Existing American population policy largely rests on two documents crafted thirty years ago, during the Presidency of Richard Nixon. 

On the domestic side, the 1972 Report of the President's Commission on Population Growth and the American Future provided the historic rationale for an aggressive Federal campaign in favor of birth limitation and against the dreaded "third" American child.  The Commission rejected the American "population growth ethic" that "more is better," concluding that "no substantial benefits would result from continued growth of the nation's population."  The number of children "born now will seriously affect our lives in future decades, it said"; indeed, the excessive number of American children could already be blamed for the country's so-called "crisis of spirit--environmental deterioration, racial antagonisms, the plight of the cities," and--amazingly--even the Vietnam War.  A later passage darkly labeled the Baby Boom generation a "new wave of humanity," one that bore responsibility for virtually every national problem, from overcrowded schools to high traffic accident rates to general unease.

Astonishingly, the Commissioners admitted that, in 1971, the American fertility rate had in fact already fallen below the Zero Growth level for the first time in the nation's history: their goal had already been achieved.  And yet, the Report still attacked the idea of a "birth death" or "baby bust" as phony.  Instead, it mounted a full assault on the three-child family.  The Commission warned that a three-child system would produce a population of 300 million by 1995 and a billion by 2070; a two-child per family system would slow growth to 325 million by 2070, saving the nation from a host of perils.  One particularly foolish map showed the lake regions of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota running out of water by 2020, due solely to this dreaded "3-child family" system.

While not directly assaulting religion, the Commission used the code words "tradition or custom" to make the same point, linking such "custom" to "ignorance" for good measure:

Our immediate goal is to modernize demographic behavior in this country: to encourage the American people to make population choices, both in the individual family and society at large, on the basis of greater rationality rather than tradition or custom, ignorance or chance.

Commission recommendations included open propaganda in the schools in favor of population control, the promotion of "sex education" for all ("especially" in the schools), the distribution of "prophylactic information and services" to minors, and the legalization of abortion "along the lines of the New York State statute."[1]

On the foreign policy side, one of President Richard Nixon's last acts before resigning in disgrace was to direct the National Security Council to prepare a secret "study of the impact of world population growth on U.S. security and overseas interests."  The result was National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) #200, dated December 10, 1974.

The document focused on a United Nations' estimate of 3.6 billion persons in the world in 1970, with a median projection of 6 to 8 billion by the year 2000 and 12 billion by 2075.  "Massive famines" were probable consequences, it said, as were slowed economic growth, severe resource shortages, and "high and increasing levels of child abandonment, juvenile delinquency, chronic and growing underemployment and unemployment, petty thievery, organized brigandry, food riots, separatist movements, communal massacres, revolutionary actions, and counter-revolutionary coups."  Among the less developed countries, disruptive internal migrations, high numbers of young people, and "pressures for foreign migration" also could be predicted.  These developments, the NSC staff concluded, "point toward Malthusian conditions for many regions of the world."  Accordingly, the Report concluded that continued global population growth posed a grave security risk to the United States.

NSSM #200 also argued that "[w]e cannot wait for overall modernization and development to produce lower fertility rates naturally."  An "all-out-effort to lower growth rates" was imperative.  The Memorandum set a goal of keeping maximum global population at no more than 8 billion, by achieving "a replacement level of fertility, (a two child family on the average), by about the year 2000."  Specific strategies included undermining the traditional role of motherhood and "concentrating on the education and indoctrination of the rising generation of children regarding the desirability of smaller family size."  The NSC document did give a nod to "the right of individuals and couples to determine freely and responsibly the number and

spacing of their children."  Yet the spirit of the report was closer to the "Alternate" view placed near the end of Section I, which pondered the possible need for "mandatory population control measures for the U.S. and/or for others."

