Population

Not legislation. (girl babies left to die in China)

But you need to work out how many Chinese there would be now if they hadn't done something about it.

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fworld-15391515&h=aAQFP6bCdAQGnNxwlZA7Cgs9KO6pC72mKgreWgVn5I81e0w

NO YOU DON'T !!!!! YOU NEED TO FEEL SORRY FOR THE POOR DEAD BABIES!!!!

Do recommend you click on this (or copy & past). It is a real eyeopener. You can put in your date of birth and see how much the population has increased since then.......

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fworld-15391515&h=aAQFP6bCdAQGnNxwlZA7Cgs9KO6pC72mKgreWgVn5I81e0w

and convert your links. it's not difficult.

please and thank you. and !

Of course I feel sorry that girl babies have died. I also feel sorry for the mothers who have been persuaded to get rid of their girl babies. That is something the Chinese should have dealt with/deal with. It happens elsewhere too - where boys are worth more than girls.

There is a big difference between "population control" and having a "population policy". One of the reasons for advocating having a population policy is to avoid the future necessity of having population control.

The population increase (and the rate of increase) and the sheer numbers involved lead to China having population control. It is not very nice! That is why we have to convince people - and help them - to voluntarily limit their populations.

I am not in favour of selective genocide as the Chinese are want to do, carboncareful, which is what population control really means.
Education, within a country's cultural dynamics, has to be the way forward.

Exactly. And setting an example is not a bad thing too

I think we're talking at cross purposes cc. I've probably explained myself badly.

I don't understand? What I am saying is that we don't want to be forced into doing what the Chinese have done but on the other hand if they hadn't done it things populationwise would be a lot worse. OK that sounds like a contradiction but we (the rest of the world) have to learn the lesson and not let ourselves get into that position. We could do this by having a sensible population policy that educated the public about the dangers of continual and/or rates of population growth; about contraception; about being responsible about our fertility; about women's rights; about depleting resources; about poverty, and so on and so on......
Does that clear things up?

There are twenty countries that have zero population growth, that's a start I guess, but I read that the UK population increases by 500,000 per year. Where exactly are all of these people going to live? It must having an impact on the price of houses, transport, health care, pollution levels, energy, water, etc etc. I can see the negative impact in Australia on having an increasing population in the last twenty years and we are getting close to the 23 million mark.

^be

Saying we need a population policy (not population control) is easy but coming up with something effective and fair is tricky. There are already people who know that they cannot afford more than say one or two children and so don't have any more, but there are also those who still can't afford them but procreate anyway. Do we decide that child benefit should be for the first child only? Do we make family housing even more difficult to find than it is already? Education is a possible route but doesn't seem to be doing very well on a wide variety of other social subjects – sex and drugs and binge drinking, for example.

Would any population policy have to include an exemption clause for those whose religion prevents the use of contraception?

A policy isn't legislation so exemption wouldn't arise.

The more I think about a population policy the more it seems like a minefield. What about IVF and fertility treatment? What about immigration – this government seems to have a very crass approach. And at the other end of the scale – what about the elderly? Health care is already rationed and the elderly are already feeling the thin end of the wedge. Yet, there is a logic, if no humanity, in refusing medication to, say, those over 75 and providing only palliative care.

I appreciate that absent, perhaps exception would have been a better choice of word. My point, as you have already highlighted, is that 'coming up with something effective and fair is tricky'

Do you think we shall see the contraceptive police knocking on people's bedroom doors Notsogrand. That would really be Big Brother watching you. Not you personally, of course, especially if, like many of us, you're post menopausal. Perhaps we would have to register that we are post menopausal. Shut up absent.

Lower birthrates follow better education, female emancipation, and equal opportunities. Even those who do not want to use contraception have smaller families now than the 12 or 15 they would have had a couple of centuries ago. You cannot impose population control before there is a good reason for people not to have a large family to help provide for them.

As a nation gets more prosperous and more organised to look after its weaker members, the need for the insurance of many children lessens.

But when the state has taken over the whole role of providing for everyone, cradle to grave, disabled or able bodied, hard-working or idle, the connection between producing children and the family working together to raise them to an age where they can help support the older and younger members is blurred.

I don't advocate leaving children to starve because their parents have no work, or exposing unwanted infants, but I do follow carboncopy's reasoning about China. That is not the way to go - but it did have a result!

I'm not only post menopausal Absent, but also post men.

Surely one of the problems with ageing populations and a falling birth rate is that there will be nobody working and thereby generating income to pay for our pensions?
To digress to the 7 billionth baby I was so disappointed that is was not my new (still expected) GC - although how anybody knows is a mystery to me. Does something go "kerching!" like in a fruit machine and loits of gold coins come tumbling out?

You'd think it would, wouldn't you Gracesmum!

notso!

The trick about falling birthrates is to balance dependants so that as the number of old people to be looked after increases the number of children to be cared for/educated decreases.