For this last bioethics blogs, I want to focus on something that has become more and more prevalent in recent years: population control. Everyone knows that the human population is growing out of control, but no one really seems to know what to do about it. One thing that scientists are able to agree on, though, is that the current growth rate is unsustainable. We live in a world of finite resources, and the more people there are in the world, the faster they will be used up. As of now, the population of the Earth is more than 7 billion people. Estimates vary, but scientists have reached a general consensus that Earth can sustain somewhere around 10 billion people. We have a ways to go before we hit that cap, but if we blow by it without any sort of change, the results could be catastrophic. Billions of people already face food and water shortages; this will only get worse as the population increases. Oil will become a rarity, requiring humans to develop a new way of getting energy. The world’s most populous cities will continue to grow and grow, and more and more people will be trapped in a never-ending cycle of poverty as they compete for the few jobs available. The natural beauty of the world will be hacked into to create more places for people to live and more resources for them to use.
In short, the outlook is grim, and both in fiction and in reality, people have started looking more and more towards biology to solve this impending issue. As of now, however, there is absolutely no bioethical solution to the problem of overpopulation. Other than euthanasia or some sort of government-required sterilization procedure after a couple has had a certain number of children, there really isn’t anything that can be done to address the rapidly expanding human population besides increasing education about contraceptives and helping people in poor nations break out of poverty. While these solutions would definitely work and have a significant effect on the world’s population, they are borderline barbaric and show an almost total disregard for human life.
One of the most interesting ideas (at least in my opinion) about this situation came from a Dan Brown book called Inferno. In the book, a fanatical population biologist develops a plague that affects one third of the world and render them completely sterile, causing the population increase to come to a grinding halt. Is such a thing possible? Probably not, at least not with our current technology. But the concept behind it is certainly intriguing. It is a desperate measure, to be sure, and one that could most likely never be implemented legally, but no one knows what the future hold. I personally could never agree that such a plan would ever be the right thing to do for humanity, but as the situation becomes more and more serious, people stop following logic and start following their beliefs. As for now, the best we can do is hope that as the world becomes more developed, the population growth stabilizes and we can all live together in peace and share this world.