Birth control in less developed nations

[Kelt]

Having visited Africa, I think that ABC should be available for those who wish to use it. In addition, comparing the USA, Canada and Europe to the majority of countries in Africa is ludicrous because off the vast difference in literacy rates. Yes, education plays a huge role in regulating pregnancy. I, for one, would not want to bring ten kids into this world if there were only enough food and safe water resources to feed two. Watching ones children die over and over because of starvation is not exactly the way life should be.

Absolutely.
Christian Aid used to always say…We believe in life before death.

 

[St_Francis]

I’m sorry, it sounded like a rude and abrupt dismissal…but obviously, a Catholic website is only going to find a Catholic nurse with a Catholic viewpoint. They are not going to be as generous as you are, in even considering a different viewpoint.

Nor will progressive, abc–supporting sites.

You seem to be lumping our unemployment benefits and healthcare system together? Not sure what the ‘social protection’ is? Brits don’t understand the panic and horror engendered in some Americans by a public health system. Ours has problems with a high influx of immigration and increase in possible expensive treatments, but that will have to be worked through somehow. It shouldn’t be impossible to fix one way or another. No-one wants to lose it. A measure of the humanity of a society is how it treats it’s poor. And anyway, the health of a nation seems to be a fine thing to spend our money on! (When we work we do pay our contributions into the healthcare system.) Of course some people will try to take advantage, but we don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath-water when we tackle the problem.

Do we not have a society of nations? And yet look at the attitude you expressed towards the poor nations of Africa and the relatively paltry sums the UK spends on them.

(I don’t know what social protection is, either, but don’t you, as a UK citizen, want to find out?)

Yes, some of Africa’s problems come from outside. Some people blame past colonisation by European countries…but I can tell you, they ain’t seen nothin’ yet when it comes to modern day colonisation and ‘land grab’ that is going on in Africa today! China is going to make ‘us’ look like cuddly kitty cats.
The population is largely poor, cannot afford education and is in no position to withstand the pressures, threats and bribes coming with the land and resource-hungry colonisers of the modern world.
Our resource hungry lifestyles need their ‘stuff’ and when we buy our cheap goods - in order to make our economies grow - we will be inadvertently playing a part in all this.
While the Africans - and world aid - try to feed, house and educate their people and try to get rid of corruption, how much more possible it will be if the poor families are not trying to support 10/12/16 children! What is wrong with letting them have the opportunity to restrict their family size so they can at least have a better chance of getting out of poverty?
Other crises are climate related - then it’s down to sheer survival.

You still miss the point. What will Africans be fighting for if they don’t have many children? If they depopulate their lands, who cares if the Chinese take them over?

 

[weller2]

You still miss the point. What will Africans be fighting for if they don’t have many children? If they depopulate their lands, who cares if the Chinese take them over?

No, YOU still miss the point.

Let me tell you a family story:

My great-great-grandfather owned a lot of land. He was a rich man. He had 12 children; and he divided his land between them. So, none of his 12 children were that rich, but they were still pretty well off, and so they married, and had their children. My great-grandfather had 4 children.

But then he realized that while 1/12th of the original inheritance is enough to feed a family, a 1/48th of the original land is too small for that, because this was roughly what 1 person needed to survive. So my grandfather was forced to leave the land to his brother and move to the city.

Around the same time, the neighboring country realized that it cannot support its rising population without a decline in living conditions, using the amount of land it has – and so, it has invaded my country. So the invaders took my family’s land and forced my grandfather into slave labor for them. (Fortunately, he escaped. Also fortunately, about two years later the invaders made a really dumb strategic decision which directly led to their downfall about three years later. )

I have noticed that Boomer Americans like yourself are unable to comprehend the idea of limited resources versus population. Instead, you believe that the resource base will always grow to support the growing population. I believe that is because:

(1) as an American, you believe in a national mythology which can be summarized as There is always more land available in the West. Not only this has not been the case since the end of 19th century (but old ideologies die hard), the only reason it was ever true is that your ancestors have exterminated 100M of native people (mostly accidentally through disease). So of course, they had a lot of free land.

(2) as a Baby Boomer, you have lived most of your life in the era of expansion of available natural resources, so you naturally believe that there will always be more resources available to support a growing population. You are obviously oblivious to the fact that (a) the US oil production peaked in 1972 and has been declining since (hence Carter’s malaise speech); (b) the world oil production has peaked in 2005 and remains flat since (despite increasing demand) – which is, coincidentally, why you had to pay for the war in Iraq. And, by the way, (c) shale oil is a fraud.

Sorry – the world of your childhood is no more. It’s time to face resource contraction in the face of a growing population.

