From the World Congress of Families III, Mexico City, March 31, 2004:

Diagnosing the Impending European Population Implosion

By David A. Hartman*

As the world enters the 21st Century, political and social scientists are witnessing a profound shift in the global distribution of populations and wealth.  Nothing will shape and define the new century more than these massive shifts and their consequences.

Over the course of the last millennium, Europe (including Russia) and its Western offshoots (including the USA) have experienced explosive combined growth in their populations.  The growth in their combined economies has been even more meteoric, fueled successively by the agricultural and industrial revolutions that these peoples pioneered, and sustained by the raw materials of the New World they settled.  Because of this remarkable and prolonged economic development, during the same period that the combined European-derived populations grew from less than one-sixth to one-third of the world’s people, the fraction of the world’s production of wealth accounted for by these populations rose from less than one-sixth to two-thirds.

Since peaking prior to World War I, the proportion of the world’s population accounted for by Europe and its offshoots has declined to one-fifth.  During this period, the population growth in raw numbers has been nearly equally spread between Latin America, Asia, and Africa.  However, the annual rate of population growth in Asia has now slowed to below the world’s current average of one percent. Meanwhile, over the past quarter century the population of Europe and its offshoots has grown at slightly below one percent per year. But this apparent population growth in Europe and its offshoots is deceiving as an indicator of demographic health.  Much of the population growth in Europe and its offshoots during this period has resulted from immigration from the Third World and from increases in life expectancy.  Without this immigration and increased longevity, the combined population for Europe and its offshoots would have declined.

In other words, immigration and increased longevity are masking—at least temporarily—a decline in fertility to well below the zero population growth (ZPG) level required to maintain a stable population.  This astonishing decline in fertility has occurred in all the major European nations and their offshoots except the United States, where fertility rebounded in the early Eighties to approximately the ZPG level.  The European Union’s fertility rate now stands at only 70 percent of that required for natural maintenance of constant population and is well below that in some countries, such as Spain and Italy. 

Because virtually the entire economically developed world, including Japan, has experienced this “fertility deficit” the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recently conducted a comprehensive inquiry into its causes.

One of the most significant discoveries of the OECD researchers was that in almost all OECD countries, the average age at which a woman bears her first child has risen by three years since 1980.  To understand more fully the reasons for this delay in childbearing, the OECD scholars scrutinized the relationship between women’s fertility rates and their employment rates and educational attainment in 1980 and then again in 1999.  Their analysis, however, yielded no statistically significant correlations.  Through parallel analyses, the OECD scholars also attempted to link the retreat from childbearing to divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing in those same two years.  But once again, they uncovered no statistically meaningful correlations.  The only statistically significant fertility relationships reported by the OPEC researchers were those linking an elevated fertility rate to rising youth employment rates and a low fertility rate to rising ages of singles living at home.

However, by comparing OECD data for 1980 with that for 1999—rather than looking at each year separately—even those with no special training in statistics or social science can see what the OECD analysts curiously ignored: the rates for female employment, higher education, divorce, and out-of-wedlock childbearing all rose between 1980 and 1999, while fertility rates plummeted.  It is hard to resist the suspicion that leftist and feminist political ideologies blinded the OECD analysts to the obvious correlations across time linking the drop in fertility to the changes in these telling social variables. 

It is likewise difficult not to suspect that it was political bias that prevented the OECD analysts from investigating the effects on fertility of the worldwide growth of the welfare state during the last three decades.  That growth has translated into an increasing tax burden for families and into perverse social incentives for the recipients of the welfare-state benefits paid for with these taxes.  Between 1970 and 2000, government spending in OECD nations grew by one-tenth of GDP, and fertility rates dropped by one-third.  In the European Union (EU), a rise of one-ninth in government spending on welfare benefits and services was accompanied by a two-fifths decline in fertility.  Few should be surprised that as the welfare states have grown so too has the number of employed women who want no children or only one or two.