Most controversially, the U.S. government secretly targetted 13 nations whose growing populations reportedly posed a special threat to American interests: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia, and Columbia.  Declaring a kind of covert demographic war on this "Key 13," the National Security Council urged that limited American resources be focused on reducing future human numbers in these lands.  Interestingly, the document did warn that "[w]e must take care that our activities should not give the appearance to the LDC's [Less Developed Countries] of an industrialized country policy directed against the LDC's."  This meant that American policies to cut human fertility overseas should also be "ones we can support within this country;" there needed to be a unity between domestic and foreign population policies.[2]

THE "DEPOPULATION BOMB'

It is true that the Presidential Commission on Population Growth was torn by dissent and that key recommendations faced stiff opposition among a minority of the Commissioners themselves and at the Nixon White House.[3]  It is also true that NSSM #200 remained secret until 1989, lest its country specific strategy stir up emotions overseas.  All the same, the sentiments behind these two documents did provide the philosophical framework for a range of policy innovations during this era: from implementation of the Title X domestic "family planning" program to the legalization of abortion (by Supreme Court fiat) in all fifty states to the mobilization of the U.S. Agency for International Development and related bureaus in favor of birth limitation and population control.  Opposition by social conservatives bore only limited fruit: U.S. funds could not be used to pay for abortions, neither domestically (the Hyde Amendment) nor in foreign lands.  Otherwise, the Malthusian policy victory was fairly complete. 

Indeed, in 2003, the architects of this policy revolution might look back on their work with a grim pride.  Fertility is tumbling around the globe.  In the year 2000, the United Nation's Population Division predicted a global Total Fertility Rate (or TFR; an estimate of the average number of births per woman over her lifetime) of 2.1 by the year 2050; only two years later, in 2002, the group revised that number downward, to 1.85.  This means that the world's population would peak midcentury at 8 to 9 billion (not far from the NSC goal of 8 billion), and decline thereafter.  In an article for Nature magazine, Austria's Applied Systems Analysis bureau even predicts a decline in the world's population of 500 million by century's end.  Among specific countries, Brazil's TFR has fallen from 3.4 in 1990 to 2.0 today; Iran's from 4.0 during the 1980's to 2.0 today; Mexico's from 7 births per family in the 1970's, to 2.0 today; and the USA also hovers around the 2.0 figure.[4]  Has population stabilization built around the two-child family system in fact been achieved?  Has the environment been saved from the catastrophe of excess number numbers?

Alas, the answers are "No."  It turns out that there is no such thing as population stability, except as an ephemeral and relatively brief transition point.  The very forces that have reduced average family size from a natural level of seven children to two also appear to press fertility reduction well below the 2.1 replacement figure, creating a different reality: depopulation.  We may actually see the human future in Europe.

In 2003, the threat and reality of depopulation--once dismissed as right-wing fantasies--have gone mainstream.   The New York Times highlighted this year "an increasingly worrisome reality for Italy and other European countries whose fertility rates have plummeted over the last decades, shifting one-child families close to the statistical norm."  Spain, Sweden, Germany, Russia, Greece, and Italy--to name but a few--now face "the spectre of sharply winnowed and less competitive work forces, surfeits of retirees, and pension systems that will need to be cut back deeply."  In some parts of Europe (such as the Italian Province of Ferrara and German Saxony), fertility has fallen to an average of .85 children born to women over their lifetime, barely 40 percent of even the zero-growth level.  In northern Europe, marriage has been replaced by low-fertility cohabitating unions.  In southern Europe, young men and women refuse to form unions of any kind.[5]  Fertility decline has been particularly striking since 1990.  By 2050, in consequence, most young Europeans will have neither brother nor sister, nor aunt nor uncle, nor cousins: so undoing even the extended family.  "What we're seeing right now is a revolution in fertility," says Joseph Chamie, director of the United Nations Population Division.  The child is vanishing.[6]

