Extra Credit

The six billionth person in the world was a baby born in Sarajevo in 1999. Since then, the population is reported to be growing much at a much slower rate than in years past. Obviously, this is all due to new technology and people making smarter decisions. Some interesting figures are found all over the world. In years past, a average Mexican woman gave birth to seven children in her lifetime. In Bangladesh, a woman would would normally have four kids, and that number has been reduced to three.
The reason all these changes are occurring is because women all over the world are making better decisions and getting educated. The use of contraceptives (birth control) is becoming more common. This is also good for children themselves, as women are going to have a much easier time caring for their children within a smaller family.
To help keep the population in check, we need to keep doing what we are doing. If we keep getting women educated and promote the use of contraceptives, it is likely that things will take care of themselves, as more technology is always going to be developing that will allow us to handle larger populations on into the future. I think another measure that makes sense would be possibly placing a limit on how many kids a family has. Two or three kids is enough, and I think we could resort to something like that. There is no need for a family to have six or seven children as some do. I really do not think imposing a two or three-child limit on families would be too harsh.
Continual education and promoting birth control will help stunt population growth. Also, a three-child limit is something I think we could resort to. This way, you don't have ten kids running around in a family and it is also more fair to the children. Parents will be in better situations economically, as smaller families are obviously going to cost a lot less to care for. At the same time, smaller families will have more opportunities to do things together, and the siblings will be much closer. A 1st and 3rd child are going to have much more in common than a 2nd and an 8th. Limiting families to three kids is completely fair in my opinion. Combining education, birth control, and possibly imposing a childbirth limit are good starts to help control the population. Besides these factors, we must take into account that technology is going to get more and more sophisticated on into the future. The human race will be just fine.