Virtually everyone recognizes the role of reliable contraception and legalized abortion in helping to drive down fertility in the developed nations.  But what many fail to understand is that women are particularly likely to want to use these means of preventing childbirth if they live in one of the essentially socialist modern states in which utopian ideology justifies high rates of taxation to pay for family-surrogate services provided by the government.  The leaders of these modern states, moreover, typically denigrate marriage and family, attack religion, and undermine property rights.  As cultural elites in academe, entertainment, and the media lend their efforts in advancing the legal and cultural agenda of these political leaders, the traditional motivations for having children disappear, as do the financial means to support a traditional family.

We see this welfare state dynamic, terribly subversive of fertility, fully at work in the EU, where government’s spending accounts for nearly half of GDP, and nearly sixty pence out of every Eurodollar of personal income.  Welfare expenditures constitute two-thirds of this government spending.  The taxation necessary to sustain such ambitious welfare states makes it almost impossible for middle-class citizens to achieve economic independence through personal savings.  But as much as modern welfare states hurt family life by collecting burdensome taxes, these states cripple family life even more by spending that tax money in ways that subvert wedlock and childbearing. 

Consider, for example, the way government taxing and spending largely explains why the southern countries of the EU have even lower fertility than the EU average.  As typical Southern European countries, Greece, Spain, and Italy have all seen fertility drop even more sharply in recent decades than have Northern European nations, even though marriage rates have not dropped in these three southern nations below those seen in their northern neighbors and even though divorce rates have actually remained much lower.  What is more, the religious and cultural traditions of these three southern countries are distinctively supportive of family life.  The persistence of these traditions is evident in the fact that in these three countries, only one out of ten babies is born out of wedlock, compared to three out of ten for the EU as a whole.

However, the cultural effects of family-supportive traditions have been decisively undercut by government largesse in these three countries, where retired citizens receive old-age pensions that are higher—relative to incomes—than those for other EU countries.  The government pension policies in these three countries help to separate the aged from the younger generations by making the elderly economically dependent not on their own children and grandchildren, but rather on the government and its tax collectors.  Such costly government pension programs and the heavy taxes they require may drive down fertility by making it hard for men to support children (as in Italy and Greece, where rates of female participation in the labor force remain low) or by forcing women into out-of-home jobs that interfere with childbearing and family life (as in Spain, where rates of female participation in the labor force are now high).  But besides putting tax pressure on young families, the generous pension plans of Southern European nations discourage childbearing by cutting the economic ties between these young families and the childcare providers mothers typically prefer when they do enter employment: namely, grandparents.

It is an axiom of economics that governments get more of what they subsidize and less of what they tax.  So who should be surprised by low fertility in European welfare states where intact young families pay heavy taxes while government benefits flow only to unwed mothers (whose social and cultural circumstances make child- rearing difficult) and to elderly citizens increasingly cut off from their children and not-very-numerous grandchildren? 

The effects of anti-family tax and subsidy policies are now evident worldwide: the higher the expenditures of government (particularly on social welfare benefits) and the higher the consequent taxation required to sustain these expenditures, the lower the rates of marriage and fertility and the higher the rates for divorce and out-of-wedlock births.   Such is the dreary pattern clearly discernible in the EU. 

In a partial departure from this pattern, the Nordic countries (Finland, Norway, and Sweden) have reduced the scale of their welfare states, and fertility rates in these countries now stand significantly above the average for EU and OECD countries.  Even in these Nordic countries, however, fertility still remains 15 percent below ZPG level.  Nor is the persistence of sub-replacement fertility really surprising even in these Nordic countries, where postmodern feminism still dominates the culture, where tax rates on personal income remain high, and where no-fault divorce laws still provide no protection to wedlock, even when children are involved.  Nordic policymakers must do more than simply trim the welfare state to restore the child-friendly, married-couple family to its place of legal and cultural primacy.

