Argumentative Essay On Population Control

Living in constant fear; soldiers out on the hunt; hideouts always on the risk of exposure. This may sound like the holocaust, but it would be ordinary life for large families if the government enacted population control. For hundreds of years, population growth has been a distorted world problem. In the article,“ Point: population Growth is not a Significant Problem,” M. Lee and Geraldine Wagner explains that starting as far back as the 18th century, an economist named Thomas Malthus believed that,“... The increasing levels of people on the earth would inevitably lead to deadly levels of starvation.” Even in present day, governments fear overpopulation and are forcefully sterilizing and aborting young women to deal with it. The government

In the article, “The girl with no identity: Being a second child in China,” Feng Ke and Katie Hunt quote,“...China's family planning laws require most families living in urban areas to have one child... resulting in forced abortions and hefty fines that are used to enforce it.” To clarify, families who accidentally have a second child, and can’t pay the fines for it, have to kill their children or go into hiding. This is inhumane and sadistic, and a parent should never be forced to do such a thing. Eventually, population control could get as bad as Kurt Vonnegut states in the fictional short story,“2BR02B,”“ … The law said that no newborn child could survive unless the parents of the child could find someone who would volunteer to die.” This concept of zero population growth causes a huge moral dilemma for people wanting to have a child, because they basically have to find someone sick, old and ready to die, before they even think of getting pregnant, or they have to find a way to kill someone. A reality like this would mean that one of our basic freedoms would be taken away, and we wouldn’t have control over our bodies. Therefore, allowing governments to control our population would allow them control over our bodies, restricting our everyday life as

Some people believe that “rising” population levels will cause many severe problems such as lack of space, resources, and unemployment. However, the more people there are, the more likely it is that better, alternative solutions to these would-be “problems” will arise. In the article, “ The More the Merrier: Population Growth Promotes Innovation,” Casey B. Mulligan States, “The more people on earth, the greater the chance that one of them has an idea of how to improve alternative energies, or to mitigate the climate effects of carbon emissions. It takes only one person to have an idea that can benefit many.” It only makes sense that the more people on earth, the more problem solvers we have for any problem. And if we start running out of resources and need to solve that problem, the more brains the better. “Thus, even if the brilliant innovators would be born regardless of population control, their incentives to devote effort toward finding new discoveries and bringing them to the marketplace depend on the size of that marketplace. And it’s clear that incentives matter for innovative activity: That’s why we have a patent system that helps innovators obtain financial rewards for their inventions. Not surprisingly, research has shown that market size stimulates innovative activity.” Clearly, our system is set up to reward solutions for problems, even “overpopulation”