America's leading scientific and environmental journals also now convey a new reality.  The March 28 edition of Science reports "Europe's Population at a Turning Point."  It notes that the concept of "population momentum measures the effect of current age structure on future population growth."  In the year 2000, Europe's "momentum" shifted from positive to "negative."  If the European Union's current Total Fertility Rate of 1.5 remains unchanged through 2020, the EU will lose a quarter of its population--or 88 million persons--by century's end.  The existing "dependency burden" of workers would nearly double, as well.[7]

But perhaps this will be good for the environment?  Alas, this does not appear to be true.  A recent article in the influential journal, Nature, reports a peculiar development: while Italy's population is in absolute decline, with deaths outnumbering births, the number of separate households is growing: a net increase of 6 million in recent decades.  Why?  The answer is simple: fewer marriages, more divorces, and fewer children there have sharply reduced average household size.  In central Stockholm, Sweden, as another example, two-thirds of all households are lone individuals, who consume on a per capita basis much greater resources--from fuel to food--than do the vanishing large families.  Counter-intuitively, it turns out that the retreat from marriage and fertility decline actually accelerate urban sprawl and environmental decay.[8]

Developed nations in Asia show the same turn toward depopulation.  Japan has a TFR of 1.42, driven by a sharp rise in the number of adult women who are not married.[9]  South Korea records a TFR of 1.5, down from 6.0 in 1960 and "a record for low fertility in a developing country."  The number of abortions there exceeds the number of births.[10]

FLAWED EXPLANATIONS 

Why the failure to achieve population stability?  The answer, I believe, lies primarily in a flawed understanding of the cause of fertility change.  The dominant explanation for most of the 20^th Century might be labelled "materialist."  Focused on economic incentives, it has exhibited "socialist" and "liberal" variations.  Both show fertility decline to be the inevitable product of modern market economies.  This assumption of inevitability has, in turn, given false direction to population policy.

The socialist explanation arose during the first Western birthrate crisis of the 1930's.  The Swedish social democratic economist Gunnar Myrdal laid blame for fertility decline squarely on liberal capitalism.  In societies under this system's sway, children became the chief cause of poverty.  Given current social organization, the refusal of young people to bear children was natural, rational, and blameless, he said.  The very persons who contributed the most to the nation's existence were dragged down into poverty, shoddy housing, poor nutrition, and limited cultural and recreational opportunities.  Myrdal said that a voluntary choice between poverty with children or a substantially better living standard without them was what young couples now faced.[11]

Contemporary Social Democrats make the same case.  As Peter McDonald explains, "[t]he risk-averse individual in a world that rewards market production is unwise to devote time or money to social reproduction [e.g., by which he means family creation].  Social reproduction involves altruism, that is, time and money devoted to others….For the risk-averse in a free market economy, altruism is equivalent to foolhardiness."  Specifically, the risk-adverse woman will be sure to be able to support herself and not to put herself in a position of dependency on a man.  More broadly, the market is very short term in its orientation; indeed, financial markets punish individuals and firms for any short-term lapse.  But child rearing is long term.  Accordingly, rational persons choose to forego children.[12]

The "liberal" variation of the materialist theme is usually identified with Nobel Laureate Gary Becker of The University of Chicago.[13]  Essentially, Becker and followers--also called the 'Chicago School'--argue that fertility decline is caused by shifts in the balance of economic costs and benefits produced by child bearing.  They assume that all families in all times and places have some knowledge of contraceptive techniques, and turn to the rational control of births when it is in their economic interest.  During pre-modern times, characterized by family-centered household production and high death rates, families behaved rationally by bearing many children.  But a new development appeared during the 19^th Century, as fertility fell while per-capita income rose.  Becker attributes this new development to a rise in "the price of children."  This so-called "price" depended, in part, "on the value of the time spent on child care by parents, typically mothers."  The "foregone value" of time spent rearing children--which might have been sold instead on the emerging labor market--actually comprised over half of children's "shadow cost."  Also, as infant mortality rates began to fall, parents shifted their reproductive strategy from "quantity" of children to "quality."  In smaller families, they could invest more "human capital" in each child, and assume that it would survive.  Becker emphasizes that the demographic transition toward low fertility was "not simply the result of 'modernization,' but itself help[ed] produce a modern economy partly by encouraging a greater investment in human capital."[14]  The result was smaller families, but higher quality children and greater wealth.