Fertility rates in the United States have run higher in recent years than even those observed in the relatively fertile Nordic countries.  Nonetheless, family life has suffered in the United States because of the burgeoning of the American welfare state since President Lyndon Baines Johnson launched his Great Society programs in the Sixties.  By 1993, the U.S. government was spending $20,000 per individual 65 or older, regardless of means, and an additional $20,000 on every child in households with income below the government-defined poverty level. The numbers of children dependent on welfare-state benefits naturally grew as the progeny of unwed mothers multiplied.  Between 1970 and 1993, the average income for married-couple families (adjusted for inflation) remained stuck at the 1970 level despite a 38% increase in the hourly productivity of American workers and despite a 50% increase in the hours worked by wives.  The additional wealth generated by the U.S. economy during these decades was entirely consumed by the growing welfare state and its dependents.  Not surprisingly, the prevalence of divorce and unwed motherhood soared, while the incidence of marriage and child rearing within marriages declined.  Nor did these trends seem to disturb the affluent retired citizens enjoying unprecedented welfare benefits themselves.  The bumper stickers on their motor homes unashamedly declared:  “We’re spending our kids inheritance.”  Longer bumper stickers might have acknowledged that they were actually spending their unborn grandchildren’s share, as well.

The United States currently comprises less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet consumes one-fifth of world economic output.  But how long can Americans enjoy their singularly favorable economic circumstances if the values that sustain family life and productive labor continue to erode under the welfare-state pressures?  Already those pressures have forced the United States to borrow massive amounts of foreign capital, so transforming America from the world’s largest creditor to the world’s largest debtor in just two decades.

Fortunately, Americans have seen some improvement in the economic and social status of the family since 1993.  After stagnating for decades, the median inflation-adjusted income for married-couple families increased steadily between 1993 and 2000, while the federal tax burden for these families declined.  In response to these favorable economic changes, American marriage rates and marital fertility finally ended their downward spiral, though they have not regained the ground lost since the 1970’s. The divorce rate has declined, and total fertility has even risen back to 2.1 births per American woman, the zero population growth level.  Unfortunately, however, the improvement in overall American fertility has been entirely the result of more out-of-wedlock births.  True, the fraction of all American babies born out of wedlock has finally stopped rising, but it has stabilized at the relatively high level of one-third of total births.  It remains to be seen if additional increases in income for median married-couple family incomes will foster further improvement in fertility and marital trends and will help reduce the incidence of divorce and out-of-wedlock births.

But while recent developments in American family life offer at least some reasons for optimism, it is hard to justify any such optimism when looking at European family life.  In the official population projections published in 2004, Eurostat predicts that the “natural” (that is, non-immigrant) population of Europe will begin to drop in 2005, with the trend toward “natural” depopulation accelerating in subsequent years. Even with immigration, Eurostat anticipates overall European population to begin to fall by 2020.  Eurostat did not revise its low-range population forecast in its latest projections; however, the low-range forecast included in the projections published in 2003 indicated that Europe’s population could decline by 20 percent by the year 2050 despite immigration. 

But Eurostat’s sobering numbers may understate the depth of Europe’s fertility crisis.  In a 2003 study of Europe’s population prospects, analysts for Science magazine suggest that Eurostat’s official mid-range population forecast is overly optimistic.  If Europe maintains its current 1.5 fertility rate, its population will decline by approximately 25 percent by 2080.  Even if European fertility rose immediately to the ZPG level of 2.1 children per European woman, the continent’s population would still decline until 2060, because fertile women now make up a remarkably small fraction of the total population.  Demographers well understand that the disappearance of young, fertile women always produces this kind of “negative momentum” in population trends.

Europe thus faces the dismal prospect of shrinking populations, resulting in a “dependency ratio” (the ratio of workers to retirees) that will grow more unfavorable at an alarming rate.  The trend toward depopulation also poses serious problems for European nations trying to maintain their technological competitiveness, for it is difficult for business to improve technology when a stagnant or declining population makes it unnecessary to increase productive capacity. 

