Overpopulation and the church

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@roger: Doesn’t it make you pause when you consider that various sources have been making doomsday claims since at least Malthus, and never once has it come to pass? I saw a chart on another site, which I just tried to find and could not at the moment, but it showed I think everywhere in the world except central Africa had birthrates of either 1-2 or 2-3, essentially at or below replacement. I will try to find it later.
 
I think in discusions of “overpopulation” we tend to overlook our greatest natural resource: people! It’s not as if people are born just to consume. We also think, work, invent, cultivate the land, devise new ways to alleviate suffering. I’d argue that the value a new person adds to the world is much greater than what he/she expends.
 
Roger12345 said:
Most people in the modern industrial world, including myself, are office serfs. If the system were to collapse, or even be disrupted for 6 months we’ll be the first to go. People who are capable of self-sufficiency will be in a better position. You’re right the rural areas will be the first to be impacted by shortages, but I’m talking about achieving the ability to be self-sufficient, at least for a while. I seriously doubt that 5 % of the U.S. population is in the position to achieve anything close to this. The rest of us are going to be outsourced to that big office in the sky. (Maybe that’s purgatory)
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Don’t be fooled by the survival crowd; those fellows are all bull-squashing themselves.

If there is a worldwide catastrophe, no one will be secure.

We all have to die of something and it will not be a positive experience when it occurs.

Don’t worry about survival, it is a losing game for everybody. Work off your Purgatory instead.

ICXC NIKA
 
The world is not, repeat, NOT, overpopulated. GOD created it and HE knee what he was doing. The problem is not enough young people to sustain care for the elderly and aged. Of course, abortion and contraceptives are to blame for that.
 
nodito said:
I think in discusions of “overpopulation” we tend to overlook our greatest natural resource: people! It’s not as if people are born just to consume. We also think, work, invent, cultivate the land, devise new ways to alleviate suffering. I’d argue that the value a new person adds to the world is much greater than what he/she expends.
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👍👍

A human being is not just a belly to be fed, but a set of hands, and a mind.

The more people are alive, the greater the synergy of minds can become.

ICXC NIKA
 
I am from a family of 11, and we went from large families being the norm to in school where the motto became, “Blessed are the sterile” as predicted by Christ quite some time ago.

Okay, let’s say that’s correct that the world is overpopulated. How to best go about doing something. In my time, when I went to school, contraception had just come into vogue and was being hailed as the “magic bullet”, the answer to our “population problem”. We were told that if everybody used it, we could do away with abortion and this entire issue, easy that.

We were told the abstinance system and natural family planning “didn’t work”. This is after thousands and thousands of years of teaching abstinence, we were going to come up with a “better” method than that, and natural family planning methods.

Okay. Well, do you know something curious happened. Try to remember back to times like the 1960s where we had the advent of contraception when virtually everyone was using it. Did our “unwanted pregnancy” rate actually go down as promised? No! Not only did it NOT go down, it skyrocketed!

Okay, so time for stronger measures. After contraception failed, the population then wanted abortion. First, we started off with abortion in cases of incest and rape, etc. Then, it was abortion in the first trimester, on demand for any reason. Now, we have abortion in the second and third trimesters. We have had movies on cases where the baby survives the abortion, like in “October Baby”!

So obviously, what we have been doing hasn’t been working all that well.

Further, we hate to admit this, but even when used properly, it has a certain failure rate anyway.

Now, some countries, like Brasil, for their Carnival went out and threw condoms everywhere thinking that would decrease the population. Well, notice, anytime contraception has come in, it has NOT decreased the population but done exactly the opposite. If you don’t believe me, look at statistics.

You might say…“well, that’s because it was used incorrectly”. Okay. Many of the people who you might want to use contraception are…teenagers. These are the very same folks who can’t get it together to clean their rooms, brush their teeth, eat their vegetables or all the rest. We expect these kids, who do not even have their prefrotal cortex developed (controls judgement) to be able to have the self discipline to use controception correctly?

