I was thinking of a dystopian fantasy - what if people had a 'license to breed'? The problem of course is, it's open to abuse by all sorts of people for racial or eugenics purposes. But there must be some way to control the population.

Here in Southeast Asia there's a problem when you have poor families without the economic capacity to support even a single child having a whole brood of them, then waiting on the government to dole out support. Meantime the kids become fodder for vice - just going to an internet cafe to check my email in the afternoons and listening to kids as young as 4 or 5 cussing each other at the top of their little lungs with the equivalent of the F word or SOB in the vernacular is evidence enough that society - and the church - has been deficient.

They're actually not bad kids - they're generally polite when queried or confronted and they have not yet lost all their innocence but when your professor is Gordon Freeman and your schools are one or more of the many MMPORGs available for play, not to mention sensationalist, violent and sexually charged mass media, what do you expect?

If the rich here put off marriage till they're i their thirties, till they've established an economic base, what are the poor doing procreating? Who will feed those mouths? Who will care for the farming family that makes virtually zilch and comes to our door at Christmas begging for handouts and hand-me-downs? Yet there they are each year, seven or eight kids in tow.

This might not seem a lot but consider that many of these poor kids will not finish school because their families are too poor to send them there. This robs them of the basic economic base with which to start building their lives. Where will they go then? Into turning tricks, into vice, into petty theft, into cheap thrills and addictions. And after that into prostitution, into armed robbery, into murder-for-hire, into harder and more expensive drugs and thrills.

And when election time rolls around they all count for one vote each as long as they're conscious long enough to register. Is it any wonder that convicted murderers and rapists can run for election in this country - and win?

As a Christian I agree that yes, each of these lives is important. Yet I can't help but think that if that family had planned - or had been guided by government and church (church is a very powerful influence on the surface of things) to practice proper family planning then there'd be less mouths to feed. Less mouths means more money going around to people who REALLY need it as well as to upgrading social and cultural services. Less mouths mean less consumption of resources, more resources going to less people. Less mouths mean a more equitable balance between population and the earth which supports us.

I think that ultimately we're all sitting on a powder keg - the top ten percent consuming the resources that the bottom ninety need while the bottom ninety squabble for table scraps. What to the bottom ninety are Plato or the Pleiades, as the poem goes? And with Plato and the Pleiades goes morality.

I'm not advocating genocide or sterilization or a one-child policy or anything of that sort of course, but I think that there must be a forceful effort on the part of government, civic and religious groups and media to change people's minds, particularly in developing nations about population growth. We are rapidly outstripping our capacity to produce and then either we go like lemmings on yet another death march - made all the more deadly and risky by the killing capacity of modern weapons - or society collapses on itself as a battle for resources begins.

Ultimately I think the problem is self - unbridled selfishness. In the rich countries it's "Here we are now, entertain us" and even if I have to spend like tomorrow never comes I'll have fun. In the poor countries it's "Take what we can get for tomorrow we may die" and that includes sex, even sex with one's underaged kid sister (horrific as that sounds it happened - the wife of the rapist was a distant relative of my dad's). We have, in this age without true conscience or moral compass, forgotten the peace, the joy, the honour and beauty that is to be found in the second greatest commandment : "Love thy neighbor as thyself."

Not necessarily Christians for Contraception, but rather Christians for INTELLIGENT and REASONED Conception.

We control the population now by choice - or we let circumstance 'control' it for us, with all the implied violence and heartache attendant.

Just my third world point of view.

H A  Meaney