Confronting such bleak prospects, Europeans might want to ask the question on the lips of Charles Dickens’s Scrooge after his third ghostly visitor shows him a terrible and hopeless future: “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?”  In other words, is this course of events unavoidable, or can it be changed?

Since no group of prosperous nations has ever before voluntarily depopulated themselves, it is difficult to regard the de-peopling of Europe as inevitable.  Like good consultants trying to revive any failing enterprise, policymakers must simply start asking some simple questions.  What has changed from earlier times when the enterprise was succeeding?  Why have these changes occurred?  What can be done to reestablish a dynamic of success?

The Europe that thrived and grew and prospered was founded upon family, religion, free enterprise, and individual responsibility.  The Europe that is now decaying has lost these foundations as socialist dreamers have tried to create utopia by building secular welfare states in which the individual is completely autonomous in morals and self-expression, but completely dependent in economic life.

Policies that will regenerate Europe must revive the values that fostered past growth and prosperity.  Such policies should include the following:

• Restoring primacy to marriage and family by repudiating policies that make the welfare state the surrogate parent of the child and the surrogate husband of the woman.

• Restoring religion to a respected place in society, so allowing it once again to reinforce a family-centered morality, particularly in the education of children.

• Encouraging women to devote themselves to child rearing rather than employment, and helping men to accept the challenge of providing for their wives and children.

• Relentlessly cutting the welfare state, so reducing the tax burden it imposes on families and so ending the government intrusion into domestic matters that families can and should handle by themselves. 

• Replacing the old-age pension and health-care programs of the welfare state with individual and family savings accounts owned and managed by individual families for their own benefit. 

• Ending welfare-state programs that give benefits to unwed mothers and improvident retirees by taxing young families.

• Reversing policies that sustain present prosperity by saddling future generations with the responsibility for deficits in trade and in government budgets.

• Ending in both social and tax law the discrimination that denies to married couples the rights of any other partnership and excuses them from the obligations.

Policymakers will need to go beyond this list of recommendations.  But this list does outline a fundamental agenda for bringing European countries closer to God’s will, human nature, and the natural order of a healthy society.  Anyone who knows and understands history will confidently expect European countries that enact this agenda to grow and prosper once again.  This agenda holds the same promise for the United States.

In both Europe and the United States, socialist policies have triumphed only because gullible citizens have believed ideologues’ assurances that government can achieve social justice by using the tax code to confiscate wealth and the welfare state to redistribute it.  Europeans and Americans alike should have recognized in such policies the illegitimate plunder of private property.  Given that power to plunder, the welfare state has grown without restraint, so denying property owners their traditional rights and eviscerating the cultural protections for family and religion.  The heritage of free men has withered as corrosive welfare-state policies have corrupted both those who have received undeserved benefits and those who have administered those benefits. And unless they reverse course, Europeans will pay even more dearly for their welfare-state illusions in the years ahead: as even more families disintegrate and the few remaining flames of religion flicker out, the continent will experience the demographic implosion already looming ominously in the statistics of population experts.  None of this will much trouble the Asian nations poised to begin a new global hegemony.

Nor should Americans consider themselves safe from the perils now facing Europe.  As U.S. policymakers have vastly expanded the American welfare state, they have frequently allowed Marxist theorists to help draw up the blueprints.  American family life and economic vitality have both suffered as a consequence.  The only antidote is the one already outlined for the European nations:  American lawmakers must dramatically scale back the welfare state and end the burdensome tax policies that sustain it.  Only in this way can families again enjoy the means and the time necessary to care for themselves and enjoy the fruits of their labor and freedom.  And only in such a political and economic environment are Americans likely to recover the cultural impulses that reinforce motherhood, fatherhood, and lifetime families.

Unto the Least of These My Brethren: U.S. Population Control Policy  

By Steven W. Mosher, Ph.D.*

As a convert, I am always impressed by the wisdom of the Catholic Church on issues concerning human life and the transmission of life. This wisdom is, perhaps, most evident in its rejection of efforts by the wealthy nations of the world, chief among them the United States, to impose birth control programs on poorer countries. Such efforts have been condemned frequently by Pope John Paul II and bishops in this country and others.

