Today's PBS news hour--arguably the most objective of our daily news programs--fell far short of that ideal. It devoted a lengthy segment on Haitian relief, without once mentioning the fact that Haiti's biggest problem isn't earthquake damage but overpopulation.
This rendered the entire discussion academic--as futile as pouring gallons of water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.
They never discuss overpopulation because it's uncomfortable, but this glaring omission undercuts PBS's claim to be the news program of record.
Then, in the same show, they did another long segment on efforts to preserve the life of pregnant women and their fetuses during childbirth in Peru. Again, not one word about any plan to compensate for all these additional people showing up in the population.
The underlying principle is that everyone has a God-given right to reproduce without limits, no matter the consequences to their families, their country, the environment, the future.
It's such a right it's not even open to discussion.
Of course every single other news outlet does the same. I'd just hoped PBS could rise above that.
It can't.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Of course the need for population stabilisation does run up against the basic human desire / right to reproduce.
They key is to somehow wrangle it so that people freely choose to have less kids. Believe it or not this is the situation in much of the developed world today.
Demographers have determined that the average woman should give birth to 2.1 children during her life in order for population to remain stable. Birth rates below 2.1 will eventually lead to a population reduction, while birth rates above 2.1 will lead to increasing population levels.
Much of the Western world has a birth rate of under 2.0. Conversely, many of the poorer nations have high birthrates.
There's a lot of reasons for this situation, one being that the more educated women are the more they are in control of their reproductive health, and this leads to lower birth rates. Align this with a decent health system (one which brings about a low infant mortality rate) and you have the recipe for eventual population reductions.
The thing is that women in countries with low birth rates do not feel as though they have been denied the right to have babies - they retain this right, but on average choose to have a small amount of offspring (or none at all).
China of course decided back in the 1970s that their birth rate needed to drop, so they instituted the one-child policy that legally prevented women from having more than one child. This has been successful though at the cost of personal freedom. China has reached such a level of prosperity, however, that even if the one child policy is abandoned, Chinese women will still have a low birthrate (below replacement level).
In Australia (my country) we have had our share of conservative politicians wringing their hands about the birth rate and how bad such a low birth rate is (which is rubbish) so they decided to introduce what is called the "baby bonus" - women who get paid a lump sum of money (which is currently $5000 or so). Ostensibly this was done as a way of helping young families to cope with financial demands of having a new baby, but the real reason was to gain votes. What resulted from the baby bonus was an increase in the birth rate - from about 1.7 kids per woman to 1.9 now (not enough to push birth rates over replacement level, but enough to be significant).
In the same way it is probably more than possible to use cash payments to prevent babies being born. If women, for example, are given financial incentive to have tubal ligation surgery after their first or second child, there is every reason to believe that this would result in a decrease in the birthrate. A similar payment could be made for men to have vasectomies after fathering one or two kids.
Now if we translate this to the third world, we can see all sorts of advantages. The education of women, the provision of high quality health care and the availability of financial incentives for sterilisation procedures would not only reduce the birth rate, it would also reduce the death rate while also raising individual wealth (especially if the money comes from overseas).
One Salient Oversight--I generally agree with your observations.
I should add that your country (Australia) is a perfect example of population outstripping the renewable water supply. Despite having vast nearly uninhabited areas, the outback can't be filled with people due to lack of water.
China imposed its one child policy as a crisis measure, and I agree with them that they were facing a crisis. Their neighbor India, with a comparably sized population, didn't impose such a measure, although they did a few things to encourage people to curb population.
As a result few if any in China are starving, while India has at least 300 million who are.
It's true that virtually no affluent societies reproduce above replacement rate--and that virtually no poor societies don't have exploding populations.
The argument for China's draconian solution depends on whether you see world overpopulation as a crisis or as a problem.
I see it as a crisis because that overpopulation is directly responsible for the permanent destruction of well water supplies through overpumping from porous aquifers and the greatest ongoing species extermination worldwide since the Chicxulub asteroid exterminated the dinosaurs (and a lot else).
These processes are irreversible and gigantic in scope. Hence the crisis. Haiti demonstrates this in microcosm. Easter Island is an even better example. There the natives exterminated half a dozen species of trees (every single species of tree on the island), which took with them a variety of other species, and for 100s of years before the island was discovered by Westerners, its carrying capacity for humans was crippled. Actually it's still crippled. Think of that when you see pics of the Easter Island statues.
Another unspoken assumption is that the current number of people on Earth is just fine.
It's not. I guesstimate that the world can sustain about 1 billion people comfortably. Now we're six times that, and it shows.
Woman having fewer children than is needed to sustain the current population creates an immediate problem--having enough workers in the labor force to pay for caring for a proportionally increasing cohort of retirees--and a long term problem: would the human race eventually die out?
The former problem is real, and it's most obvious in Japan. OTOH none of the countries with population explosions--except, perhaps, America--take care of their old people now. And I think the depth of the crisis outweighs this problem.
The longer term problem is pretty theoretical at this point. When and if the world is back to its ca. 1900AD population level (1 billion) it deserves consideration. But not before.
Fortunately that far-off potential problem, the biggest dissuader for women to have children--dying in childbirth--has pretty much gone away in the rich countries.
Lastly, I generally agree that the more rights and options women have in a society, the fewer children they choose to have.
So we should do all we can to promote women's rights and opportunities worldwide, and in the long run that would do much to take care of the overpopulation crisis.
But until then we also need China's one child rule. And if it isn't imposed worldwide, demagogues worldwide will claim it's a plot to exterminate...fill in the blank--blacks, "people of color," Muslims, yada yada.
New billboards in Georgia are claiming racial genocide as a pro-life issue. This is laughable when considering the high poverty rate in Georgia (around 30%) heavily affects African-Americans with high birth rates. As an aside, the Klan is now actively recruiting them for a "civil war" with Hispanic immigrants.
Since Reagan's Administration stopped funding institutions for the mentally ill, cities have been heavily impacted by mentally ill homeless people of all races (55% of homeless). This chronically homeless population increases costs of police, fire & social services.
NJ cut ADC funds after 2 children, which quickly reduced babies born without parental support. NJ Gov. Christine Whitman got it passed & within a 1-1/2 year that population dropped in half.
My point is simple... governments must consider carefully those fiscal incentives that encourage population growth that leads to such poverty.
Post a Comment