The various forms of birth control

I used to read a series of Lord or the Rings type fantasy books, the kind where humans are one of a myraid of races, along with the likes of dwarves, elves, trolls, gnomes and more. In this particular 'world', elves were eternal. That is to say, they didnt' die of natural causes. You could kill an elf - they weren't immortal - but they wouldn't just grow old and die. For millennia they'd essentially stay the same age.

The theme of the series of books was to contrast that kind of life with the lives of humans, which the elves tended to see as brief, busy and essentially reckless. Humanity's greatest gift, one of the elves said, is fecundity.

Fecundity is the ability to procreate at an incredibly fast rate, even at the expense of the good of the species.

So in a very round-about way, this fantasy series was about the various forms of birth control. Elves, because fo their long-lived nature, wouldn't ever over-reproduce. Humans, because of our short-lived nature, over-reproduced as a matter of course.

That has become a theme of every day life in this, the real world as well. Humanity's numbers are rising every years at an almost exponential rate. At the beginning of the twentieth century there were two billion inhabitants on the planet. At the end of the twentieth century, there were seven billion inhabitants of earth. If there are twenty-five million inhabitants of earth at the end of this, the twenty-first century, will we be able to feed everyone? Will we end up cutting down all the forests for crop and grazing land? Will our fecundity become the death of our species?

That's why it's important to educate ourselves about the various forms of birth control. We need to end practices like the Catholic church, which has lied to the people of Africa for years saying that condoms don't work. In fact, condoms are the most reliable of the forms of birth control other than abstinence.

And yes, abstaining from sex is the best of the forms of birth control, but it's also not the most practical. Like all animals, humans have a need for sex. Trying to find biblical justification to pretend otherwise doesn't actually help the situation. As a matter of fact, children who are enrolled in "promise keepers" and other types of abstinence only education programs are shown to have a higher rate of teen pregnancy than kids who are educated on the various forms of birth control.