Foreign Policy In Focus

Of all the overlapping explanations proffered for the recent spate of legislation designed to limit access to contraception and abortion in the United States, few have any kind of international focus. This makes sense, as few of the proponents of such measures refer to global concerns. Yet it seems likely that deep-seated fears of demographic change are lurking somewhere behind such efforts, and, more importantly, help to make compromise so difficult.

The first thing to remember is that, besides the larger debate over abortion, concerns about contraception have been germinating in some quarters for several years. In 2003, on the 30^th anniversary of Roe V. Wade, Cristina Page, of the National Abortion Rights Action League, and Amanda Peterman, from Right to Life Michigan, co-wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, titled “The Right to Agree.” In this op-ed, Page and Peterman wrote of finding common ground on such issues as support for single mothers, affordable child care, an end to violent rhetoric and actions, and supporting legislation that would require that health insurance plans cover contraceptives. While there was reportedly little strong response from pro-choice organizations, Peterman found herself ostracized from her fellow activists.  Page has subsequently written about how this chain of events helped her to realize that much of the purported anti-abortion activity actually is not focused on abortion per se, but on larger anxieties about families and sexuality.

So what does this have to do with the world outside? Despite the very low rates of abortion (and sexually-transmitted diseases) in the Netherlands, that country’s policies of sex education, along with subsidizing and promoting contraception, do not endear themselves to American conservatives. The exact opposite is true. While the Times, in a 2006 article titled “Contra-Contraception” highlighted the ethical reasons for such seeming cognitive dissonance, it also seems likely that there is a subconscious (and sometimes very conscious!) strategic explanation. In other words, if the Netherlands, and many other countries in Europe and around the world, manage to prevent abortions by preventing pregnancy, that is not considered an acceptable strategy, partially because the resulting low fertility rates allegedly leave such countries open to conquest by Muslim immigrants.

This hypothesis, sometimes awkwardly referred to as “Eurabia” (most Muslim immigrants, like most Muslims in general, are not Arab), has become a staple of right-wing rhetoric in the past decade. Pat Buchanan has mentioned this trope repeatedly, beginning with his book Death of the West in 2001.  Mark Steyn has largely built a career on this sort of thing; he made a considerable impact with America Alone in 2006, and was continually invoking concerns of low fertility, though without explicitly mentioning an Islamic takeover, in recent months. Numerous other authors have added their voices to this chorus of fear, and opponents of the idea also responded in kind. Indeed, such fears are not only misplaced, they are comprehensively wrong across the board. The numbers regarding fertility and immigration patterns, as well as the social and political beliefs of many Muslims in Europe, do not even remotely support the hypothesis of people like Steyn, and yet their ideas have stuck in the minds of many. Anders Behring Breivik and the English Defence League share these concerns. Perhaps more importantly, so does the American Christian Right, the most bellicose demographic in America, and the same one responsible for the wave of legislation targeting contraception and abortion.

Christopher Hitchens sometimes noted that conservative religious groups have been known to put aside their differences in opposition to secular modernity, but that is not currently on the agenda for American Evangelicals vis-à-vis Islam. The situation is somewhat different in Europe, where secular and/or leftist groups, feminists, gay-rights activists, and others have also sometimes endorsed restrictions on Islamic dress and mosque construction; though they also tend to fiercely oppose groups like the English Defense League. In any event, American conservatives seem to want “more babies” (in the memorable tirade of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse’s Leslee Unruh) more than they want fewer abortions, partially due to fear that the wrong people are reproducing too often. This is one reason, though not the largest, why Cristina Page and Amanda Peterman had such a brief opportunity to agree.        

Scott Charney is an intern at Foreign Policy in Focus.

On the occasion of the world's population reaching seven billion, William Ryerson,  founder and president of Population Media Center and chairman of the Population Institute, told Alanna Shaikh at UN Dispatch:

The first earth day was largely about population growth, then it became taboo. Part of why it become taboo was human rights violations committed by India and China [in the name of population control presumably -- Ed.], and partly was because of Ronald Reagan, who said that population growth was a good thing. He was influenced by Julian Simon, who said [in his book The Ultimate Resource and elsewhere -- Ed.] there was no limit to how many people the planet could support.

Furthermore

There are economists that believe that endless population growth is necessary for economic growth. This is a Ponzi scheme form of economics. It will not last. … Some biologists feel that after oil and fossil fuels are gone, the planet could sustain 2 billion people in a Western European lifestyle. At the Ethiopian lifestyle, we could maybe sustain 10 billion people.

Those of the belief that economic growth requires open-ended population growth would be advised that living Ethiopian-style (or lack thereof) makes for poor consumers. Meanwhile, Ryerson refrains from mentioning those who believe the exploding world population -- the planet's "carrying capacity" -- is an excuse for "global elites" to institute the Great Die-off. According to this world view, by means ranging from neglect to sterilization to dosing with infectious diseases  the super-rich hope to re-design the world with a minimal look, population-wise. Since it focuses on no particular group, it's not genocide, just mass murder to the tenth power. An example of this outlook is provided by Webster Tarpley back when he was with Lyndon LaRouche. (His work is often valuable today.)