Social Democrats have relied on their version of the materialist argument to justify a massive socialization of family functions and child-care costs as the way to encourage more births.  Modern Malthusians have used the "Chicago school" explanation to argue that their project focused on birth limitation is in harmony with social evolution and economic growth.

Unfortunately, both portraits of economically rational parents making judicious fertility decisions soon ran into a problem: they failed to explain real historical changes.  Charles Tilly reported that there was no historical evidence from Europe showing any relationship between declines in infant mortality and declines in fertility.[15]  Detailed investigations of fertility patterns in Germany and England between 1550 and 1850 found no signs of fertility control guided by measures of poverty or changes in "the cost" of children.  Rather, the areas studied all showed "natural fertility" throughout this period, where births to married couples reflected "the absence of deliberate birth control" and an average of six to nine children born into each family.[16]  Moreover, recent massive demographic investigations for the European Fertility Project at Princeton University and The World Fertility Survey point to the incomplete nature of the materialist explanations.  Until very recent times, these studies show, contraceptive use was confined to only a very few elites; and marital fertility in the West was "constant" at a high "natural" level, despite the fact that children often represented a net economic loss to their parents.[17]

"IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES"

Australian demographer John C. Caldwell began to suspect that ideas and values, more than economic incentives, lay behind fertility decline.  Even after the rise of industrial capitalism, Caldwell found that "the [traditional] family, hallowed by time and enthusiastically sanctioned by religion," could still  prevail.  What Caldwell called a "family morality" system could actually serve as a brake on the economic pressures toward social change; as he put it:  "[t]his morality (and the [associated] high fertility) can long survive the growth of a substantial capitalist labor market, partly because it is supported by public religion and private adage."  The Western world, he insists, had such a "family morality [system]…backed by the religion and outlook of the day" until about 1900, one that held the family economy and the market economy in balance.  As Caldwell explained:

The family system in the West depended on a sharp division of labour:  the husband worked outside the home for wages or profits…, while a wide range of [productive] activities (clothing, feeding, providing a clean and comfortable environment, child rearing) was undertaken by the wife with the help of the children (especially the daughters).

Resting on religious affirmation and a purposeful system of job and market wage preferences for fathers, this "two-tiered mode of production"--what we would call the bourgeois or Victorian home--sustained high fertility long after the materialist thesis said it should have disappeared.[18] 

Caldwell concluded that the decline of this system had nothing to do with internal family economics.  Again, "ideas" and "ideologies" were actually at play.  Malthusian ideas gained hold of key elites among West European nations during the 1800's.  These ideas eventually spread into the culture.  A study of 19^th Century English literature, for example, "showed that pride in large families declined well before there was any evidence of widespread fertility control."  Birth limitation then spread, "domino fashion," to other European nations.  The key triumph in every case, Caldwell argued, was the "rolling back of religion's grip on--indeed, concentration on--sexuality" and the consequent "ignoring of the religious view."

The same process occurred in the Third World, where colonial masters in India, Southeast Asia, and Africa transferred their Malthusian views to emerging colonial elites.  Eugenic ideas played a role as well, pushed by American organizations such as The Population Council, the Hugh Moore Fund, and The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations.  As Caldwell explained:

The challenge to reduce high Third World fertility necessitated the development of a morality that made contraceptive practice in the West not merely expedient, but respectable and increasingly praiseworthy.  Almost incredibly,…the discussion of 'condoms' changed in half a century from being regarded as lewd and obscene to demonstrating moral merit.[19]