For the last thirty years, we Americans have been subjected to a drumbeat of propaganda about the so-called overpopulation problem. The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich was only the first of many books that warned us that we were breeding ourselves off the face of the planet. Such “irresponsible” childbearing, we were told again and again, would inevitably lead to food shortages and famine, poverty and environmental disaster.[1]

In 1974, the National Security Council (NSC) gave further impetus to these fears, circulating a secret report which declared population growth to be a grave threat to US national security.[2] If the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America were allowed to multiply, the N.S.C. claimed, their quest for social justice would inevitably lead them to communism.  This would limit the U.S. access to strategic minerals and other raw materials, both directly through the action of hostile regimes and indirectly because of greatly expanded local consumption.

Thus was population control declared to be a weapon in the Cold War.  The immediate result was a huge jump in spending on birth control programs by the U.S. and its allies. Dozens of countries around the world were targeted, especially those which were considered to be vulnerable to communist insurrection (such as Thailand) and those sitting on top of valuable metals (such as the southern tier of Africa).

Today the Cold War is over, and the population bomb has proven to be a dud. The specter of famine was never more than that—a ghostly phantom receding on the horizon. The number of people in the world currently stands at 5.9 billion, far below the 8 to 12 billion that Stein Bie, head researcher for the Food and Agriculture Organization, recently estimated the earth can easily support using existing agricultural technology.[3]  Food shortages occur in war zones—as in the Sudan—or in socialist economies—as in North Korea—but massive famines resulting from crop failure are a thing of the past.   

Moreover, as noted above, world population growth is slowing dramatically.  Demographers are now agreed that the population of the world will never double again.[4]  Based on our review of U.N. Population Division figures, we at the Population Research Institute expect that global population will peak at seven billion or so in 2030, then begin a long decline.[5]

The reason for the coming depopulation is shrinking family size. The Census Bureau reports that the world’s totally fertility rate (TFR)—the number of children born per woman during her reproductive lifetime—has declined to 2.9, its lowest level ever. As recently as 1985, the worldwide TFR was 4.2. In many countries, couples commonly stop at one or two children.

There are now 79 countries—representing 40% of the world’s population—with fertility rates below the 2.2 needed to sustain their present numbers. The developed nations have been hit the hardest. Fifteen of them, including Russia, Germany, and Italy, already fill more coffins than cradles each year. But this “birth dearth,” as Ben Wattenberg has called it, has now spread well beyond the developed world. There are now 27 “developing” countries where women are averaging fewer than 2.2 children, including such unlikely nations as Sri Lanka and Thailand.   While the population of portions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America will continue to grow for several more decades, the rest of the world will soon be in a demographic free fall.  

If the human face of this population implosion is melancholy—villages bereft of children, schools closed for lack of students—the economic consequences are nothing short of grim:  Labor shortages cramp production, the housing market grows moribund, and this in turn creates a drag on real estate and other sectors of the economy. One wonders how much of Japan’s current economic malaise can be directly traced to insufficient numbers of young people to power the economy?

Humanity’s long-term problem, it now seems, is not going to be too many children, but too few:  Too few children to fill the schools and universities, too few young people entering the work force, too few couples buying homes and second cars. In short, too few consumers and producers to drive the economy forward. The imploding markets of Europe and the economic sluggishness of Japan will spread soon enough to the U.S. and the rest of the world.  All this prompts a pragmatic question: Why spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on contraception, sterilizations, and abortions that will only bring that day closer?

Population control advocates have been quick to claim credit for falling birth rates—and to ask for more billions to finish the job. But anyone who has seen the checkered path of “family planning” programs in the developing world finds it hard to take their claim—or request for additional funds—seriously.  

