In India, where the average life expectancy according to the world bank is only 63, lives a 72 year-old mother of a baby of 18 months. Population growth is becoming a major problem in India. The population is growing so fast, that the country is unable to keep up with enough roads, jails and schools necessary for the country to function properly. This appears to be a situation where couples exercising their legal right to reproduce are negatively affecting society as a whole. Also, having so many children doesn’t seem to be of benefit to children.
The older a women becomes, the higher the risk of her baby being born prematurely or unhealthy are. Naturally, after a certain age it also becomes increasingly difficult or impossible to become pregnant. What an alarming number of women in India are doing now is becoming pregnant using in-vitro fertilization, or IVF. Why would women in India, a country struggling with rapid population growth, want so desperately to continue to have children even when they’re over the age of 50?
Social pressures in India are a driving force behind the desire to have children past the age at which it is safe to do so. In many cases women already have several children but did not have any male heir to continue the name of their family, or if they did have a son he passed away. Because it is so important in Indian culture to have a son, women are willing to go through IVF.
Sadly, when the average life expectancy is only 63, many couples are having children, knowing that they very likely will not be around for there child’s 18th birthday. This same situation is legal in the U.S., but most doctors would be unwilling to do the procedure for moral reasons. Choosing to have a child at this age is like preconceived abandonment.
Overpopulation leads to another important legal and moral issue. China is the most populated country in the world and because of it’s large population, the government has made a one child policy. Wouldn’t this sort of approach be a much more ethical solution for a country such as India. Many people world-wide argue that it is a natural right to be able to have children, but wouldn’t parents be giving children a better life by having fewer children? Parents would be able to dedicate more time, attention, and money to each child if they had less children, and society would function better with a smaller population.
I do not believe that there is an ethical way for the government to control how many children couples have. The government could however campaign for and promote adoption. It is strange that the U.S. government will pay to put out advertisements encouraging people to fill out their census, and yet there is virtually no promotion for adoption. I think that it is more of a civic duty of people to try to only have two or fewer children in order to maintain or reduce population growth than a government responsibility.
Source: found through instapundit.com
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