During their preparations for the United Nations' so-called International Conference on Population and Development, scheduled to be held in Cairo in September of this year [1994], the genocidal bureaucrats of the U.N. are seeking to condition governments and public opinion worldwide to accept the notion of a "carrying capacity" for our planet. In other words, the U.N. butchers would like to establish scientific credibility for the idea that there is an absolute theoretical maximum number of persons the earth can support. Some preliminary documents for the Cairo conference set a world population level of 7.27 billion to be imposed for the year 2050, using compulsory abortion, sterilization, euthanasia and other grisly means.

Note how much sooner we're reaching the number that will trigger these events than was anticipated at the time. Those who believe this cite Malthus at his worst (however imaginative). 

All the children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to this level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the deaths of grown persons … we should facilitate … the operations of nature in producing this mortality. … Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.

Or as James Corbett, whose website The Corbett Report is a media center for open-source intelligence news, claims: 

Overpopulation, like the global warming fraud, is a false front for the eugenics program.

Here's an example of quotes that those who subscribe to this line of thinking cite as proof. 

“A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
Ted Turner

“We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.”
Mikhail Gorbachev

“World population needs to be decreased by 50%.”
Henry Kissinger

“Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license.”
David Brower, the Sierra Club

Looks like, when it comes to percentages, loose lips sink not only ships but populations. In fact, there may be some truth to the murderous aspirations attributed to the super-rich. It doesn't, however, detract from the need to slow population growth. In fact, we're close to a tipping point, or, pivoting to another cliché, a perfect storm, as Ryerson says.

The combination of rising oil prices and declining water could lead to a perfect storm where suddenly all these things lead to human catastrophe around the planet. … Right now [the World Food Program] responds to famines in Sahel [the North African coast-to-coast zone just below the Sahara] or East Africa but they have never dealt with a billion people starving all at once [with] chaos all over the world as a billion people rampage for food. … There would simply be no ability of the donor countries to respond to a situation of this magnitude. It could happen between 2012 and 2015, according to an estimate by the U.S. military.

Those who dismiss concerns about overpopulation parallel and, as well, are enmeshed with those who deny climate change. Since the price we'll be paying if they're wrong is non-refundable,  it's better to be safe than sorry ­ -- to trot out another cliché -- and at least act as if overpopulation and climate change true.
 
Even small measures, accumulated, can help turn the tide. At the Globe and Mail, Doug Saunders writes about a variation on family planning.

The solution is outlandishly simple. Mexico … did it successfully in less than a decade: You send out teams to villages who explain not how to cut family sizes (an abstract concept) but how to widen the space between children – a concrete act that both parents and children appreciate. Four years between kids, rather than four months, opens up a new world. “… It's the moment when poor families notice they can do better for their children if they have fewer children.”

We'll give Ryerson the last word.

We must persuade governments to celebrate low fertility rates and declining populations.

It might help if religions bought into this too.

In a recent Focal Points post, Michael Busch notes that "the gradual transition of hegemony between the United States and China is currently being threatened by Washington's insistence that Beijing dispense with its clever practice of currency manipulation, tinkering that has artificially driven down the price of Chinese money." He then quotes Thomas P.M. Barnett writing for World Politics Review (can't link -- paywall).

China's demographic clock is ticking like no other nation's in human history. Already losing its cheap-labor advantage right now, China is set to stockpile elders from here on out at a pace never before witnessed. By 2050, it will have more non-working old people (400 million plus) than America's total projected population (400 million). . . . That should explain what's driving China's seemingly selfish economic strategy. [It hopes that the] seemingly inexhaustible engine of [its] savings will be able to sustain . . . a rapidly aging East. 

In the cover story of the November Foreign Policy, Phillip Longman writes about this "gray tsunami" that is engulfing not only China and the United States, but much of the world. He writes:

It's true that the world's population overall will increase by roughly one-third over the next 40 years. . . . driven not by birth rates, which have plummeted around the world, but primarily by an increase in the number of elderly people. . . . Then . . . humans will face the very real prospect that our numbers will fall as fast -- if not faster -- than the rate at which they once grew. . . . That might sound like an appealing prospect: less traffic, more room at the beach, easier college admissions. But be careful what you wish for.

To those of us who aren't versed in the issue, it's counterintuitive to wring our hands over a significant decrease in the world's population. But if it's our society's wealth were concerned about, Longman explains that it depends on demographics.

At first, with fertility declining and the workforce aging, there are proportionately fewer children to raise and educate. This is good: It frees up female labor to join the formal economy and allows for greater investment in the education of each remaining child. All else being equal, both factors stimulate economic development. . . . Then, however, the outlook turns bleak. Over time, low birth rates lead not only to fewer children, but also to fewer working-age people just as the percentage of dependent elders explodes. This means that as population aging runs its course, it might well go from stimulating the economy to depressing it. Fewer young adults means fewer people needing to purchase new homes, new furniture, and the like, as well as fewer people likely to take entrepreneurial risks.