Something over two-thirds of the world’s fertility decline can be accounted for by simple modernity, as women marry later, have greater educational opportunities, and work outside the home. The only population-control programs that have enjoyed conspicuous success have relied on the more or less compulsory sterilization of large numbers of women. The most notorious example is China, where for two decades the government has mandated the insertion of intrauterine devices after one child, sterilization after two children, and abortion for those pregnant without permission.

But the use of coercion in family-planning programs is not unique to China. The Population Research Institute has documented abuses in 38 different countries, most recently in Peru, where for the past two years a sterilization campaign has run roughshod over the people of that country.

The campaign began in spring 1996, when the Peruvian Ministry of Health set a national target for sterilizations.  Quotas were handed down to individual medical workers.  The medical director of the impoverished Huanacavelica region, for instance, ordered that “named personnel have to get two persons for voluntary surgical sterilization per month.”  According to this directive, “At the end of the year there will be rewards for the site that has ... the greatest effort to bring in people.”

To meet these targets, mobile sterilization teams travel throughout the countryside, holding “ligation festivals” and sterilizing as many women as possible at each stop. In many areas health workers receive a bonus for every procedure performed, while they can lose their jobs if they fail to meet their quotas. As the Huanacavelica directive notes, “At the end of the year each person will be evaluated by the numbers of patients captured.”

Dr. Eduardo Yong Motta, health advisor to Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, openly defends targets and quotas. “Of course the campaign has targets.... [Success is measured] through many methods, including numbers of acceptors versus non-acceptors.” He admits the dangers of setting targets, but insists that “the campaign has been a success.”

That Peruvian medical workers under heavy pressure to meet sterilization quotas should resort to coercion themselves is hardly surprising. Knowing full well this danger, the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo, condemned the use of quotas or targets in birth control campaigns, an admonition Mr. Yong Motta and other population control enthusiasts regularly breach. 

Coercion takes various forms. First, there are repeated visits to the homes of holdouts.  As one woman remarked, the workers came “day and night, day and night, day and night” to urge her to be sterilized. Bribes and threats are also employed. Hungry women are offered the opportunity to participate in food programs, including programs supported by the United States, if they agree to sterilization. Women already participating in food programs have been threatened with expulsion. 

Rural women report that no mention is made of sterilization’s health risks. Nor are they given the opportunity to choose alternative methods of family planning; in fact, natural family planning is actively discouraged. There have even been sterilizations performed on women without their consent, often during the course of other medical procedures. Victoria Espinoza of Piura has testified before a U.S. congressional committee that doctors at a government hospital told her she was sterilized—without warning or permission—during a Caesarean delivery. Her baby later died. She can have no others.

Dr. Motta attempts to defend the pressure tactics. “If the Ministry of Health did not do the campaign house-to-house, people would not come,” he asserts. As far as the repeat visits are concerned, “It was a doctor’s responsibility to convince the patient into doing what was best and having [a tubal ligation]. Women in Peru have many children.”

Condemned by the Peruvian bishop’s conference, and the subject of several unflattering documentaries—including a PRI effort recently shown on Peruvian national television—the sterilization campaign has faltered of late.  The government will fall far short of its “annual goal” of 78,000 tubal ligations and 22,000 vasectomies this year, Jorge Parra, director of the Ministry of Health’s “Reproductive Health and Planned Parenthood Program,” admitted on 4 June 1998.  Parra blamed the “collapse” of the program on “a subtle guerilla war” waged against the program by the Catholic Church. 

To understand how oppressive and intrusive Peru’s family planning program is, imagine how you would feel if someone from the Department of Health and Human Services showed up on your doorstep bearing contraceptives—let alone an order to report for sterilization.  Not all government-sponsored family planning programs are as coercive as Peru’s.  But there is an element of intrusiveness common to them all, for they deliberately seek to dissuade couples from welcoming children into the world.  

