5. Free Birth Control Techniques
Should Be Available Everywhere
Matthew: Peter, what sections of the population do you think free birth control techniques should be available to?
Peter: They should be ...available to all sections of the community er...things are getting to such a pitch that I personally think that ...er...not only should birth control methods be available to all sections of the community, but indeed should be compulsory. There should be some kind of law which says that a family should not have more than three children, a complete maximum of three children, if they have three children then they must be obliged by law, almost, to use birth control, if not have er...various kinds of operation which ...um...make conception impossible.
Matthew: But surely this very er...explosive in social terms?
Peter: It’s very ...it’s a very totalitarian notion, but the alternative...if we look around us in the world outside is millions of people starving to death in places like India, and people suffering from malnutrition in...in other parts of the underdeveloped wor...world and indeed even in parts of the dev...so called developed world. 6. It’s a World Problem
The rapid rise in world population is out creating problems only for the developing countries. The whole world faces the problem that raw materials are being used to up at an increasing rate and food production cannot keep up with the population increase. People in the rich countries make the heaviest demands on the world’s resources, its food, fuel and land, and cause the most pollution. A baby in the United States will use in his lifetime 30 times more of the world’s resources than a baby born in India. Unless all the countries of the world take united action to deal with the population explosion there will be more and more people fighting for a share of less and less land, food and fuel, and the future will bring poverty, misery and war to us all. 7. What Has Caused the Population Explosion?
The main reason is not so much a rise in birth rates as a fall in death rates as a result of improvements in public health services and become parents, and many more adults are living into old age so that populations are being added to at both ends. In Europe and America the death rate began to fall during the Industrial Revolution. In the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America the fall in death rate did not begin till much later and the birth rate has only recently begun to fall. 8. "The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Bagies..."
This sudden increase in the population of the developing countries has come at a difficult time. Even if their population had not grown so fast they would have been facing a desperate struggle to bring the standard of living of their people up to the point at which there was enough food, housing , education, medical care and employment for everyone to have a reasonable life. The poor countries are having to run faster and faster in their economic activity in order to stay in the same place, and the gap in wealth between rich and poor countries grows wider every year.
The most pressing problem created by the rapid increase in population is a shortage of food. More mouths have to be fed every year, and yet a high proportion of the existing population are not getting enough of the right kind of food. Over the past two years the total amount of food has decreased, and of course the total amount of food per person has decreased even more sharply.
More and more of the babies born in developing countries have been surviving infancy and now nearly half the people living in those countries are under the age of 15. the adults have to work harder than ever to provide for the needs of the children, who cannot contributed to the economy until they are older. There is a shortage of schools and teachers, and there are not enough hospitals, doctors and nurses. Farming land is becoming scarce, so country people are moving to the towns and cities in the hope of finding a better standard of living. But the cities have not been able to provide housing, and the newcomers live in crowded slums. Finally, there are too few jobs and unemployment leads to further poverty. |
