This week, Population Connection (www.populationconnection.org) is in Washington, DC, lobbying for international family planning.
As the biggest contributor to global warming, human activity is amplified by human population growth, which also amplifies the associated environmental and economic damages. This is what makes family planning critical to life on Earth as we know it — and it also makes the Rubbish on the Right’s more babies uber alles policy among the biggest threats to the environment that no one seems to be talking about.
For just a moment, forget that you have been shifted, by the same Rubbish on the Right, into an argument about when life begins and slut-shaming, ignoring — at our own peril — that there is no Planet B. And Planet A, which supports ALL life — not just the wittle fetuses, mind you — is in real trouble.
Forget it and instead choose a fresh start in re-framing the entire issue as an environmental one, because at this point in history, it is irresponsible and dangerous to force more humans into an already-damaged ecosystem, and unconscionable in a world where so many already go to bed hungry at night due to lack of resources, or access to them.
Ask yourself: Why are politicians always running on the same (unsolved) problems, year after year, decade after decade, making promises they cannot keep, spouting mythologies and ideologies that only hurt people over the long run?
The answer is this: Human population growth. Or, as an article called Population and the Environment: the Global Challenge from Actionbioscience (American Institute for Biological Sciences) points out, overgrowth — every 13 years, the world’s human population grows by 1 billion people. This constant growth puts a real damper in our political efforts to improve life quality for all, as we are so busy playing catch-up due to population growth that even our best intentions may fall short.
The same article goes on to say:
Slowing the increase in population, especially in the face of rising per capita demand for natural resources, can take pressure off the environment and buy time to improve living standards on a sustainable basis.
As population growth slows, countries can invest more in education, health care, job creation, and other improvements that help boost living standards. In turn, as individual income, savings, and investment rise, more resources become available that can boost productivity. This dynamic process has been identified as one of the key reasons that the economies of many Asian countries grew rapidly between 1960 and 1990.
Research the stats on how much environmental damage is done per each American baby, not to mention the staggering costs to the taxpayers to house, feed, clothe and provide infrastructure for a population growing by the millisecond, and you’ll see some shocking statistics. One article in the New York Times, called “Having Children Brings High Carbon Impact,” nails it, and cites some pretty stunning findings from a study done by Oregon State University.
Among them:
Take, for example, a hypothetical American woman who switches to a more fuel-efficient car, drives less, recycles, installs more efficient light bulbs, and replaces her refrigerator and windows with energy-saving models. If she had two children, the researchers found, her carbon legacy would eventually rise to nearly 40 times what she had saved by those actions.
And this:
The average long-term carbon impact of a child born in the U.S. – along with all of its descendants – is more than 160 times the impact of a child born in Bangladesh.
It seems that all the complaining and whining by the Rubbish on the Right regarding legalized abortion and birth control fall flat: neither have made even a dent in the human exponential population growth curve, so what’s it going to take to correlate family planning with environmental preservation, and thus a better global quality of life for all of us who actually value life enough to be concerned with quality rather than quantity? Forced sterilization? Pandemic? World War III? (And yes, I do realize that last one would destroy what environment we do have left.)
I remember an argument several years back in which people were arguing whether it was SUV owners or meat eaters who were to blame for global warming. I could only laugh, because in reality, it is the sheer (and growing) numbers of both, among our planet’s many other “people with habits,” i.e., all of us. Once again, we’ve been wasting our precious time on the wrong argument.
I’ve had many people tell me that “if we took all the humans on Earth and put them together, they’d only take up the state of Nevada.” Well, that’s nice, but let’s not forget the buildings, the roads, the farms, the pollution, the landfills, the cars, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the wood we burn, the overwhelming amount of stuff that the human population builds, utilizes or wastes...and there goes your “wide open spaces,” which the Dixie Chicks love to sing about. (And as a Nevadan, I admonish my statemates: Have you seen Lake Mead lately?)
I’ve also heard some people say that we have enough resources to feed 30 (or 40…or 50) billion people, but I can’t take those claims seriously when we can’t (or won’t) fully feed 7.3 billion, which is the world’s current human population in 2016 (Google search). And then there are those who declare that “we can all move out to Mars, or onto big space ships!” Okay, go. If you can find a suitable and affordable transport to Mars, go for it. Because I don’t like traffic...or the fact we spend years of our lives on customer service hold or waiting in line because there are too damn many people, and resources are diminishing...seemingly including the resource of time itself.
The image at the top of this article contains two quick searches using Google that you can do, comparing Earth’s human population in 1960 versus its human population in 2010. The numbers speak for themselves, and very loudly at that: 3.036 billion people in 1960 increased to 6.884 billion in just 50 years. That means a human population doubling time of under 50 years. So I don’t wonder why so much environmental damage has occurred — I only wonder why it has been allowed to continue at the rate it has.