When the population controllers move into a poor country like Peru, primary health care invariably suffers. Government health officials and local medical associations are first co-opted by highly prized opportunities for advanced training overseas, or even by generous gifts of limousines or sought-after office equipment. Once a country’s medical establishment has agreed to make “family planning” a priority, national health budgets tend to be spent disproportionately in this area.

At the same time, fertility reduction programs funded by such groups as the U.S. Agency for International Development, the United Nations Population Fund, or the International Planned Parenthood Federation are set up. Generously funded by local standards, such programs become magnets for scarce local medical resources. Local doctors, attracted by the higher wages, abandon primary health care in favor of “family planning.”  Local health care clinics are transformed into “family planning” stations, where the only readily available medical care involves contraception, sterilization, and abortion. 

“Our health sector is collapsed,” reports Dr. Steven Karanja, the secretary of the Kenyan Medical Association. “Thousands of the Kenyan people will die of malaria, the treatment for which costs a few cents, in health facilities whose shelves are stocked to the ceiling with millions of dollars worth of pills, IUDs, Norplant, Depo-provera, etc., most of which are supplied with American money. ... A mother brought a child to me with pneumonia, but I had not penicillin to give the child. What I have in the stores are cases of contraceptives.”

“Some of these contraceptives like Depo-provera cause terrible side effects to the poor people in Kenya, who do not even have competent medical check-ups before injection. Many are maimed for life ... I look at [these women] and I am filled with sadness. They have been coerced into using these drugs. Nobody tells them about the side effects, and there are no drugs to treat their complications.”

“Special operating theaters, fully serviced and not lacking in instruments, are opened in hospitals for sterilization of women,” Dr. Karanja also notes. “In the same hospitals, emergency surgery cannot be done for lack of basic operating instruments and supplies.”[6]

Such is the state of medical care in many developing countries, where generously funded family planning programs have become a magnet for local personnel, resources, and official attention, leaving primary health care programs to collapse from official inattention or outright neglect. 

The government of the United States has been the principal architect, cheerleader, and fund-raiser for population control programs. Since the 1970’s, “stabilizing world population growth” has been enthroned as one of the five goals that all U.S. foreign aid programs must advance. In pursuit of this objective, some $385 million in population funds were appropriated by Congress in 1997 alone, with an additional $25 million budgeted for the United Nations Population Fund.

The Clinton administration pursued this war on population with special fervor.  One of President Clinton’s first official acts was to rescind the Reagan Administration’s Mexico City policy, which forbade any U.S. funds from going to organizations that perform, promote, or advocate the legalization of abortion. The chief beneficiary of this family-unfriendly act was the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which does all three, often in defiance of national laws. 

In the months leading up to the 1994 Cairo conference on Population and Development, U.S. officials took an even more radical position. Not only did they argue for global targets for population growth, they also pressed for the worldwide legalization of abortion to help meet these targets.   Dee Dee Myers, then White House Press Secretary, openly acknowledged this link on 1 April 1993, stating that the worldwide legalization of abortion was “part of the overall approach to population control.” 

Timothy Wirth, then Under Secretary of State for Population and the Environment, fumed the following month that the 114 nations that continued to place restrictions on abortion were violating “basic human rights.”  These sentiments were echoed by U.S. AID administrator J. Brian Atwood, who at a meeting of Population Cooperating Agencies in 1994, was quoted as saying that “while obstacles cannot be removed overnight, this administration will continue to stand for the principle of reproductive choice, including abortion.” 

President Clinton’s effort on behalf of global population targets failed, as did his related initiative to make abortion an integral part of “reproductive health” and, therefore, of worldwide population control programs.  Sentiment in favor of such assaults on the dignity of the human person remain pervasive in the upper echelons of this administration, however.  

What can the layman do to fight this worldwide problem for which our country is primarily responsible?  After all, the origins of the population control movement go back 30 years. So ingrained have these ideas become that many now accept the pessimistic notion that the human race is breeding like so many lemmings and is ultimately headed for the same end.  Education, then, is an important part of stopping the population control movement.  People need to be aware that we are in much graver danger of living on a depopulated earth than one with too many people.

