Despite what your parents told you, there is a 50 percent chance they did not intend to conceive you that fateful night when sperm met egg.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended.
This is a staggering number, yet it’s not surprising. With the stigmatization of nearly all forms of contraception by the religious right, everything from condoms to abortion has been condemned as counterproductive to God’s will.
With the world’s population now a steady 7 billion and rising, I firmly believe God does not want us to starve.
Population is a number that grows exponentially, meaning one becomes two, two becomes four, four becomes eight and so on. Therefore, as our population becomes larger, it also grows faster.
At our current rate, we will reach 8 billion people by 2025 and 10 billion by 2083, according to the projections by the UN. Considering the world population sat at a comfortable 2.5 billion in 1950, it’s clear to say the world has been having lots of unsafe sex.
We have two choices. We can either attempt to control our population through worldwide family planning programs, or we can let overpopulation run rampant to the point where human need drastically outweighs our natural resources. Let the war and famine ensue.
People either need to stop being born, or people will die of starvation. Our planet simply cannot support such a drastic rise in population over a 100-year period.
So it seems like the only rational thing to do is to provide voluntary affordable or government funded family-planning resources to the people in this country who are contributing to our massive unplanned pregnancy rate.
“Providing modern family-planning methods to all people with unmet needs would cost about $6.7 billion a year, slightly less than the $6.9 billion Americans are expected to spend for Halloween this year,” according to The Economic Times.
This number speaks for itself. For a relatively low price, we can maintain the population in the United States, arguably the only population we can effectively manipulate.
However, there are naysayers to every good idea. In this country, that includes the religious right, the most recognizable being the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church believes in a concept called natural family planning. In a nutshell, contraceptives are the devil, and every child is a gift from God. This results in families with upwards of 10 children on occasion, further perpetuating the stereotype of enormous Catholic families.
Personally, I think the concept of natural family planning is probably one of the dumbest things I have ever heard.
God gave us the condom to prevent your ninth child from being born into poverty. God gave us the vasectomy to prevent your wife’s vagina from looking like Hiroshima circa 1945 by the time menopause begins.
Republicans argue spending $6.7 billion a year on family planning will give the irresponsible women in this country an excuse to go out and mount every gentlemen they come across. They will say this will lead to rampant spread of STDs and HIV/AIDS in this country and call it a drain on taxpayer money.
However, common sense and health care providers will tell us that birth control pills are effective in preventing pregnancy, not disease. Therefore, wrap it up unless you are in a monogamous relationship.
Abortion rates in this country would steeply decline if oral contraceptives were affordable or subsidized. Abortions are a result of unwanted pregnancy; therefore, if you prevent unwanted pregnancy, you prevent abortions.
In the end, the argument will not be about money; it will be over ethics. Republicans will cry wolf over spending money we don’t have on useless things, until somebody points out that it costs the taxpayers more than $20 billion annually to air condition military facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Oops.
People will not stop having sex, especially impoverished people with little education. The solution to rising population is staring us in the face. All we have to do is remember to take it once a day.
 
Parker Cramer is a 20-year-old political science junior from Houston. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_pcramer.
 
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Contact Parker Cramer at [email protected]