CONTENTS

1. Personal/household considerations -- How making another person can change your life.

2. Environmental considerations -- How making new people affects the world, and quality of life.

3. What can one do? -- Information, Assistance, and Community Resources.

4. Contact and contribution information.

• They are very small at first, also noisy and smelly. So you have to tend them a lot, to the exclusion of most else. This will affect most every aspect of your day-to-day life. After a few years, they get larger, and sometimes less noisy (until they are teenagers); the smell usually subsides by the time they're 18, depending.

• You can pretty much forget about having a good night's sleep for the next two years -- maybe more.

• Schedules, timetables, and shared duties. Best to pencil these out, before you start to make another person. There are, after all, only 24 hours in a day; so best to see, ahead of time, how it all fits together. Don't forget job hours, commuting, and time for sleep, and try to leave some leeway for emergencies that, with a child, will occur.

• Travel plans? Put them on hold for about 18 years. "Family vacation" is an oxymoron -- a contradiction in terms.

• No more romantic evenings out on the town -- dining, dancing, movies, etc. -- with your spouse, unless you're willing to pay a sitter about $40 (assuming you come home fairly early). Oh, and don't forget the tip.

• How well do you like to live? Even aside from babysitting and day care costs, this will be a drain on your wallet and household budget for the next 18 years; sometimes more, particularly if the child turns out to have special needs, or if you decide to send them to college. You can pencil out what you think these costs will be, but, in the end, this day-to-day expense will likely be more than anticipated. In addition to child care, there will be additional costs of food, adequate housing, furnishings, clothing, school supplies, electronics, medical costs, transportation, toys, recreation, and other routine costs that arise and can't be avoided. If you like having the means for travel, occasional fine dining, a comfortable home, cars, and the "finer things in life", childless couples are better able to afford these things, and, all else being equal, will enjoy a higher standard of living. Over the years, income can change and jobs can end, but household obligations usually don't. Many couples with children live "hand-to-mouth", barely getting by, with little or nothing to put away. Consider a couple, at age 25, that is paying an average of $833. a month in child costs; if, instead, they put that money into a retirement fund at 5% interest, after 18 years, they'd have over $300,000 in the account.. 

• Far less romance at home with your spouse. You'll both be too tired from tending the kid(s), and won't have much privacy, anyway.

• If your lifestyle calls for both spouses to work, day care will probably make this no longer cost-effective. So one income will be gone, or consumed by day-care expenses.

• If one spouse (or partner in sin) was planning to continue their education, well, that probably won't be happening either; if it does, it will be far more difficult, and it is likely that they won't be able to do it as well.

• The times, they are a-changing.* Some people are old enough to remember when parents could go on with their lives, recreation, jobs, and education with less impediment. Those were the days when day care was available reasonably, and the "girl down the street" did babysitting, maybe while doing her homework, for 50 cents an hour. Nowadays, though, the girl down the street is on the street; and, in Minnesota, in 2014, rates for care of one child approached $8 an hour. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has reported that child care for an infant, in Minnesota, can cost more than a year of tuition at a state college.
    * phrase adapted from a well-known work authored by Bob Dylan

• Biological effects. A woman's figure will usually not ever be the same afterwards. And her "fun zone" certainly won't. Further, have you ever noticed that a lot of women, who have had children, have to take frequent washroom breaks? That's because it is not uncommon for pregnancy to result in damage to the bladder. Interruption of blood circulation, due to the carrying of the unborn child, may cause part of the organ to become dead tissue, and the bladder actually becomes smaller. This damage is usually permanent. In some cases, a degree of incontinence can also result.

• How certain is your marriage or unholy union? Present law actually encourages divorce or separation by making it financially advantageous for the custodial parent, usually the woman. This has caused divorce and single-parenting rates to reach epic proportion. As the saying goes, "If you can get the cream, why put up with the bull?" If your spouse, or partner in sin, decides to separate, and gets custody, say goodbye to about 25% of your paycheck for the next 18 years.

• Some think that making a person will hold their union together. This is a myth. If anything, it will strain it more, and give the prospective custodial spouse (usually the woman) the ability to walk out and still retain financial security (see the above paragraph). If someone thinks that they need a kid to hold their union together, that union is probably on pretty shaky ground to begin with; those people should not even consider making another person. It usually only worsens things -- and, ultimately, will be very expensive to the person who eventually becomes the non-custodial parent.

