Originally Posted by nomadking

It's strange that other species are intelligent enough to focus their efforts on ensuring the survival of their existing offspring rather then having loads more of them. The species that have the most offspring tend to be the ones that aren't bothered how many survive and don't take much care of them. Even an amoeba has the 'intelligence' to stop reproducing when times are hard.

If a high death rate is the reason for large families, then surely any new child would be to replace one that died which would mean that although there may be a large number of births the total children alive at any point in time is not large.

Condoms are far from 100% effective against pregnancy, which when you factor in other reasons why a pregnancy may not occur(eg wrong time of fertility cycle) they will be even less effective against HIV. Then there are the times when regular condom users forget, are unwilling, or are unable(eg drunk) to use them.

There was a study that a while back recently found that a third(yes that many) of homosexual men who knew that they carried HIV continued to have unprotected sex. So education and knowledge of condoms doesn't even come close to solving anything.

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