Is birth control ultimately self-defeating?

Great Debates
21

Hmm … the theory could also be extended to gun ownership. Since people who have a gun in their homes are statistically much more likely to shoot themselves or a family member than an intruder, and assuming the desire to own a gun is as genetically linked as is the desire to use contraception, then eventually the desire to own a gun will be bred out of our society.

It works for crime too. Since criminals are either locked up or executed, their ability to procreate is severely limited. Criminal tendencies are genetic, surely? That means crime will soon be eliminated as well! Hooray!

22

Even assuming that there would be more births-per-woman among non-BC users than among users, that’s not enough to result in the non-BCs outbreeding the BCs.

If that was what it took, all species everywhere would be competing in total offspring, like the herring who I believe produce tens of thousands of eggs per spawning. Elephants would over time go from single births, to twins, to triplets, to massive spawnings of hundreds or thousands of mouse-size baby elephants, and no doubt they would go from two-year gestations to shorter and shorter gestations. And they haven’t, so a selective force does not work in that direction here.

So we have many examples in nature where maximum-births-per-female have not worked as a reproductive advantage.

23

You also need ot appreciate that birth control is in no way exclusive to humans.

Kangaroos and other macropods practice birth control in the sense that embryos are stalled early in development and only allowed to complete gestation when the mother is in prime health, which may be years later or it may be never. Marmots will attack any subdominant female that falls pregant so violently and persistently that she is forced to abort her litter. Wolves will attack subdominants of boths sexes that show an sign of sexual initaition. That prevents the females from coming into season and supresses hormonal urges in males. The list of animals that practice soime form of birth control is impressively long.

So we then need to ask ourselves how birth control could become so common is the OP is correct? And of course it couldn’t. The point that is being overlooked is pretty much what MaryEFoo said: evolutionary success isn’t about the number of offspring produced, it’s about the number that survive to reproduce themselves.

What we need to add to that producing and caring for children is not risk free. Mothers still die in childbirth, fathers still die of heart attacks due to the stress of providing for children. In the likely event that society doesn’t remain stable and another serious depression or war strikes the risks of parents starving increases greatly with the number of children, and worse yet from an evolutionary perspective the larger the number of children the greater the risk that all will succumb.

What all this means is that producing more kids isn’t a guaranteed path to evolutionary success in any way, in fact it’s probably exactly the opposite. A well educated healthy parent with 2 kids is far more likely to be able to raise that child to maturity than an uneducated parent with malnourished children and limited access to healthcare. Moreover a parent that leaves off having children until they have a secure career, own a house and have sufficient funds saved up to send the kid to college will have massive survival advantages over someone who drops out of high school to have their first child at age 15.

You could possibly make an argument thatif things remain exactly as they are now for the next 20, 000 years then birth control will be self-defeating, but that’s not a plausible scenario. In reality things will change, there will be wars, there will be pandemics, there will be unforeseeable social and environmental changes.

With that in mind ask yourself who has a better chance of surviving those conditions? Consider two reproductive units: a single teen mother with 3 children under 5, or a 30 yo soccer Mom with 1 child. Who will have a better chance of surviving a pandemic due to access to heath care? Who has a better chance of fleeing a hurricane because they have access to a vehicle, alternative accommodation etc? Who would be more likely to escape an invading army? Who will be in a better position if there is no more social security at all?

And so on and so forth for all possible change scenarios, great and small. No matter what happens those people with the most education and most money will have the best chance of surviving, and all things being equal those with the fewest children will have the best access to education and resources. If we take it for granted that the next 10, 000 years will not be climatically, culturally and politically perfectly stable then it is far more likely that birth control will be beneficial than harmful from an evolutionary POV. You are far better off producing one healthy and well educated child than 10 sickly and uneducated children, and the best way to ensure education and health is to limit the number of children to the number that you can care for fully.

24

Basically you are asking if people who use birth control will eventually be bred out of the gene pool? The answer is no. The use of birth control is a learned behavioral trait, not a genetic one. Secondly, birth control is not permenant. People who use BC at some point may decide to have kids. And there will always be people who want to have children.

Yes, the overall birth rates will decline, but IMHO, that’s a good thing.

25

No, birth control is not self defeating. When a woman uses birth control, she uses it to stop herself from getting pregnant. That’s the goal. Using birth control helps to achieve that goal. Thus, birth control is successful.

Now, if the goal of birth control was population control, and if your assertion that population as a whole is increasing, and that assertion can be linked to the widespread use of birth control, then you would have a point. Women use it for one goal and it has the exact opposite effect. Birth control would then be self-defeating.

But that’s not what’s going on here. The woman’s goal is met and thus success is achieved.

26

The other argument that you might be making is that a kid born even after birth control is employed has something different genetically that allowed that survival. So that difference can now be passed along to others in the population. Thus we eventually create Superbabies immune to all known forms of birth control pills.