• You may not be able to raise your kids the way you want to. Nowadays, the government thinks that's their business. When planning children, most future parents envision well-behaved and civilized ones. Present law, however, doesn't support that. If you use healthy discipline in the home to teach kids, when necessary, which end is up, well, these days, you may end up spending a lot of time talking with the "Human Services" people, or in court (and the schools are not your allies in child-rearing like they used to be -- they may actually be the ones that cause you problems with the agencies). As you might not dare to use healthy discipline in your own home, your kids may run wild in it. And then, when they get a little older, there'll be the costs of bail bonds, fines, lawyers, foster care (yes, the parents sometimes have to pay for this -- and it's not cheap), etc.

• A man's home is his Castle. If you like being respected in your own home, today's kids may not be for you. The Fifth Commandment is often thought out-of-fashion these days, and if you think you can insist on it in your home, well, we covered the discipline matter. So, in many instances, what one ends up with is having a person, or persons, in their home, over whose conduct the parent and homeowner has little or no control. (This can extend to damage, violence, bringing drugs into the home, etc.) Some of these things can cause the parent to be held criminally responsible for things of which they weren't even aware. And, sometimes, the parent can't have these people (their severely misbehaving children) removed from their home, for many years, without incurring substantial expense, including costs of out-of-home placement.

• If you have belongings (including good china, microwave or other appliances, knickknacks, TV, electronics, objects d'art, antiques, lamps, etc.) in your home that you value, best put them in a safe deposit box, or they'll be broken or gone. Forget about buying and using nice stuff for a while.

• These days, a lot of environmentally-conscious (discussed post, this page) men and women are choosing to be child-free families of two. These can be as valid, devoted, productive, and strong as any other family; maybe more so than some.

• With baby dolls, other girls' toys, and subtle suggestion, in contemporary American society, young females are indoctrinated, almost from birth, to believe that that they are supposed to produce offspring. That's what they are for. This would be true if one was a cow. Cows are for producing offspring, producing milk, and finally, when too old for those purposes, becoming part of your hamburger. It is not true for a woman. Her destiny may be to become a devoted and well cared for wife in a fulfilling marriage; but not necessarily to produce offspring. Offspring are no longer a necessary part of a successful marriage, nor a sign of success as a man or a woman. The most environmentally conscious men and women don't produce them. And a lot of people have too much living to do, and/or too much to contribute to society, to toss away 18 years of their lives as babysitters and nannies.

• As anyone who has visited the east, or west, coast knows, successful child-free couples are not at all uncommon; in the midwest, though, there's more of an outdated childbearing ethic; and often, even people who cannot produce anything of value nonetheless produce offspring -- sometimes a lot of them -- for which society at large bears the cost. This "tradition" of large families may have had it's roots in an earlier farm-centered society where the more kids one had, the more farm hands he had. But it has lost a lot of it's application nowadays, when a farmer can't even get kids to detassle corn for good pay (which is why they started using expensive machines to do it).

• It's easy to think about parenting when you're not -- people tend to think only about the good parts, and the kids turning out the way the prospective parents want. Many parents state that, if they had it to do all over again, they wouldn't. In many instances, a newly married couple spends their first year or two together making children, and the next 18 years trying to find time away from them.

• A lot of prospective parents have kids thinking that they will be the next Albert Schweitzer or something. That could happen, but, statistically, the odds are better that he'll be the next Charles Manson type; and the overwhelming probability is that he'll be neither -- not famous, nor infamous. Just another nondescript cog in the wheel.

• Many people have a drive to pass on their genes. But what with all of the Wranglers, Levis, Rustlers, etc., there are really plenty of jeans out there. Are yours that fancy, really? One's good work is a much better, and more enduring legacy to leave than one's offspring. One's work CAN change the world. Case in point: Consider Mark Twain. Do you even know his daughter's name? Ah, but I'll bet you remember some of his work.

• BEFORE YOU GIVE A "GIFT" TO THE WORLD. Even for people who are high-achievers, their progeny may not be. Although intellect is an inherited trait, applied genius (intellect, and the ability, and drive, to use it for betterment) generally is not. Applied genius is the product of a rare combination of heredity, environment, and either happenstance or divine intervention, depending on how one chooses to look at it (in Judaism, for example, there are no coincidences). To make the point, consider your own heroes. People who, by their genius, forever changed our way of life for the better. Did their children (and most of them had them) follow suit? Do you even know who their kids were?

