Poverty and large families.?

Question

Am I the only person who gets really angry when people in this day and age have lots of kids and they are struggling financially for the basics already. I read about people in poor countries, that must do menial work 12 hours a day, like breaking stones with no gloves and inhaling its dust which results in respiratory infections. plus extra people, results in a strain on resources which contributes to damage to the environment.

Should there not be a global initiative to stop this trend of large families? Is this happening? I have not heard of it? Perhaps incentives could be given to couples if they have sterilisations or pay people to have sterilisations?

Answer 1

and where is the freedom of choice? people should be allowed to bring into the world as many children as they can take care of, and this people in poor country's why do they always have young kids? cant they say no if they cannot feed themselves nor will their government take care of them?

Answer 2

it always make me wonder just how these chavs have so many kids when they have no means to support themselves let alone children.

Our government seems to encourage this behaviour for some reason by footing the entire bill for there lives perhaps the government has some secret agenda for large family's they certainly do nothing to prevent it from happening, who knows whats going on  :)

Answer 3

Well, its nice to know there is always someone out there telling other people what they can and cannot do.

Nice to meet you.

This whole bull c**p about over population has been a farce since the 1800's when it was first thought about.

If you took the entire world's population you could fit them in the United States and not have a single city more densely populated as NYC is currently. Leaving the entire rest of the world as farm land to raise food crops and live stock.

Choice.... I'm so glad you're against it.

If I choose to not educate myself and lay around all day making babies with my uneducated wife with my 10 other children in the other room of our dirt floored house, then so be it. Its all about choice.

Maybe, instead of advocating the killing of more than one or two or three children (which IS being done in China today) you should advocate the removal of welfare programs and foreign aid programs that allow these people to skate by on the system.

Answer 4

Overpopulation is the biggest challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. But people don't want to face up to it. Look at the emotional responses in some of the answers above. People deny the problem even exists.

In my own lifetime, the global population has more than doubled from 3 billion to over 6 billion. This can't go on. But everyone thinks they have the right to have children, the more the better it seems. China is the only country to have made any effort to contain population growth.

Before someone points the finger, my wife and I have acted responsibly and have had no children, through mutual choice. This, of course, makes us objects of scorn, pity and derision. We have even been accused of acting selfishly!

If we don't contain our own population, Nature will do it for us.

Answer 5

The most efficient remedy to the world's population and poverty problems would be for the rich to eat the poor.  That would cure both problems at once.

Answer 6

Interesting that you have involved yourself in this.  You might read a little more or go back to school to rid yourself of this phoobia.

Answer 7

I wouldn't get angry about it.   One of the challenges in our world is to understand the reality of being in a different culture with different mores.   Its helpful to me to think about it in a series of overlapping steps, where each culture in any part of the world can occupy a place on a continuum of something we might think of as "civilization-sophistication-excess-decl...  Different cultures have different strengths.   It's not hard to think of examples of cultures that we might think of as more "backward" than our own, but that have some aspects that we admire or envy.  An example might be the american indian culture's relationship to the earth.  Many tribes considered the earth sacred, and they honored the resources they consumed in a spiritual way.   What we don't admire about some tribes might be their treatment of women, or their ability to fight off the white man.  So while that culture ultimately lost the major battles for control of north america, we still tend to admire and honor that culture for a number of things.

So, each culture on the earth probably fits into some kind of a rough pyramid, where you perhaps start with subsistence, and end up with wretched excess, and peak somewhere at a sustainable and spiritually fullfilling lifestyle.   America seems at the moment to be on the downslope toward the kinds of excesses that can ruin a culture.  Great Britain has at times been described as overly civilized, to the point of becoming ineffectual or weak, yet they seem to recover from these periods and have been stalwart allies to America over time.

Some of the cultures that you are concerned with may simply be on a path upward, and are not yet positioned to be effective at population tuning and optomizing mouths to feed, vs productive capacity.   But they will get there, or perish in the process if they cannot sustain themselves.   This is the natural order of things.   We all will eventually be replaced by newer and more evolved versions of humans.....

Answer 8

The reason for poor families having a lot of children is because they probably don't have any other source of entertainment.

Answer 9

The point is a lot of these countries do not provide the people with access to contraception etc, plus there is often a lot of crime and many people are raped which is a big factor in the HIV thing and parents die and their children are left to fend for themselves.

You shouldn't be angry with them, you should be angry with their government, and the rest of the world for allowing this to keep happening.

Answer 10

It's like killing people then, really...

The more people there are, the more can help. Many poor families are being sent aid and there isn't really much we can do to stop poverty growing except from charity.