What About Population Control?

Here are two additional questions from the Comments section, submitted by Josie and Wayne:

 

Dear Madame L,

 

Is the earth becoming overpopulated with people? If so, should I plan my family accordingly?

 

Sincerely,

 

Just wondering 

Dear Wondering,

Madame L is so glad you asked this question. Madame L's friends, knowing she has more than the politically correct number of 2 children, ask her similar questions quite frequently, so she has also been trying to come up with an appropriate and helpful answer. (Unfortunately, Madame L has no problem coming up with snappy but inappropriate and unhelpful answers.)

So Madame L went to the source: the prophets and leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where she found a very helpful and appropriate answer in the April 2005 issue of the Liahona magazine of the church, and was written to help church members as they study "The Family: A Proclamation to the World." It reads, in part:

"...Probably a more relevant issue than population density is how we use the resources God has given us to support the population now and in the future. “For the earth is full,” He said, “and there is enough and to spare. … If any man shall take of the abundance which I have made, and impart not his portion, according to the law of my gospel, unto the poor and the needy, he shall, with the wicked, lift up his eyes in hell, being in torment” (D&C 104:17-18). “The enemy of human happiness as well as the cause of poverty and starvation is not the birth of children,” said Elder Henry B. Eyring of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. “It is the failure of people to do with the earth what God could teach them to do if only they would ask and then obey."

Relief Society General President Julie Beck writes in the March 2011 issue of the Ensign, "This generation will be called upon to defend the doctrine of the family as never before. If they don’t know the doctrine, they can’t defend it." 

Madame L encourages her readers to print out a copy of "The Family: A Proclamation to the World," study it, and teach it to their families.

Again, thanks for asking,

Madame L