Other new demographic evidence points as well toward religion--its strength or absence--as the major influence in determining fertility.[20]  This view holds that an economic shift (such as the change from "family" to "factory" production) is merely an incentive for fertility decline; it is "neither sufficient nor necessary" to explain demographic change.[21]  Instead, the influence of religion on the beliefs of persons regarding fertility serves in practice as  the critical, necessary, and sufficient variable:  only change here can lead to fertility decline.  As Belgian demographer Ron Lesthaeghe summarizes, "secularization"--which he defines as "the decrease of adherence to organized forms of religion"--is both "the most powerful variable at the outset of the fertility decline" and "the one with the longest lasting effect or the highest degree of persistence."[22]  Without secularization, the evidence shows, fertility decisions would remain "in the realm of the sacred," whatever the economic situation.  This suggests that pre-1850 fertility in Europe was "natural" and high because most Europeans were active Christians; they refused to reduce their family size, not out of ignorance, nor because of potential household economic gains, but because of their obedience to Christian teaching.[23]

It was the French Revolution which released a "total attack" on this family morality system, advancing individualism, materialism, and radical egalitarianism to replace the Christian family system.  A century later, Protestants broke ranks with over a thousand years of Christian consensus (including teachings of their own theological founders such as Martin Luther), and started to turn fertility control over to the individual's secular conscience.  This left only the Roman Catholic Church to offer resistance in Europe to this aspect of secularization in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries.

In sum, the weight of the evidence shows that the "first demographic transition" in Europe--marked by the abandonment of "natural fertility"

levels of 6 to 9 children per family in favor of a TFR slightly over 2--was primarily a religious event.  Secular ideas of individualism, rational calculation of economic gain, and materialism won out because Christian obedience to the Genesis command, "be fruitful and multiply," waned.  Put another way, the compelling new evidence strongly suggests that sharp fertility decline was simply a sign of societal wide religious retreat. 

THE DIMINISHED CHILD

What about the "second demographic transition," the label given by demographers to the turn toward below replacement fertility that set in, among developed nations, about 35 years ago?  Does it, too, have a religious explanation?

The answer is "yes."  Following the celebrated--if brief--Marriage Boom and Baby Boom era after World War II, fertility declined resumed in Western nations; the critical year was 1964.  Fertility soon tumbled well below the zero-growth level; a massive retreat from marriage commenced; and Western societies seemed to lose all sense of inherited familial order.  Dutch demographer Dirk van de Kaa has described the phenomenon as involving four transformations:

1. A shift from the golden age of marriage to the dawn of the age of cohabitation, where marriage is increasingly discarded in favor of informal sexual and living arrangements;

2. A shift from the era of the king-child with parents to that of the king-adult pair with one--and usually only one--child;

3. A shift from preventive contraception, designed to benefit the favored early children,  to self-fulfilling contraception, designed to please the parents; and

4. A shift from a uniform family system of a married couple with children to pluralistic families and households, including the rapid growth of single-parent families.[24]

How do demographers explain these changes?  The "Chicago School" theorists emphasize the role of women's wages in this change, arguing that at "almost every age and birth order, higher net women's hourly earnings [compared to men's] reduce the likelihood of birth."  Equal Pay Laws adopted in the 1960's and early '70's, they suggest, disrupted systems where higher net wages for men encouraged fertility.[25]  Researchers looking at Japan trace that nation's sharp fertility decline to the increase in the proportion of married women who were employed, from 13 percent in 1963 to 42 percent in 1991, a change labeled "the most rapid increase on record in economically advanced nations."[26]

But among other analysts, suspicion remains that "women's employment" may be more symptom or consequence of the second demographic transition, than cause.  Michael Murphy suggests that the "Chicago School" simply cuts out the "middle level" explanations in order to link fertility decline to "remote determinants," without showing how these actually work.[27] 

