I'm going to issue you a challenge that may change how you feel about yourself; probably for the worse. Forgive me for saying that I hope it does. On top of that, I'm even going to accuse us all of a terrible crime. It's real, and, apparently, nobody else has the courage to tell you. As was said: "The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy." The enemy here is famine and disease.

Ready, criminals? Consider a moral problem: if you had a cousin who would die for lack of an operation that would cost $100,000, and you had just returned from a trip to Bangladesh... would you try to save your cousin, or surely save the lives of a hundred starving exotic people? ...a hundred people whom you don't know, but that hurt all the same. It's a horrible problem; you would never feel you'd won.
. . Chose --one death of one person you know, or of a hundred people you don't. Let's make it even tougher; what if it were your own child who needed the operation? Ethically, would there be any difference? Now... what if it was yourself?!
. . This is the sadness of not helping the people on the street: money that could help them is better spent on the population problem. It means the sacrifice of somebody right in front of you, for the sake of someone --no, many people-- you'll never know of!
. . We also make moral decisions by making no decisions. Some people may hide behind purposeful ignorance; denial, really. In the end, for you to have a child is to decide that "many" (six to forty... hard to say) people in certain areas of other countries will die of starvation. To ignore the fact doesn't change your responsibility.
. . That the dead are not particular people that we can point to --does not change the fact. The fact is that most Americans have the potential to save the lives of at least a dozen people in other countries --and don't. This makes those Americans (you and I) guilty of negligent manslaughter. <
. . But don't worry, you couldn't be found guilty --but only because the jury couldn't identify any particular individual that your decision killed. But those people are dead, all the same.
. . I can compare gun control to population control --in that whelping kids is like firing a machine-gun into a crowd-- reproductive organs are just as much a weapon. In either example, random people die.
. . You have powers, advantages. If you live in an advanced and privileged country --you have the power to save many bottom-rung people from a terrible life and probable death. If you do nothing, you have decided to let them all suffer, and to let many die.
. . Don't expect people in a starving nation to say "Please send us birth control pills", tho it's certainly the best... no, the only thing that can help them.

Here's the hard-line. Perhaps you say that you've assuaged your guilt with a contribution to a food-relief fund for a famine-ravaged country, etc. (If that money gets through....) You've fed and saved a starving woman in a country where population is out of control. But that fund didn't give her birth control. The money would've been better spent on it.
. . People might say: how can you spend $10 to sterilize a woman who's had two kids, and let other kids starve, when you could spend that money to feed those other kids for one day? <
. . I would say, then, because of the result. Simple. That woman may go on to have an additional five kids. (Hey; you decided to give food, not birth control!) Of the five, four would die a slow death of starvation. Only one would've survived, who would've grown up to produce five more kids, of whom four would die a slow death of starvation. Only one would've survived, who would've grown up to produce five more kids, who would all starve. That's nine, in this typical example. That's in only two generations, and generations keep coming. By your failure to study the problem, you have made the situation horribly worse.
. . I realize that you want to feel good about doing something that seems to be appreciated (by the companies you're doing it through). So how much suffering --how many many people (mostly children) are you willing to let die for the nice feeling you'd get for saving one? How many deaths is your nice feeling worth?!

There's another excuse that people commonly cite. Perhaps you've heard that there's plenty of food, really; it's just an economic problem. Yes, even where there's food enough, many people starve for lack of money to buy it. Sure, there's much truth to that, but --past your vote, and the occasional demonstration-- you can't do a lot to change that aspect of it. To say that a famine is an economic problem is specious reasoning. It is always economic. (Disregarding rare access problems.) But the economic problem has a precedent cause: over-population. Much war, too, is economic--a fight over increasingly scarce resources. They're scarce because of... division among too many people, or destruction by too many people.

It is always the poor who will die first. To put it off as only an economic problem, means that there never has been a famine due to anything else, and that's true but meaningless. Whether there is food enough for half the people or a quarter of the people, the famine is still economic. It makes as much difference as if it were not economic at all. Half or 3/4 of the people will die in either case.

A friend quotes/paraphrases Kenneth Boulding ( from memory):
"To believe that you can have exponential population growth in a world of finite resources, you have to be either a madman or an economist."

Parallel that with a scenario of an aircraft losing altitude fast... you gotta figure that eventually, inevitably, you're gonna crash into something solid. Now imagine that while the plane is diving, all the passengers tell the pilot, "No, we're all right so far. As long as we don't look out the windows. And the extra speed we get is free, isn't it? So don't pull up; Let's find an alternative."
. . Sorry, there is no alternative. According to the World Bank, 800 Million people are chronically malnourished by United Nations standards. It will get worse.