Catholics, especially, can also help spread the truth that people are not to be seen as mere numbers, but as unrepeatable unique individuals with immortal souls created by God to spend eternity with Him.

There have been recent Congressional efforts to control the population control agenda. The first of these initiatives is to reinstate the Mexico City policy. This is important, and Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ) should be commended for his leadership on this. Still more is needed. The Mexico City policy will not eliminate problems such as those occurring in Peru because it keeps funds only from those organizations that promote or perform abortions overseas. Programs of forced sterilization would not fall under its purview.

A second Congressional proposal would move $100 million from the budget for population control and put it into child survival programs.  This, too, would be helpful, but still more is needed. 

The third proposal, which would eliminate population control spending altogether, would be most effective. And, admittedly, most difficult to pass.

Population control programs continue to lead to human rights abuses. At a February 25 congressional hearing, for example, USAID Assistant Administrator Mark Schneider announced that the government of Peru was ceasing its population control campaign. Just two days later, a Peruvian newspaper published an interview with Health Minister Costa Bauer in which he announced that not only would the campaign continue, it would be expanded.  Even now, in the face of fierce public opposition, the Peruvian government—with U.S. backing—continues to press forward with its population control agenda.

I find it troubling, to say the least, that U.S. tax funds support, promote, and, indeed, undergird massive programs to control the population growth of other nations. We have no business telling families in the Third World how many children they should or should not have. Rather, we should spread and uphold the Church’s teaching on responsible parenthood, in which the frequency of births and size of the family is a matter to be determined as follows: (1) by the free, informed, mutual decision of the couple; (2) based on their conscientious assessment of their responsibilities; (3) to God, themselves, their children and family and the society of which they are a part; and (4) enlightened by the authentic teaching of the Church’s magisterium regarding the objective moral order and the licit methods of spacing or limiting pregnancies. (Most Rev. James T. McHugh, “The Person, the Family, and Fundamental Choices,” Reprint from the 1983-1984 Respect Life Program Manual, NCCB)

Our faith tells us to be generous in welcoming children into the world. The “better angels of our nature” so admonish. How much good we could do by sharing this message with couples across the globe.  How much good we could do with the funds now poured into urging—and even insisting—that families not welcome children, were the funds used instead to provide basic health services and sanitation. Children are not commodities to be accepted or rejected at will. They are our link to the future and teachers of their parents in the virtues of patience, prudence, and humility.  “Children are living, breathing signs of God’s love in our world....They are laughing, walking loving signs of hope in our midst.”[7]

With the Catholic Bishops of the United States, each of us has an obligation to ask and answer this question:

Our nation stands in judgment now, as it did more than a century ago: are we to be a nation that honors its commitments to the right to life, or not? And if not, then just what does our nation stand for?[8]

Endnotes:

1  Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb. New York: Ballantine Books, 1968.  Ehrlich opens the book by stating that “The battle to feed humanity is over.  In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death...” The predicted famines, needless to say, never materialized.  

2  Called National Security Study Memorandum 200, NSSM 200 for short.

3  Joe Woodard, “Rome’s Other Ghosts:  Population Control at the Food Summit,” PRI Review (January/February 1997), p. 9.

4  U.S. Bureau of the Census, World Population Profile: 1996, August 1996.  World Population Prospects: The 1996 Revision, Annex Tables 1, 2 and 3, The United Nations, Population Division, New York City.  

5  This is essentially the U.N. Population Division’s 13 December 1996 “low variant” prediction, with African, Asian, and Latin American total fertility rates adjusted to converge on those of present-day Europe, or 1.35 children per woman.

6  Dr. Steven Karanja, “Health System Collapsed.” PRI Review, March/April 1997.

7  Letter from Rev. Pius X Harding, O.S.B., dated July 19, 1996 to President Bill Clinton

8  “Light and Shadows: Our Nation 25 Years After Roe v. Wade,” National Conference of Catholic Bishops, November 1997.