A few weeks ago the Duggar family, of “19 Kids and Counting” fame, announced that they will be expecting the arrival of a 20th child in April. The family has been intensely criticized for this due to the fact that the 19th pregnancy resulted in a premature birth with serious complications. Obviously, all of this was chronicled on their reality television show. The Duggar family appears to be experiencing some overpopulation in their family.
Theories of overpopulation problems generally revert back to the famous works of Thomas Malthus who vehemently believed that overpopulation would be the downfall of human kind. The idea was that resources grow at an arithmetical rate while populations grow exponentially. As a population grows, it depletes its resources. Individuals then starve and die until the population is small enough to once again be supported by its environment. The numerical figure associated with Malthus’ equation is known as “carrying capacity.”
The Duggar family must be experiencing its own Malthusian problems: if the parents were to only sleep for four hours each day, all of their children would only get a single hour of one on one time with them. I find it extremely difficult to wrap my head around the fact that these parents are providing enough love and emotional support for their children. They have a successful reality television show, and I have no doubt they can financially provide for their family, but giving proper amounts of attention to each child is another story.
Like the Duggar family, the world is experiencing an overpopulation problem. And because there are areas that are so vastly over populated, many people live in severe poverty, without sanitation, clean water or adequate food. According to National Geographic, “the United Nations estimates that as the 21st century begins more than a billion people lack basic needs.” These basic needs include the aforementioned luxuries of running, contaminant-free water and enough food to not starve. But if the planet is unable to adequately provide for the entire human population now, what is to come in 2050 when global population is expected to be around 10 billion people?
It is wholly unrealistic, and dangerous, to try to limit the number of children an individual or couple can have. China is our prime example of this; clearly, it does not work effectively. People in large part need to simply start having a sense of responsibility to the future of mankind. It is irresponsible to just keep having children until one can no longer carry children because the world cannot sustain an attitude like that. Instead people should be taking into account the needs of our entire species and our habitat, as opposed to solely their own need for carbon copies of themselves.
What this is all to say is that people should be having fewer children. Those children should be brought into an environment where they can be provided for both financially and emotionally, not one where they need to compete for the attention of their parents. Adoption should be encouraged and more widely practiced so that people who want children do not have to add to the global population in order to be parents. Contraceptives should be more widely available to men and women all over the world; unplanned pregnancy does not need to happen as frequently as it does considering there is an overwhelming wealth of options available. The problem is mainly limited access. Furthermore, the world should be working towards preventing situations where women are denied power over their bodies, and thus conceive children they may not want or be able to take care of.
It all comes down to responsibility, to ourselves individually and to each other. There is no reason for any two people to have 20 children. There is no reason for women to have children they do not want or cannot care for. There is no reason children need to be starving in the streets because of overpopulation and poverty. There is no reason for these issues because humans are smart, innovative creatures capable of great feats. The issue of overpopulation is one that can be worked through; there just needs to be more time, effort and resources put into it.
Kellie Quinn is a Collegian columnist. She can be reached at [email protected].