 

[Kelt]

(I don’t know what social protection is, either, but don’t you, as a UK citizen, want to find out?)

You still miss the point. What will Africans be fighting for if they don’t have many children? If they depopulate their lands, who cares if the Chinese take them over?

I assumed you’d taken the phrase directly out of something you read. I would have liked to see the context that’s all.

The Chinese won’t worry that the African people are there or not on the land - other than to provide v cheap or slave labour. The population is poor and helpless and doesn’t have a voice. More people…more poverty…less voice. hey can’t fight big business or corruption. They’re no problem for land grabbers.

 

[Hans_W]

… And I would postulate that the lack of interest is sex is a recent phenomena …

On which planet are you living?

 

[St_Francis]

On which planet are you living?

Is it that well-known a fact that the lack of interest in sex in Japan is longstanding that it is weird I didn’t know about it?

 

[St_Francis]

I assumed you’d taken the phrase directly out of something you read. I would have liked to see the context that’s all.

The Chinese won’t worry that the African people are there or not on the land - other than to provide v cheap or slave labour. The population is poor and helpless and doesn’t have a voice. More people…more poverty…less voice. hey can’t fight big business or corruption. They’re no problem for land grabbers.

Oh, sorry here it is.

 

[St_Francis]

First, I am pretty old, but I missed being a Boomer by a year or two (I don’t like them either ).
Second, best estimates show that there weren’t even 100 million people in the Americas when the Europeans arrived after Columbus, so the Europeans didn’t have the chance to kill that many.

Third, In the early 1930s, Germany had a population of about 65–68 million. In the late 1990s, the population was 82 million, and yet the Germans did not see a need to go to war then, did they? Overall, I’d say the need for Lebensraum was a pretext for going to war. The main problem Germany had at that time was the horrendous debt imposed after WW1, which the Allied Powers refused to mitigate.

I am sorry about what happened with your family. My family was fortunate enough to get out after the Germans invaded.

No, YOU still miss the point.

Let me tell you a family story:

My great-great-grandfather owned a lot of land. He was a rich man. He had 12 children; and he divided his land between them. So, none of his 12 children were that rich, but they were still pretty well off, and so they married, and had their children. My great-grandfather had 4 children.

But then he realized that while 1/12th of the original inheritance is enough to feed a family, a 1/48th of the original land is too small for that, because this was roughly what 1 person needed to survive. So my grandfather was forced to leave the land to his brother and move to the city.

Around the same time, the neighboring country realized that it cannot support its rising population without a decline in living conditions, using the amount of land it has – and so, it has invaded my country. So the invaders took my family’s land and forced my grandfather into slave labor for them. (Fortunately, he escaped. Also fortunately, about two years later the invaders made a really dumb strategic decision which directly led to their downfall about three years later. )

I have noticed that Boomer Americans like yourself are unable to comprehend the idea of limited resources versus population. Instead, you believe that the resource base will always grow to support the growing population. I believe that is because:

(1) as an American, you believe in a national mythology which can be summarized as There is always more land available in the West. Not only this has not been the case since the end of 19th century (but old ideologies die hard), the only reason it was ever true is that your ancestors have exterminated 100M of native people (mostly accidentally through disease). So of course, they had a lot of free land.

And yet some of the most economically successful places have been the most crowded: Japan, Hong Kong, Shanghai,…

(2) as a Baby Boomer, you have lived most of your life in the era of expansion of available natural resources, so you naturally believe that there will always be more resources available to support a growing population. You are obviously oblivious to the fact that (a) the US oil production peaked in 1972 and has been declining since (hence Carter’s malaise speech); (b) the world oil production has peaked in 2005 and remains flat since (despite increasing demand) – which is, coincidentally, why you had to pay for the war in Iraq. And, by the way, (c) shale oil is a fraud.

I won’t go into your opinions about shale and oil, but will point out that what happens in a free economy is that people adapt. Blacksmiths become mechanics when cars become more popular than horses, etc.

Sorry – the world of your childhood is no more. It’s time to face resource contraction in the face of a growing population.

Yes, it is true that times have changed. However, one if the major changes has been the terrible consequences of abc in our country, which has contributed to family instability, the denigration of women, and a lot of problems caring for the elderly, problems which are worse in other nations.

 

[Kelt]

And yet some of the most economically successful places have been the most crowded: Japan, Hong Kong, Shanghai,…

.

