The fertility rate for the U.S. is 2 children per family; Utah's average is 2.6 children per family. Utah county's fertility rate is higher than Indonesia, Brazil and Bangladesh.
Planes falling out the sky, power outages, food shortages, water rationing, riots. These are just some of the images that flash through our brains when we think of the clock ticking into the new millennium. Over a year ago, the media and computer experts began making their ominous predictions of what to expect when we tread into the year 2000. Thanks to a media frenzy, the entire nation knows exactly what the dangers of this computer bug will be. Everything from our cars, to our power, to our communications systems are in peril of crashing or malfunctioning. Thanks to ubiquitous coverage we all know about Y2K.
But another day came and went without too much notice: October 12, 1999 was dubbed Y6B, the day the earth's population reached six billion. The United Nations designated this day to bring awareness to population issues. The media showed up for a few press conferences, the local TV news provided its in-depth two minute analysis on the population boom and that was it. No follow-ups, no special reports examining the many layers or effects of human proliferation that will affect everything from our water supply to food production to natural ecosystem sustainability.
Y2K is an instantaneous event that will bring on a few power outages, computer crashes and maybe some bank statement inaccuracies. Once the bugs are fixed, we will move on with our lives. (Author's note: If you are reading this after January first and all the predictions of power outages, famine, riots and Armageddon are underway, I can't believe you don't have anything better to do than read this article.)
On the other hand, Y6B is an issue that affects every society in the world, with or without computers. Half of the earth's population, was born after 1960. It took less than 40 years for our population to skyrocket from 3 billion to 6 billion, and as our population grows, more space is taken up for housing and by the encroachment of lands previously used for food production. We live on a finite earth with finite resources and the USA is probably the worst nation to come to terms with that fact.
Americans make up five percent of the world's population, yet we consume 25 percent of the world's energy. We are also responsible for 22 percent of the world's of industrial carbon dioxide emissions, a leading cause of global warming. With our growing economy and the apparent overabundance of resources, we have become detached from the ways we affect the rest of the earth.
"We've purchased the luxury of externalizing the impacts of our actions," said population and environmental activist, Ivan Weber.
The United States is the third most populous country in the world following China and India. Two and a half million people are added yearly to our current population of 265 million, making us one of the fastest-growing industrialized nations.
Humans, here and in the rest of the world, are multiplying at rates unknown to this planet. To the best our knowledge, we have never had 6 billion people living at any one time. As we multiply, we take up more land and destroy natural ecosystems. Species are becoming extinct at an alarming rate. Plant and animal lives have always faded out of existence, but in the past, new organisms have replaced the old ones and this natural replacement is no longer happening. Part of our people proliferation comes from our technology that allows for a higher child birth survival rate and longer life expectancies. We use technology to improve the individual aspects of our quality of life, so, why can't we use that same technology and information to improve our communities through planning and voluntarily limiting our population? So we don't hit one of the walls of overpopulation: food shortages, famine and/or disease? And even before we slam into one of those catastrophes, why don't we think consciously of ways to preserve our lifestyles of open space?
According to Weber, "If your view of life is simply to cultivate people as though they were pigs or turkeys on a farm, then yes...I suppose, strictly speaking, the carrying capacity of the earth could be much greater than many of us see it to be. I see it as being a world that is populated by the complete variety of species that belong here that have as much right to be here as we do and we are in no way superior to them and in fact we're probably inferior to them . We're demonstrating that right now, by squandering our intelligence and failing to use it to control our own population."
Bringing the numbers home: Within the US, Utah is the fourth fastest growing state in the nation; some of our counties, Utah County to name one, actually rival developing nations in fertility rates. The fertility rate measures the number of live births per 1,000 women in their childbearing years, ages 15-44. The fertility rate for the U.S. is 2 children per family; Utah's average is 2.6 children per family. Utah county's fertility rate is higher than Indonesia, Brazil and Bangladesh.
We have the youngest population in the country, a third of all Utahns are under the age of 18, which means a large portion of Utahns are not even into their childbearing years. If they continue in our breeding tradition, we could be in real trouble.
Our state grows by approximately 43,000 people each year, which means a city the size of Bountiful is planted in this state every year. Here is another sign of Utah's fruitful reproduction: this century the world population growth 250 percent, in Utah that rate was more than tripled with our growth increasing 809 percent in the last 100 years. The population is expected to increase 194 percent by the year 2050, from 1.7 million to 5 million. Now, the national growth rate is a little less than one percent, compare this to Utah's growth rate of 2.12 percent. A one percent growth rate means the current population will double every 70 years, while a 2 percent growth rate means it will double in only half that time. You do the math.
Home Grown Visionaries
A non-profit organization, Envision Utah, has sprung up in Utah that has started to address how we grow. The organization is backed by many high-profile individuals with John Huntsman Jr. as chair (He replaced Robert Grow, appropriate name, eh?) and with Utah Governor Mike Leavitt, as unofficial media cheerleader. With this high name recognition, Envision Utah is by far the most visible group dealing with growth issues. They project how developing areas should zone their communities and create research tools for growth., but they refuse to plan for limiting our growth. Why are they leaving this component out of the equation?
