WHAT DO THE SECULAR HAVE BUT THE SELF?:

Calls for population controls selfish (Pamela Bone, December 21, 2007, The Australian)

Three of my grandmother's 11 children died in infancy. None of my mother's did. The reason the world's population suddenly ballooned in the 20th century was not that people started breeding like rabbits but that they stopped dying like flies. Indeed, the number of children born to each woman across the world has halved since the 1970s.

This does not stop the periodical panics about population growth. The latest, in response to debates about climate change, is a call for a carbon tax to be imposed on babies.

Writing in The Medical Journal of Australia, Barry Walters, an associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia, has proposed that families choosing to have more than a defined number of children should be charged a carbon tax, while people buying condoms or having sterilisation operations should receive carbon credits.

I am sure Walters is a very good obstetrician, but I don't think I would want him delivering my babies, especially the ones I had over the defined number. Does he swear "another bloody little consumer" under his breath every time he pulls one out?

There is no doubt more people means more consumption, more waste, more traffic, more congestion and more emissions of carbon dioxide. But there seems to me something selfish about the calls for curbs on population. I can be here on this earth but not you, unborn others.

Gaia demands blood.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 26, 2007 6:57 AM