We don't want anyone who's here to leave this earth. Far from it, we want people to live as long, and as well, as they can. For this to happen, though, particularly as concerns quality of life, it is necessary for people to voluntarily limit their procreativity. Otherwise, they will leave their progeny a broken world to inherit.

• A WORLD IN DENIAL. Despite the downplaying of this factor by the media, almost every world environmental problem, from global warming, to air and water pollution, to resource shortages (including food), to demand for nuclear energy (the by-products of which can make the earth uninhabitable for a very long time), to the burning of the rain forests, and species extinction; can be directly linked to a single cause: human overpopulation. It's effects also include famine and starvation, the spread of disease, crime, and propensity for war. These things lower our quality of life; the next generation will not enjoy the same quality of life that we did. Sure, they'll have faster computers, more efficient cars, and, probably, more gadgets; but you can't eat those. Some credible sources have reported that, even now, over 3,000 people a day, worldwide, die of starvation and poor-diet-related illness. Do you really want to contribute to all of these global problems that, given continued population growth, we will soon see more of right here in the U.S.?
        (Source: worldnews.nbcnews.com (Feb. 16, 2012))

• When Providence created the Earth, He provided for an essential self-regulating balance of the various species, many of which are symbiotic and interdependent. For instance, if an orchid bush is removed from the forest, a nearby fig tree may stop producing. Why? The insect that pollinates the fig feeds from the orchid. The world is full of these interrelationships that fit together as well as a jigsaw puzzle. Philosophies may vary, but from the order and symmetry of bodies and particles in space, right down to the perfect interplay of species on earth, Issac Newton was led to conclude that such a perfect order could only have been created by a very powerful and intelligent being. Absent human intervention, this balance regulates itself by way of geometric reproduction; and then , when the numbers of any species get too large, reduction of same by starvation, predation, and extreme shortage of other resources necessary for life, like land, water, and shelter. There are other natural factors, for example, high population density promoting the spread of infectious disease. As an apex species, predation upon humans is principally by its own kind. When this predation is done individually, often stealthily, as with tigers, we call it crime; when it's done in packs, like wolves, we call it war. Although the motivation for human predation is frequently redistribution of wealth and resources, including space for habitat, it also has the effect of reducing population. The ordering of Nature is such that prey becomes more available, and hence, this predation becomes easier and more frequent, as population density increases. This is part of Nature's self-regulating aspect.

Nature, though, is a cruel mistress. Nature provides for continuous generation of species, without residual excess, by providing for geometric, sometimes massive, reproduction; and then, a culling of the resultant populations. Sometimes it is survival of the fittest; but sometimes individual mortality is determined simply by happenstance. With sea turtles, for example, the female may lay over 100 eggs in the sand, but, probably only 5 to 19 percent of them will hatch and make it back to the ocean; most are eaten on the beach by birds shortly after hatching, and of the ones that reach the water, many are then eaten by sea predators. It has been estimated that only 0.1% (1 in 1000) of eggs laid live to become adult turtles. This phenomenon of excessive regeneration, and then culling by natural factors (discussed ante, and post), transcends all species, including humans. The culling is the part that most people find objectionable; but that, too, is a part of Nature's plan when, as with the fall deer harvest, unchecked populations becomes too large to function. In any species, the amount of natural culling is dependent on the rate of reproduction. The survival percentage moves inverse to the reproduction rate, so, for example, elephants, which produce much fewer offspring than sea turtles, will (absent man's intervention) have a much higher percentage of survival to maturity. It is like getting a haircut -- if one grows a lot of hair fast, a lot will be more frequently cut off to maintain the balance. If he grows less, then less will be cut off. So it is with species populations -- the ones with the highest reproduction rate also suffer the greatest culling and mortality. If the rate of reproduction is less, then natural factors are affected, and the result is a balance achieved by a lower rate of mortality. In other words, as the rate of reproduction goes down, the probability increases, of the survival of an average individual for a longer time, as well as their quality of life.

Extinction of species -- Desperate people do desperate things. Most people have an instinctive empathy and altruism for other species, and few want to see elimination of any of them, except possibly for mosquitoes (which, actually, also have a purpose in the food chain). But when there is hardship, and the survival of an individual and/or his family is in peril, altruism, pretty much, goes out the window. For simplicity, let's just consider poaching -- a major threat to endangered species. Consider a bushman in Africa, with some land to farm, and by which he makes his living. He might like the wildlife and appreciate its value, not only as part of the ecosystem, but also to promote tourism and boost the area economy. But due to population and competing demand, resource shortage, and cyclical weather patterns resulting in area famine, one year he cannot feed his family. Elephants occasionally browse his fields, with a high black market value for ivory. Even if that person claimed to be an environmentalist, do you see that the elephants might not fare well in that situation? This is one way, one by one, endangered species travel to extinction.

