Under Population

John Albjerg Writing 122 Persuasive Essay Under population The effect of under population in the world is causing lack of people to replace those who die or retire with inability to continue working. Just done in the U. S. Census 83 countries and territories are now thought to experience below-replacement fertility. This basically means they won’t be able to replace the people who are dying or no longer able to work, these places take up roughly 44% of the world’s total population. Due to several causes in our current world we are experiencing low mortality rates. Currently several countries are having lower life expectancy that they did not have 40 years ago. Though many countries are experiencing a time of peace there is a large HIV-AIDS epidemic going on in about 1/6thof the world. These low mortality rates are causing issues with proper population in these countries. Another cause of under population is the legalization of Abortion. Reports have shown since the legalization of Abortions that since they were legalized Europe as well as 15 countries by 2002 is reporting rates of 1. 3 children per woman or below. A rate of 2. is needed to maintain a population. The reports where this is the largest issue is found in Europe where abortions are used as a method of birth control. This issue is also begunto appear due to women waiting till later to have children. Instead of starting to have children in their early 20’s many women are waiting till 30 or later to have their first child. This is causing people to have smaller families as well . The average family is going from a 2-4 children per family to a 1-2. In some cases the women lose fertility and are unable then to have children at all as well. There is report’s that many nations are not offering enough maternity leave in terms of length and money being paid out to the women during it. This has caused some women to put off having children till later in their careers. This comes into play once again the older the woman gets the less fertile she becomes. This also causes the women to lose desire to have more than one maybe two children. Some nations have begun to address this issue by offering more maternity leave benefits and/or reward larger families in other ways. None of these countries appear to be considering revising their bortion laws in attempt to overcome this issue of under population. If Europe does not get a stronghold on this issue they could be looking at a lack of 20 million workers in 2030 compared to what they have in their current work force today. Now this can be counter acted if they were able to increase their immigration. But it would need to at least quadruple to an average of almost 4 million n et entrants a year just to prevent a decline in the size of people ages 15 – 64 years old, considered the working age over the next 50 years. Soon coming as well is the large amount of people coming to retirement age within China as well. They also in some means of want to control the population within their country have cut down on how many children people are allowed. By doing this they have caused themselves issues in the fact that the work force in large abundance is reaching retirement age within their country. Without sufficient people to support those retiring I think we are going to see a huge economic crash within their workforce and communities. The real cause of under population is all speculative. Only real hard facts are that we are not producing as many children as there are people within the world. Disease, accidents, and old age are all factors to be counted in. But overall people are dying at a much higher rate than producing and if we continue down this path we won’t have the people to make up for the work force that is retiring and dying off. One thing we don’t seem to keep in mind is that even though the advances within medicine are much better today than they were 50 years ago some reason our mortality rate is much lower today than back then. I think people don’t seem to notice the changes due to the fact we are living in a more peaceful era than most of our ancestors in the last decade. In the last 30 years we have not had any world changing wars. That left millions dead and millions more homeless or handicapped for life. But still we are not reproducing at an upward rate. The cause like I said has many factors and not one can be pointed at directly. Well all of these need to be addressed we need to main address the fact that if we do not change our ways of life in the next 50 years our world will not be able to support itself. In conclusion my feeling is that we need to give women more incentive to want to reproduce and have families. We have built our world around a working family. 60 years ago the typical family was the man worked and the woman raised the kids. Today you look at our society and it says that the man and woman should both work. I feel this is the biggest factor that comes into play. It is causing women to wait longer to have children and end up having less if none. All my information from the census and numbers was from the website http://www. abortiontv. com/Lies%20&%20Myths/underpopulation. htm