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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

People screaming overpopulation are always and everywhere on a slippery slope to eugenics.

Carrying capacity is mediated by technology. WRT water, wastewater reclamation and desalination have a lot of gains that aren’t widely deployed. Also rewilding and reforestation can do a lot to mitigate creeping aridity.

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This doesn't have to be true anymore. Not all "we have too many people" people believe we need to FORCE depopulation. We have strong reason to believe that simply giving people sex ed, ample forms of birth control, and women's rights leads to a self selection of fewer children. Every country that has done these things has seen its fertility drop.

Personally the earth can easily, EASILY, support more than ten billion humans if we stop being so damn stupid about resource utilization. Remember that we already produce an immense oversupply of food. Every human that is hungry is not a resource production problem, but a lack of empathy problem. The earth can only struggle to supply billions of humans if you insist that nothing can happen without a strong profit motive.

> Every country that has done these things has seen its fertility drop.

And this result is somehow supposed to be a good thing? Every country that has this result, no matter how we theorize that it got there in the first place, is now facing a demographic crisis

> that simply giving people sex ed, ample forms of birth control, and women's rights leads to a self selection of fewer children.

The devil is in the details here, and programs focused on contraceptives in developing nations have a very checkered recent history.

> the earth can easily, EASILY, support more than ten billion humans if we stop being so damn stupid about resource utilization

This is sort of what I'm driving at.

You better give some references about this "checkered recent history" because for example the programs US had for Africa were removed by GWB in the beginning of century when there was still less then billion of people in Africa. Now there is close to twice as that and Africa is not able to feed itself because population is growing faster than its capacity to produce food.

Normally those who stand against birth control have some very clear political agenda to use the size of the population in their advantage.

I'm not making an argument against birth control.

So as an example of checkered history, I'm referring to things like the push for circumcision as a measure to fight AIDs which has counterintuitively lead to a drop in condom usage in some places[1]. This is a great example of well meaning people from Europe and the US intervening in a way that makes things worse.

There have been concerns around HIV risk with DMPA[1] and ethical concerns about around the initial trials of the drug[3].

There were forced sterilizations in South Africa as recently as 2005[4].

There were similar issues in Kenya in the early 2010s[5].

My point was that people should look upon population alarmists with some skepticism, and when they talk about birth control in Africa I think it merits extra scrutiny.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3362967/

[2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7232639/

[3]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17441692.2019.1...

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-51637751

[5] https://www.hhrjournal.org/2015/07/kenya-forced-sterilizatio...

I don't see how any of this is relevant to the issue. I'm talking about birth control that is family planning, programs that provide contraceptives and these incidence are something completely different.

My original statement was "programs focused on contraceptives in developing nations have a very checkered recent history.".

Forced sterilization falls neatly in that category.

These examples are about infectious disease control and not about family planning.

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