Women -- The Unacknowledged Source Of Overpopulation

While it's true women produce babies, they wouldn't be able to do so without men. And most men are pretty enthusiastic participants in the process of reproduction even if they don't always want to actually reproduce. Same goes for women.

Feminism since its outset has sought to give women the right to reproduce *less*, not more. It has sought to pursue this by means both good for the rights of men and bad, sometimes consistent with the concepts of justice and sometimes not. But to lay it all on women? That doesn't seem fair or accurate. Ultimately the problem of overpopulation seems to rest with the fact that people in most non- or under-industrialized parts of the world (ie, where most of the world's population lives) simply have little or no access to pre-conceptive birth control or live in societies where it is not allowed to use it. On top of that, children may be viewed as the next best thing to Social Security, since they don't have anything like that where they live. In agricultural societies, children are a family farm's workforce. They are an economic necessity. Taking all this into account, it's easy to see why people are still having as many kids as they are in non- and under-developed countries. And I think everyone is in on the act.

I am not sure if overpopulation should be a concern. I have heard that the earth is no where near it's occupancy level, and that overpopulation is a bunch of hype.

Russia recently announced that women are not having enough babies to sustain their population levels. They have more abortions compared to births.

I don't think the birth rate is so much a concern, but rather producing babies that grow up to be contributing individuals is the problem. We need more givers and less takers.

Birth control is a double-edged sword. Many expect it to be used to prevent births until marriage, and then within marriage to space out the time between children to a manageable rate.

But instead what frequently happens is that it allows women to be promiscuous before marriage with a false sense that they can't get pregnant (many young women are not even interested in marriage - due to "sexual freedom"). It also gives men a false sense of security against pregnancy and an expectation that women should be sexually active with them (and if a woman likes him, she will be, or else the man moves on). Then birth control fails and an unplanned pregnancy occurs between a man and a woman that are not committed to raising a child together and then you get children raised to a lower standard and less potential.

I think the problem is the break down of families due to sexual freedom that both men and women seem to feel entitled to. If an intact healthy family produces children, I have no concerns about how many children they have.

The one thing the author got right is this: "Is this not the de facto credo of feminism -- giving every woman a right to be selfish, no matter what the consequences on others?"

I believe that is the credo feminism. Women do whatever they want despite the consequences to children or men. Children suffer for them and men are expected to pay for them.

How women defused population bomb. I added a comment as follows:

'Indeed it is good that western countries are now at just-under-replacement rates and in poorer countries, they are at 2.5 children/woman. But that isn't good enough. The population of the planet needs to be REDUCED. We need to back way away from our headlong drive to 8 billion+ people. It's true we could add many more people to the planet, but that isn't the point. We really well and truly do not need to. Our species is not struggling for survival. We at the top and show no signs of stopping being there any time soon. The issue really is lifestyle-- people in other parts of the world have an equal moral claim to the luxuries of invention we in the west have been using, provided of course they can pay for them. If so, then they ought to be able to buy them. So let's say these people's countries develop enough so that they are able to obtain a middle class lifestyle more and more and can buy the stuff we in the west take for granted. Consumption will go up commensurately. Good for business, bad for the planet. The more people doing it, the worse it gets. Can newcomers to the western lifestyle be morally barred from availing themselves? Not really. We really do need to find a way to convert our economies to ecologically-friendly means of production and products while fulfilling reasonable marketplace demands. This is a tall order to fill. Finally, I have read from others that this is a man-bashing article (or woman-good, man-bad article). I can see how you could make that judgment. Men-are-to-blame articles abound in popular press and any article that has the general sense of "women are doing something good" in it can easily be construed as implying that what they are doing is in contrast to what men are doing (by implication, it would be bad). However in this case, it is hard to make that judgment, largely because men are not mentioned at all as reproductive factors (despite being as necessary to reproduction as women). Had the article asserted that it's men who want large families and women were "oppressed" by this, then that would be one thing. (Such an assertion is counter-intuitive anyway, defying most people's experiences as it does.) But that isn't what it says. It just says that now that women are not having nearly as many kids as they used to, our population growth is much less than it could be. Nonetheless, it is still too great. We need to implode the numbers, not explode them further.'