The very pervasiveness of this "second" transition points to better explanations.  David Coleman notes that remaining pockets of high fertility in Europe--such as in the rural urSwiss regions of Switzerland--all disappeared after 1964.  So did pockets of higher "Catholic fertility" still to be found in Spain and Portugal.[28]  Van de Kaa reports that 97 percent of 21-year-old Danish women now report having had pre-marital sex, essentially marking the full collapse there of the old sexual ethic.  Lesthaeghe and Meekers show that only 20 percent of all European Community citizens above age 18 have a meaningful link to organized religion; among young adults, the figure is closer to 10 percent.[29]  Ronald Inglehart cites the sharp decline in votes for identifiably religious political parties in Europe after 1963 as a sign of what he calls "the silent revolution" in European values.[30]

Coleman concludes that ideas and values "may be more important that had been thought" in explaining the second demographic transition.[31]  Lesthaeghe is more blunt.  Recent changes in family formation and marital fertility, he says, are nothing new.  They merely continue the "long-term shift in the Western ideational system" away from the values affirmed by Christian teaching (specifically "responsibility, sacrifice, altruism, and sanctity of long-term commitments") and toward a militant "secular individualism" focused on the desires of the self.[32]  Accordingly, secularization  or the retreat from religion emerges again as the key variable in understanding population decline. 

It is important to note that the values of the new secular order, despite the rhetoric, do not in fact center on "freedom" and "choice."  Rather, the evidence suggests that those are transitional arguments, masking a new and quite negative view of children.  Belgian researchers point to signs that European youth "appear to be extending non-conformism with respect to abortion, divorce, etc., to parenthood as well," agreeing in large majorities with statements such as "children need only one parent" and "children are no longer needed for personal fulfillment."  Even those who choose to parent now do so "to satisfy their private needs," rather than to meet religious, family, or communal obligations.  The new "tolerance" of alternate lifestyles at times comes near to excluding parenthood even as an option.[33]  Van de Kaa notes the paradox that it was the arrival of "perfect" contraception--in the mode of  the birth control pill--in 1964-65 which, instead of bringing "wanted" children within marriage, produced couples who could live outside of marriage "without fear of unwanted pregnancy and forced marriage."[34]  Historian Philippe Aries, author of the classic volume Centuries of Childhood, sees "a new epoch, one in which the child occupies a smaller place, to say the least."  Between 1450 and 1900, he notes, the Europeans had expanded the place of the child in their civilization.  Levels of care improved noticeably, and the period of childhood became something precious.  Looking near the 20^th Century's end at a civilization with almost universal pre-marital sex, ubiquitous contraception, legal abortion, and record-low fertility, Aries concludes:  "In like manner, [the child's] role is changing today, before our very eyes.  It is [now] diminishing."[35]

Can the Europeans turn this situation around?  It is highly unlikely.  To begin with, as noted earlier, the "momentum" of demographic change in the European Union shifted to the negative side in the year 2000.  The very age structure of the population now makes fertility decline even more likely than during the prior three decades, when it was already sharp and sustained.[36]  Moreover, most European policymakers are simply clueless regarding the driving role of faith and values in the changes they confront.  They commonly embrace materialistic explanations of cause, welcome the disappearance of motherhood as a vocation, dismiss religion as a superstition of the past, and place all their hopes in the Swedish model.  Specifically, they call for full gender equality, the priority of the work line over the family, and generous day care, paid parental leave, child allowances, and other welfare benefits as their policy solutions.  But there is no evidence that these measures positively affect completed family size.  To the contrary, such reforms seem to lock post-family, anti-child values into place.[37]

