In this final letter
I am using material from Don Barry’s preaching series Clear Thinking About Abortion.
The one aspect I thought I would highlight is
the argument put forward by pro-abortion advocates that abortion should be used as a method to control the world’s population
to lessen the poverty and financial and emotional burden that a child may create in a family.
“It is argued that in the light of these pressing
problems (population, poverty and financial burden), abortion is justifiable. There are several problems
with this line of argument.
The first is that the ‘over population’ argument is largely a false one.
The natural resources of our planet are more
than capable of sustaining the world’s current population.
Colin Clark, former director of the Agricultural Economic Institute at Oxford University and noted
author of many books on population and resource questions, classified world land types by their food raising capabilities
and found that, if all farmers were to use the best methods now in use, enough food could be grown to provide an ‘American-type’
diet for 35,100,000,000 people – almost 10 times as many people as now exist.
Clark said it would be possible to feed three times more again (that’s 30 times as many as now exist) if we used a
Japanese standard of food intake rather than an American one.
Clark’s model assumed
that half the earth’s land area would remain conservation area. It didn’t require cropping
every available inch of land.
The UN forecast of the earth’s population by the end of the 21st Century is 16,000,000,000.
The problem isn’t the inability of
the earth to sustain growth. It’s the selfishness of economic systems that disallow the sharing of
resources. In the US farmers are often paid to plough their crop into the ground to artificially inflate
world prices.
If you want to deal with the
problem let’s ensure we isolate the correct one.
It seems there is confusion between finding a solution and eliminating the problem.
You can eliminate a headache
by cutting off the head. That’s not finding a solution; it’s eliminating the immediate problem.
In doing so it creates another one!
Abortion to solve a problem of selfish distribution of resources is eliminating a problem not solving
it. Aborting the next generation so that we don’t have to share our plentiful resources with them
is an alarming response.
You
might respond, ‘Well the earth does seem incredibly crowded in places. Don’t we have a problem
with space for all these new lives?’
The whole argument of congestion is also somewhat deceptive.
The so-called ‘congestion’ is found exclusively
in urbanized seacoasts and major cities.
The fact is the rest of the world is largely empty.
Francis Felice points out: ‘We
could put the entire population of the world (4 billion), in the State of Texas and each man, woman and child could be allotted
2,000 sq feet. (That’s a good sized home.) The rest of the world would be empty.
Arguments from over population, poverty and
financial burden, if valid at all, would only be valid in cases of over population, poverty and financial burden!”
You might like to pray about the selfishness of the
present economic systems in the world and about the lies perpetrated about world population and that effect on the abortion
rate.
Blessings,
Sue
