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Originally Posted by zinglebarb
Ok this is not going to be liked but why do we keep on insisting on helping these people? we constantly see adverts asking for money save a staving child etc. They breed like rabbits its not the rest of the worlds fault. If science is to be believed a very large part of Africa will be uninhabitable by the end of this century all these Africans will be migrating north and south then in the millions the more you keep alive the bigger problem it will be. If they are 3rd world and not trying to help themselves leave them to the mess
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Well thankfully £57 million worth of donations to Comic Relief suggests many people disagree with you ...
A high birth rate is simply characteristic of an undeveloped, or developing, society. The birth rate is high because the death rate is high. Families have lots of children, knowing that the chances of all those children surviving to adulthood are small. The same was the case in this country until about the end of the 19th century.
As a society develops, first the death rate falls, then after a lag the birth rate falls as well. That's where India is at at the moment, but only just. They have had decades of high birth rates and falling death rates, which is why there's about a billion of them right now.
Africa has a number of major problems, and some of them are our doing. The major colonial hangover is the fact that what infrastructure is there, was generally designed to allow us to get natural resources from the interior to the coast, so it could be shipped off to wherever we needed it. We did very little about connecting territories together. That makes communications, including trade, between modern African nations more difficult than it should be. We also carved up the land according to the colonial aspirations of European countries rather than the natural allegiances of the native populations. In some cases we created divisions that didn't exist before. That has been a recipe for conflict in Africa's post-colonial era.
And Africa, far from being overpopulated, is actually very underpopulated. As well as lacking financial wealth, it lacks much of the manpower required to haul itself out of poverty.
Anyway, to the topic. I think people are taking a fairly unsophisticated view of why Herr Ratzinger is promoting non-use of condoms. It's as much to do with the Catholic view that Every Sperm is Sacred (cue Monty Python) as it is about making a point about abstinance being the best way to avoid STDs. I'm not saying I agree with him, just that he deserves to be engaged with and argued against on the terms he's set out rather than a distortion of them.