Slightly revising John Locke's natural rights of life, liberty, and property, Thomas Jefferson declared in 1776 that every man has certain rights granted to him simply by being born. Such rights are not to be legislated by any government, as they are granted by a Creator superior to any man-made principality.

Among these, he states, are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Those are words upon which our nation is founded. Understanding exactly what those three pillars of a humanist democracy mean is up for much debate.

Who doesn't like to start off an essay by quoting such a highly-regarded wordsmith as Thomas Jefferson? I wrote those introductory paragraphs several days ago, and now that I'm coming back to finish, I'm tempted to delete them. It's a bit cliché.

In any case, there they are.

Nobody is guaranteed Happiness, just the right to pursue it. The government does nothing except control Liberty, even in the effort to protect it. Of course, the government's protection of those liberties is necessary for the stability of society. Assuming the people in control don't delude themselves into thinking they grant liberties instead of protecting those inherent to us as humans, government is a good thing.

Life. That is the tricky one. We do, after all, put criminals to death after due process of law; have legalized abortion; and kill in times of war. Sometimes we (as a government and a nation) even sanction murder outside of the law.

All of those instances, though, are concerning post-conception lives. Do the yet-conceived have the same right to life? Given that they have yet to be Created, it is easy to argue that they do not. They have not yet been endowed. Are we guaranteed the right to reproduce? It is likely that this would be one of those God-given liberties. We're born with genitals-- why should the government tell us that we can not use them for their intended purpose? (I, of course, do not use mine for their intended purpose, but that is another story.)

I have been saying for some time that the key to sustaining human civilization is limiting the growth of population. This is one of those cold equations that we don't like to think about, but is true, nonetheless.

Sure, you can call me an Ebenezer Scrooge. He was definitely a downer, but when he said, "If they'd rather die, then they had better do it and decrease the surplus population. Good night, gentlemen," he was letting us in on the dirty urban secret: too many people is a bad thing.

He had plenty of evidence right before his eyes, though. His hometown of London was undergoing rapid growth during the Industrial period. The population of the city of London was booming, along with the factories that spewed poisons into the air. The crowded quarters led to outbreaks of sickness and disease. All of those people in one place were a bad thing.

Not only is there a detrimental physical effect from high population densities, but there are psychological effects as well. In discussing John Calhoun's famous Malthusian experiments on the social effects of high population densities in mice and rats, a Stanford University researcher commented, At a population this dense, man would be extinct.

What did Calhoun, and others since him, discover? There is a critical mass, a tipping point, at which social order will break down into chaos. We need only to look at crime rates in our modern cities, where resource distribution is extremely uneven, to see the foreshadowing of a greater crises.

We do not yet know-- and should wish never to find out-- how high the population density of human societies must be before anarchy ensues. I don't want to be a doomsday prophet and say it will happen tomorrow, but it is something we must plan for-- that we must actively work to avoid.

So far, we're headed right for disaster.

There is only one way to prevent such a global disaster: stop making babies.

This concept is presented in dystopian novels like The Wanting Seed, 1984, and Brave new World. In these works of fiction, one aspect of the bleak future is the limitation of reproductive rights. In a slightly different vein, The Children of Men presents the idea as an imposition of nature. Like the fish and frogs who can change gender depending on the needs of a group, our genetic code responds to sociological and psychological forces to keep humans from having children. And maybe P.D. James was onto something there-- the number of births per woman has decreased from 5+ in 1950, to just over 2 in 2000. Maybe nature itself is staving off the descent of man into beast. Despite such a drastic reduction in births per woman, the population still climbs.

Even with the help of nature, we must put forth some kind of effort to limit the population to a number sustainable by the resources we have. Americans are repulsed at the very idea of limiting births. As a nation, we look down upon the Chinese One Child policy as barbaric. The Chinese are right, and we are selfish. It is the nature of all creatures to spread their genetic code to as many offspring as possible. Without this drive, evolution would not occur and a species would likely die out. As humans, however, we also have the desire to raise ourselves up from our animalistic beginnings. We are better than the beasts. We create laws to help deter us from acting on our beastial impulses-- that is the very definition of society. This one particular desire, though, we cannot seem to rise above.

It is China which has once more brought the issue to the spotlight. As part of their proposals to the climate summit in Copenhagen, the Chinese government noted that population growth control must be considered when developing environmental policy. Again, they are right.