As I was reading this week from our textbook, the chapter was called "The Context of Intimacy." It was talking about cohabitation, delayed marriage and the reasons for it, birth rates, household size...things like that.
The paragraph about birth rates I thought was really interesting. I'm going to post the whole thing, it's pretty short. It says:
As a result of later marriages, delayed first births, and an increasing number of childless marriages, the birth rate declined considerably from the 1950's, though it leveled off after 1995. In 2005, the rate was 14.0 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 years, a little more than half of what is was in 1954 and less than half of what is was in 1910. In fact, the rate is now lower that what is necessary for the natural replacement of the population. Without immigration, the U.S. population will eventually decline if birth rates remain at the present low level.
Yes, I bolded, underlined, and italicized that last part because it is INSANE! I remember having a teacher in high school who would tell us that the world is overpopulated and that people need to stop having children.
(to which I would reply, under my breath, "i'm going to have babies. Lots and lots of babies." Yeah, he loved me)
But then it also reminded me of last year when elder Russel M. Nelson gave a talk here in Rexburg and told us something along the lines of (I searched for it in my journal, I KNOW I took notes, but i couldn't find the entry so I'll paraphrase):
"If you took every person in the entire world, and gave them each an acre (it might have been a square mile or some other unit of measurement) to live on, they would fill up 80% of Chile (or it may or may not have been Brazil)."
And that's it!
It's times like these when I realize how much Satan wants to attack the family as a unit. He knows that we will be unhappy and more susceptible to follow him when we are alone, so that's what he convinces the world that it is the "right" thing to do.
There's a saying I heard once that went something like, "God made the world for us; not the other way around." Not to say, because of this, that it's okay to destroy the Earth, but that there's enough room for everyone. If people really believe the world is over-crowded they need to drive through Wyoming or Montana or even Wales! Nothing much there.
ReplyDeleteI don't believe we should necessarily set out to have as many children as fast as we possibly can (I've seen too many not-so-great things come of that mindset) but worry about over-population certainly shouldn't prevent us from having as many children as we want and/or can support.