Addict Nation (29 page)

I realize this is a sensitive and emotional subject. Many Americans come from large families and cherish the experience of growing up with three, four, or even more siblings. As adults, they often seek to replicate what feels comfortable and natural to them. Pointing out the very real problems of overpopulation should not be perceived as a condemnation. History is filled with ever-changing circumstances that have always required humans to embrace new ways of thinking—if only for their own survival.

The continued population boom in the United States is also being fueled by what’s called “population momentum.” Even a population like ours, which is at or below replacement-level fertility, will keep growing. Why? Because the higher fertility—in our nation’s recent past—produced more babies. Those babies have now matured and are currently making babies. So it can take a few generations for the population to stabilize and lower, even if the average woman is having fewer kids than her mom or grandma. It’s like turning around a big, gray battleship. Population trends don’t turn sharply downward overnight without something horribly catastrophic occurring, such as famine, an epidemic of disease, or genocide.

“The diseases are just going to get worse. They are evolving as we are evolving. A disease could arise which we do not have immunity to, and in our interconnected world, we have contact with so many people and things are spread so easily, lots of people could die. It could be a self-regulation of Mother Nature. We think we are the only organisms on this planet, but we’re not. We’re in balance with everything else here, and at some point the balance is going to tip too far and we are going to get the bad end of the deal.”

—Becky Heineke, blogger at
overpopulationblog.blogspot.com

Another obvious reason for the United States population boom is that Americans are living longer. In 2001, life expectancy at birth for the total population reached a record high of about seventy-seven years, up from about seventy-five years in 1990.
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Immigration is yet another reason we can expect our population to keep expanding. Between now and 2050, the Hispanic population is expected to triple.
USA Today
reports, “Even if immigration is limited, Hispanics’ share of the population will increase because they have higher birth rates than the overall population. That’s largely because Hispanic immigrants are younger than the nation’s aging baby boom population.”

Another huge factor is religion. Hispanics, whether immigrant or American born, are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. The church still shuns artificial birth control, preaching that sex is a sin unless it’s done within the context of marriage, retaining “its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.” Catholic Church doctrine condemns “Any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means.” Abstinence during certain times of a woman’s cycle is allowed as it takes advantage of “a faculty provided by nature.”
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If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s not to argue religion at the dinner table, or even in a book like this. However, perhaps because I’m Puerto Rican and Irish (and my bosses assumed I was doubly Catholic), I was often sent to cover Pope John Paul II during my decades as a TV news reporter. I viewed these religious assignments as fun, out-of-town jaunts. So I never told my assignment editors that my parents were lapsed Catholics who preferred to dabble in Reichian therapy and Zen Buddhism while neglecting to have me baptized. The upshot is, while my mom and dad never attended Mass, I did . . . lots of times . . . on the clock as a reporter. I followed the late Pope as he visited Mexico and saw—with my own eyes— the enormous sway he held over the masses there. His word was taken as gospel by many millions in Latin America who follow church teachings unquestioningly. And the message was clear: make more babies, apparently even if you can’t afford to feed them.

It’s not just Catholicism. Most religions seem hardwired to promote procreation, perhaps—in part—as a form of self-preservation. While the Catholic Church apparently feels its principles are above and beyond questions of demographics and population, I know the Church does address the issue of human suffering. I believe much of the human suffering going on today is caused by the fact that we simply have too many humans beings born into a world that doesn’t want them, doesn’t appear to need them, and can’t even feed them.

One Child Dies Every Five Seconds
as a Result of Hunger!
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While not big on organized religion, I am a huge fan of Jesus Christ. I feel strongly that Jesus Christ would not be in favor of mass starvation. Suffice it to say that our cultural addiction to procreation is very much intertwined with a variety of religious doctrines whose roots stem way back to a time when the mere concept of billions of human beings was simply unfathomable. In the controversial book
Conversations with God
, the author purports to find himself in a two-way dialogue with the Almighty. He takes the opportunity to ask God why he doesn’t solve problems like world hunger. He says God’s reply is this: “The day YOU really want an end to hunger, there will be no more hunger. I have given you all the resources with which to do that.”
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Whether you believe he was talking to God or not, the truth is obvious. Ending world hunger is up to us—you and me. The fact is, we let 700 children die of hunger every hour; 16,000 children die of hunger every day.

Starvation is a slow and painful way to die. In our world today, most of these starvation victims are under the age of five. So many babies are coming into this world just to die. Is that a respect for life?

We are in denial. We pretend that these deaths are not happening and that we are “good people” as long as we can feed our own children. Unless it involves a massive hurricane or earthquake, these child-starvation deaths in faraway lands rarely attract news coverage or outside help. If you consider an innocent child dying of starvation to be an obscenity, then we’ve already hit bottom on our cultural addiction to procreation. There is a better way!

Adopt Me, Please

There are 145 million orphans in the world.
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That’s UNICEF’s estimate. An orphan is defined as a child who has lost one or both parents. About 15 million children are double orphans, meaning they’ve lost both their mother and father. The vast majority of these orphans are in the developing world.
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Brangelina (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) and Madonna may have made adoption trendy, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. Adoption, either of American children or children in a foreign land, is one obvious way to fulfill one’s desire for parenthood—to nurture and give—and alleviate crushing social problems in the process. My therapist once said something that really impacted me: “You don’t have to give birth to your own biological offspring to be a parent. You can be a parent to someone else’s child or you can parent animals. You can even parent forests and oceans.” I agree. We need to expand our circle of compassion beyond our own flesh and blood.

