Judge’s Ruling: ‘No more kids’

This is awesome. A judge has ruled that, as a condition of her 10-year probation sentence, Felicia Salazar bear no children.

Salazar, 20, admitted to failing to provide protection and medical care to her 19-month-old daughter, who suffered broken bones and other injuries when she was beaten by her father, Roberto Alvarado, 25, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Laycock, the Michigan law professor, said that in a past Wisconsin case, a father of nine who was convicted of intentionally failing to pay child support was ordered to have no more children as a condition of probation. The Supreme Court of Wisconsin upheld that condition.

Seriously, I hope this type of order (to not procreate) becomes widespread. Got a domestic violence conviction? You shouldn’t be able to have kids — or adopt — for 10 years. Also, you should get a psychiatric evaluation before getting the OK. I think we should have the same restrictions on alcoholics, drug addicts, and crazy people. Why should we let them procreate and increase the number of children born into broken homes?

Travis judge tells woman to stop having kids - Austin-American Statesman

Pope Hypocritical on Sustainable Humanity

Pope Benedict, speaking to the people of Australia, said today that the world’s natural resources are being squandered in the pursuit of “insatiable consumption.” What he didn’t tell you was that his position on family planning ensures that our world is less sustainable than ever.

“Perhaps reluctantly we come to acknowledge that there are also scars which mark the surface of our earth: erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world’s mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption,” he said.

The Pope failed to note that his policy of denying condoms and birth control to developing nations allows for irresponsible and unsustainable population growth, which increases human resource usage and damages our planet. Such irresponsible policy simply forces our future generations to deal with the problem of environmental destruction, though they will be even less able to act because of their untenable population.

“The concerns for nonviolence, sustainable development, justice and peace, and care for our environment are of vital importance for humanity,” Benedict told the crowd.

My question has always been, “why does the Pope support this garbage population policy that only destabilizes humanity and brings us closer to the demons the church so opposes?”

The answer lies in plain sight. First, the Church thrives off instability. Those who have nothing often come to the Church as a last hope and seek salvation, which the Church is only so happy to provide –in exchange for complete devotion.

The second reason that the Church supports unsustainable population growth is that doing so furthers its own means. Membership has risen exponentially in the last 200 years. In 1970, the Church counted some 654 million adherents. In 2007, due to a lack of family planning in church ranks, membership now numbers 1.131 billion — a 73% increase.

What the world needs is reason, and little or none of it is coming out of the Catholic Church. To them, it’s like the Enlightenment never happened!

Pope says world’s resources being squandered - AP

Roman Catholic Church - Membership

World Population Day

July 11th is World Population Day!

In 1968, world leaders proclaimed that individuals have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and timing of their children. Forty years later, modern contraception remains out of reach for hundreds of millions of women, men and young people.

This year’s World Population Day reaffirms the right of people to plan their families. It encourages activities, events and information that will help make this right real – especially for those who often have the hardest time getting the information and services they need to plan their families, such as marginalized populations and young people.

When people can plan their families, they can plan their lives. They can plan to beat poverty. They can plan on healthier mothers and children. They can plan to gain equality for women. Plan to support World Population Day this year!

(emphasis mine)

This is my most-favored cause, and I strongly recommend you give to the UNFPA, as it’s extremely underfunded.

Louis Bacon on Irresponsible Population

Q: What’s the most pressing issue facing the world?

A: “A Malthusian population explosion intersecting with globalization. We have encouraged all 7 billion of the world’s inhabitants to live like Westerners, and now that they have taken the bait, we are realizing it is impossible on this small Earth. The first big hit has been to the environment; the next, which we are witnessing, is to energy prices, and it is leading to food shortages and eventually more famines.
Governments are only starting to address the problem, and the planet’s most inventive and powerful economy, America’s, is leading only from the rear, if at all, given our present administration.”

From Alpha magazine, June 2008.