And where do they get their resources from?
Hong Kong feeds itself from other islands where it doesn’t allow other development and apart from that, it imports everything. Japan being an island, consumes a lot of fish, but as its population has gone up it has widened its net, so to speak, and has virtually fished out certain species around the Solomon Islands - after the British left. Not enough to go round! No of course many of the inhabitants of the SI’s don’t like it but this generation gets a SHORT TERM benefit of some sort of payment…but the next generation feels the real effects.
Hardwood forests too.
It all boils down to more people = more resources.
Weller2 is right, there seems to be an idea in the US in particular but not exclusively, that

1. resources are somehow INFINITE, which means that
2. our economies can (and have to) keep on GROWING.
   But think hard about it and this cannot be the case. If everyone in the world made a leap to even the most modest western lifestyleworld ( and why wouldn’t many of them aspire to that? Even though I think many would reject it at least for a while ) - house, furniture, car, fridge, TV, computer - bearing in mind the environmental degradation that is caused by this lifestyle at the moment…how would that be possible? Some people don’t seem to think it matters that we encroach more on the natural world - what’s the problem with losing a few species of animal/plant? But we are part of an intricately evolved web. We abuse our environment and our climate at our peril. Of course, anyone with a simplistic belief that it was all created for man’s benefit, and therefore at our disposal for whatever we might think we need, might have trouble seeing the dangers to us and our fellow planet inhabitants.)
   And some of course, might agree that it’s immoral to wipe out species anyway.

 

[Kelt]

Is it that well-known a fact that the lack of interest in sex in Japan is longstanding that it is weird I didn’t know about it?

Well that’s great isn’t it? Solves all the problems without upsetting anyone! If only it would spread!!

 

[Kelt]

Here in the US, we are hearing precisely what the governing people think of us: stupid, so they have to lie to us to help us.

So, do we think that people in Africa are stupid, that we must lie to them in order to help them?

Actually, I really have to wonder about the general thrust of all this activity. Why are Bill and Melinda Gates so involved in “family” “planning”? Having found out this week that one important goal of the US federal government was to force people to buy health insurance even if their employers wouldn’t buy it for them was that they wanted to avoid the simple incentive of allowing monies spent for health insurance to be tax-free as it is for employer-provided health care, I now feel very suspicious of all this do-gooding.

So, *cui bono *if women are targeted for economic development? Who benefits if more poor third-world women are available to work and not off taking care of their children? Could it possibly be computer-manufacturing companies? Feminist T-shirt manufacturers? Other people in search of really cheap labor as other nations begin to get wise to what we are up to with all our out-sourcing?

They’re ahead of you! Exploitation of the poor is already a reality. More poor children in India, for example, provide more virtual slave labour for T shirt manufacturers. It’s not just feminist T shirts - why do you think Walmart has such cheap stuff? Children are ‘trafficked’ from large, dirt poor families out in rural areas where there are no jobs other than subsistence farming. They are taken from the family with promises of a better life and a job in the city. They end up locked in a workshop.
It doesn’t have to be the mothers with less children who become the cheap workforce available…the mothers with lots of children are providing the workforce - in their children, whom they can’t afford to educate!

 

[Hans_W]

Is it that well-known a fact that the lack of interest in sex in Japan is longstanding that it is weird I didn’t know about it?

I’ve heard about that as a strange phenomenon. It hasn’t taken on here where I live and the rest of the planet, I assume.

We are surrounded by a sex culture. Two hundred years ago only half the new-born ones made it to their reproductive stage. Today, if it wasn’t for ABC we would have a world population of 50 billion, not 7 billion.

Here are some statistics:
12% of websites are pornographic
40 million Americans are regular visitors to porn sites
25% of search engine requests are pornographic related
Some more here: dailyinfographic.com/the-stats-on-internet-pornography-infographic

Even if these figures are badly exaggerated, I can’t see a dwindling interest in sex.

 

[HerCrazierHalf]

I’ve heard about that as a strange phenomenon. It hasn’t taken on here where I live and the rest of the planet, I assume.

We are surrounded by a sex culture. Two hundred years ago only half the new-born ones made it to their reproductive stage. Today, if it wasn’t for ABC we would have a world population of 50 billion, not 7 billion.

Here are some statistics:
12% of websites are pornographic
40 million Americans are regular visitors to porn sites
25% of search engine requests are pornographic related
Some more here: dailyinfographic.com/the-stats-on-internet-pornography-infographic

Even if these figures are badly exaggerated, I can’t see a dwindling interest in sex.

What I see is that higher population densities plus a myriad of possible pursuits/distractions leads to lower birth rates. With various careers, hobbies, gadgets and entertainment it might be possible that the effort gain access to actual sex won’t be worth it to many in the near future.

