Number of Children Desired
The number of children desired by a couple will vary according to background, or tradition, and current ciscumstances. Couples in the past desired numerous children because of the high date rate and because children meant additional workers for the family farm or business. Society was not then facing crucial ecological problems, depletion of fuel supplies, and inadequate food.
Of the more than four billion people in the world today, it is estimated that up to half are starving and ten of fifteen percent more are undernourished. Productive nations of the West consume eighty percent of the resources of the world, but millions of people in the overcrowded countries of the East are starving.
One reason for the population crisis is that modern medicine has reduced infant deaths and prolonged the lives of adults. In past centuries, plagues swept across nations and looks large numbers of people, preventing the rapid increase of population. Unless parents in underdeveloped countries, where population is increasing rapidly, learn about and practice birth control, the future will bring more widespread sufferings through starvation and death by disease. Responsible parents should desire to have children, but they should not want to contribute to the serious problems of overpopulation, which confront most nations, by having too many.
Birthrates are proportionately higher among the low-income groups than among high-imcome groups. University educated people have smaller families. Among religious groups, Catholics are more prolific than Protestants. Mixed marriages of Catholics and Protestants have fewer children.
The Catholic Church takes the position that the primary purpose of physical relationships is procreation. In 1930, Pope Pius XI stated that birth control is "unnatural and intrinsically evil and therefore not to be justified for any reason, however great."The only birth control allowed was refraining from intercourse during the fertile period. Protestants do not consider the use of contraceptives to be a normal issue. Rather, many are beginning to conclude that failure to use birth control devices is immoral.
Sensible family planning will allow most couples to have two or three children without endangering the survival of the human race or placing the home under undue strain. Some encouragement has come recently in a news release with the caption " Good News for the World- Population Growth on the Decline." The article did not say that population is declining, but rather that the rate of increase has slowed down. By the year 2000, population is now expected to increase from the present 4.1 billion to about 5.6 billion instead of the predicted 6.5 billion.
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