. Forecasts by geologists predict such
acute oil shortages will happen inside the next twenty to forty
years.
It is important to understand
that while the world population continues to grow, the earth
and its finite resources do not. Let me illustrate this point
with a personal experience: on a recent flight I was reminded
by the cities below of my job many years ago as a lab technician
in a bacteriology laboratory. There we would put minute quantities
of milk or water samples in sterile Petri dishes with a thin
layer of a nutrient base called agar. If the samples contained
harmful bacteria, then after one or two days in the incubator
there would be black spots, i.e. colonies, on the agar. However,
if perchance a Petri dish was left too long in the incubator,
the whole agar base was black, indicating the bacteria had multiplied
and exhausted the entire nutrient base. In the end of this process
the bacteria perished in their own waste products. This is analogous
to global human expansion and the ultimate fate will be no different,
i.e. resources will be depleted and the human race along with
many other life forms will be forced into extinction by the effects
of massive pollution and mutated microbes that will be completely
resistant to all antibiotics. We are perilously close to this
microbial threat right now as the mutation process intensifies
and antibiotics are overused and becoming less and less effective.
At present Mother Earth is already convulsing under the strain
of global pollution and habitat destruction. Weather patterns
are changing significantly throughout the world, the oceans vomit
tons of waste, including medical debris, onto once-pristine beaches.
Some of today's environmental situations are so incredible that
few could have imagined them a single generation ago. Who, for
example, could have foreseen that today vast quantities of waste
are shipped from the US to the Philippines where the poor and
desperate sift through the disposable diapers and other filth
in search of something useful?
Who could have believed a few decades ago that people would buy
water in stores and pay more for it than for gasoline?
The current popular term "sustainable
development" shows that few people (and virtually none in
government and business) understand that an expanding economy
and a healthy environment are mutually exclusive. The world economy
is based on waste and driven by greed. The claim that we can
have a high standard of living, unlimited population growth and
a healthy environment is a deadly dream.
The mushrooming world population
and the resulting deteriorating conditions raise a critical question
that is widely ignored and rarely addressed: is this world fit
to be born into? Consider the facts: every day some 34,000 children
die for a lack of basic food and medicine that could be provided
for as little as one dollar a day per child. Countless thousands
are subjected to child labour, working ten, twelve hours a day,
some chained to the looms they make carpets on. Most are paid
less than ten dollars a month. Thousands spend all day on garbage
dumps in search of anything edible or useful. Homeless children
live and die on the street. Some are hunted by police in places
such as Brazil and shot dead.
Other children, wherever they live, face a world of violence,
sexual abuse, hunger, disease, unemployment, poverty and disintegrating
families. Even in the richest country in the world, the United
States, human suffering is widespread: At least 18 million children
are undernourished, three million people are homeless and some
40 million have no medical insurance.
See: http://members.shaw.ca/eye-openers/islifeworthliving.htm
If producing children were as difficult as raising them, the
human race would have become extinct many centuries ago. To raise
children requires patience, intelligence, love and sacrifice.
To produce children requires no brains, but just a set of male
and female functioning genitals and a bit of aerobics. Most children
are not planned: they are simply the result of ovarian roulette.
Children who are planned serve as ego-boosting commodities for
their parents most of whom have been conned into believing that
parenthood will strengthen their relationship, while in fact
most marriages end after childbirth. People who actually plan
to have children do so for their own misconceived conformist
needs. They act strictly on their own wishes and rarely consider
if this reproductive decision is in the interest of the child.
Yet, a major survey in the US showed that most parents would
not have children if they could start their lives over.
It is interesting to note that the world's two most important
occupations which in fact shape our society are parents and politicians.
Paradoxically and alarmingly neither requires formal training
nor proof of competence. Anyone who wants to fish needs a licence
and before one is allowed to drive a car one must first pass
a test to prove (s)he can do so competently, but to become a
parent--the most challenging of all human endeavours--no training,
no experience and no brains are required. Even imbeciles can
(and do) reproduce. If parenting doesn't work out, then society
is expected to come to the rescue with the police, doctors, lawyers,
psychologists, psychiatrists, parole officers, social workers,
foster parents and so on.
If life is as wonderful as the advertising industry portrays
it to be, why are today's rates of juvenile delinquency, divorce,
violence, sexual abuse and suicide higher than ever before? Suicide
is the second leading cause of death among teenagers in the US
and Canada. In the US every 10 minutes a teenager attempts suicide
and every 90 minutes one succeeds. In our world of spreading
diseases, dwindling resources, increased violence, environmental
degradation and climatic changes, it is the epitome of selfishness
to cause the birth of children and thereby subject them to all
the increasing ills that are multiplying in our midst.
The vast majority of people practise reality denial, conning
themselves into believing that life is worth all the suffering
that forms an integral and inevitable part it. If you are one
of them consider the following quotes by some of the brightest
minds the world has known:
"Every age is fed on illusions,
lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to
an end." Joseph Conrad
Luigi Pirandello, the great Italian
playwright and recipient of the 1934 of the Nobel Prize for Literature,
wrote: "Life is little more than a loan shark: it exacts
a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes."
Schopenhauer wrote about life as a gift:
"Everyone would have declined such a gift if he could have
seen it and tested it beforehand." Voltaire wrote: "Why
have we imagined that not to be is a great ill, when it is clear
that it was not an ill not to be before we were born?"
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote: "All
the reasoning in the world, all the proof-texts in old manuscripts,
cannot reconcile this supposition of a world of sleepless and
endless torment with the declaration that 'God is Love.'"
Matthew Prior, author of Solomon on
the Vanity of the World, wrote: "Who breathes must suffer,
and who thinks must mourn; and he alone is blessed who never
was born." A thought echoed by Sophocles who wrote: "Not
to be born is the most to be desired."
Anyone who honestly and objectively
studies the worth of life will come to the inescapable conclusion
that for most people in the world there is a lot more misery
than joy. Moreover, all indications are that the near future
will be a lot worse than the present.
Social injustice, environmental degradation and all other forms
of misery will end only when human reproduction does. Any other
'solution' is but a cruel illusion. People who really love children
don't produce any and thereby spare them the inevitable misery
they would otherwise suffer. For these and all the aforementioned
reasons human reproduction cannot be justified.
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