 

[Hans_W]

What I see is that higher population densities plus a myriad of possible pursuits/distractions leads to lower birth rates. With various careers, hobbies, gadgets and entertainment it might be possible that the effort gain access to actual sex won’t be worth it to many in the near future.

I think that it’s mostly the rising costs of bringing up kids that puts a lid on population growth - in the developed world. Having more than one child or two is too much of a dent in the lifestyle for most people. In poor countries you need children to do the work and bring in more money.

I cannot imagine that our desire for sex is in decline. You mention more time going into gadgets and entertainment. I wonder how much of that time goes into the pursuit of sex.

Has anybody got statistics on ABC sales, pills, condoms etc.? That should give us a fairly clear picture.

 

[St_Francis]

The issue about Japan is a side issue. I me tioned Japan as a place where they are having priblems because of low fertility, someone respinded that Japan’s low fertility is due to lack of interest in sex rather than using abc, and then all this other stuff happened… no one is arguing that this is a solution or anything about it.

 

[St_Francis]

They’re ahead of you! Exploitation of the poor is already a reality. More poor children in India, for example, provide more virtual slave labour for T shirt manufacturers. It’s not just feminist T shirts - why do you think Walmart has such cheap stuff? Children are ‘trafficked’ from large, dirt poor families out in rural areas where there are no jobs other than subsistence farming. They are taken from the family with promises of a better life and a job in the city. They end up locked in a workshop.
It doesn’t have to be the mothers with less children who become the cheap workforce available…the mothers with lots of children are providing the workforce -

Is there anywhere in which an Industrial Revolution has occurred *without *the “exploitation” of the poor? It seems like even the Industrial Revolution in England could not have occurred without the displacement if the country people whose commonses (?) were stolen for sheep. New York City and other places in the US were similar in their use of child labor and paying poor people an amount sufficient to keep only one person, so that everyone ij the family had to work, including the toddlers!

in their children, whom they can’t afford to educate!

Which is similar to the situation above, no? Why do you think they had to enact truancy laws? Because the children were working instead of going to school.

 

[Kelt]

Is there anywhere in which an Industrial Revolution has occurred *without *the “exploitation” of the poor? It seems like even the Industrial Revolution in England could not have occurred without the displacement if the country people whose commonses (?) were stolen for sheep. New York City and other places in the US were similar in their use of child labor and paying poor people an amount sufficient to keep only one person, so that everyone ij the family had to work, including the toddlers!

Which is similar to the situation above, no? Why do you think they had to enact truancy laws? Because the children were working instead of going to school.

Yes you’re right! The ‘enclosures act’ was when a lot of the pieces of land used by the poor to produce food and graze sheep/cattle/ poultry was fenced off (with hedges ultimately - part of our pretty countryside today ironically.) That was in 1773. Cities like Liverpool got rich off Slavery in America. We didn’t have slaves here but we traded them and owned plantations in America.
And it’s still happening all over the world because the poor are without a voice and, well…poor! How do we help them to stand up for themselves? Help them to be self- sufficient…ie, not to be dependent and therefore vulnerable to others for their basic needs…and education! Controlling family size and protecting women from shortening their lives by being a continual baby- factory will help in MY view. But tell me what you’d do…if we can all work together while understanding our own ideologies, so much the better. Let’s think of ways we can help!

 

[St_Francis]

I have been responding, but as a result, I am just saying bits and pieces of what I think, and what I believe the Catholic response to be.

First, Catholics believe that using abc is objectively a mortal sin, and the type of sin that nothing justifies. There is no circumstance which would render the use of abc moral. (I say objectively because it may be that the use of abc would be judged as a lesser offense in particular cases due to some aspect of that particular person’s use of it which mitigates that particular person’s guilt.)

Catholics sometimes forget that God’s laws are above our human concerns. For God, it is a much greater evil for a person to commit a mortal sin than to die, to suffer, to be poor, etc. The *worst possible thing *in God’s eyes is to commit a mortal sin.

Now, why then do Catholics consider it so important to help others? Not because of the state of the other, per se. It is important because God wants so very much for us to help others. We are His instruments, and it is our obligation to relieve the suffering of others. And of course, we cannot use immoral means to fill this obligation. We cannot sin ourselves, nor can we suggest or help or require that another sin in the hopes of alleviating suffering.

In God’s eyes, it is not at all a bad thing to be in need of help (unless we are in that situation due to some sin we ourselves have committed, in which case the problem is the sin, and not the condition). He loves those who are in need.

In God’s eyes, it is a *terrible *thing to neglect those who are in need. We often think that not helping those in need is not a big deal, esp since we give so much to the government and think that the government has all our charitable obligations in hand, but this is not the case.

