Al Gore

My last for the day (I promise).

I'm curious to hear your comments on Al Gore's theory.  I have many years under my belt, so to speak, working with abandoned baby girls from China.  I've worked with these girls for many years and saw the raw emotions they exhibit when faced with their reality of being abandonded as infants, including my own adoptive girls, so I'm probably prejudiced when it comes to talk of population control or a woman's uterus.  Although I don't believe Gore is calling for a one-child policy (obviously), his theory has struck a nerve close to my heart. 

Al Gore: Stabilize population to combat global warming

From the safety of the political sidelines, former Vice President Al Gore is venturing into a touchy topic, presenting his holistic view of how to curb the buildup of greenhouse gases warming the planet. Besides improving technology to reduce fossil fuel emissions, he is advocating "educating and empowering girls and women."

"That's the most powerful leveraging factor," Gore said in a speech Monday in New York. "When that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices."

Although not entirely spelled out in the speech, Gore's thinking goes this way: If women are confident their children will survive, and if they have access to "fertility management," and if they have the power to decide how many children they want and when to have them, the result would be stabilization of the global population.

As it stands now, demographers at the United Nations forecast that the world's population will hit 7 billion later this year, march past 9 billion in 2045 and exceed 10 billion by the end of the century. Nearly all of the growth is expected to come in poor nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Gore made his remarks at the eighth annual Games for Change Festival, a conference organized by those who want to promote the use of video games for social change.

“One of the things we could do about it is to change the technologies, to put out less of this pollution, to stabilize the population, and one of the principle ways of doing that is to empower and educate girls and women. You have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can choose how many children have, the spacing of the children.

You have to lift child survival rates so that parents feel comfortable having small families and most important — you have to educate girls and empower women. And that’s the most powerful leveraging factor, and when that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices and more balanced choices.”

Video is here:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2011/06/al-gore-climate-change-population-contraception-fertility.html