Here's the Socio-Biology. What women don't know about men is that not a piece of paper, nor even an elaborate ritual, can change the DNA structure in their cells. Women have the equivalent DNA and hormones as men. Hormones, too, are uneffected by ceremony. Most males are designed to be attracted to females, and vice versa. This is nature, and was good for us... when our population was small and predated upon by lions, tigers, and bears. Essentially, we are the only predator left. Now, the result of those hormones --more population-- is our greatest enemy.
. . Perhaps (nature, or whatever god there be) thought he took care of that horrible eventuality by giving us brains. We sure don't use them well. It got us into this mess in the first place, as it made us king of the mountain, because of our ability to destroy; now maybe we can use it to save ourselves. It's now obvious to anyone who uses that organ that the only way we can do that is to limit our population --severely. All the way to a reasonable number. Somewhere under a billion, certainly.
. . What is the ideal population of people on Earth? Suggestions are as low as a million. Statistically and genetically, what is the minimum number that will escape any threat of inbreeding? For another: what's the minimum that will sustain scientific progress and social dynamism? Athens did it with five thousand! Does our technology make a larger number necessary to do that work? The minimum number for genetics would depend on care taken to avoid near-relation breeding, a la computer planning for race horses and zoo animals. Don't want to go that far! (Notice that I didn't answer the question of this paragraph.)
. . On the question of world food-supply, Dr. Erlich (& others) calculates: With over 6.3 billion people, the world produces enough food to supply six billion with a severe, vegetarian Chinese diet; four billion with a South American diet; or 2.1 billion people with an American-level diet. (That's if we continue to take the food that other species used to eat.) The math doesn't work out, does it? I know the counter-argument. To say that there is plenty of food but that it's just not distributed properly is to assume all of the points below. All of them! (And many more I haven't thought of yet. Can you? Tell me.)

1. Absolute knowledge of the needs of each area and of each individual, and --without profiteering-- perfect implementation of a distribution policy based on those needs.
2. Absolute intelligence --of every last person-- to know what's best. What to plant; where not to plant; how to deal with bugs, fertilizers, etcetera, in a harmless, sustainable way; what to ship where; who will not get an American-level diet (namely everybody); etc., etc. And perfect implementation of that policy. No mistakes.
3. Absolute altruism of everybody on the planet. No theft; no hoarding. Perfect communication of the omniscient knowledge needed to use that altruism.
4. Absolute peace. NO conflicts, hot or cold. Unlikely, especially where hunger exists beforehand.
5. Absolute lack of economic causes or hurdles. No strikes. Helpful: no foreign debt --anywhere.
6. Absolute and immediate cessation and total reversal of the Greenhouse Effect, Deforestation, Ozone Depletion, Acid Rain, erosion, and many other trends. (This is a flat-out physical impossibility.)
7. Immediate halt of baby-production. Yes, that's the phrase I mean; to say "population increase" is too abstract; it sounds easier than the decision is in an individual's life. Say: no kids for ten years, then a maximum of one per woman for the next couple centuries. With all its laws and enormous peer-pressure for a one-child limit, China has failed (so far). I do not demean their accomplishment; what would've happened without their efforts is terrible to think of. We could've smelled the corpses from here!

No, to grow more food isn't --and never has been-- an answer. It is --at best-- a palliative; a stopgap to postpone the disaster, to give us time to get the population down. If, instead, we ignore the problem, the time will merely let the population get even worse. Like a bomb that's getting more explosive powder added all the time, the longer we wait, the bigger the blast.
. . A "stopgap" implies that there's a stable situation on the other side --in the future. There is, but only if we do drastic measures now. A severe limit on reproduction is not "the hard way". The hard way is mass death --a sea-cliff that the human race will push each other over like lemmings until our population is very low again. And we'll take many other species with us.

If we allow people to breed like lemmings, we will die like lemmings.
. . On the other hand, we could have all the cars, cattle, and chainsaws we want... we could do all kinds of destructive things... if the population was low enough. Conversely, if it rises, we can't have the individual freedoms we had before. Or the food.

Freedom and democracy are incompatible with a high population. It makes severe controls necessary.

