[Taxacom] Pro-natalism vs. biodiversity

[Frederick W. Schueler]

Kenneth Kinman wrote:

>       Educating more of the world's women would probably be helpful, but
> ONLY if they also have access to a ready supply of condoms (and
> willingness of their sexual partners to use them).   The world
> production of condoms is about 12 billion per year, and assuming that
> there are close to 2 billion sexually active males in the world, that is
> only 6 condoms per year for each male. 
>        Even if you assume a more conservative estimate of 1 billion
> males having sex with fertile females, it still would only be an average
> of one condom per month for each of them.  Hardly enough to prevent
> unwanted pregnancies (not to mention STDs).  Even cheap condoms at two
> cents apiece, a billion dollars would buy 50 billion such condoms, which
> could easily prevent hundreds of millions of unwanted pregnancies and
> new cases of STDs every year.  
>       Preaching abstience is clearly not going to have much of an
> impact, but making plenty of condoms freely available to the world's
> women would make a HUGE difference.  The most effective way to curb
> population growth is to be proactive and eliminating most unwanted
> pregnancy.  Condoms would also reduce a lot of human misery by reducing
> disease, reducing food shortages, reducing overcrowding and other
> stresses.  Pouring money into vaccines and medical supplies is fine, but
> it's really short-sighted if one doesn't invest in lost-cost condoms at
> the same time.  

* sorry to rain on the parade, but our Conservative government has just
declared maternal & infant health to be its current motherhood & apple
pie issue, and when the minister responsible was interviewed about this
on the CBC this morning, the interviewer (who must share some
paraphyletic genes with Bull Dogs), went after her repeatedly on the
obvious correlates of maternal & infant health, but she couldn't get the
Minister to admit that family planning or any contraceptive or
abortion-like activities had anything to do with it. I've never heard
anything so persistently pronatalist, or, by extension, so
biodiversity-can-go-to-hellish.

fred.
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          Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
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