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Originally Posted by Goblin Tears
What's your source for this? The environmental damage part especially sounds fishy. Anyway, even if you halved the population of the USA, do you honestly think its governemnt would pool its left over resources into anything but its dying economy? I wonder if having three kids instead of two is really as damaging as you think. And this argument doesnt make sense if the children are adopted.
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The large contribution of population growth to greater resource use and ecological damage (resulting from resource use and waste) is well known, Goblin Tears. One family having 3 kids isn't so bad. However, when
millions and millions of people choose to have more than 2 kids...particularly in the developed world, where I've read that one child consumes 10 times the resources of an African child during her lifetime...then it IS a huge environmental problem:
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QUOTED FROM Human's Ecological Footprint in 2015 and Amazonia Revealed : News :
A recent study shows human population size and affluence are the main drivers of human-caused environmental stressors, while urbanization, economic structure and age of population have little effect.
The researchers focused on the ecological footprint, a measure of how consumption may affect the environment by taking account of food and fiber production, energy use, and human use of land for living space and other purposes.
They found that increased affluence exacerbates environmental impacts and, when combined with population growth, will substantially increase the human footprint on the planet.
Reference: http://stirpat.org/frontiers_hi_res.pdf
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Currently people are using resources and producing waste in a non-renewable fashion. The Sierra Club describes the problem well:
Population and Consumption - Global Population and Environment - Sierra Club. Here is additional information:
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Footprint Basics - Overview
Our current global situation: Since the late 1970s, humanity has been in ecological overshoot with annual demand on resources exceeding what Earth can regenerate each year.
It now takes the Earth one year and five months to regenerate what we use in a year.
We maintain this overshoot by liquidating the Earth’s resources. Overshoot is a vastly underestimated threat to human well-being and the health of the planet, and one that is not adequately addressed.
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I was referring to people having their own biological children, rather than adopting.
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Originally Posted by TheCunningStunt
I think people have the right to choose the size of their family.
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I agree people need to have the right to choose the size of their family. The best way to reduce family size is not to legally limit the number of children people can have. In the developing world, the best way to slow population growth is to ensure parents can earn a good living and families have good health care, so that they don't have to rely on their children as a source of wealth and security.
In the developed world, people do not have to rely on children for survival and care in old age, so then having many children is simply, I feel, caused by parents' lack of concern and foresight about the future and the impacts of large families on their fellow humans. I think parents with many children focus on their own joys of their own nuclear family without concerning themselves with the bigger picture.
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Originally Posted by Tea Supremacist
Ouch! That's a big generalisation!
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Well, I probably should have clarified that I don't think people in the developed world who choose to have more than 2 kids are
overall selfish people; rather, I feel the *choice* to have so many kids is selfish, short-sighted, or shows a remarkable lack of understanding of exponential population growth. The people I know who have 3 or 4 kids are lovely people, and the kids are darling.
The ethical problem in having more than 2 kids, though, is this: even if parents can care for their 4 children now, the parents are still choosing to do something that their own descendants not only shouldn't do (have many kids), but will essentially be prevented from doing because their ancestors had so many children, resulting in severe depletion of resources and living space that force the descendents to limit their own procreation.
I feel that a behavior is ethical only if I still feel it would be ethical if everyone did it. I feel it is wrong for parents to make a choice (to have 3 or 4 kids) that they couldn't and shouldn't advise their own children, grandchildren, etc., to follow.