Do abortion and contraception control the world population?

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Let’s be clear first:

I am in no way trying to defend either one of these, but I would like a good response in case I’m confronted with the question.

With the advent of modern medicine, people live longer and longer. As we all know, abortion and contraception prevent the birth of millions.

If everyone in the world refrained from abortion and contraception, wouldn’t the world be incredibly overpopulated?
 
No. Overpopulation is a myth.

catholic.com/thisrock/2008/0812fea2.asp

Abortion and contraception continuing will actually cause the population of the world to shrink, in fact this has began to occur already in certain parts of Europe where they have negative growth. 1 person born for every 2 deaths. Someday far down the road it wouldn’t surprise me if humans became infertile like in that movie Children of Men.
 
06convert said:
No. Overpopulation is a myth.

catholic.com/thisrock/2008/0812fea2.asp

Abortion and contraception continuing will actually cause the population of the world to shrink, in fact this has began to occur already in certain parts of Europe where they have negative growth. 1 person born for every 2 deaths. Someday far down the road it wouldn’t surprise me if humans became infertile like in that movie Children of Men.
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I agree that overpopulation is a myth, but that is WITH abortion and contraception.

If nobody practiced those things, the fertility numbers would be much higher. So wouldn’t the global population be much, much higher?
 
joeflow said:
I agree that overpopulation is a myth, but that is WITH abortion and contraception.

If nobody practiced those things, the fertility numbers would be much higher. So wouldn’t the global population be much, much higher?
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The more the merrier. 🙂

If we had more people on Earth, we would have more people discovering new ways to efficiently use resources and driving exploration of other planets. It would be really cool to colonize the Moon. 😃

All this is secondary to God’s command to go forth and multiply. I trust Him to provide whatever we need. He wouldn’t have said it if it would cause us to destroy ourselves.
 
joeflow said:
I agree that overpopulation is a myth, but that is WITH abortion and contraception.

If nobody practiced those things, the fertility numbers would be much higher. So wouldn’t the global population be much, much higher?
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Higher? Probably. Overpopulated? No. I don’t think we fully grasp how big the world really is. You could take the entire population of the earth, give everyone a 4 square foot box to stand in and the entire population would fit into Rhode Island.

Besides, if you really get into it, population controls itself. Disease, natural disasters, etc take out large portions of the population. It can never get too big, because of natural control measures.
 
06convert said:
Higher? Probably. Overpopulated? No…
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I like that answer!

The term overpopulation implies a negative effect, it seems to imply a level of population that is over the sustainable capabilities of the planet or some other scenario where the amount of population is a danger to itself.
 
Well, let’s use me as an example. I’m married, 38 years old, have 3 kids and have never used any form of contraception. We’re quite fertile and conceived each time we stopped following the NFP rules for ‘avoidance.’ Would 3 kids per couple destroy the earth?

If people knew how bad contraception really was for them, they’d quit and those of them who had a serious reason to avoid, would use NFP. Some of THEM would later come to see how frivolous their reason really is and have more kids.

Would this result in true overpopulation? Possibly, but not any time soon. 😉
 
manualman said:
If people knew how bad contraception really was for them, they’d quit and those of them who had a serious reason to avoid, would use NFP. Some of THEM would later come to see how frivolous their reason really is and have more kids.
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I think people more and more are being to understand how bad that stuff is for them. I keep hearing lots of stories about people with no religious convictions at all going to natural or barrier methods.
 
Even before abortion and chemical contraception, couples had some control over how many children they had. The evidence is in letters, as well as in the relative birthrates with and without government incentives to have more children. People on the frontier had more children to get land grants, whereas people in cities had fewer. Demographers don’t know the reason for a sudden drop in the birthrate at the turn of the 20th Century, but I’d guess a generation had gone by since the last land grants and women were realizing they couldn’t all afford seven or eight kids. NFP works, as those here who use it have attested. I can vouch that chastity is possible even in the toughest period of a woman’s life. Later marriage means fewer children. Indeed, rising infertility rates are scarier than overpopulation.
 