This might be true. It could happen. But we also don’t multiply or create new generations as fast as bacteria and thus our rate of evolution is necessarily slower. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of years here unless we also selectively breed humans to try to extract this Superbaby gene. This theory assumes that science is stagnant and cannot create an even better form of birth control down the line that even the Superbaby gene cannot evade. Maybe by injecting kryptonite into the woman’s bloodstream…

27

The whole discussion about how likely it is that humans could evolve some form of birth control resistance is pointless, as

is flat out wrong. The only relevant biological factor is a hardwired endorphin release attached to sex. That’s it. Every other desire that people experience associated with sex and babies and parenthood is cultural. There is no “biological desire to have children,” and as such a woman could take all the birth control pills she wanted, or none, and her child’s desire to have children would not be affected one whit.

28

In 20/20 hindsight I wish I’d said “self-limiting”, since I didn’t mean to imply that using birth control defeats the individual’s purpose in using it.

29

That’s an extremely strong statement, and one that I feel is questionable. Because of the excesses of Social Darwinism and Eugenics, there was an extreme backlash that led at one point to people declaring that virtually ALL human behavior was taught. It’s only been in the last couple of decades that people have been able to even raise the question of variations in human behavior having a genetic basis without in essence being called Nazis.

Of course not, since taking oral contraceptives does not effect one’s genes. I was speaking of pure selection having a cumulative effect over generations. But since you claim that premise #2 is false, the debate hangs at that point.

30

That’s it? It seems to me that the OP has been conclusively refuted, and that changing “self-defeating” to “self-limiting” wouldn’t have changed a single one of the cogent arguments put forth against it.

Daniel

31

OK, in conclusion:

I admit that my OP was based on a fairly binary outlook (wants kids=doesn’t use birth control/ doesn’t want kids= uses birth control). As pointed out by several posters, birth control might more properly be called birth regulation: having exactly as many kids as you want, when you want them. Given that this relates directly to long-term success in propagation, then modern methods of birth control probably simply allow people to do more precisely what they’ve been doing all along. So I concede the OP refuted.

32

No, but you see you’re wrong for three main reasons:

  1. Clearly birth and the pill are in depth topics upon which much can be said
  2. If it hadn’t been for her horse she never…wait. What?

You…concede?
Ignorance has been fought?

No, no, that simply will not do. You cannot do that. It cannot be done. These boards don’t work that way. I’ll grant that you’re new here, what with it being only six years and all, and thus you clearly didn’t understand the rules. If you don’t staunchly support your premise despite all forms of evidence known to man being slung at you then you’re not worthy of this Great Debate and I shall be forced to report you to the moderators of this board for them to deal with you. Good day sir.

33

I’m adding to this old thread because I recently found something pertinent. This year a novel by David Brin was published called “Existence”, and in one passage someone says exactly what I was trying to ask when I started this thread. To quote the end of chapter 32, the section headed “Disputation”:

34

David Brin is a lovely man, and an idea factory all by himself. He’s one of the smartest blokes anybody could ever hope to meet.

He’s also way wrong…now and then.

There is no evidence that behavior, at the level he describes, is genetic. There is, meanwhile, tons of evidence that it is societal.

He might just as well have said that there is an inbuilt evolutionary trend toward pooping on the sidewalk, and that those who do this survive while those who don’t get constipated and die. It’s our cultural behavior not to defecate publicly, not evolutionary.

It’s just a revisitation of Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons.”

(If you’ve never had the joy of hearing Brin trash-talk the movie “Waterworld,” you’ve missed something absolutely epic! It rivals Mark Twain’s excoriation of James Fennimore Cooper.)

35

We can test the idea by looking at a place where women haven’t been treated as property and forced marriage and rape have not been the norm for thousands of years: western civilization. I see no evidence that western civilization has been overrun by women with a particularly strong maternal instinct because that trait won out in the evolutionary battle.

Evidence would suggest that people’s desire to have many or few offspring is societal, because in some societies the norm changes overnight, evolutionarily speaking. Everyone’s familiar with the stereotype of the big Italian family from a couple generations ago. The correct stereotype today, however, would be the small Italian family. Fertility rates went over a cliff in the 70’s, as they did in many other countries.

36

I hadn’t noticed at first it was a zombie thread, until I got to one particular poster who I completely agreed with. Wow. That was me. Seven years later, I feel pretty much the same.

The problem is that it’s not an all or nothing thing. Most people use birth control to limit the number of births, not to eliminate having children completely, and too high a percentage of births come from these people in order for the theory to work, even if (2) were correct.

37

??? What are you basing that on??

38

I thought it was a basic historical fact that wasn’t in dispute. Obviously there are instances, such as the slavery of blacks in the Americas, where both genders were treated as the property of some other person. However, in the main that hasn’t been the case for women or men. In ancient Pagan Rome, the rule was Patria Potestas, which established the male head of household as having absolute power over everyone else in the household. However, that was abolished shortly after the Christians took over and since then individual liberty as the default has been the law, if not always perfectly implemented. Likewise forced marriage has been against the law since then.

39

I know a lot of moms that used birth control before they were ready to get pregnant.

Birth control is not a lifetime choice.

40

Sigh. And here I thought that the argument was going to be that we’re selecting for people who get pregnant even though they’re using birth control. I don’t think anyone is looking for evidence of that.