More about billionaire investor/environmentalist Louis Bacon

We Must Preserve The Earth’s Dwindling Resources (For My Five Children)

The Onion just wrote a fantastic satire piece on irresponsible population that just you have to read:

We Must Preserve The Earth’s Dwindling Resources For My Five Children

6,666,666,666 Humans

The 6,666,666,666th person alive on earth was born today. If four horseman have just ridden past, don’t panic. Oh, and happy Mother’s Day.

Perhaps the Duggar family is responsible for humanity’s reprehensible overpopulation?

Just putting it out there.

Jeffrey Sachs Visits Seattle

Jeffrey Sachs, on tour to publicize his new book, came to Seattle last week to address the World Affairs Council.

During his speech, he outlined 10 steps he believes would assist humanity in its quest towards equality, ending poverty, and creating a sustainable global society. Two of the steps, number two and eight, involve reducing population to responsible levels. Here are some of Sachs’ comments on the issue:

The second challenge is that not only is the per capita income going up but the world population is on track, on the relatively optimistic medium forecast of the United Nations Population Division, to reach more than 9 billion people by mid-century — another 2.5 billion people, net, added to the global population on a planet that’ already extraordinarily crowded. With all of that increase, at least in the initial point, coming in impoverished countries that already are not creating jobs/livelihoods, and in many cases are already under remarkable environmental stress. But the poorest of the poor are still having 6 or 7 children, maybe 4 or 5 survive to adulthood, each mother is raising 2 daughters to adulthood, each generation therefore is roughly doubling every 25 years, in the poorest lands. And this is against a backdrop of extreme poverty, massive disease burden, great water scarcity, and a tremendous amount of conflict. And the migration pressures that will come as climate change interacts with population growth are going to be phenomenal. And of course we don’t even want to talk about those things. And we have a global policy sophisticated enough to say, basically, ‘people get shot when they try to cross borders’.

So population is the second great challenge. And it’s one that’s not even discussed anymore, because first it’s not deemed to be a matter of concern to our government, and reasons such as, I suppose, the religious right, and others who don’t want to talk about it, and we’ve forgotten about it in public discussion, and again, to our [own] peril.

Eight. I would start refinancing, again, the UN Population Fund. Do you know that we cut all funding for the United Nations Population Fund at the beginning of the Bush administration? Just to make sure that the poorest and most unstable countries in the world don’t have contraception, don’t get their fertility rates under control, and therefore, somehow, are going to help solve these problems in the world, makes absolutely no sense from any point of view: economic development, environmental sustainability, or US national security. And we have to get back to some basic realities: the United States used to lead the effort to help spread family planning, voluntary fertility reduction, contraceptive availability, access to sexual and reproductive health services. And it would make a world of difference for our own security to continue to do that.

Hopefully, Sachs won’t be the last global power broker come to his senses, and embrace responsible population as the real solution to global problems.

The podcast is here, the video link is here.

Ted Turner Speaks on Population

Billionaire Ted Turner, in an interview with Charlie Rose last week, said that failure to address global warming will have us all dead or eating each other by mid-century.

One way to combat global warming, Turner said, is to stabilize the population.

“We’re too many people; that’s why we have global warming,” he said. “Too many people are using too much stuff.”

Turner suggested that “on a voluntary basis, everybody in the world’s got to pledge to themselves that one or two children is it.”

Ted Turner: Global warming could lead to cannibalism

John Ward Is My Hero

Councillor John Ward of Medway, Kent, England last week stood up against those who steal from all of us and fail to change their ways. His target: Karen Matthews, who, despite being completely supported by welfare payments, has reared seven children from five different fathers and earns additional money for each child.

Welfare mum Karen Matthews and her allegedly abusive partner, Craig Meehan

To me, it’s quite evident that someone unable to adequately provide for themselves has no place shepherding our next generation, let alone getting paid to do it. It’s an abomination. Mr. Ward agrees: “This is yet another example of ‘Breakdown Britain’, much of which stems from the Government-encouraged change away from the hard-working and decent family structure to an increasingly self-indulgent immoral and state-funded lazy lifestyle. Children become just a means toward that end, and are of themselves of little if any further significance in this new society. I think there is an increasingly strong case for compulsory sterilisation of all those who have had a second (or third, or whatever) child while living off state handouts. It would clearly take a lot of social pressures off all concerned, thus protecting the youngsters themselves to some degree, and remove the incentive to ‘breed for greed’ - i.e. for more public subsidy of their lifestyle [...] With over-population being the root cause of so much that negatively impacts Planet Earth, the very last thing the world needs is to encourage excessive breeding.”