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Europe is dying; so may be Japan, also done in by a broad rejection of children.  However, unlike the late 1960's and 1970's, when America was leading the global retreat from marriage and children, something different is  now happening here: Americans are breaking free from the Malthusian mindset.  The United States is the only developed nation in the world which recorded an increase in its total fertility rate between 1981 and 2000: from 1.81 in the former year to 2.13 in 2000, an increase of 18 percent and slightly over the replacement or zero-growth level.  This was not, as some suggest, a function of a rising number of births out-of-wedlock.  Between 1995 and 2000, even marital fertility rose by 11 percent, the first sustained increase in that number since the mid 1950's.  Nor was this a function of America's greater ethnic diversity.  The increase in fertility among Americans of European descent actually climbed by 21 percent after 1981, to a total fertility rate of 2.114, also slightly over the zero growth level.  As The Economist magazine recently summarized, "demographic forces are pulling America and Europe apart….America's fertility rate is rising; Europe's is falling.  America's immigration outstrips Europe's….America's population will soon be getting younger.  Europe's is aging."  By 2050, The Economist calculates a U.S. population of about 500 million, compared to an EU in demographic freefall,  with barely half as many people.[38]

The best explanation for America's greater fecundity is the higher degree of religious identification and behavior shown by Americans, when compared to Europeans.  Forty-four percent of Americans, in the year 2000, reported attending religious services during the prior week; in Europe, under ten percent.  And believers do tend to have more babies.  For example, a study of differential fertility among "white fundamentalist Protestants" found a total fertility rate 13 percent above the American average.  Among "fundamentalists" who attended church weekly, the figure was 27 percent higher.[39]  To choose another example, the fertility of American Latter-Day- Saints, or Mormons, is about 70 percent above the American average.

Importantly, this American exceptionalism is actually not new.

Back in 1755, the American polymath Benjamin Franklin had published an essay on "Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c."  Europe, he saw even then, had little surplus land and was already filled with manufacturers.  But in America, "Land being thus Plenty…and so cheap that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family."  Americans were "not afraid to marry" because they could look ahead and see that their children when grown up could be provided for as well.  Franklin continued:  "Hence marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe."  And such marriages were fertile: eight births to each Marriage in America, Franklin estimated.  The true "Fathers of their Nation," he added, would be "the Cause of the Generation of Multitudes, by the Encouragement they afford to Marriage."[40]  In a later essay, Benjamin Franklin also mused that religious belief could influence the rate of population growth, and that here, too, the Americans were very different from Old Europe.[41]

And this population difference also bore consequences.  One demographic historian, looking at the 18^th Century, notes: 

 [A]s early as the 1730's, some Americans came to look upon the rapid growth of population…as God's sign of approval for the virtuous lives of the colonists.  In view of the role that the idea of virtue played in producing a revolutionary ideology, this perspective on population increase seems of more than passing interest.[42]

Edward Wigglesworth, Professor of Divinity at Harvard, told his fellow Americans in 1775 that regardless of the results of the emerging American rebellion against the British, the astonishing growth in American numbers insured that the weight of power would shift to them by 1825.  This confidence inspired by surging human numbers appears to have enabled Americans to risk open confrontation with England in 1775 over constitutional and economic questions.[43]  Stated more directly: America's fecundity--its abundant fertility--actually made possible The American Revolution.

America's current place in the world may also be a consequence of American exceptionalism in population.  Consider that in 1900, the great powers of the world numbered five: France, Germany, Russia, The United Kingdom, and a newcomer--The United States of America.  The next hundred years saw these basic demographic changes:

In the year 2000, there remained only one great power--the United States of America.  Perhaps these figures are proof again that demography is, indeed, destiny.

Moreover, recent economic theory has shown the inadequacy of the Malthusian model, which equates population growth with diminished human wellbeing.  Economist Julian Simon acknowledges the obvious fact that "Additional people [such as babies] do indeed dilute capital and reduce the standard of living when they first arrive."  But, from a longer perspective, the increase in the number of "knowledge creators" and the "creation of new technology in response to increased demand" produce very different results: "Additional people are then seen to have a positive effect in the long run."  He concludes that moderate population growth is good, even necessary, for sustained economic growth.[44]

TOWARD A NEW POLICY FRAMEWORK

What does this mean for the 21^st Century?  For reasons of social and cultural health, national security, and economic growth, it is time to recraft American population policy for a new century and a new reality.

