Romania, 1990 - the dictator Nicole Ceausescu and his wife have been overthrown and executed less than a year ago. Lines of pregnant women wrap around the block waiting for a legal abortion. In 1966, Ceausescu had made having less than five children punishable with heavy fines. Despite the fact that the country was bankrupt through government corruption, each couple had to have at least five children. The women that day were grateful for the abortions. In their cases, the abortions were acts of mercy.

Although Ceausescu ordered couples to have five babies, he did not order them to keep them. The babies, if they had lived, could have wound up in one of Romania's notoriously horrific orphanages.

And if the human population doesn't soon get under control, what happened in Romania could happen in every country in the world.

The Current Dictator

Ceausescu said that, "Anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity." 

Instinct to breed is our internal dictator. For millions of years, this instinct worked pretty well for us. Because of high infant mortality, each couple had to have a barrel full of kids just to assure that one managed to reach breeding age. 

However, we have long passed the need to reproduce. In the 1900's, the entire human population of the world was estimated to be 1.6 billion.  It is now about 6.7 billion, although some scientists argue that there are more people than that. If the trends continue, by 2100 there will be at least 13.4 billion. Each baby brings with it a whole slew of stuff - from how much food it will consume in its lifetime, to whether there will be a job available to how much trash it will produce at the expense of every other species on the planet.

According to Joel Cohen's How Many People Can The Earth Support?, each person takes 2.1 hectares of land and water in order to live, although the average American needs 10 hectares of land. 

Meanwhile, nearly every other species on the planet is dwindling. Currently, one in four mammals is threatened and the seas are turning into dead zones. We are also running out of water. Our planet clearly has a finite amount of life that it can support.

Combating Overeating

We aren't doomed to drown in a sea of humanity. We do have the mental capacity to override our instincts when those instincts aren't working. Many people can do this when it comes to overeating, although there is still an epidemic of obesity in the world. The drive to eat is just as strong - if not stronger - than our drive to reproduce.

We are programmed to eat as much as possible because we don't know when we're going to get our next meal. Our instincts do not realize that we have easy access to food that was denied to our ancestors. 

We have the intelligence to deny our bodies the food it doesn't need in order to live. This is proof that we can do the same thing when it comes to changing any of our behaviors that negatively impact all other life on earth.

"Be Fruitful and Multiply"

The key to changing our attitudes about having as many children as we can before we become infertile is in changing our perspective of our own species. For thousands of years, we have wrongly believed that our species is somehow more important than any other species on the planet. We even made up religions to emphasize this point.  Every other living thing had to bow down to our greatness.

Time and time again, nature shows us that humans are not unique and are dependant on many other plant and animal species in order to survive. Humans are no better than any other species. It's time to stop speciesism if we want to save the environment, or at least salvage what's left of it due to human arrogance and error. 

Do we really want to doom our children to live in a world where there is only other people and no other animals? Without species diversity, the soul of this planet will be snuffed out. 

Why do we have so many kids, even though we know the kids will be worse off than we are? Because we are scared to die. We still have a primal hope that we will somehow live on through our offspring even after our physical deaths. We also have kids because we are selfish and are too cheap to hire domestic help. We want the kids to take care of us.

But, all this could be moot if we continue at our pace in wrecking the environment, killing of species and destroying the very air we breathe. However, we will not be able to make any permanent strides in helping the environment without looking at human overpopulation and our inner dictator.