Not enough children or too many people?

April 15, 2025

In this article, the Edgars assume that by having more children we can maintain society as it is today.

In the seventies when the Paul R. Ehrlich published The Population Bomb there were 2.5 billion people on Earth. It was a time of massive famines in Africa. Ehrlich warned that we had reached the limit of what the natural world could support without borrowing from the future.

Young women, like I was then, concerned for others and the planet, adopted the meme “replacement only”. My husband and I had two children. It was considered immoral to have more when other children starved.

However, multinational companies taking over food production for profit, did just that, borrowed from the future. We are now nearly nine billion people.

We are depleting natural resources at a permanently damaging rate and climate change will exacerbate that. Informed and intelligent young women are taking the decision not to have children, not necessarily for the narrow economic reasons the Edgars give here. We need to rethink how we live, not simply breed more children.