NAME: FASORO OLUSOLA EMMANUEL

DEPARTMENT: MEDICINE AND SURGERY, OAU

LEVEL:300L

TOPIC: ABORTION AS A GRAND METHOD OF POPULATION CONTROL; A POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE

METHOD?

In a world whose human population would hit an estimated ten billion by 2050 [1],
overpopulation is a genuine problem. Would abortion be a grand method for the control of our world's
fast growing population? I'd like to argue that while it may seem effective to choose abortion as a
method for the control of population, it would overstate the problem of overpopulation by breaching
the sanctity of the most valuable resource on the planet, the human life.

Firstly, like every other deliberation on abortion, the bone of contention remains: Is the unborn
fully human or not? As modern medicine has indicated, the unborn is no less human than the full-grown
adult[2], but just a stage of human development as the infant, child, adolescent and adult are too. Life
inarguably begins at conception. Objections to this generally do not hold water and have all been
refuted by modern science.[3] So while some may mention in their bid to justify abortion, the impacts it
is making in population, it still begs the question of the humanhood of the fetus. Otherwise, anything
that results in the mass destruction of the human population would be justifiable, simply because it
reduces the number of people on the Earth.

Secondly, I wish to scrutinize the problem of overpopulation more critically to address this issue.
It has been a long-standing concern for centuries that our world is at the tipping point of its population
capacity. However, the problem of overpopulation has been escalated beyond proportion. The concern
for the implications of overpopulation on the world was expressed through the Malthusian theory,
which basically suggested that human population increases geometrically while food resources grow
arithmetically and consequently the world would suffer for that. [4] This theory has had profound
influence on the introduction of population control measures including abortion. The problem with this
theory is that it fails to factor in the fact that the ingenuity of man would always surpass the forces of
population increase. So while scholars like Malthus were busy predicting how famines and social crises
would engulf the world due to overpopulation, great minds were-and still are-developing methods to
ensure the proportionate rise of food with human population growth. [5] This is not to downplay the
cruciality of the problem of overpopulation, but simply to suggest that undertaking abortions in the face
of this would be akin to bringing a missile to a gunfight.

Lastly, I wish to assert that abortion does not really proffer solutions to overpopulation but
merely attempts to eliminate the problem, albeit unjustly. Taking the life of an unborn to prevent some
ill it just might pose is just amoral. Like Baruch Brody wrote, "In an age where we doubt the justice of
capital punishment even for very dangerous criminals, killing a fetus that has done no harm, to avoid a
problem it may pose, seems totally unjust."[6] Choosing abortion to control population would be like
attempting to "eliminate a problem of headache by cutting one's head off", [7] hence would undervalue
the human life. This could lead to the acceptance, or at least, the proliferation of actions that regard the
human life lightly, such as infanticide and other forms of murder. It is no news then, that a man like
Hitler, who had no regard for human lives whatsoever, had a liking for abortion. [8]

In conclusion, while I concede that abortion would reduce the human population, but so did the
World War II. We can easily see why those wouldn't be recommended as grand methods for population
control. Overpopulation is a problem that can be controlled by much more acceptable methods-which
the ingenuity of man continually makes available-than abortion.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

[2] -https://www.mccl.org/post/2017/12/20/the-unborn-is-a-human-being-what-science-tells-us-about-
unborn-children

-https://pointofview.net/articles/when-is-a-fetus-a-human-being/

[3] https://www.princeton.edu/~prolife/articles/wdhbb.html

[4] Wikipedia Malthusianism

[5] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-malthus-is-still-wrong

[6] Baruch Brody, Abortion and the Sanctity of Human Life: A Philosophical View (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T.
Press, 1975), 36–37.

[7] Francis J Beckwith: DEFENDING LIFE- A Moral and Legal Case against Abortion Choice pg 98

[8] https://conservapedia.com/Abortion_and_Adolf_Hitler