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July 30, 2005
population musings~
people everywhere!...anywhere you go. on a recent trip across the country..in kerala, in the coastal city of the calicut, on a wide beach promenade on the shore; i couldn't see the beach sand, there were only feet and shoes....if calicut is this bad, i dread to think about uttar pradesh and bihar where about 200 million live..or mega cities like dhaka...
pah! queue up for anything and everything you need..ticket windows, doctor visits, check outs, school admissions, concerts or cinema tickets! shortages and rationing abound! water fights and electric power thefts. not enough roads, everyone wants cars...there is no space to walk much less green spaces... mass rapid transportation ah!, its downright human rights violations for the beings that commute on the local suburban trains in bombay; capacity of which; is for one tenth of the users; that it struggles to support!
where do we start with population control? education, birth control (damn the pope)? do we look at what china does, is that enforcement even possible in a democracy? do we step aside and just hope that the environment/planet or some external entity/force will automatically bring it to equilibrium either through diseases or wars? or can we sterilize forcibly?. or better yet, put something in the air or water (as one of my buddies suggested) to make humans sterile..buy a pill to 'progenise' eh!
as i sit and debate here with dad....(yeah with the rains being heavy...indoors we are bound. what else to do eh :) ..we run into four contentious issues that are sort of related to this issue of population control....abortion, euthanasia, death penalty and embryonic stem cell research..issues that the western world (specifically america) is preoccupied quite a bit...pro-life, pro-choice, pro-death penalty..the citizens debate on and on..we vote our leaders ..we get them to nominate supreme court judges or we support charities, all on our positions. neo-liberal! conservative! we slap labels, brandish jargons and bucket folks on this.
as our discussions weave around trimester terminations, bone marrow stem cells, sustainable living spaces, calcutta street orphans, rape related pregnancies, european and middle-east fertility rates, unplanned parenthoods, life-imprisonment, non vegetarians (and animal killing), tax payer dollars and wrongful convictions..i layout ;imho; my practical and pragmatical reasons for my pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia and pro-death penalty stance....
why bring the kid to the world if you CAN’T provide for it? stop the mistake (if it was that.) or if it was rape...adopt if you can since there are so many already present. i accept that a fetus has a soul...and yes killing is defined as taking the soul out...(though i have to extend this to animals as well being a strict vegetarian but thats another discussion)...but if thats what is necessary to prevent unwanted, unplanned or unsupported kids..so be it. yeah..my couple of good friends would not have been there..its sad but its okay. we just can't sustain anymore in this planet. with the death penalty, too bad for you man if you didn’t do it. wrong place and wrong time; you just fell into the wrong side of the probability statistic. have million other innocents to worry about; a more useful use of tax payer money than pay for your life-imprisonment, i say.
i am however presented with a slightly different perspective. leading the reasoning against a strict pro-choice stance that present ugly side-results like gender-selections with a pre-disposition to a male progeny...really a serious problem in some socieites..dad presents a pro-life position with a pro-choice twist and a judicious pro-death penalty stance...a foetus gets a soul during conception! so abortion when performed is killing it. you are killing a soul for no mistake of it when you do it. now exceptions are made for certain circumstances..and according to this perspective; its the mothers right to choose! situations when there is rape, situations when the baby is deformed, or the baby is blind or not capable of surviving on its own post-birth....give the parents/mother the choice whether they want to keep it whenever and even after birth..(and this morphs into a pro-euthanasia stance) ~ death penalty is ok well as well but must be used sparingly and judiciously!...it is killing but you are preserving the dharma in doing this...the person is guilty...of killing others...so its allright!..
both perspectives agree on research investment and promotion of birth control measures....so the question of choice becomes minimum....
and mull i do on these issues as i sit on the swing later.......while i listen to tunes from alanis morissette unplugged....
Posted by dharma at July 30, 2005 07:16 AM