Letter to the Editor: Pressing problem
BY Maureen Gilliland, Tulsa
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
10/17/12 at 2:56 AM
In Anne Michaud's Sept. 28 article, "Why have kids? Oh, where did we go wrong?" she worries that the human species will go extinct because the birth rate in the U.S. has shrunk from 2.1 percent to 1.9 per American woman. Never mind that the world contains more than seven billion people, and that our possible impending doom comes, not from extinction from low birth rates, but from the inability to locate adequate food sources and clean water for a world population that now adds another billion to the fold every few years.
She wants to reverse this trend, and thinks we can do it if we believe that "saving the species" is important enough. (Are Americans a "species?" I wonder about this, but I digress.)
Perhaps she simply doesn't notice the world outside the borders of America, and realize that it contains people too. If the American species (?) goes extinct, the rest of the world will happily pick up the slack. India, for instance, adds another 29 babies per minute. So the human race will go on, if it doesn't die out from starvation due to over-population - which, by the way, is a far more pressing problem.
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