Quote:
Originally Posted by dobbles
you know what? i am gonna come at this from a different angle. (shouldn't be a big surprise eh?)
things like this are irresponsible as a human being. regardless of what we want to think about beign individualistic and free, this world has a carrying capacity. given our current standards of food production, there is a theoretical number of people this planet can support. if we continue to indiscriminately grow our population with people having this many children, we will force future generations to have to ration their output of kids similar to china. i am not saying people shouldn't have children, but you have to be a responsible human being. if you already have 6 kids you should really think hard about trying to have 8 more at once...
i just think this is a terrible situation.
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Yes, but...
Most Western societies are either below or barely over replacement fertility rates and having more kids in developed countries does not really put any more of a strain on resources because we're barely replacing ourselves as it is. For instance, in the table linked below, Canada's Total Fertility Rate is 1.50, meaning that on average Canadian women have 1.5 children throughout their childbearing years. It might sound okay until your remember that women produce all of our offspring but only represent 50% of the population. Therefore in order to replace ourselve domestically, our fertility rate would have to be 2.0. The U.S. is 2.05, so they are managing to replace themselves, but only just. (You also have to remember that a certain percentage of live births will never reach child bearing age and for all intents and purposes should be subtractded from the replacement numbers.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...fertility_rate
Immigration allows a redistribution of some of the differential fertility rates, but is limited in that regard by logistics. As such the populations of Western countries could decline unless people have a couple more kids.
I'm not arguing that this is responsible, I agree that it isn't, but from a societal populations standpoint I don't think the argument holds up unless this becomes truly widespread.