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Fertility Rates
Many people who advocate family planning will
often point to fertility rates to prove their point that the world
is racing towards destruction and will soon be grossly
overpopulated. The upright woman owes it to humanity to have no more
than 2.2 children (or, at the most, 2.5), lest the population
explodes and we find ourselves suddenly faced with too many people
and not enough world to put them in. And, while their warnings are
often well-intentioned and their underlying point may have some
validity to it, the problem with these kinds of assessments is that
they are based on faulty numbers, or at the very least numbers which
can only be called, at best, an educated guess.
The problem with their principles is that fertility rates are *not*
good evidence of how many children a woman needs to have to maintain
the population without creating a population explosion. The
necessary information to calculate how many children women should
have to replace the population without increasing it simply doesn't
exist; it's information that can only be gathered accurately over a
40 or 50 year time span, and yet is only effective when applied to a
single year. So instead, those people responsible for calculating
percentages of the kind have come up with a formula which allows
them to take the percentage of women of a given age who have
children in a given year, make adjustments for death rates and for
women who die young, and come up with a number that may or may not
resemble something somewhat close to reality.
What does this rate have to do with the average family? Very little.
Family planning choices are more likely to be based on the family's
income and convenience than on any desire to reach a particular
population balance, and that is the only logical way to do it. For
example, what about the women who are unable to have children? Who
will replace them? What about those women who never marry or who
choose not to have children? What about all the women and girls who
die before they have any children at all?
In short: fertility rates are fun things for scientists to play
around with. But no couple should ever plan their family around the
idea that if they have more than three children, the world will
explode.
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