I think we did better under the abstinence system with chaperones. The RATE of unwanted pregnancy was much lower. Why don’t we use something that actually works?

As to teens, Aristotle said teens (due to not having their brains fully developed as of yet), go around in a constant state that resembles drunkenness!

In this time, people say they got pregnant, “by accident”! In the olden times, you could get pregnant all kinds of ways but none of them was “by accident”!

This is just the tip of the iceburg, but I used to interpret at a hospital. I have talked to women who are about to deliver who have assured me they DID use contraception but that their method failed, and then they found themselves in these terribly tragic situations.

We used to have the “rhythm” method, but since, it has long been improved and is VERY accurate, and it doesn’t have all the chemicals, side effects of giving people hormones over a long term. Perhaps others who know a lot more than I do can elaborate.

A lot of our overpopulation problem was greatly exacerbated…thanks to contraception.
 
A couple of decades ago I used to worry about this. Not any more.
  • The sinfulness of man will take care of over population.
  • The earth can support an even larger population.
  • We don’t have a population problem we have a consumption problem.
 
Offering a small thought to the OP.

If you think of overpopulation in terms of “how well can a population adjust consumption patterns and expectations in response to increasing scarcity” rather than “we need X amount of space per person so our maximum population is Y”, the Church’s position will make more sense. The Church calls us to live simply, not be dependent upon material things, to fast, to give charitably, and live in peace and humility with our neighbors. Overpopulation, then, is less an issue of the number of people and more an issue of what lifestyle is lived.

Consider, for example, The Netherlands versus China. The Netherlands is the 27th most-densely populated nation but it suffers few of the ill environmental effects that China (the 81st most-dense) suffers. Scarcity in the Netherlands is dealt with in terms of market allocation (yes it’s very expensive to live there so family size may be limited by innate factors such as late marriage, or abstinence; or the tradeoff of family size with conspicuous consumption becomes more pronounced), while such market functions work less well in China due to substantial government intervention. This is no small difference - when prices and wages aren’t free to adjust to demand conditions, there’s no way for signals to prevent workers from crowding into already-crowded suburbs along the East Coast, nor to know when to develop the vast, sparsely-populated West and Interior of China.
 
Wow what an amazing and silly thread all at the same time. I live out in the west and there is no way anyone could ever believe there is a not-enough-room problem. I believe in Kansas they are actually giving away free land to homesteaders. kansasfreeland.com/

Couldn’t agree more with most posters here. We have more of an under-population problem than we do an over-population and even that is not going to be enough to notice except maybe when you’re in an over-crowded nursing home. 😃 Seriously though, that shouldn’t be an issue either.
 
Overpopulation is not a fact, it is a justification for the society of death that we are living in.
 
The issue of overpopulation is a very complex one. Often, we address it by wanting to do away with the youth, or in some cases, the sick, or very elderly.

We need all our population, and especially our youth. Younger people often can’t see this as clearly as many older people. How God made us seemed to be that when we are young and vulnerable, our parents take care of us. When we are older, in the ideal world, the youth will take care of us in our old age.

When we try to just stop, or nearly stop, having children as a way of controlling the population, it creates untold problems down the road that you will begin to see as this all unfolds.

I once went to somebody else’s family gathering and was surprised that there were NO children there whatsoever. NONE.

One of the problems the “developed” or “industrialized” world has it can be sort of top heavy, have more older folks than younger. This is a problem.

Children are a blessing. In the ideal, the youth should help the elderly as the mothers and fathers raised the children. If you tinker with this formula, you do so at your own peril.

We can’t simply stop having children. If we do, who will be there to take care of the elderly?

I know my brother and his wife thought they couldn’t have children and wanted to adopt. I know, at that time, there was a 5-year waiting list! They didn’t want to wait 5 years so adopted two children who had health problems. My brother’s also a doctor.

