I told a former friend of mine once that I was never going to have children because there were too many people on the planet already, and that, since we are all living longer than any humans have ever lived  (save for fictional Old Testament characters), our population would only keep on increasing until we either voluntarily slowed the birth rate ourselves or until nature did it for us in some gruesome or violent way.

Being religious, this person had long before been sold on the notion that reproduction was a sacred moral imperative, and that, in her words, how could there be too much of a good thing?

Yes, and broccoli is also good, so why not cover the face of the planet with it?

The fact that many religions, cultures and communities are nearing the end of their life cycles is why many people seem to be desperate about reproduction in an age of nearly seven billion humans.  This Slate article asks if America should offer (further) tax incentives to have children as they do in France.  John Gibson comes right out and says that white people should be having more babies here.  It is obvious that someone is afraid of something in this discussion.  And I think that that something is the gradual loss of dominance by one culture over our planet.

The only reason, therefore, to be concerned about reproduction in an age of overpopulation is cultural, not biological.

It is too bad that those cultural breeders don’t take a look at their own actions and motivations a little more closely.  I’ve been watching more TV than is healthy recently, and I can’t tell you how many shows I’ve stumbled across that are all about so-called family values.  I guess all of those people who are always complaining about Hollywood’s lack of values haven’t seen the shows I have.  In many of these programs, a character will talk about how much they want to “settle down” and “start a family,” and they go on to say how much they think having children will be better for them, will make their lives better.  They often opine about how much they’d like to have a son to toss the football around with or a daughter to play dress-up with.  Cue the emotional piano or strings, cut to an artfully framed picture of a father and son or mother and daughter, and wait for the tears to begin.  Fade out and cut to commercial for Viagra.

This rosy view of family life is also incredibly selfish and narcissistic.  Having a child will be better for me, it will change me, it will help me grow, it will make my life better.  I will have someone to pass the family business to, I will have someone to teach my values to, I will be able to fix the mistakes of my parents and undo the wrongs of my childhood, I will have a new thing to play with, I will have someone obligated to take care of me when I’m in the nursing home, and so on.

This rather selfish mindset is borne out in the life we are creating for these children.  Scientists have been predicting for years that today’s children, for the first time in modern history, may actually have shorter life spans than their parents.  The studies done on this subject usually focus on obesity, but let me add a few things to the list: diabetes, asthma, skin cancer, drought, fuel crises, potential epidemics and the storage of nuclear waste.  (These are but a few.)  Each of these problems is either directly caused or at least exacerbated by the footprint of the large human population (and our activities) on the planet.  And yet people still treat mindless reproduction as a casual right rather than a carefully considered privilege (and a means to secure the future of all life on the planet, not just our own).  In doing so, they selfishly exacerbate problems which will lower the quality and length of life for those children they claim to be making out of selfless love.

Not to mention that they are ignoring millions of orphans who could use some selfless love right now.

I am not a supporter of using animals in scientific experiments, but I cannot ignore the data already collected, either.  And in most studies ever done on population in non-humans, nature almost always finds some unpleasant (or at least undemocratic) way of reducing populations when they get out of balance with the ecosystem.  I think we are currently doing a study on ourselves, and global warming is obviously one of the ways that nature is trying to deal with us today.  So, we can either act rationally now to reduce our own population humanely and democratically, and save the future of all life on the planet, or we can wait for the planet to wipe us out horribly with ecological or biological calamity.  Or, for that matter, we can wait for some technological disaster of our own making.

Really, the choice is ours.