When the Supreme Court delivered its famous Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, it upheld a woman's right to choose based on the Constitution's guarantee of a right to privacy. This makes perfect sense: the prevention or termination of pregnancy is, and should be, a private matter, and thus the decision to end a pregnancy belongs to the woman alone. I contend, however, that the opposite does not hold true: the decision to give birth is not a matter of privacy. A woman who has an abortion affects only herself; bringing another human being into the world, on the other hand, immediately impacts the mother, the newborn individual, the larger community, and the very fate of the planet.
The concept of a population's
carrying capacity is something we all learned about in high school. The idea is that a population of organisms will increase in size until it reaches a set number, determined by resource availability and competition pressure. After this point, large scale death will prevent further population growth. population size will oscillate around the point of the carrying capacity, but increased death rates and reduced reproductive fitness will not allow population size to increase further.
We usually discuss such concepts of population in relation to yeast cells, mice, deer, etc.: organisms to which we have no particular emotional attachment. We have to be a lot more careful, though, when talking about the growth of the human population, since most of what we do is already an effort to deny that we are, by definition, animals, constrained by biological precepts. The notion that we are somehow different from yeast cells, mice, or deer is enforced by the observation that our population's growth curve currently shows no indication of approaching a carrying capacity limit.
In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins advanced the idea that exercising moderation in reproduction could actually be evolutionarily advantageous. Producing many more offspring than can survive under certain environmental conditions is, evolutionarily speaking, wasteful. Likewise, reproducing at an unchecked rate will quickly deplete resources and is also a terrible evolutionary strategy. For these reasons, the population of a certain organism will stay relatively constant over time, and when population pressure begins to increase, the organism will (unconsciously, of course) curb its rate of reproduction to avoid a dangerous scarcity of resources somewhere down the line.
Human reproduction, however, has proceeded at an explosive rate, which Dawkins attributes to modern medicine, the welfare state, and complete failure to look to the future. We may have been reproductively successful during the last five hundred years, but that is small change in the span of evolutionary time. Our current reproductive strategy is, to say the least, unsustainable, and may prevent us from seeing another five hundred years. As Dawkins says, "The one thing animal populations do not do is go on increasing indefinitely."
Unfortunately, population discussions are not politically correct, and tend to conjure up dystopian images of calculated killings and mass sterilization programs. Furthermore, the discomfort with the issue belongs to those at every stage along the entire political spectrum. Regardless of the environmental or societal impact, argue conservatives and liberals alike, the human right of reproduction is too sacrosanct to curtail. Thus we talk about population growth in positive, rather than normative terms: "How will we emend farming techniques and colonize other planets to keep up with the human race's inevitable increase?" Yet the human population has the potential to double in less than a hundred years; we can't afford to be so magnanimous forever. In a stand-off between biology and political correctness, biology will always prevail in the end.
