Dear Editor,
Women around the world and in our local region need preservation of their rights as human beings instead of baby-making machines. It is our environmental responsibility to provide means for a better life to many women and girls struggling in developing countries as well as in developed countries that enforce unjust laws based on religious or cultural beliefs.
Our environmental crisis is a direct result of our growing population’s carelessness. Every day 200,000 more people are born and increase our population’s burden on the planet by polluting and depleting resources.
Women around the world are raised to believe they have no other options than to give birth to more children than they often want, adding to rising poverty levels and an unhealthy population.
The solutions to this problem are: restricting family size, making abortion and contraception available and legal, encouraging alternative lifestyles and of course, allowing universal access to education.
We can learn from struggling areas like Africa that availability of family planning can significantly improve life.
Knowing that over 5,000 women die in childbirth each year and that two-thirds of the illiterate world population are women, we must feel very fortunate to live in a country with accessible medicine, doctors and education.
But the truth remains anywhere that to be a responsible species living on Earth, it is our obligation to defeat outdated beliefs which prevent the logical needs of our exponentially destructive population.
‘mdash;Cherry Jimenez San Diego resident