Mother: Caring for 7 Billion Page #3

and we had our first child and

that was great, a little boy.

We had our second child a little

girl and that was great.

And then I kind of thought...

you know I was kind of imagining

we'd have more,

but then we had talked about it.

JP is from a small family of two,

and he said he really believed

in the replacement.

That we wouldn't expand

the population.

That it was a really

big belief of his

and I could fully get

behind that and

understand that intellectually,

but there was a feeling in me

that was like...

you don't really have a family

if you can't...

have a baseball team

at any given moment.

So I wanted to have a bigger family

and JP is a very, kind of

a rare, willing mate

in that he was up for that too.

Adoption seemed like a great way

for our family to grow

in a way that didn't impact

population.

So we adopted our youngest daughter,

Lorato,

from South Africa.

And I have to say...

it feels... better to me

to have three kids.

Two felt kind of puny to me.

It didn't feel like enough.

So I was approached by the

producers of this film,

to be involved because

of the work

that I have been doing

with children's rights.

With some friends I co-founded

Mothers Acting Up.

Which is a movement that

invites mothers to

see themselves as advocates

for the world's children.

I was intrigued to learn more about

how this issue was impacting

children's issues and women's issues.

The population explosion has

immediate dangers for us

and for our children.

You know when this issue first burst

into public consciousness,

population was growing,

incredibly rapidly.

People were making really

dire predictions.

The world responded,

things changed,

a lot more women got access

to contraceptives.

Population growth rates came down,

pretty dramatically all over

the world.

And so people said: "That problem

is largely solved.

For the last few years the UN has

been revising its predictions

upwards, in both developing

and developed nations.

If we now assume the problem

is solved and

fail to pay adequate attention to it

we're going to see all of that

work undermined.

Over the past few decades,

the debate about population

has been pushed to the side.

One reason is the ongoing

stigmatization of the issue,

mainly coming from human rights

abuses by several countries

that have used forced sterilizations

and other coercive means

to lower their growth rate.

The topic of population is also

a victim of it's own success.

The growth rate of the world

has been nearly cut in half

over the past 50 years.

The developed world,

primarily Europe and Japan,

have seen their decreasing numbers

and the aging of their population

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes