The Myth of
Overpopulation
& the Wickedness
of Birth Control
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A NOTE TO THE READER
A few months ago I ran across a news article about the Duggars, a family with 19 children who have gained fame by
being featured on a ‘reality tv’
show. And while not Catholic (they are instead Evangelic Protestants as far as
I can tell, what others call ‘Protestant Evangelicals’ or ‘born
again believers’, etc.) --- and thus not on the way to salvation in their
present state of false religion --- they are to be commended for not being
afraid to bear the fruit of the womb, and for displaying a large family that is
attractive in the sight of others because they live an orderly life and
demonstrate charity for each other in their home.
But, of course, the mere mention of such people brought disparaging
remarks & modernist commentary. The
world is overpopulated! pontificated many readers.
It’s disgusting & selfish! said others. They
should be fixed! declared some.
And so forth and so on. Everybody knows the rigmarole nowadays. We
are so saturated in anti-offspring propaganda for the last forty years that the
litany is very predictable. I know, because I used to believe in it. Before
becoming Catholic and while studying for my degree at the university, I was a
typical ZPGer (zero population growth partisan).
Then I came to realize the truth about the situation. That truth is
distilled below in a brief commentary of my own that I submitted to the news
site. I have no idea if it was posted. They may have blackballed it. But you,
my dear reader, can benefit from it here. Nothing has been changed except for
breaking it into small little paragraphs, incorporating the date of
transmission, and adding emphasis, such as underlining & italics.
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19 September 2009
Having lots of children is not ‘selfish’
--- what’s greedy is refusing
to have children in a marriage because you can keep more money, have more fun,
and indulge sexual pleasure without the responsibility of offspring that often
comes along with it.
Meanwhile, justifying this greed by
worrying about the earth is a lame excuse. People with large families can just
as easily refrain from polluting this world or wasting its resources as can
people with small families. To say otherwise is to assume that human beings are
totally evil and don’t have a right to exist (the person thinking this always
making an exception for his own existence,
of course).
But the truth is very different:
Our Creator made us in His Image, to look like Him in both soul
& body.
And every single man, woman & child
is worth an entire cosmos because of this simple fact. We are the
centerpiece of His Garden, and what gardener does not want a much-loved plant
to grow, spread and produce something valuable?
It is for this reason that the human race
is made to bear fruit. It is why we are on the earth.
In marriage, that fruit is children. All of the sarcasm about ‘rabbit-like
reproduction’ is mindless & degrading. Critics of this sort make
people (and themselves) into stomachs with mouths and an intelligent brain
attached as a kind of random afterthought.
What else can they think when the only
thing that matters to them is the pleasures of this world and how smart a
person can be to enjoy them?
Hence the demand for
so-called ‘birth control’. By it,
husbands are free to become insatiable leches, wives
free to become just-as-insatiable whores, and children are merely an economic
consideration that, in older days, were required in large numbers to make a
farm profitable or to overcome high rates of mortality --- or, as is the case
in more recent times, kept in much smaller numbers to satisfy some kind of an ‘emotional
desire’ on the part of wannabe parents.
Yet what is the more difficult to
believe --- that people are only animals
with smart brains (in which case, the dumber you are then the less you
matter) or that every person is wildly
important because every one of them is made by an Infinitely Smart God in
His Infinitely Great Image?
Which then leads anyone to see that
there is no such thing as ‘too many children’. Every
single child is wanted by the Creator. And
can the God that created the world out of nothing, and Who provides for the
least of the animals on this earth, fail to care for those that He made in His
Image and who humbly ask Him for their daily needs?
Obviously not.
Poverty, then, is not a reason to
avoid children. We don’t truly need most of the things that the modern
world leads us to believe are necessary, and we are too proud to live like our
ancestors who did not have these things. Yet who is to be blamed when employers
refuse to pay a person what he needs to support his family and cites the market
(read: how little everyone else gets paid for the very same job) as justification
for their tight fistedness?
No, the problem is not large
families. It is small minds and big prejudices, along with a lot of greed &
arrogance.
-Paul
Doughton
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Pilate’s
query met:
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© 2009 by
Paul Doughton.
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