"We have defined our focus to look at the impacts of growth that we are expecting, not to alter the growth rate, so it's just not part of our agenda. We've never felt like we would be able to achieve any kind of consensus on how to address the fertility rate issue and furthermore, it wouldn't make much of a difference," said Baxter.
One pro-growth argument says that our population increase is just a sign of a robust economy and if we didn't grow internally, outsiders would come in and take all the jobs. Yet, our economy is only one component of the puzzle. We also have to contend with limited resources like water, food and air, and like our economy they may not always be around. Unfortunately, this defeatist attitude towards population growth is what will take us into the new millennium, especially when Utah's own governor refuses to address population growth.
The official statement from Mike Leavitt's office reads, "It is not the role of government to tell people how to plan their families. Those are personal choices each family should make."
Family planning should be a personal choice, but it should also be an informed one. Almost half of all pregnancies in Utah and the United States are unplanned. This does not mean that the child is unwanted, it says that the parents were not making a conscious decision to have a child, when conception occurred. Deliberate family planning should be like planning for anything in life. When you buy a car, you time and budget for the purchase.
"All we are asking is an awareness that when you bring children into the world, you're adding to that 6 billion and can your family support it, can the community you live in support, can your state, can your nation, can your world support it and what are you going to give and take to make sure that that can happen and that's why there was a partnership with the environmental groups," said Karrie Galloway of the Planned Parenthood Association of Utah. "We can solve these problems, but if we don't plan for them as Envision Utah is thinking about doing, they've left out that one equation, how many kids are you planning for?"
Mormon Birth Control
Utah has such a high birth rate because of this state's unique culture; even Envision Utah says large families are the single most important factor impacting Utah's population growth. Since its inception the LDS church has encouraged women to have as many children as possible: intercourse was synonymous with conception. But this year's church handbook quietly enacted a new church policy on birth control. "It is the privilege of married couples who are able to bear children to provide mortal bodies for the spirit children of God, whom are then responsible to nurture and rear. The decision as to how many children to have and when to have them is extremely intimate and private and should be left between the couple and the Lord. Church members should not judge one another in this matter. Married couples should also understand that sexual relations within marriage are divinely approved not only for this purpose of procreating, but also as a means of expressing love and strengthening emotional and spiritual bonds between husband and wife."
Now, women have a choice to decide how many children they want. The policy gives credence to both family planning and birth control measures. It also gives LDS women a tool to help limit population in both their family and community, if members so choose. Yet the church has done a very poor job broadcasting this message to its members
"Women need to know about the new LDS birth control policy. They need to know that the church has finally admitted that parent hood is a personal decision, period," said author and historian Maxine Hanks, "Most of all, women need to know that they have options and know what those options are. The number of children a woman should have is a private, spiritual matter between her and god, This is why the new birth control policy is fair and humane, because it advocates personal decision making."
Spread the word and maybe a few condoms
Education and family planning are the only way to come to terms with our great birth numbers, but they need better mediums for dissemination. The LDS church should be one, the other should be public schools. For years, legislation to implement sex education in Utah schools has been killed. Abstinence is the only form of birth control taught in schools and having sex outside of marriage can't be discussed. Sex education is not a class that teaches teenagers how to get pregnant on a Friday night, it is a class that admits that high school students are going to experiment with sex and teaches them how to responsibly deal with that decision. Even making condoms available in high schools is not going to propel teens into the back seat of their parents' car at the mere sight of a latex prophylactic.
Like education, they are a resource that can be used by those who choose to use them. If teens want to choose abstinence, they should be encouraged to do so. But, with more and more teens losing their virginity at a younger age, it would be naïve to expect abstinence to be the only birth control they will practice. We have to stop looking away and pretending a solution will appear if we just ignore it.
Teens need to know what kind of birth control options they have. In the United States, teenagers, ages 15-19, account for one quarter of all births in the United States; compare that to the rest of the world where only one-fifth of the births are mothered by teens. As one of the most advanced nations on the planet, we need to use our technology to help prevent a population catastrophe. Many European countries come close to having zero population growth, largely because universal health care provides birth control.
The government cannot force families to not have children or for that same matter tell a woman if she should or shouldn't carry a child to term. Both must be choices. But leaders do have a responsibly to give their constituents the power to make informed decisions about birth control, pregnancy and family planning, and perhaps use a little of Envision Utah's own thinking...
"The underlying philosophy of Envision Utah is that if you give people good information they'll make good decisions or maybe better decisions. So what we want to do is generate different information about different ways we can accommodate growth and what the impacts of each of those different approaches might be."That is from Envision Utah's Scenarios Manager, DJ Baxter.
Good education, good logic...get it?
