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Should doctors advise people to limit the number of children they have for the sake of the environment?
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by mchawk | August 10, 2008 at 03:13 pm
1595 views | 16 Recommendations | 7 comments
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Should doctors advise people to limit the number of children they have for the sake of the environment?
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The poll was put after a BMJ editorial that posed the same question:
Several readers have pointed out that the BMJ’s recent coverage of climate change has ignored a key issue—the need for population control... They may be right that "population" and "family planning" are taboo words. The BMJ hasn’t actively avoided these issues, but we could do more to highlight them. As Guillebaud and Hayes portray it [in their article in this issue of the BMJ], every week an extra 1.5 million people need food and somewhere to live, amounting to "a huge new city each week, somewhere, which destroys wildlife habitats and augments world fossil fuel consumption."
Population control need not be coercive, they say. Half of pregnancies worldwide are unplanned. Simply by meeting women’s unmet contraceptive needs, several developing countries have halved their fertility rates. Clear evidence points to the demand for contraception increasing when it is available, accessible, and properly marketed. Guillebaud and Hayes call on doctors to take an active role in overcoming barriers to the universal availability of contraception and ensuring that patients and the public understand the environmental consequences of population growth. Controversially...they say that doctors should advise patients on limiting family size for environmental reasons and should set their own example.
Not everyone will agree that this is a doctor’s role. Most will agree, however, that it is the role of doctors to deal with uncertainty...[that] doctors should not just manage therapeutic uncertainty but should force it into the open ... that guidance from the UK’s General Medical Council explicitly states that doctors must help to resolve uncertainties about the effects of treatment. This means being open about uncertainty with patients and the public..
Even as someone who thinks there might be too many people in the world already, I find this a rather cold assessment of the situation - perhaps the very definition of "clinical."
But I have to offer thanks to the BMJ's editors for having the guts to broach such a contentious issue. I don't entirely agree with The Guardian's assessment of the BMJ article, saying it "calls on GPs to encourage the view that bigger families are as environmentally dubious as owning a patio heater or driving a gas-guzzler", but that raises the point that the topic of poplulation control is one of those political third-rails - if politicians touch it, their career dies.
But, when so many of the world's resources are running so low that it has brought us to war, is this not the exact time that we and politicians should be having this discussion?
Perhaps the lead should not be left to doctors, and certainly not to politicians. Should the choice not be left to prospective parents? But should their decision to have children at all be made only when they have all the facts and have considered the larger ramifiactions of parenthood - even if discussion children in terms of 'carbon footprint' may seem shocking?
So it is perhaps the educators who have failed. Irrational protests against sex eduacation has taken that subject off the syllabus in a number of countries. Such short-sightedness has left Britain with the highest rate of teen pregancy in Europe. To show such willful lack of responsibility is a failure of us all to see the 'bigger picture' - that we have finite land on which to grow finite crops to feed what must be a finite population.
The questions are difficult and any 'solution' frought with danger.
But the questions must be asked, nonetheless.
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (7)
at 16:01 on August 10th, 2008
mchawk, I like this story. It's good stuff. "Overpopulation contol" Thanks for bringing this delicate task to our attention, nobody wants to hear it, but 2050 we are 10 bn people, epidemcs run with the speed of airliners around the planet. Your Icon logo self explaining. Article should be continued on "sustainable village population" Thanks
at 19:08 on August 10th, 2008
mchawk, I like this story. It's good stuff.
at 19:34 on August 10th, 2008
I think the point you make about education is a good one, so long as it's realistic education that has parents consider just how challenging child-rearing can be. I think a lot of young people reach a certain point in their lives and simply take for granted the idea that you're just 'supposed' to have kids, that it's like going to college or buying your first home. It would be nice if childlessness (is that a word?) were seen as a viable and more socially acceptable option for people, rather than what I think a lot of people do, which is view kids as being the missing component that completes us. That may be true for some people, but certainly not all.
at 04:04 on August 11th, 2008
Hi Rob - thanks for the GS.
A good point about the "inevitability" of having kids. I do agree that a lot of people seem to stumble into the whole marriage-kids-house in the suburbs routine because that's the 'done thing.'
In the UK, there seems to be a growing acceptance of couples not having kids, but there's still a lot of pressure to 'conform' - especially from parents who now expect to become grandparents!
at 02:42 on August 11th, 2008
mchawk, I like this story. It's a good post, especially since the issues are so complex that it is not really possible to give a simple Yes/No answer; rather a view one way or the other, backed up by the evidence to support that view. I was horrified when I taught in West Africa to find so many of my (male) students so against any form of birth control. They argued that they had the right to have as many children as they wanted regardless of what other people said: it was a kind of mascho statement. But also, in the UK, we are in danger of having a population bulge of elders now and we are desperately short of young people. OK I know we coukld easily import young people from elsewhere! But, given the prejudice against immigration that is easier said than done!
at 04:07 on August 11th, 2008
Thanks, all, for the flags
at 04:52 on August 11th, 2008
mchawk, I like this story. It's good stuff.