Among the various species, man is unique in that he is the only one capable of wholly eliminating another species, either by hunting, or otherwise driving it to extinction.. Man is also unique in that he is the only species that is not bound by Nature in his procreativity; but can control it.

A world without wars. War is always destructive -- a waste of man's work and efforts; and there are no "good wars". A world without wars could be achieved only if there was enough resource to reduce the pressure to acquire same from another, or another nation -- or, in other words, where the population does not exceed available resources -- AND if population density, with its accompanying deplorable living conditions and poverty, was prevented from reaching explosive proportions such as we've seen in Haiti, and Gaza. There will always be different classes of people and different prosperities of nations, both determined, to a large degree, by work and incentive. And, among people, there will always be a certain element who are like a  jackal which prefers to rob the meal of another, rather than finding its own. But, for most, crime becomes impractical, when there is enough resource to "go around" with reasonable individual effort and work; and where people are not overcrowded for living space and habitat. In other words, when the population is balanced to the available resources. When it is not, Nature rebalances it via wars, famine, disease; water shortage, natural disasters, and other such things which create extreme hardship and suffering for many, as the rebalancing occurs. In an environment of fewer new births, there is less need for Nature to do this rebalancing. If the "input" of new people did not exceed the rate of attrition (natural deaths) -- in other words, if there was zero net population growth -- that would tend to maintain quality of life at its current "tipping point" levels.. Were there fewer new births than the rate of attrition, that would tend to reduce "friction" between people, cultures, and nations; as well as competition to acquire limited resources; tending to make crime, and war, less desirable pursuits.

• OVERPOPULATION GIVES RISE TO EPIDEMIC DISEASE. It's no coincidence that, during the coronavirus crisis, it spread fastest in high population density areas, like New York and the Eastern seaboard; low density areas, like Montana and Wyoming were much less affected. We are not meant to be packed like sardines, and when population densities get too high, plagues of infectious disease are one of the ways Nature restores balance.

• Further, the food needs of a burgeoning human overpopulation lead to the need to employ unsanitary, unwholesome, and non-sustainable "factory-farming" practices that are an incubator for zoonotic epidemic diseases that jump from animals to people.* Things like swine flu, and the deadly bird flu (H5N1) with its mortality rate in humans of over 50%.
*See https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/4/22/21228158/coronavirus-pandemic-risk-factory-farming-meat

• WITH CURRENT POPULATION GROWTH, THE FREQUENCY OF PANDEMICS IS INCREASING. Human population has more than doubled over the last 50 years, and over the last 30 years of burgeoning population growth we've seen the emergence of many new and difficult to treat epidemics, including SARS, Ebola, novel coronavirus, and the various flus; with increasing frequency, contagion, and mortality.

• Other than climate change, and more frequent pandemics, one of the first ways we may feel the effects of overpopulation lies in shortages of fresh clean water; an absolute necessity of human life.** Already, groundwater aquifers are running dry; and in some years, the farmers in California's central valley "breadbasket of agriculture" have been unable to irrigate because their historical source of water, the Colorado River, has been diverted, via aqueducts, so L.A.'s mushrooming population can water their lawns. Elsewhere in the world, huge lakes have been almost totally drained to provide for the agriculture needed by a burgeoning population; they're not there anymore, and we are at a breaking point. The effects of freshwater shortage aren't limited to drinking water and showers. A major effect will be to make agriculture, as we know it, impossible, leading to food shortages, and eventually, mass famine. Technology has provided many work-arounds to some aspects of environmental devastation (e.g. electric cars and solar power) brought by an over-the-line population; but technology can't cure this one. Some farmers have tried to conserve by resorting to drip irrigation and enclosed greenhouses, and then there's always desalination of ocean water for household needs. But we'll never be able to desalinate enough to water fields of wheat, and many other of our agricultural staples. Those sources of food, as well as some textiles, like cotton, will be lost; or at the very least, become in short supply, hard to get, and expensive. The sustainable answer lies in limiting our population, and hence demand, to balance the clean freshwater that nature provides us.
**See the PBS documentary, "H2O: The Molecule That Made Us".