There can be no doubt that feminism has been a major contributor to out-of-wedlock births as it has categorically sought the elimination of marriage* as well as supplying the ideological basis for public funding of a single woman's reproductive agenda should she not be making her own money to do so. The basis of this is indeed the idea of women having *exclusive* discretion regarding reproduction, no matter who has to pay for it (her/child's father/the taxpayer). The question though of whether a given woman has or does not have kids is left to her and that has always been feminism's position. On top of that, with no reproductive rights of his own, feminism has always insisted that a man be 'held responsible' for becoming a father (as if it was a crime), even if he did so as a consequence of duplicity ("It's OK, honey, I'm on the pill."). Feminism isn't about justice, it's about women having greater rights than men and of course, more privileges for women.

But to your point, in the history of the human race, many more people have been born out-of-wedlock than within it. Marriage as it is defined here in the west is a relatively new idea. Other societies were not nearly so impractical as to assume that a couple could or would want to stay together indefinitely, especially if they were young. Historically, a marriage, in societies where it has been practiced, has been for a set period of time or for only as long as certain conditions persisted, and then it expired. Seems like a better approach overall, and would unburden our western legal systems greatly if it were simply re-defined to be something less all-encumbering and intertwining for the people involved.

The reproduction rate has fallen with the rise in feminism, but more particularly, with the rise in education rates for women combined with the societal acceptance of women in fields and workplace arenas they either were not accepted into before or, through their own choosing, elected not to go into. Naturally a woman with an advanced education will likely have advanced ambitions to go with it. Getting into a 40-60 hr/wk. job then leads inexorably to her having to decide whether or not to reproduce or continue working. She has thus far invested nothing in being a mother or becoming one but has already invested what, 4~6+ yrs. in higher education plus, in most cases, incurred a great deal of debt to go with it. The choice is clear: stick with the job. (Besides, having a baby sounds pretty painful; why would you want to when you can just go to work?) By the time she gets to her mid-30s (the time just shoots by!), married or not, she suddenly realizes that IF she will have kids (or one kid), she better do it now-- assuming she can. So maybe, if she does, she has one.

Not surprisingly, we in the west are seeing very low fecundity rates overall and if things keep going this way, the native-born populations of our nations will simply die out. But make no mistake, we will in phases be replaced by immigrants, legal or not, from societies with higher reproductive rates (and by implication, lower education rates among their female populations, or among their populations of both sexes). Take America, for example: can as much land as makes up America go underpopulated for long when large parts of land in other parts of the world go overpopulated? Eventually, the people there will figure it out and come here. We're no different than any other species: just like lions and antelope, we go where the room and resources can be found.

From my POV (and redwoodwriter, I think we are simply approaching the matter from different points of view), the issue here is not whether feminism is or is not encouraging women to have kids, in or out of wedlock-- as such. The issue is what is the consequence of the world's women overall still having babies at an average of greater-than-replacement rate, even if they are not married? Their marital state makes no difference to me. What matters is, are we going to be topping 8 billion people soon? Consider that if 5 billion people reproduce a total of 10% over 10 years, the population after 10 years is 5.5 billion. But now, say 7 billion people reproduce at just 7% in total over 10 years, the final figure is 7.49 billion-- almost an increase of .5 billion, or almost the same increase as when 5 billion people increased over 10 years at a 10% total rate. The point I am making is that as the population of humans goes up, even if our repro. rate falls appreciably, we are still adding huge numbers of new bodies to the planet, and they in turn add to the repro. rate in the next cycle. If we have an annual greater-than-replacement rate of just .05% (ie, to get the total pop'n figure, multiply 12 billion by 1.0005), then starting at 12 billion people, the year following, we will have added 6 million more people to the planet (12 billion x 1.0005 = 12,006,000,000). And on it will go. Clearly, we just cannot keep going on this way. It's not unsustainable so much as it is suicidal. Somehow humanity has got to get its reproduction under control and I am just not sure how that is going to happen even with the most aggressive educate-the-females agendas currently in place. But frankly, I don't think that's going to solve the problem. There are simply too many of us and too many of us still want to reproduce no matter how educated we are or what it does to the rest of the world.

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* The elimination of marriage from an MRA standpoint may not, IMO, be such a bad idea. Think of how many men have had very bad consequences arise in their lives that started with those two little words, "I do."

Nonetheless, marriage could be a very enjoyable thing for both parties provided they are right for each other, love each other, have reasonable expectations, are mature, have good relationship skills, and generally want the same things. Not easy to find, especially these days. But the marriage contract as it has evolved by legal precedent has made it a fairly burdensome institution for those who have made the mistake of choosing the wrong mate. For most people, especially men, does it really make a lot of sense to do it? I understand there are people in the world with traditional mindsets about these things, but stepping back from it and looking at it objectively, does marriage, for the typical man, especially the typical young man, really seem like a wise thing to do? I don't think so.