LJN21 said:
I think people more and more are being to understand how bad that stuff is for them. I keep hearing lots of stories about people with no religious convictions at all going to natural or barrier methods.
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This is actually true. I’m seeing some signs of this. Of course that will just lead the world into finding new unnatural methods. :hmmm:

My wife is a skin care specialist. Birth control pills really mess with peoples hormones and skin. They develop all sorts of skin issues that they hate (people who use birth control, on average tend to be vain about their appearance). They complain about how much the birth control is messing with their body, but don’t want to quit taking the pill.

My wife and I discussed how to tactfully mention natural birth control methods to these people. Maybe we can help some people see the light. :knight1:
 
survive said:
Later marriage means fewer children. Indeed, rising infertility rates are scarier than overpopulation.
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I was instantly reminded of the Vonnegut Book “Galápagos” with that statement…
 
06convert said:
…
Besides, if you really get into it, population controls itself. Disease, natural disasters, etc take out large portions of the population. It can never get too big, because of natural control measures.
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Yeah. Starvation and plague. Exactly what the planet needs to “take out” large portions of the population. I’m guessing you’ve never seen either.
 
Arclight said:
Yeah. Starvation and plague. Exactly what the planet needs to “take out” large portions of the population. I’m guessing you’ve never seen either.
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Well whats better, God taking care of it on His terms or mankind taking care of it with abortion and contraception?

Right now starvation might not be horribly far off. There was an article in our local Catholic paper this week about how the declining populations of China and Russia leading to social collapse. In 20-30 years it is estimated there will not be enough workers to support the elderly.
 
LJN21 said:
Well whats better, God taking care of it on His terms or mankind taking care of it with abortion and contraception?..
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I’ve seen plague and starvation victims. If you are serious about culling population, a rubber seems a lot more humane than either. I’ll concede on the abortion issue, given the nature of this site.
 
God controls the world’s population. The licentious can murder and kill, those who follow His will let Him do His work.
 
Arclight said:
Yeah. Starvation and plague. Exactly what the planet needs to “take out” large portions of the population.
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Don’t forget the ever popular endeavor of war. 5.4 million people in the DR of Congo died during the past decade from the civil war there.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7202384.stm

And yet those of us in the West barely noticed.

An earlier comment praised higher world population as leading to more efficient use of the world’s resources. I am not so sure about that - I think a higher world population is more likely to lead to more wars over resources and ideology.
 
06convert said:
I don’t think we fully grasp how big the world really is. You could take the entire population of the earth, give everyone a 4 square foot box to stand in and the entire population would fit into Rhode Island.
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While geometrically that may be true, try living your life in a 4 ft^2 box. The world may be large, but the inhabitable space and resources necessary for life are not infinite.
conitions
06convert said:
No. Overpopulation is a myth.
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what? A myth? Studies have shown that populations of organisms can quickly over populate if the conditions are right. Humans just have longer life-spans that the things like bacteria or fruit flies that are studied, but on a biological level all populations are the same.
 
You guys are getting off track and lead into a false dilemma. As pointed out earlier, contraception and abortion are NOT the only means of controlling the number of births. Prior to the 1900’s contraceptives were few in number and considered disgusting by most of society. And yet even back then you saw that the welathier, urban families had fewer children. It’s simply not that hard to recognize the symptoms of fertility unless you are a modern who has forgotten all other approaches to health and wellbeing besides popping pills.

From Europe, to Asia, to Africa and the Americas, the same pattern is seen from age to age: Wealthy and secure societies generally have fewer children per family. Large families predominate in cultures where the economy DEMANDS more labor (agriculture) and where civilization is weak and early death stalks the land.

The solution is not to abort and contracept. The solution is stable governments, just economic systems and the rule of law. Do that and population will stabilize. Ignore those elements and you will STILL see huge population growth in the impoverished nations and population DECLINES in the rich and wealthy ones.
 
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