China Crisis

Wanna hear something scary? Listen to this little factoid…..

If you were to take a standard sheet of writing paper 0.1mm thick and cut it into two sheets, placing one atop the other, it would then be 0.2mm thick. Then, cutting the stack of two and making a stack of 4 sheets, it would then be 0.4mm thick. Believe it or not, if you continued to do this just one hundred times, doubling the size of the stack each time, the thickness of the stack would be 1.334 x 10¹¹ light-years. This is an example of exponential growth, where the rate of growth is always proportional to its present size.

Let’s apply this theory to the global population. Take one couple, who produce two children. Each of those two children produce two more children, so the couple have 4 grandchildren. Those 4 children go on to produce 2 children each, who each produce two more children…. and so on.

And lets then imagine what that theory means for families with 3 or 4 or even 5 children. You do the math. Or maybe that's an unfair request. I know that these figures are so huge that they are a little difficult for our brains to compute, just how many that actually is. So to put things into perspective for you, here’s the visual…..

Don’t mean to panic ya or anything but…. This relentless mass production of shiny, brand new human beings, is ultimately what will end civilization as we know it. In the last 1 hundred years the global population has gone from 1 billion to 6.5 billion.

Why isn’t more made of this issue? Why are we not bombarded with this information? Can politicians and world leaders not see how scary this is? It is out of control. Controlling the global population NOW will have far more of an effect on the environment (and, in fact, save the human race as we know it) than any amount of recycling or “car-share” schemes. In case you are in any doubt about that, look at the figures for global population, oil pumped, and CO2 emissions on the "Earth Clock" at the link below....

Callous as it sounds, for hundreds of years disease and infertility has been one of nature’s many ways of controlling the population. Now we grow babies in test tubes. We spend billions of dollars every year on extending peoples lives, yet we do nothing to control birth numbers. We hand out tax payers money to millions of families who are adding to the strain on resources, instead of financially rewarding those who remain child free. And why? Because “breeding bans” are not vote winners. How can a government expect to win an election when they are taking away people’s dreams of having their own families?

The Chinese population crisis became so out of control that in 1979 it introduced its “One Child Policy” which meant that married couples were limited to having only 1 child. This policy is still enforced today and will continue to be for at least another decade. This policy has lead to the prevention of over 250 MILLION births in China between 1979 and 2000.

The downside of China's policy, however, was that, due to cultural beliefs around gender in China, millions of female babies were being left to die in China’s infamous “Dying Rooms” so that couples could produce another child and hope that it would, this time, be a boy. As a result there has been a stark increase in the abortion rate and a massive gender imbalance in China with an expected 1 in 10 Chinese men being unable to find a bride by 2020.

Now I’m not suggesting that we impose radical bans on reproduction like China has, or take away people’s rights to have children. But I do think we need to raise awareness of this situation and rely on people’s intelligence and social consciences to allow them to make informed decisions as to how many children they have. Currently people are mindlessly breeding, blissfully unaware that this crisis exists. What frustrates me the most about this situation are the millions of unwanted children languishing in childrens homes, yet still we have to have "our own".

I’m also not suggesting that my own decision to remain child-free qualifies me for some sort of “super-hero saver of the planet” award (although I’d quite like one if anyone knows of one?). My decision not to breed is for purely selfish reasons, just the same as those who decide to breed. Because it’s what “I want”.

What we need is a global shift in peoples perceptions of the child-free. Why do we feel that, unless we are married and breeding, that we are unsucessful in life or social pariahs? Think about it. Our whole lives the message is drummed into us that we grow up, get married and have babies because that is what people do with their lives. And if we don’t we feel that we have somehow failed and are viewed either with suspicion for being so selfish, or with sympathy for being so tragic. From our TV shows to our story books we are bombarded with images of “happy” families. Even our government actively promotes “family values”. Why? Because it cares? Or because it is appealing to the voting masses?

We need to make people aware of this situation NOW. And change society's views on unmarried, childless women. No longer should we be seen as "tragic spinsters" but more as brave pioneers representing a new generation of women in an era of choice.