He hit the nail right on the head.

Somehow, the political opposition (Labour) is trying to seize on Mr. Ward’s comments, and have gone as far as comparing his suggestions to those of Hitler. If he were legitimately trying to sterilize women on his own as some sort of vigilante, then Labour would be right to make the Hitler comparison. However, Mr. Ward is only illustrating a problem in order to bring it to light and to encourage thought and debate.

We have a problem - what is the optimal solution?

Because I’m against overreaching government intervention in personal affairs, I’d prefer some system of incentives and/or fines to ensure the number of children in a family is just right. Perhaps having a child could be a privilege for families on sound footing who would be charged a token fee that would go toward elementary schooling. Families unable to pay would be penalized for having children that they could not support.

Stories like that of Karen Matthews are sad for her, her children, and society as a whole. As a society we should find a way to prevent this kind of injustice, and relegate it to the past.

Daily Mail - Calls for Tory councillor to resign after he suggests parents on benefits should be sterilised after one child

Jeffrey Sachs is a Fucker

Jeffrey Sachs is a fucker. Not content with being a respected economist, Columbia professor, government advisor, and bestselling author (The End of Poverty), Jeffrey had to go out and write the book I wanted to write, beating me to press.

You should buy his book anyway.

It’s called Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.

Sachs argues that the crises facing humanity are daunting. He identifies four main issues: global warming/environmental destruction, overpopulation, ending poverty, and political logjams that hinder global cooperation. Sachs rolls out his doomsday scenario, complete with data that’s fun for the whole family! Consider me spooked. Then, as only an economist can, Sachs pats himself on the back and busts out a magical beanstalk plan that will solve everything on the cheap (if only the idiot politicians would listen).

Jeffrey Sachs Sucks

Every Minute, Every Hour, Every Day

4.2 children are born every second, 253 per minute, more than 15,000 per hour. Each year sees 133,398,951 new births. That’s 133 million children that will need education, shelter, food, water, energy, clothing, computers, and transportation for at least 66 years (the WHO’s estimate of global life expectancy). These requirements are too taxing on our planet’s natural resources. Even when accounting for human innovation which aims to maximize everything from crop yields to water reclamation, our birthrate and resource usage is unsustainable.

Only 55 million humans die each year, which, measured against the amount of humans added, is extraordinarily out of proportion.

US Census Bureau

The World Summed Up In A Paragraph

It would be a difficult task to describe the world in just one short paragraph. The CIA World Factbook threw their hat into the ring:

“World: Background

Globally, the 20th century was marked by: (a) two devastating world wars; (b) the Great Depression of the 1930s; (c) the end of vast colonial empires; (d) rapid advances in science and technology, from the first airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina (US) to the landing on the moon; (e) the Cold War between the Western alliance and the Warsaw Pact nations; (f) a sharp rise in living standards in North America, Europe, and Japan; (g) increased concerns about the environment, including loss of forests, shortages of energy and water, the decline in biological diversity, and air pollution; (h) the onset of the AIDS epidemic; and (i) the ultimate emergence of the US as the only world superpower. The planet’s population continues to explode: from 1 billion in 1820, to 2 billion in 1930, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1988, and 6 billion in 2000. For the 21st century, the continued exponential growth in science and technology raises both hopes (e.g., advances in medicine) and fears (e.g., development of even more lethal weapons of war).”

It’s a pretty solid primer on the 20th century, and we can take much from reading it.