God *wants us to be moved by the plight of others. *And He wants us to help them insofar as we are able. And He wants us to do so in a way that does not violate His law, even if that means that some will continue to suffer, or even if it means that people will continue to be born into a bad situation. In this case, we need to continue to give, not try using immoral means to alleviate the suffering.

It is important to avoid putting the alleviation of suffering so high in our priorities that we resort to immoral shortcuts. It is more important to avoid sin than it is to reduce suffering, even tho that may “feel” wrong to us. And it is a hard concept for many to understand—it took me a long time to get it.

 

[St_Francis]

In addition to the Catholic view which I outlined above, there is also the view from natural law.

First, what is natural law? Natural law is sometimes referred to as the law written on our hearts, but sometimes what is written on our hearts is obscured by our feelings, by what we have learned, or by some overwhelming factor. So I consider natural law to be analogous to natural knowledge, which Catholics often contrast with revealed knowledge. Revelation is that we which have learned directly from God, and which we could not have learned in any other way. Natural knowledge is that which we can figure out ourselves. So, the fact that the world is created by some intelligence is a part of natural knowledge–this is mentioned as such in Scripture, and Aristotle figured it out.

In the same way, we can figure out that the world just doesn’t work if we do certain things. In the short run, certain actions may seem like a good idea, but in the long run, they don’t work out.

One example is that if we dirty our world and don’t clean up after ourselves, that causes problems. So we could say that one rule of natural law is that we have to clean up after ourselves.

Another example is the use of abc. We know that the sexual impulse is an appetite. Appetites must be reigned in and under our control; unfettered, they cause a lot of trouble, don’t they? People inveigh against unfettered greed, for example; others are very concerned with unfettered gluttony, and many are imprisoned as a result of unfettered anger.

Lust is another appetite. How does it cause problems? First, there is the damage to the family. The family is the true basis for society. The family is the ideal situation which brings forth the future of our society. We see the effects every day of what are now called broken families only by the politically incorrect.

ABC takes away the idea of the connection between the sexual impulse and procreation. If a woman cannot become pregnant because she is on the Pill, then she can have sex whenever and with whomever she pleases. She does not have to be married to have sex; she does not have to restrict herself to her husband.

In the same way, why should men restrict themselves to sex only with a lawfully-wedded wife? Marriage is for having children, but sex is for having fun. The problem is that people get used to loving and leaving, or having sex and behaving badly, and we end up with a lot of broken or never-completed families.

Then there is the problem of those who have sex on the basis that no child will result, When a child does result, in our abc-addicted society, people feel that some contract has been violated! This is how far away we have gotten from the idea that sex and procreation go together. Thus, abc leads to a situation in which abortion “becomes necessary.” People are having sex with people they don’t want to have babies with, or at times during which having a baby would be inconvenient, and what happens? Babies get the death penalty for the crime of being conceived through no fault of their own.

So we can see that using abc leads to a reduction in the need to keep sexual activity within the marriage bounds, a break-up of families with the disadvantages for children, and abortion. I would also posit that the widespread use of abc has resulted in a deterioration of the status of members of each sex within society, allowing a sort of androgyny resulting in perception of persons as mere economic units, but that’s probably too big a subject to handle here, and as far as I know, there are no scientific studies backing up this theory up.

How is it that NFP does not result in the same problems? NFP requires the cooperation of both spouses in maintaining its effectiveness and removes the sexual activity rather than the chance of conception in avoiding procreation. The situation of a woman using NFP to avoid conception is very different than that of a woman using abc, since the mechanism is avoiding the very thing which abc allows more of.

Using NFP maintains and strengthens the mental link between sexual activity and procreation, which enhances the need for the self-control of chastity and marital fidelity rather than eradicating it as abc does.

 

[HerCrazierHalf]

In the context of controlled urges and sex between only married couples what you said makes sense. But there are other concerns that complicate this strategy.

First of all, even in committed relationships the required abstinence of NFP will lead to hardship in many relationships as some on CAF have admitted to. Also, it does little to reduce the spread of STDs. Even when no abc is used there are a sizeable number of men who father children with multiple women and leave. So when these individuals fail at chastity doesn’t that show that the connection of sex with pregnancy is not an effective deterrent?

Also, rape is more prevalent in many African nations compared to the West. So much so that modern anti-rape devices were invented. If a sizeable amount of men are not restraining those urges than is it realistic to expect most couples to be chaste and practice nfp?

I’m not questioning your motives but I’m not sure how practical a lack of abc would be without first laying down the foundation of chastity. The sexual revolution genie is already out of the bottle and going back is not as simple as you suggest. Imo