Our children, are one of our greatest natural resources. Yet, in our shortsightedness, we have come to see children as being “in the way”

When God wanted to bless Abraham, he gave him a lot of descendents. Yet, in our generation, we have come to see children as a curse. These are, indeed, dark times.

Some people say not to depend on our children, to depend instead on the government to take care of us in our old age. Hey, the government has been ready to shut down on occasion. How can any of us depend on something like that? True, children may or may not come through for parents in their old age, but still, that system has worked successfully for thousands of years.

It’s only in our generation where we want to experiment with so many things in finding solutions.

I know the point of this was probably that the original post wanted to promote contraception to Catholics. However, besides all the other problems with contraception, it seems to promote promiscuity, which is not in society’s best interest.
 
  • I’m not saying that I support birth control, abortion, family planning, population control, or any other policy. My point is not to suggest a solution to the problem, but only to point out that the problem exists.
  • Several people have posted that the current childbirth rate is not enough to replace the aging population, but keep in mind that only holds true in European countries.
    Judging from the post I would say that the church’s position is that there is not a population problem. Thanks to everyone who responded to the post. 🙂
 
Roger12345 said:
  • Several people have posted that the current childbirth rate is not enough to replace the aging population, but keep in mind that only holds true in European countries.
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The countries that have high birth rates are generally in Africa. These countries also tend to have higher infant mortality rates, grater number of childhood deaths and generally shorter life spans. For instance Nigeria has one of the highest birth rates in the world, but also has the 8th or 9th highest infant mortality rate, They also do not have a graying population as the average life expectancy is something like 52.

The world wide total fertility rate is somewhere around 2.4 or 2.5 and the global replacement rate is around 2.33. In other words we are actually fairly close to net zero gains. The most likely UN projections show the population stabilizing over the next 30 - 40 years with a decline starting in the next 60 years or so. It is possible that in 2100 that the world population will have dropped by 10% of present levels with an ever increasing downward slope. If current trends continue roughly 45% of the 6.2 billion people in 2100 would be over 60.

So back to your original question. No, the Church does not believe that the world is overpopulated. 🙂
 
The issue is not so much that our population is necessarily unsustainable, but that our entire civilization is unsustainable. There’s nothing that population control can do to fix that.
 
Roger12345 said:
  1. Overpopulation is the biggest problem facing the world today. 2. The climate is measurably warming up as a result of pollution; 3. many species of animals are becoming extinct, 4. fossil fuel can’t last forever. 5. Water is going to become scarce in the future as the population continues to stress the environment. It’s obvious that the next one or two hundred years is going to be a catastrophic time in human history. 6. What is the Catholic Church’s position on overpopulation and how to best deal with the problem?
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  1. The global population is expected to remain fixed at 11 billion. At the moment fertility rates are dropping and are expected to remain level from now on. That means that every year 2 billion babies will be born, which is exactly the replacement level for a population of 11 billion people.
    Over the next 100 years north and south america will have a combined population of 1 billion people. Western europe is expected to have 1 billion people. Asia is expected to have 5 billion people and africa is expected to have 4 billion people.
  2. The Climate is never really static. Climatologists studying ice-cores in Greenland have said, and I watched them talking in a shed about a core, that the Climate (as opposed to the weather) can change within a few months and change back again. That is the science they were seeing.
  3. Animals are always going extinct. But the really interesting question is where are all the new replacement evolving animals that evolution teaches us about?😉
  4. Fossil fuels cannot last forever but they will outlive us, so I am content to call that someone else’s problem. Its no secret that finite resources are finite, so people will adapt their lives to circumstances. 100 years ago, 200, 300 years ago people had almost nothing that we have today and they managed just fine. Life will just be a little different, thats all. And these types of societal changes happen gradually at a pace that people can absorb.
  5. Rainfall I’d imagine is pretty constant. And with the expected stable global population I imagine public services and improvements are inevitable.
  6. The CC’s position on population growth is probably the same as the statisticians, that the population is going to level out at 11 billion people and because of the reduction we are seeing in fertility rates that population will have a stable replacement level.
 
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