Nikhil, my dear chap,Thanks you for the kind reply.
: 1. sir, no one is trying to impose a one-child policy a la Chinese style on teh women of teh Thrid world. we are trying to give them freedom of choice. the plain fact is that most women in places like north India, west Africa, and otehr places bear mroe women than they want to. When they are given power over their own lives and access to birth control if they so desire, they almost invariably start having fewer children. birth rates have fallen all over the third World as women have become more free and birth conrtol has become more accessible. Doesn't this suggest that most people don't really want to have eight children?
The problem with "choice" is that the victim never has any say in the matter, he or she is simply summarily executed in the abortuary. Again, the phrase "choice" is used to conceal the induced contradiction: LIFE IS DEATH.
: 2. regardless of your own personal views on birth control, can you really deny to other people the freedom to control tehir pown lives?!
I'll turn that around on you and ask, Why then are you trying to deny the most innocent ones of an even more basic freedom? That is their first breath.
: 3. You must implicitly acept that population must stop growing at some point in the future, right? which means that average birthrates much recah 2.2? please tell me yes. You canm't really think that population can growq indefinitely? if nothing else, the size of the earth and its finite resources limit us. But not to worry, by the time we get to that stage, we'll have run out of food, water and oxygen long ago.
Populations increase and decrease for reasons not yet fully understood by man. Some populations have become extinct over time. Some have flourished. Perhaps your misunderstanding of populations comes from a strictly academic viewpoint. If you go out into the real world you will find that, even in India, large populations get by. Perhaps not as well as the academics would like them to, but certainly that's no reason for conducting wholesale slaughter in the abortuary. Remember, Malthus predicted that in 25 year's time the earth's population would grow so large that it would be unable to sustain itself. He made that prediction in 1796. I could hardly find a group of doomsdayers who have been so consistantly wrong.
: 4. Just because food production has increasd in the past, you conclude that it will increase again in the future? That's like saying, 'Well, the Greeks were wrong about water being an element, lavoisier was wrong about fire being an element, so I guess carbon isn't an element"....
: There are finite resource limits in the world, beyond which we can't increase our production. besides, do you really want to convert the whole world into a giant granary? Do you want to cut down our remaining wildernesses, and deny all otehr species a place to live?
Why can't man produce even more food? Again, food commodity prices are the lowest in a 12,000 year history right now. What's more the population is at an all time high. The facts don't square with your argument. Perhaps that's because your argument is based on mere speculation, conjecture, and oh yes that most reliable of all sources, deterministic computer modelling.
: 5. 840 million people are starving right now. It is true that there is enough food to feed them, but the capitalist market economy taht we live under does not allocate food to thsoe who are too poor to afford it. regardless, if there were fewer people, there would be less of a problem feeding everyone. And no, for the millionth time, this is not a call for killing people. this is a call fopr allowing people the technology and the freedom to plan and choose the size of their families.
Those who starve are being held captive by some dictator such as Comrade Kim in North Korea, or some war lord in a war torn region. Typically it takes armed convoys to get food to them. That's hardly a reason to sentence innocent children to death in the abortuary. That certainly won't feed anyone, now will it?
Perhaps, Nikhil, your negative attitude towards innocent children stems from the fact that you are surrounded by doomsayers. That tends to be the case when you are in academia as it can overwhelm you at some point. Should you shed yourself of this rather masochistic environment and get out and see the world for real, perhaps you will indeed see the cup as half full, rather than half empty. A mother nurturing her children is hardly a loss of freedom. In fact, it is probably one of the most joyful sights to man. Check it out some time.
God Bless.
Robert