My assertion: Sheer human arrogance in thinking that we are the only “precious” life form on Earth. And it’s even worse when the Rubbish on the Right brands human fetuses as the only truly precious life form — this is arrogance beyond arrogance, not to mention biting the hand of Mother Nature, that which feeds us all. It is no mystery why we are losing Earth-saving and environment-balancing species by the truckload while pollution-related illnesses kill more millions of people each year. We’ve simply gotten too full of ourselves, something I look at as a result of a corporate-controlled, “consume at all costs” society gone absolutely bat-shit crazy off the rails. Along with a very strange form of religion which supports it.
But there really is no escaping it: having a clean environment to enjoy, with clean air, water and enough resources for a decent life has everything to do with a woman’s right to choose. The five biggest reasons I have chosen to remain Child-Free by Choice are one, the environment; two a very expensive, long and life-altering bout with pollution-related disease, in my case, cancer; three, I’ve never found a guy I could trust enough to put my body and a large chunk of my life on the line for; four, I came from a family history of a long cycle of abuse, and this is my way of breaking it; and five, I could give a hoot if there is a god or there isn’t. As an agnostic, I never understood the insistence regarding an invisible sky wizard with a fetish for what I need to be doing with my lady parts, amazingly always told to me by some very assuming, very rude self-appointed spokesmorons, who only end up reaffirming one thing: anyone claiming to speak for god on this Earth is a fraud.
Speaking of fraud, at this point in history, restricting abortion or birth control is both economic and environmental folly, as well as a national embarrassment...you’re not saving any baybees, baby. In countries where women have the right to choose if, when and how many children they will have, quality of life improves dramatically. Instead of restrictions based on GOP (God’s Outdated PlanTM) ideology, it’d be wiser to encourage questioning as to whether or not it is environmentally sound to have a child at all, sustainability being the key word here as it applies to the national economy, the environment, and thus the overall quality of our lives.
In my perfect world, this starts with sex education and family planning services that include information on the environmental, economic and taxpayer impacts of having a child. That, and treating your significant other to that vasectomy he’s always wanted (and oh, yeah — de-funding Crisis Pregnancy Centers, which are nothing more than taxpayer-funded conversion centers that threaten our rights to exercise our own fiscal responsibility, bodily autonomy and have a clean environment).
According to the Brookings Institution, $12 Billion per year in taxpayer money is already spent on publicly-financed medical care related to unintended pregnancy — and fully half of all pregnancies in the US are unintended. This is in every way an environmental as well as fiscal and economic issue (and health issue, and infrastructure issue, and so on).
The needs of an ever-growing population fly in the face of all the cries of “lower taxes!” that the Rubbish on the Right liars use to garner votes (when they’re not pandering to knuckle-dragging entities of all shapes and sizes). When they claim that funding family planning and abortion costs taxpayers too much money, I respond with studies showing that it simply doesn’t — and the numbers don’t lie.
Doing simple research from fact-based sources provides us with the ammo necessary to combat these pretend-to-be tax-avoiding desperados, who will vote for any creature that uses a noun, a verb and the word “abortion” together (thanks, Joe Biden!). An article on teen pregnancy from the Office of Adolescent Health under the US Department of Health and Human Services states:
Teen childbearing costs U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars due to lost tax revenue, increased public assistance payments, and greater expenditures for public health care, foster care, and criminal justice services.
Another article from ThinkProgress, “How Denying Women Access To Reproductive Choices Costs Taxpayers” says:
The [Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act] would increase the deficit by $75 million between 2014 and 2018 and by $225 million from 2014 to 2023. These costs are thanks to the fact that 40 percent of all births are paid for by Medicaid and additional births will drive up those costs.
Add that to the indisputable fact that each new baby born causes us all to suffer the environmental as well as fiscal and economic consequences in forms including higher taxes. In legal terms, these consequences are referred to as externalities. Investopedia defines an externality as:
A consequence of an economic activity that is experienced by unrelated third parties.
A factory in my neighborhood or a couple down the block having their third kid can produce pollution and increased traffic patterns, along with the increased need for services, education and so on. This will increase my taxes due to increases in healthcare costs, educational costs, and other infrastructure costs required by said factory and/or family.
So who really pays for these externalities? As it is now, we’re all paying, so the point is to keep these negative externalities to a minimum for our greater environmental and fiscal health, and instead bring about those which are positive in effect.
And that involves the re-framing of a whole lot of our currently useless arguments into actual productive discussions that mean something and create real progress, one being that free birth control drastically lowers the abortion rate. This is one project I am working on, getting every woman in the US access to the birth control of her choice...for free. If companies can line up against North Carolina’s anti-LGBT law, then they can do so for women as well — if they are serious about being positive forces for change and anti-discrimination, non-selectively and across the board.
Our dialog has been so narrowed by the move to the right in the US that these topics — family planning, fiscal responsibility and the environment — rarely cross paths at a time when they absolutely must.
Cheers! And thanks for reading. Please visit www.populationconnection.org for even more good info!