What overturning Roe v. Wade could mean for birth control access, maternal care

Tocky on 17/11/2022 at 15:54

Under the guise of clearing up any instances where they could be sued, a group of anti-abortion doctors in Mississippi is attempting to take away even the right to refer a woman to out of state doctors for an abortion. You might say this is a "hand maid" to the trigger law.

(https://apnews.com/bc79acc494b606ccc387f8cb2caff6f4)

june gloom on 19/11/2022 at 04:07

Quote Posted by Nicker

Seven plus billion of us is too much to ask of the planet.

Don't fall for neo-Malthusian horseshit. The problem isn't population. We have more than enough housing, more than enough food, more than enough resources to house, feed, clothe and equip everyone in the world. We just don't do it because it's not profitable to about 100 soulless ghouls, who have a vested interest in making you think we're short on everything except weaponry.

Nicker on 19/11/2022 at 05:39

Correction - Eight Billion as of November 15, 2022.

Quote:

The problem isn't population.

I beg to differ. Overpopulation isn't a political issue. It's biological.

Sure there's always greater efficiencies we could design and more fair methods of distribution but as long as our economic (ecological) models are based on constant population growth and the necessary industry to supply it, we will out-consume our environment. Resource extraction, processing, consumption and ultimately disposal; there is always an environmental limit to population. Whatever your capability to provide is, the population will always push it to the breaking point.

We see this in local food chains with booms and bust cycles in predator/prey numbers. We see it over and over in vanished civilizations who either over extracted resources or failed to adapt to changes in their environment, often ones they created.

The only difference with industrial humans is that we have been hugely successful in deferring and relocating the deleterious effects of our desires. We have stolen it from the vital ecologies which sustain all the other creatures of the earth (as if we super-monkeys have a special claim). We have forced it on struggling countries, destroying their living lands to extract oil and worthless gold while dumping our trash in their ruined landscapes.

Mostly we have pushed the consequences into the future. We are the opposite of people who plant trees to make shade they will never sit in, we create disasters we will not have to suffer. Or so we thought.

In the early 1900's, Fritz Haber developed a method to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This was used to make explosives to feed our appetite for war, and cheap fertilizer to feed our bellies. Haber is hailed as the savior of billions, rescuing them from starvation. What he actually did is defer the suffering and amplify it.

Unless we learn to limit our impact and to create sustainable, non-growth models of being on the earth, it will eventually be unable to support us. Eventually we will consume every habitable square meter of the planet. A necessary component to sustainability is a stable population. This is an inescapable fact.

So yeah. Population is always the problem. Has been for 3.8 billion years and as clever as we are, we haven't changed that.

Yet.

Cipheron on 19/11/2022 at 07:41

Quote:

This was used to make explosives to feed our appetite for war, and cheap fertilizer to feed our bellies.

If only, our response to that was that now we can use less land for food so make more national parks, it would have been better. But instead we put the fertilizer on the good land to get more food, then also put it on the bad land to turn it into more farmland.

Here's one alternate take: we don't just overpopulate then starve to death, but the cost of living just gets ever-higher so everyone works to death and have fewer and fewer kids. That's basically the same thing as hitting the carrying capacity of the planet, but from a different perspective.

Nicker on 19/11/2022 at 20:01

Maximizing population is a fundamental instruction contained in the DNA of all living things. We are the first species to understand carrying capacity and which could avoid natural cycles of boom and bust, through management of resourcing and population. But we have encoded constant expansion in our economic and geo-political models. The "health" of a business or a nation are measured by growth. Investments must grow. Markets must grow. Consumption must grow. Populations must grow. They can be limited but they can never be allowed to decline. The debt is always moved forward, to be paid by the generations of the future.

But the wall is always there.

We would need a global agreement and management plan to share the earth fairly, with all its people and the other inhabitants. But that's completely contrary to the expectations of people and the governments they elect or have forced upon them, it doesn't really matter which. You have to get your annual 3% growth. You have to sell more cars this year than you did last year and if that means making them less robust, if that means making the old model you have, less socially desirable than next year's model, if that means filling empty fields with abandoned stock, so be it.

Madness.

Pyrian on 19/11/2022 at 20:35

:rolleyes: Economic development and population growth are inversely correlated. ...Strongly.

Nicker on 19/11/2022 at 21:04

Can you explain that in more detail please?

If that's true, why do corporations and governments act as if they are correlated?

Cipheron on 19/11/2022 at 21:46

I actually disagree too with the basic premise that eternal growth of everything is inevitable.

Inflation actually erodes growth, it's a corrective. Even within a debt/growth based economy, you only need relative growth to make that stable, not absolute growth.

I'll use US federal debt as an example. Sure, it's going up in absolute dollar terms, however inflation is happening at the same time. Growth makes the debt harder to service, but inflation makes the debt easier to service. All that's required is that the debt increases match inflation, and you can in fact have increasing federal debt for perpetuity, and it doesn't actually change what the true underlying debt is.

The problem with the "the system needs constant growth or it collapses" argument is that it's too simple. The system needs the *numbers* to be going up. But luckily, those numbers only have a loose or sliding relationship with actual physical reality.

Starker on 19/11/2022 at 21:59

Quote Posted by Nicker

Can you explain that in more detail please?

If that's true, why do corporations and governments act as if they are correlated?

Basically, the more education and financial means women have, the less children are born. Also, less children dying due to better health care and other factors also leads to lower population numbers, because people will have less children then.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate)

As for why governments want a steady influx of young people, well, they help shoulder the burden on the health care and social security systems and generate economic activity.

If you want even more detail, there's this excellent presentation by the late Hans Rosling:

[video=youtube;FACK2knC08E]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E[/video]

june gloom on 19/11/2022 at 23:03

I'm disappointed in you, Nicker. I had assumed a naive belief in the Malthusian myth of overpopulation because -- like a lot of bad ideas with racist origins -- that belief is actually quite common, but when called out on it you double down.

Here's one of the biggest problems with the overpopulation myth: it's a path to genocide. Not just in terms of the Nazi lebensraum concept, but also in eco-fascist or anarcho-primitivist beliefs that humanity must return to a hunter-gatherer society in order to be sustainable, which by necessity requires the death of billions (and very often assumes that disabled people like me are considered "dead weight" and must be gotten rid of, despite piles of evidence that primitive cultures took care of their disabled and elderly.) (https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/overpopulation-and-environmentalism/) Even fucking Greenpeace disagrees with you.

Again: we have the resources to feed, clothe and house everyone on the planet with room to spare. There's more empty houses than there are homeless people in America alone. Why don't you take a wild guess as to why this is, and why we don't do anything about it, instead of blaming people with the least power for the crimes of those with the most?