People who have many children are taking future food out of Our future mouths. When we get old, we may not be able to pay --or fight-- for it. Sometimes populations go up only slightly and it is enough to decrease the quality of that area's life a lot. Then, that perceived lessening of quality will lower the level of caring about the environment or about people. (compassion-fatigue.) Therefore, an only-slightly-larger population can pollute twice as much, and have twice the crime, etcetera. The pressure drains hope for improvement, and hope is heavier when drained.

I want not to live in a New York City. When I'm old, I want not to fight for what little food there is, because, at that age... I'll lose. Or will only the rich have enough to eat? I want not to live where the value of life is declining in direct proportion with the population increase. Early on, a sense of community and caring is lost. Aristotle: "The good life depends upon intimacy and small number."

A high population encourages --and eventually makes inevitable-- competition rather than cooperation. This lowers the efficiency of a culture extremely, and exactly at the point where it has to do better or experience mass death. When the population gets to the point where even politicians know about it, it's way too late.

Therefore, the best charity is to fight the biggest problem the world faces--the one behind all the others: over-population. And on the personal level, there are literally hundreds of millions of people who are going to die--slowly--for lack of what is to us a pittance.
. . Here's one real charity: a couple friends recommend finding gifted foreign young people who would vastly benefit, and the world benefit, from their immigration and resultant career, especially if they then go back home. Statistically, it must be true that most of the world's geniuses --at this moment-- are asleep or busy weeding rice paddies.
. . I mentioned Erlich's statement that the number of people supported by the Earth is dependent on their level of diet. The Earth can support, if only temporarily, three billion people of an average diet. So too, the destruction leveled (!) upon the Earth is dependent upon man's level of technology. i.e.: the Earth could probably support ten billion people who had a medieval level of technology, because, without infernal combustion cars and chainsaws and bulldozers, we would not destroy so much. And productive land would remain so indefinitely.

And tho I fear the future, show me a time-machine that will snap me ten years into it, and I'll go. Because I'm sure there will be thousands of fascinating things invented and developed and produced, as well as fascinating things that have taken place. One of the things, however, I'm sure there'll not be enough of in the future... is food.
. . Do we even have the right to produce so much food? Is it ethical to have vast fields of food dedicated one only one animal? Remember that that area before produced food for vast numbers of other animals. How much area is really "ours"?
. . Are we "stealing" food from other species? We are a species produced by the Earth --at what point are we taking too much? Before technology (including the invention of agriculture) there were only a few million humans. That's one level of a percentage that most would consider "fair". But then our brain-size started to pay off. We planted, kept other animals away, and ate it all. Is that fair? Which is to ask: is our brain-size part of nature or not. We'd have to say it is... but those brains can now ask these questions, and decide what level is best for the Earth as a whole.

The point is not what extreme number of humans can be supported, using all the area and all of our current technology. On the more ethical level, we would not include all that area, because it is not in the balance of things that (90%) of Earth's arable land should be controlled and co-opted by one species, where literally millions of species lived before. The top sustainable population of humans should not mean "regardless of all other life."
. . It irritates me to hear that a place "has value" --meaning value to humans. Humans only. Economic value. Value only to those who are already rich. What of value to all the other animals? Are we as a culture that egocentric? How arrogant and presumptious of us. It brings up Lord Acton's dictum (Power corrupts...). We have the power to do it, and therefore we think ourselves justified in doing it. Manifest Destiny: "We can steal it, therefore, it is rightfully ours."
. . Our species has the arrogance to turn the entire world's surface into food-production for one animal --ourselves-- and consider everything else wasted! That land formerly --and rightfully-- had supported thousands of species.
. . Also, we should become aware that other animals have fences and borders too, tho we seldom can see or detect them with our feeble senses. [cats, dogs, birds] Those borders are just as valid as ours. Species specialize for good reasons; that way, their land claims do not much interfere with the claims of other species.
. . Overlapped within a hectare of a human-fenced area are literally millions of other borders, each vitally claimed by many of the tiny residents of those areas.
. . Anthropocentric borders: We "own" only our use of a piece of land, and only for our kind of use, and only so long as it does not materially interfere with the use of that land by its other owners. (Practically speaking, obviously, that's impossible. But the thought gives us perspective.)
. . I've mentioned only starvation, but the other Horsemen of the Apocalypse (War, Famine, Disease, and Pestilence) are ready to ride as well. The four horsemen quickly come galloping to visit any imbalance in nature. The population of any place WILL get controlled, either by ourselves... or by those volunteer horsemen.

