Overpopulation

Overpopulation
http://nepthi.blogspot.com/2009/09/overpopulation.html

Imagine your life in 10, 15, 20 years. Are you married, have kids or own a house? Chances are you answered yes to all these questions and according to Ri, the author of ``Overpopulation``, that is a main contribution to overpopulation on a global scale. Her argument is that it is not a necessity for every woman to have children. And yes in theory woman can go against social conventions and not bear children. But many women feel they need to fulfil their maternal instinct by having children. They do not think about the repercussions of their actions on society’s population. And this blindness is ok. But Ri believes that you must “Take control of yourself, and you help change the world.” (Ri 2009) Her idea would work if she could get everyone on board, but whether people just want to have children or it is an economic necessity her strategy is implausible and impossible to obtain.

“I have always been astonished by people who continuously have one child after another, as if they don't know how to stop breeding.” (Ri 2009) The difficulty with this statement is that she does not imply the context that this observation is made in. It is unknown whether she is referring to friends of hers in the United States or woman in third world countries who have many children in hopes that a few of them will survive to adulthood. But this then raises the point that if these women had fewer children there would be more resources available to them and more children may survive. But again how do you convince these women to have fewer children? It is a necessity of their way of life and it cannot change overnight.

Another interesting point Ri raises is the infertility issue. In recent years artificial insemination has become a popular alternative to infertile woman. She describes the cause of infertility to be that multiple evolved sperm join the egg simultaneously and cause the infertility. She does not cite this information which makes people sceptical to believe it. “Of course, we should just let it[infertility] go and if we can't have children naturally then we should not have children. No, these people have a God-given right to bear children and infect the world with even more people.” (Ri 2009) By using the word “infect” it greatly shows the authors passion towards the subject but at the same time deters people with different beliefs from accepting her article. She does have a valid point though that artificial insemination tends to cause multiple births. In order to make this statement have a greater effect statistics on multiple births would be a helpful addition.
An additional location were a citation or greater explanation would be helpful is when Ri states that “Our expansion is three-fold - more humans, each with a bigger footprint than the last, each using greater resources than the last.” (Ri 2009) She goes on to say that on average every year the earth’s population grows by 4 million people. But she believes this is an equivalent of 12 million people due to the three fold expansion. This logic does not appear to be justified. In order to make this calculations acceptable Ri needs to explain how much bigger each person`s footprint is and how each new person uses more resources. This seems more like a trend over a long period of time than an increase from one birth to the next.

Ri proposes many interesting ideas in her blog but none are supported with any evidence thus weakening her claim. She is strongly opinionated on the topic of overpopulation specifically when too many woman are having too many children for the earth`s space and resources to support them.
References
Ri.(2009) Overpopulation. http://nepthi.blogspot.com/2009/09/overpopulation.html