I think you don’t see the can of worms you’re opening.
Au contraire - there are so many issues bound up in the population question that it’s hard to know where to start, let alone stop.
It’s difficult to think of an environmental or social issue that is not somehow related to the sheer numbers of people on the planet - if people refuse to consider the issue, or think of it as somehow taboo, what happens?
It’s not that your question is simple, it’s that (despite your good intentions), your point of view is too narrow and you haven’t thought through the consequences of the supposedly ‘simple’ solutions of ‘just not reproducing’.
Also, your ‘personal opinion’ just doesn’t cut it here. You could be wrong, you know. The desire of men and women to marry and raise a family is a pretty ‘basic’ one; even the psychiatrists agree. And even if say John and Mary are so vapid and shallow that they just want to have children solely because 'well, people expect us to". . .do you really think that once the children arrive John and Mary can’t possibly become loving and capable parents? That people don’t mature, grow, and change for the better, but only for the worse?
There is all too much evidence that many people simply don’t magically morph into good parents when they have children. I would have thought the numbers of children in foster care and the number of cases dealt with by child protection agencies spoke for themselves.
The real problem is in how the issue is addressed. Economists and politicians are big fans of population growth, because they see dollars in it. All too often they don’t seem to consider the consequences of unfettered growth - not just for the human population, but for the rest of the planet. For example, how many people in the West realise that on average, their children will consume ten times the resources, in a lifetime, as children born in developing nations?
So what’s to be done? We have a clear indication that coercive measures are counterproductive in many ways, in the experience of the Chinese with their one-child policy. However, here in Australia, people are encouraged to have children with extremely generous baby bonuses - it’s very clear where our government stands on the issue.
Where does one draw the line? I simply don’t know. The ingrained belief seems to be that people have a ‘right’ to have children - but is it really a right, and how do the rights of the potential children figure in this supposition? People also talk about having a ‘duty’ to reproduce (particularly in a religious context) but I fail to see how this is valid. We’re hardly in danger of dying out, as a species. At present, however, it’s still seen by many as an aberration when someone opts out of reproducing - despite growing numbers of individuals and couples, at least in the Western world, who decide not to become parents.
Social research indicates that more educated women, who have more social and economic opportunities (not sure about men, but it may be the same story for them) tend to have fewer children. Perhaps that is the key.
).