Welcome to Gaia! ::

I'm so sick and tired of this card being pulled in an abortion debate. "Oh, the world is overpopulated anyway, so abortion is controlling the population."

Gag.

Here's a great illustration that I've fallen in love with. My father passed it on to me recently.

There are 6.6 billion people in the world. If all of those people were brought together in one place, and each were given one square foot to stand on, they wouldn't even fill the state of Rhode Island. With plenty of room to spare.

There are 27,878,400 square feet in a square mile, and 1,213 square miles in Rhode Island. The amount of square miles that the whole world population would take up is a miniscule 236 square miles. That wouldn't even fill the county I live in.

The world is overpopulated? Nah. Society just likes to live in certain hotspots.

Even if the world is over populated, people die all the time. People are born and die on a daily basis, that's just part of life.

And if they really cared so much about the people now, why not help them? Aborting isn't really helping the population in any way.

Well the abortion/population argument is flawed anyway. In order to accept it, either it needs to be a universal truth that a fetus is not a person, or it's acceptable to kill other groups of humans to limit population. It's a red herring.

I wasn't suggesting we all pack in together into one spot, of course. It's purely an illustration to show that there really aren't that many of us on the planet, not so much that we need to kill off the next generation in order to keep the numbers down.

The illustration is intended to point to the actual over-population problem, and that's precisely the problem I.Am is pointing out - the cities. There are good reasons for cities to exist. A resource is discovered or a company sets up show, and a city grows from that. The problem is that companies that don't need anything specific to the land move into the same big cities, which draws more people, more business, more recreation, etc etc. People want to live in the big city, businesses want to set up in a big city, so of course, those cities are going to get more and more packed.

People like to live on coasts and waterfronts. That's just the way it is. Take a look at this map illustrating population density. Any inland hotspots are centered on rivers or lakes, or industry. But what if we spread out? What if industries that didn't rely on a city's resources took their business out into those empty stretches? Obviously part of that empty area is the Rocky Mountains and little can be done there. Someone might make a hassle about tornadoes, but every place has their natural disaster, be they landslides, floods, earthquakes, or hurricanes, and none of those seem to deter dense cities from popping up in those areas.

Abortion doesn't fix the population problem. We're not breeding ourselves out of existance as someone tried to tell me. We're making our lives miserable by climbing over each other to live in the big city, a problem that could very easily be, if not fixed than at least altered, by industry spreading out.

That, of course, would solve America's problem. Other countries like China, since everyone seems to be bringing them up, are a little more difficult. There are so many of them as it is, but again, I believe the same issues apply. Look at this map. Now, I don't know a great deal about Chinese topography, and how livable western China is, but if you look at the dense places, you'll see that they're right on the coast, and along the rivers.

A hundred years ago, rivers and the coast were a huge part of human life. They were necessary for trade and living. But they're not dire necessities anymore. We have trains, cargo planes, highways and semi trucks, etc etc. If people were so worried about population density and over-population, there are plenty of things to look into. But it seems to me that the population card is only played when abortion is being talked about. Which is why I agree whole-heartedly that it's purely a red herring.

But, it helps to have some facts to shoot them down if it comes up. I like seeing them wriggle around it whenever I throw a few numbers at them. Is it just me or do they keep making the same point over and over again even if I've already discredited that point?

And here's the thing too: we're not overpopulated in the West. In other parts of the world, maybe. But places like the U.S. and China (I think it's China) are almost at a negative population growth.

What this has to do with killing your damn child, I don't know.

The US is just barely breaking even, with 2.3 children per child-bearing couple.

Someone else made the point that liberals aren't having kids and conservatives are having lots of kids, so in a few generations, conservatives will outnumber the liberals.. I really love that xD

True. I think humans should be restricted to large cities and certain parts of the world used solely for farming. (And others left alone--you can visit, but no building houses) No more suburban expansion, no more living in rural areas without clean water. People need to stop spreading out; there's nothing wrong with having a few feet between your house and your neighbor's, that way you can talk to each other while sitting on your porches. 3nodding

So we need to be in favor of the choice to abort because the world "might" grow 1%? I really wish Pro-Choicers would check these stats before using that line of argumentation.