Don’t poor families living off subsistence agriculture need large families to help with their labours and to ensure parents will have enough children to support them in their old age?

Historically, there have been the leading incentives encouraging people to have large families.  However, we have now entered an era resulting from a quadrupling of population in this century and projected to increase by fifty percent in fifty years.  Growing resources shortages suggest mankind will in due course outstrip economic growth, leading to more poverty.  Question: “What are the rights of children being brought into an already overcrowded world?”

Many children are born into a deteriorating spiral of overpopulation, environmental degradation and lack of opportunity. Too many in the Third World work long hours, are malnourished and receive little or no education.  Often having migrated from rural to urban areas, they typically survive in mega-cities with sprawling slums.

Rural areas can no longer support burgeoning populations. Many rural environments have been seriously degraded.  Farms have been sub-divided when passed on, causing people to swarm into overcrowded urban areas in a desperate search for jobs. There they become an enormous pool of easily exploitable labour, eager to replace any dissatisfied workers, thereby allowing employers  to get away with appalling abuses.

That destitute parents have seemingly valid reasons for wanting large families does not alter the fact that consequent population growth has a deleterious effect on the environment, employment opportunities and social and political stability with which these children will have to cope.