Abortion / Birth Control
It always astounds me that a group can campaign against both contraceptives AND against abortion. It's simply ignoring the facts, which are thus: There is a limited amount of room on this planet. There is not enough room for an unlimited number of human beings. For example, the population of Latin America is about 550 million. To paraphrase Sir Richard Dawkins:
"If the population continued to increase at the present rate, it would take less than 500 years to reach the point where people, packed in a standing position, formed a solid human carpet over the whole area of the continent. This is so, even if we assume them to be very skinny -- a not unrealistic assumption. In 1000 years from now, they would be standing on each other's shoulders more than a million deep. By 2000 years, the mountain of people, traveling outwards at the speed of light, would have reached the edge of the known universe."
The way nature deals with overpopulation is, the weakest individuals starve to death. The human race overcomes this with a thing called the Welfare State. If two people have more children than they can feed, then the state (meaning, the rest of the population), simply steps in and keeps the children alive. This is generally seen as a good thing, as most people don't want to return to nature's system of simply letting the children of oversized families starve to death. If you starve to death as soon as you are born, you had no more of a chance than did the baby that was aborted. Therefore, it does no good to outlaw abortion if you also do not have some way of feeding excess children.
But then, how to control the population? How to avoid the mountain of humans? The answer is simple: Birth Control. Many people attack birth control as unnatural. And it is. The problem is, so is the welfare state. You cannot have an unnatural welfare state without unnatural birth control, or things would be even worse than they are in nature!
In my humble opinion, birth control is humane. Abortion is less so, but still humane. Letting children starve to death when there is no more food is what is not humane.
"If the population continued to increase at the present rate, it would take less than 500 years to reach the point where people, packed in a standing position, formed a solid human carpet over the whole area of the continent. This is so, even if we assume them to be very skinny -- a not unrealistic assumption. In 1000 years from now, they would be standing on each other's shoulders more than a million deep. By 2000 years, the mountain of people, traveling outwards at the speed of light, would have reached the edge of the known universe."
The way nature deals with overpopulation is, the weakest individuals starve to death. The human race overcomes this with a thing called the Welfare State. If two people have more children than they can feed, then the state (meaning, the rest of the population), simply steps in and keeps the children alive. This is generally seen as a good thing, as most people don't want to return to nature's system of simply letting the children of oversized families starve to death. If you starve to death as soon as you are born, you had no more of a chance than did the baby that was aborted. Therefore, it does no good to outlaw abortion if you also do not have some way of feeding excess children.
But then, how to control the population? How to avoid the mountain of humans? The answer is simple: Birth Control. Many people attack birth control as unnatural. And it is. The problem is, so is the welfare state. You cannot have an unnatural welfare state without unnatural birth control, or things would be even worse than they are in nature!
In my humble opinion, birth control is humane. Abortion is less so, but still humane. Letting children starve to death when there is no more food is what is not humane.
posted by ohnodoctor at 4:37 PM
2 Comments:
Straw man argument. I can't think of anyone who's against birth control in principle, except maybe the Roman Catholic Church, and even then, most Catholics use it anyway.
I did not say Catholics. I am opposed to broad generalizations. I was referring to the group of people that agrees with this reasoning.
Post a Comment
<< Home