What jumped out at me was the environmental movement vs. irresponsible overpopulation.  Environmental concerns have come about largely due to the population explosion along with man’s increased use of technology to increase our usage of scarce resources.  Mankind’s footprint on planet earth has been at no time greater than it is presently.  What are we going to do about this double-blow that threatens our planet?

China Reconsidering One-Child Policy

China’s one-child policy is a triumph of responsible planning.

China says its policies have prevented several hundred million births and boosted prosperity, but experts have warned of a looming social time-bomb from an aging population and widening gender disparity stemming from a traditional preference for boys. With the world’s biggest population straining scarce land, water and energy resources, China has enforced rules to restrict family size since the 1970s. Rules vary but usually limit families to one child, or two in the countryside.”

The problem in China is the same one Italy and Japan are facing: with the birthrate hovering lower than the replacement rate of 2.1 children per female, a country’s population ages while the younger generation comparatively shrinks in size. This poses problems of logistics, economics, and taxation, as a smaller workforce could be stretched too thin to support an larger society.

China’s birthrate is 1.8 children per female.

“We want incrementally to have this change,” Vice Minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission Zhao Baige told reporters in Beijing.“ Still, the government has previously expressed concern that too many people are flouting the rules. State media said in December that China’s population would grow to 1.5 billion people by 2033, with birth rates set to soar over the next five years. Officials have also cautioned that population controls are being unraveled by the increased mobility of China’s 150 million-odd migrant workers, who travel from poor rural areas to work in more affluent eastern cities. China has vowed to slap heavier fines on wealthy citizens who flout family planning laws in response to the emergence of an upper class willing to pay standard fines to have more children.

China already fines those with the means for having more children, but what is missing is a national target for births linked to a variable fine to keep births in line with their desired projection. This would allow anyone to have as many children as they want (as long as they are willing to pay for the extra strain their children exert on society’s resources), while ensuring that population growth doesn’t get out of control. Also, there are some external effects that would be very positive. For instance, allowing only the wealthy to have more than one or two children ensures that those children will have access to better education and more opportunities. As we’ve seen in North America, where everyone is allowed to reproduce without fine or consequence, we see the opposite effect: that of more reproduction among the poorer classes, who likely have less time and resources to ensure their children have every opportunity in education and personal development.

My hope is that China makes only subtle changes to its already very successful program, for the benefit of both the Chinese people and the world.

China may scrap one-child policy, official says

Sterilization is the Law

Los Angeles is now requiring all pets to be spayed/neutered by the age of 4 months. The reason: too many pets are euthanized every year in shelters, and stopping the breeding will eliminate a large portion of the unnecessary euthanizations. The effort goes towards making L.A. a “no kill” city.

Luckily, the law isn’t overreaching and doesn’t apply to everyone. Breeders and people who compete in dog shows and competitions are exempt, as are police dogs and guide dogs.

Also, the whole system is pretty fair. Non-adherents are fined and assigned community service, and subsidized spaying services are on offer to make them more accessible.

My question is, when will we roll this law out to reign-in the already out of control human population?

Pet Sterilization Becomes Law in LA

Dynamically-Sized Offspring

“…Animals have evolved a balance between offspring and effort. Some can even adjust how many offspring they produce, depending on whether they are under stress or live comfortably.”

Why have a large brood when food is scarce?  For humans, the same question should be asked when the economy isn’t provident, or when the cost of raising a child well is more than one’s income.

“Ruth Mace, an expert on family size at Imperial College London, argues this week in the journal Science that humans are governed by the same kinds of rules as animals. When the standard of living goes up, the cost of living goes up too. It takes a family in Addis Ababa (the urban capitol of Ethiopia) a lot more money to raise an additional child than a family out in the Ethiopian countryside. That may be one reason why the population is exploding in rural Ethiopia, while in Addis Ababa it is actually shrinking.”

I’m a strong proponent of quality over quantity with regard to human reproduction. More time and resources should be spent educating our children so that they can flourish. Having more children is a statement that says just the opposite.

Carl Zimmer has written a brief but fantastic article on the varied state of reproduction around the globe:

The Natural History of the Only Child - Wired