Given its relevance to the longer term sustainability of life on Earth, I thought that you might be interested in the following email, which I sent to Pope Benedict (you may have heard of him) in 2010. Please let me know if you have any comments, questions or suggestions...
With best wishes,
James
Dear Your Holiness,
First, I should state that I’m Pro Life, as opposed to being solely Pro Human Life. As you are aware, despite man’s responsibility to tend and nurture life on earth, plants and animals are now being driven into extinction at a rate hundreds of times higher than is natural, as their habitats are being progressively destroyed as the human population continues to grow rapidly. For many centuries now, philosophers and theologians have recognised that, on a finite world with finite resources, there must be a limit as to just how large the human population can become before it has a significant impact on the global environment, leading to extremes of poverty, squalor and abject misery, and eventually threatening human existence itself through war, famine and pestilence as man consumes ever more of an ever diminishing pool of resources...
Indeed, as recently as the nineteen sixties, with world population having tripled within little more than a century, Pope Paul VI recognised the extremely grave problem of how to limit the birth rate in order to avoid abject misery, without compromising family morality. He agreed that public authorities could instruct citizens on this subject and adopt appropriate measures, but that it was for parents to take a thorough look at the matter and decide upon the number of their children. That is; it was an obligation “they take upon themselves, before their children already born, and before the community to which they belong.”[1] At the time, Pope Paul believed that this could be achieved without the use of artificial contraception.
Since this time, however, the population has more than doubled and, now approaching seven billion, many millions are living lives of extreme poverty, squalor and abject misery; thousands of other plants and animals are being driven into extinction year on year and; as the earth’s resources are progressively exhausted, the threat to and rising cost of food and water supplies is already leading to civil unrest, and will lead to millions of deaths in land and resource disputes if the population is not to be stabilised at a sustainable level for both the short and the longer term.
Most recently, you have implied that the use of a condom by an HIV positive husband to protect his wife from AIDS could be seen as a good act, and a step on the way to a moral life. However, just as such an act might protect one human life from the impact of a life-threatening disease, similar acts which, aggregated over many millions of couples limit the birth rate, can protect the flora and fauna of life on earth and prevent the loss of millions of human lives through war, famine and pestilence. Thus, such acts could both form part of man’s obligation to tend and nurture life on earth and his responsibility to prevent the unnecessary loss of millions of human lives, addressed by limiting the birth rate to the replacement rate of around two children per family on average, and these acts could also be seen as a step on the way to a moral life.
I’m sure you
agree that these are important issues - and I look forward to your response…
With best
wishes,
James
Ps
Note that the Life Organisation states clearly that it is opposed to
abortion. However: it fails to mention that it views almost all forms of
contraception as abortion...
1 Populorum Progressio Encyclical, Paragraph 37
