Should there be 'population control'?

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Population control implies planning the size and composition of the human population (as a whole, or in particular areas) - with the stated goal of matching population to resources (potential and or available - over some kind of probabilistic and debatable timescale).

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People talk about this, a lot - as if it was a common sense aspiration; but I don't know a situation where it has actually been done honestly.

The reason is obvious enough - population control could only be imposed honestly and justly by an extremely powerful but also honest and just government. However, since such governments are... ahem... very rare, then whatever policies are in practice justified by population control rhetoric are in practice dishonest, unjust, ineffective - in sum, counter-productive.

So population control is not common sense.

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What is also not common sense is the idea (or, more likely excuse) that 'responsible' parents will have few children - or no children at all - because they are trying to prevent over-population.

This makes as much sense as starving oneself to death in order to prevent a famine.

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But because population planning it treated in public discourse as if it was simple common sense, and because overpopulation is a reality in global and regional terms - and therefore large scale starvation, disease and violence are apparently inevitable - people very frequently argue that it is right and correct and moral for modern Western Man to suppress fertility, to have fewer and fewer children.

As I say, I think this is the mainstream opinion - that population both can and should be planned, that this implies responsible parents should have few to zero children, and that to do this is a sign of superior prudence.

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Leaving this aside as a typical example of the kind of psychotic and dishonest refusal to think which is imposed upon people by modernity; the question still remains of if not this, then what?

How should we regard this question of 'population'?

Should we ignore prudence and have as many children as come along and trust to God or luck or government to raise them?

No. That is just another, and exceptionally vicious, modern deformation of thought - that it is just and proper and indeed necessary for the governments of developed nations to feed, shelter, clothe, and educate every child born anywhere in the world by an open-ended process of coercively extracting resources from its population and using these to create endlessly expanding child-raising bureaucracies.

This is a vile parody of charity, totalitarian tyranny masquerading as compassion.

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So not that either - then what?

The answer seems to be simple enough - the 'system' is and should be that parents are and ought to be responsible for their own children.

In other words population 'planning' starts and ends at home.

We ought to 'plan' our own families and we ought to be responsible for them.

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Now, of course, many many things can and do go wrong with such planning. Parents get sick and die, parents lose jobs and cannot find work, there may be economic collapse and natural disasters, children vary and may be handicapped, sick, unlucky... What then?

What then is essentially that families need and ask for charity, for help from others who ought to help them as and when possible (they have a duty to be charitable), and the givers of charity are given credit for their free gift and the receivers of charity ought to be thankful for such help.

Charity represents the labour - ultimately the time and effort - of other people.

Charity is a duty for Christians - although most of us utterly fail in fulfilling it - but resources coercively extracted by the government do not represent compliance with the duty of charity.

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But the bottom line is that when parents have children which (for whatever reason) they cannot raise, and if charity is insufficient - then these children will die.

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Population planning and control are therefore, essentially, euphemisms for population limitation. 

And at the bottom line, there are two options for population limitation: increased mortality or reduced fertility.

Increased mortality was the near universal mechanism is antiquity.

But it seems obvious and sensible and compassionate to modern secular people that reduced fertility is vastly preferable to increased mortality.

Well, how's that working out? Is it viable long term?

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The secular developed world has reduced and reduced fertility among its rulers, and its productive population, under a wide range of excuses and false rationalizations...

But this is grossly unnatural and unChristian behaviour - so unnatural and unChristian that it is taboo even to discuss the subject in the public arena - so ashamed and angry and confused are we about this matter.

The dishonest denial of common sense always comes back to bite us; and when it does, matters are made worse by the fact that dishonest people who have inverted common sense cannot recognize what is happening to them.

Thus the punishment is doubled.

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The West is deep into mandatory denial and evasion in terms of population as well as many other matters.

The consequences are extreme and deadly - but these consequences are also subject to mandatory denial and evasion.

So we see that sin is compounded by the consequences of sin - madness and ignorance lead to more of the same; unless or until repentance and rebirth.

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