The most important steps are philosophical, in the realm of ideas.  The current Administration would do the nation a great service by repudiating NSSM #200 as well as the Report of the old Commission on Population Growth and the American Future.  They should both be labelled as out-of-date, misleading, irrelevant.  In their place, the current Administration could articulate new principles on which a 21^st Century American population policy might be built, in both the domestic and foreign spheres. 

These principles might include:

• The United States of America holds the family to be the fundamental social unit, inscribed in human nature, and centered on the voluntary union of a man and a woman in a covenant of marriage for the purposes of propagating and rearing children, sharing intimacy and resources, and conserving lineage and tradition.

• The United States of America recognizes that strong families commonly rest on religiously-grounded morality systems, which deserve autonomy and respect as vital aspects of civil society.

• The United States of America views large families, created responsibly through marriage, as special gifts to their societies deserving affirmation and encouragement.

• The United States of America recognizes that human progress
  --social, cultural, and economic--depends on the renewal of human population.  Moderate population growth is in the nation's best interest.

• And the United States of America underscores that the demographic problem facing the 21^st Century is depopulation, not overpopulation.

How might these principles translate into domestic policy?  On the positive side, they give coherence and affirmation to the Bush Administration's current pro-family tax reforms: the increase in the child tax credit to $1,000 per child; and the reduction in the marriage penalty.  These principles also reinforce the faith-based-initiative project and the marriage assistance program now starting up at the Department of Health and Human Services. 

These principles also point toward a rethinking of Title X of the Public Health Services Act.  This "backbone of family planning services" in the United States[45] currently sustains over 4000 birth control clinics across the country.  The origins of Title X bear up to little scrutiny.  The measure was part hysterical overreaction to the so-called "population bomb."  It was part tacit racism; as one White House aide from the era explained, birth control "has become more of a Negro issue than a Catholic one."[46]  And it was part surrender to negative social forces: as an influential 1969 magazine article argued, the best way to reduce American fertility was by promoting the "anti-natalist" behaviors already found "among…our covert and deviant culture, on the one hand, and our elite and artistic culture, on the other."[47]  Designed to discourage fertility of all kinds, including within marriage,
Title X has in practice encouraged sexual hedonism, subverted parental responsibility, and purposefully targetted teenagers and minorities for conversion to an "antinatalist" culture.  In short, it encourages the very attitudes and behaviors that create the "depopulation" problem.[48]

Relative to foreign policy, these principles point toward a rechanneling of all American aid away from "family planning services" and toward "family building strategies."  Instead of support for condom distribution and Malthusian clinics, American funds could be restricted to:

• Abstinence education programs (premised on "chastity" before marriage and "fidelity" within), which have been successful in nations such as Uganda;

• Marriage promotion initiatives, perhaps reflecting successful projects in America;

• Maternal and child health projects, designed to save lives and safeguard future marital childbearing, not prevent them;

• And economic development projects that respect family autonomy and initiative.

Would this represent what Newsweek calls, in a dark whisper, "the globalization of American family values"?[49]  In one sense, no.  The purpose would not be to impose exact American models on other nations.  Rather, America would be recognizing, with respect, the "family morality systems" that exist in other lands and which have also been under attack in recent decades by Malthusian and anti-religious forces.

But in another sense, yes.  These principles would realign America with those nations that still acknowledge and respect a transcendent God and a religiously grounded family system.  The outlines of such an alignment have already been exhibited in recent United Nations' sessions, where the United States has found itself closer in morality and spirit to many Third World nations than to the dying lands of the European Union and the Asian littoral. 

The future lies with those nations that fear God and affirm Life and Family.  The U.S. of A., I believe, should take a necessary place in that vanguard.

End Notes:

[1]   Population and the American Future: The Report of The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future (New York: New American Library, 1972): 1-3, 7, 14-21, 62-63, 125, 137, 156, 170, 178, 192.