• All successful species, from insects like the forest tent caterpillar, to the ancient Mayans, to today's people, experience massive growth in their population, until it exceeds their resources; then the species suffers extensive die-offs, and sometimes extinction. Humans are a particularly successful species, that has conquered all others, and is now breeding itself into oblivion. We're presently about halfway there.

"We have met the enemy, and he is us." -- Walt Kelly
   Walt Kelly quote used by permission of Okefenokee Glee & Perloo, Inc., permissions@pogocomics.com

(Sources: Discover Magazine, circa 1992; see also "Growth and It's Implications for the Future," hearing with appendix, ninety-third Congress (1973) (https://archive.org/stream/growthitsimplica00unit/growthitsimplica00unit_djvu.txt))

• At these numbers, you don't even want to think about the effect on availability and cost of petroleum and other non-renewable mineral resources that we use every day. Electric cars and solar power? Sure. But airplanes can't fly without gas; and the ships and the 18-wheel trucks that support world commerce can't deliver without it either (an electric 18-wheeler is, theoretically, possible, but is presently a long ways off). As did the 2000s spike in diesel fuel prices, this will affect the cost of almost everything you buy, again, lowering standards of living and quality of life.

• Our infrastructures (roads, utilities, communications, etc.) are already well-taxed, even at present population levels. In 16 years, most of those new kids, that you now see in strollers or shopping carts, will each be another car on the highway. Who do you think will be paying the increasingly higher costs of building and maintaining the expanded infrastructures that will be needed? And, again, what do you think that will do for the cost of petrol (gas), the percentage of your earnings that you have to spend on it, and, again, the cost of all commodities that have to be transported with it?

• We have already fished out or killed over 90% of the big fish in the oceans; and as vast as they are, the oceans, themselves, are now becoming polluted. In time, this may affect the oceanic phytoplankton that produce most of the oxygen that people breathe.

• The breaking point -- logjams and economic effects. Have you noticed more empty shelves at the grocery store? More difficulty and longer waits when making an appointment with your doctor or auto mechanic? Many clinics, including The Mayo, are presently overloaded and are now turning away new cases. When you call your clinic to make an appointment, do you get shuffled around like the silver ball in a pinball machine? Does it seem like their right hand doesn't know what their left hand is doing? When you call for services, do you get a recording that says "your call is important to us, that's why we're not answering it"? Are prices higher almost everywhere? These things are symptomatic of demand overload -- logjams that happen when a burgeoning population's demand for goods and services exceeds supply, to where "the system" breaks down and becomes stalled like vehicles at a logjammed intersection .It is exacerbated when some people, who produce little else of value, nonetheless produce more people. When you go to the store, how many children do you see in shopping carts? Can you see that, at current reproduction rates, this, even here in the U.S., will get much worse than it is today?

• The devastation of global Climate Change is a direct result of human activity, primarily from burning carbon-based fuels (e.g. gasoline, diesel fuel, coal, etc.) in industry and in vehicles. The more people we have, the more vehicles we'll have, and the more industry we'll need. More people = more pollution. A transition to alternate forms of energy only puts a temporary Band-Aid® on the symptom; it doesn't cure the disease.

• A temporary moratorium on new births would, due to natural attrition, and following an initial lead-in period, be expected to reduce emissions of carbon and all other forms of manmade pollution, by over one percent, each year, cumulatively. This, coupled with technology, could make the Paris Accord goals attainable; any workable plan of pollution reduction would include a population limitation component;

• The Earth is resilient. It has a continuing and renewable capacity to provide humans with resources and absorb their wastes (including, to a degree, carbon dioxide, and industrial wastes -- the worst ones), but only within finite parameters. When population overwhelms those parameters, the environmental damage quickly becomes profound. Firstly, the damage reduces that population in ways that people term as "catastrophic"; then the Earth corrects its balance, but that can take a very, very long time, during which it may not be a particularly comfortable place for humans to live.

• No more koalas. And the researchers also wrote that an almost doubling of world human population, to 15 billion, would come only with the extinction of most other terrestrial species. We are seeing this happening right now, with, for example, the burning of the South American rain forests, to produce land on which soybeans can be grown, to be fed to pigs in China, in order to meet the food requirements of the current human population. Some say that we currently lose as many as 150 species per day, including species, both plant and animal, from which new medicines might be derived (the rain forest is rich in this sort of thing).

THE AMALGAMATED GOOD FOUNDATION
Environmental Awareness project
P.O. Box 1132
Bemidji, MN 56619
 

TDMPr3ya