There is so much life out there that desperately needs nurturing. To do so is to be emotionally sober in a resource-starved world. To adopt an orphan or “parent” our neglected environment is also a way of making amends for the destruction we’ve inevitably wrought as a member of our materialistic culture. Making amends is a crucial part of a spiritual recovery from any addiction.

Dateline Niger

On May 4, 2010, I was reading the
New York Times
when I came upon the story of the famine in the West African nation of Niger. “Outside the state food warehouses here, women sift in the dirt for spilled grains of rice. Seven hundred miles to the east, mothers pluck bitter green berries and boil them for hours in an attempt to feed their children.” I was about to bite into some morning toast but lost my appetite as I went on to read about how 12 percent of Niger’s children are “acutely malnourished,”
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with skinny arms that reach out for any morsel of food. But my sadness soon turned to frustration. Niger, while one of the poorest countries in the world, has the highest birthrate in the world! My frustration turned to rage as I read that there’s little family planning in this Muslim country. One woman who was boiling leaves in the hopes of making them edible had a brood of seven children. Another frantic mother had five kids. Ten children is not uncommon. This is standard operating procedure all over the developing world. Niger’s fertility rate is a mind-boggling 7.68 children per woman. Compare that to Japan’s fertility rate of 1.20.
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Join the Pop Corps

There are many Americans making extraordinary efforts and pumping many millions into fighting hunger, poverty, and disease in Africa—and the rest of the developing world. It’s admirable. Still, I can’t help but wonder why it isn’t completely obvious that the first and foremost objective and focus of all international humanitarian work must be population control. Overpopulation is the underlying problem and the common thread that runs through all of the other social problems, like malnutrition and disease. Since population can grow exponentially, especially in a place like Niger, preventing one birth is potentially preventing a thousand or even a million down the road.

We spend many millions fighting diarrhea, malaria, and measles. Wouldn’t it make more sense to focus on reducing the number of humans through birth control so there are fewer people in the risk pool for those diseases? Of course, this is best illustrated by the AIDS pandemic.

The number of people infected by AIDS is growing by almost 3 million every year! Right now, about 33 million people are believed to be infected around the world.
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For every 100 people put on treatment, 250 are newly infected. In Uganda alone, American money keeps about 200,000 people on AIDS treatment.
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Still, our generosity cannot keep up with the spread of the epidemic.

Pouring money into birth control and family planning would automatically reduce the number of people born with AIDS and the number of people who might develop it during their lifetimes. Population control should be the first line of defense and the top priority. But preventing disease or death by preventing a person from existing isn’t as dramatic as allowing someone to be born and then contract a disease from which they need to be cured. The absence of a person is an abstract concept. Abstract concepts are not as politically or socially enticing as living, breathing problems. Simply put, it’s hard to take credit for saving a person who never was.

It’s no longer an option to say, “Well, overpopulation is happening in other countries, so it’s their problem, not mine.” We are all sharing an ever-dwindling chunk of the earth’s precious resources, so an unwanted, preventable pregnancy is going to impact all of us, whether it occurs in Somalia or Santa Fe.

Even if we made population control priority number one, how could we overcome the intense cultural resistance in much of the developing world to family planning, birth control—including the Pill—and condoms? One counterintuitive way is to reduce infant mortality in those countries. In the book
How Many People Can the
Earth Support?
author Joel Cohen quotes experts who say, “No population in the developing world has experienced a sustained fertility reduction without first having gone through a major decline in infant and child mortality.”
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It would seem that many parents have a lot of children on the assumption that some will die. When children become more likely to survive, then parents are forced to rethink the equation and make long-term plans for health care and education. That’s when the impracticality of a very large family becomes more obvious.

The Future Is Female

Perhaps the most effective way to change the mind-set that results in too many children is to free the minds of the women having those children. In
Beyond Malthus,
the authors write, “In every society for which data are available, the more education women have, the fewer children they have. In Egypt, for example, 56 percent of women with no schooling became mothers while still in their teens, compared with just 5 percent of women who remained in school past the primary level.”
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Women who are educated realize they have other options beyond the role of wife and mother. They often delay having children to pursue those options, establishing a career or following a passion, be it art, business, or public service. They are also less inclined to have children for fear-based reasons, such as wanting a safety net in old age. Conversely, in highly patriarchal societies where women are subjugated, controlled, and not allowed power over their ability to procreate, birthrates are soaring.

Frankly, if we hope to survive as a species, the future better be female . . . or at least centered on matriarchal values and respect for women and girls. This is where American women come in. We are the most powerful nation on earth, and about half of us are female. American women are arguably among the most empowered women on the planet, with most of us feeling that we are in control and in charge of our capacity to reproduce, or not, as we see fit.

In recovery programs, Step Twelve occurs when, after having a spiritual awakening ourselves, we carry the message to others who are still suffering. Spreading the word is called “twelve-stepping.” It really is up to us American women to twelve-step the developing world when it comes to reproductive sobriety.

There are two messages that we have to get out: you do not have to get pregnant because you can use birth control, and you should not get pregnant if you don’t have the ability to provide for that child’s financial and emotional well-being from the moment of its birth well into the future. Adhering to just these two rules would preclude many of the pregnancies in the world today. Experts estimate that, in the developing world, one birth in four is unwanted. As for intentional pregnancies, a leading cause is said to be the procreators’ desire for a large family. American women can offer proof to women in the developing world that smaller families equal greater freedom. Train wrecks like the Octomom should be used as a cautionary tale.