Like, but vastly beyond, the governmental system of checks and balances, nature's system has every living force in itself balanced by other forces. This keeps the numbers of all species in a state of flux, and within moderate bounds. Except one species. And that one --us-- is probably temporary, because of his immoderation.
. . If we don't control our number, disease will spread much more quickly, in what is, after all, a mono-crop of humans. Ask any farmer how the bugs would be if he didn't rotate and intersperse his crops. What happens?
. . And there are an estimated 5,000 diseases out there waiting for our population to get thick enough so they can spread like wildfire. The population is shooting up at a quarter-million people a day! The germs are waiting, waiting!
. . Don't massive invasions of viruses prove that nature abhors an imbalance as much as it does a vacuum?
. . It's curious. We have trouble with a definition. People complain of pests. But by any reasonable standard, humans are the only pests on Earth! We, and those we've impacted, are the only ones out of balance.

1. most obviously, it's natural to reproduce. Our genes demand it & reward it.
2. the more children people have, the more it takes to insure that two will survive, because of the starvation brought on by too many children!
   . . Paradoxically, if all people would spontaneously observe the two-child limit, nearly all children would survive, and they wouldn't need to over-produce more kids to have two survive.
3. to provide care for your old age, when you dodder past age fifty. No kidding --fifty; in most poor areas, that is past the average lifespan, and surviving people have accumulated the effects of many diseases, deprivations, and accidents by that age.
   . . The paradox there is that without the over-population, they could have an old age, and surviving children, and less disease, and enough food, so that some is left over for you.

   Over-population not only lets human-to-human diseases go wildfire, it also makes more likely the conditions that give opportunity to those diseases that vector thru farm animals, such as the human/pig/duck vector of new influenzas in China.
   . . Besides that, starvation can cause drought and erosion. People are so hungry they'll eat anything. No trees will escape the cooking-fire; no growing thing will escape human teeth. Seeds and seedlings will be eaten before they can bear. Obviously, without trees and grass, water will not be controlled by nature. When water isn't held by vegetation, it will kill by flood, then be gone, leaving bare rock or desert.

As to the practicality and morality of child-bearing: there is about a one percent chance that a child would be born with a disease or malformation of body and/or mind; to care for him all his life would cost enough money to save the lives of literally thousands of people in starvation areas. One percent of the money to care for him must be added to the average cost of bearing and raising a child in a wealthy country. [A quarter million for education alone.]
. . If all women had but one child for the next couple centuries, those kids would be well-educated, safe, happy, and live in a prosperous world. And new-species evolution would pull ahead in the race with species-extinction, until it balanced again.
. . Malthus was absolutely correct; he merely underestimated our cleverness --our ingenuity-- in using technology to subvert the natural processes that would have limited our numbers earlier. Now we have a bigger problem than we would've in a more optimistic forecast. And he underestimated our ruthlessness in killing other species of animals and plants for our unthinkingly selfish desires --sometimes for desires that are petty and insignificant.
. . The maximum sustainable population of humans should not mean "regardless of all other life." Besides, "maximum" isn't "best".

In the top-tier world, at this time, we're ahead of the game. Only in the top-tier world, and not for much longer, can people use hundreds of tons of food for decoration, and throw it away without ever having thought of it as food. (Pumpkins, and, tho not by the ton, parsley --usually the most nutritious food on the restaraunt plate, and some people throw it away!)
. . Perhaps our biggest underestimation right now is our genetic manipulation of food-plants to make them produce their own fertilizer and resist diseases better. Unfortunately, the prospects for substantially increasing food-production look good. That would enable humans to further expand our numbers --at the expense of other life, eventually endangering the continued existence of any life on Earth.
. . Drastically reducing our population is something that must be done, and mere political tokens will not do it. A mere reduction of the rate of increase is like a doctor letting the patient die slower, and calling that "good enough". One child per family --average, for a couple centuries-- or else continued and accelerating mass death. Period. We take our choice.
. . Any sufficiently large population of humans --no matter how wise and careful-- is devastating to life on Earth. That cannot --and will not-- be tolerated.

People with a big family are like the psychopathic bank robber who robs banks "because that's where the money is". They have a total ignorance and disregard for the deadly repurcussions of their actions.
. . What of people's rights to reproduce --to chose their own family-size? Simple. Their freedom to swing their arms ends where someone else's nose begins. So too with their ability to destroy food and living space, lower the quality of other people's lives, and promote the spread of diseases. Your right of reproduction must end where other people's livelihood and survival begin. That's the point that they become the criminals I spoke of. Population-crime.

How many kids a person has is everybody else's business.