Longman writes: "a planet that grays indefinitely is clearly asking for trouble." But, to this author, it seems that the planet, already overburdened, will find itself in an even worse fix if a higher birth rates accelerates the depletion of its resources. 

To those of us who were first exposed to the overpopulation problem through the alarmism of the likes of Paul Ehrlich and his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, advocating a higher birthrate is putting the cart before the horse. Besides it pushes the issue of overpopulation even further out of the spotlight. Nor does it help that talk of curbing population has been given a bad name by those whose concerns about the planet's "carrying capacity" mask a Malthusian inclination to cull the earthly herd. (I've just begun to read Edwin Black's imposing 2003 work War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race.) 

We need to find a way to present the low birth rate in a more positive light without coming across as a tool of the ruling class. Between those who still hold a torch for eugenics (some under the guise of genetics apparently) and evangelicals with their imperative to go forth and populate -- especially since U.S. whites are due to be outnumbered by Latinos and European whites by Muslims -- overpopulation has become a real political third rail. 

Bottom line, though: a planet denuded of resources by billions more individuals than it was meant to hold is no good to anybody, rich or poor. More to come.

Our intuition informs many of us that the single greatest problem on earth, along with -- and inextricably linked to -- climate change is overpopulation. The earth is beginning to seem as overrun by humans as a neglected granary is by mice.

But, in American politics, the issue is, to use a term bordering on over-used these days, a "third rail." (In other words, to those unfamiliar with subways and commuter rail lines, no one wants to touch it.) First, it antagonizes conservative Christians, who view the edict "go forth and multiply" as a virtual amendment to the Ten Commandments. Second, many whites interpret advisory warnings to keep family size down as an open invitation to American Latinos to surpass them in numbers  The third concern comes from the left, some of whom think that attempts to control population are the work of those who believe in modern-day eugenics (the dark side of genetic engineering).

Unadorned, the voice of eugenics today is no more evident than in the manifesto cum ultimatum that the Discovery Channel hostage taker James J. Lee issued. According to an AP article, Lee, who obviously watches too much TV, had previously "demanded an end to Discovery Communications LLC's shows such as TLC's 'Kate [Gosselin] Plus 8' and '19 Kids and Counting.'" He wrote ["sics" where called for]:

The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST [focus] on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order. Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the

Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. . . . All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed.

Admit it, don't you kind of wish Lee had fleshed out the game show idea? Exactly how would that work? Also, referring to giving birth as "false heroics" is pure genius to those of us who believe that it may be more heroic for a married couple to choose not to reproduce and add to the overpopulation problem.

Okay, snap out of it. Whether or not events in his life helped drive him to his moment of infamy, Lee was obviously in the grips of advanced mental illness. His phrase "parasitic human infants" invokes how the Nazis killed "useless eaters" (the disabled). Also, thinking that media corporations would respond to his call for TV programs promoting sterilization is further evidence of how deluded he was.

Lee also invoked influential nineteenth century British scholar Thomas Malthus, who wrote:

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.

Lee and his ilk vastly simplify Malthus. Still, the term Malthusian has come to mean that population increases more rapidly than the food supply unless slowed by disease and war. This concept, rightly or wrongly, instills fear in those who believe that the ruling class and the corporate rich seek ways to "cull the herd." (More in a future post about how that helps oligarchs and their associates.)

In 1994 Webster Tarpley, who describes himself as an activist historian (though whose hyperbole, as seen in the excerpt quoted below, sometimes results in him being categorized as a conspiracy theorist ) wrote:

During their preparations for the United Nations’ so-called International Conference on Population and Development, scheduled to be held in Cairo in September of this year, the genocidal bureaucrats of the U.N. are seeking to condition governments and public opinion worldwide to accept the notion of a "carrying capacity" for our planet. In other words, the U.N. butchers would like to establish scientific credibility for the idea that there is an absolute theoretical maximum number of persons the earth can support. Some preliminary documents for the Cairo conference set a world population level of 7.27 billion to be imposed for the year 2050, using compulsory abortion, sterilization, euthanasia and other grisly means. It is clear that the U.N. and its oligarchical supporters seek to exterminate population groups in excess of the limit.

Whether or not overpopulation has the potential to be turned to its own uses by the ruling and corporate classes doesn't make it any less pressing an issue. Nor does it absolve us of the responsibility to devise and implement solutions. (Culling the herd aside, that is.)

New York Times piece, India Tries Using Cash Bonuses to Slow Birthrates, Jim Yardley details an Indian federal program. Intended to "allow India more time to curb a rapidly growing population that threatens to turn its demography from a prized asset into a crippling burden," it attempts to persuade rural Indian newlyweds to delay childbirth.

Though with . . .

. . . almost 1.2 billion people . . . roughly half the population is younger than 25. This 'demographic dividend' is one reason some economists predict that India could surpass China in economic growth rates within five years. India will have a young, vast work force while a rapidly aging China will face the burden of supporting an older population.

However, on the heels of the above "though" follows a monumental "but."

. . . if youth is India's advantage, the sheer size of its population poses looming pressures on resources and presents an enormous challenge for an already inefficient government to expand schooling and other services.

Still . . .

It was considered a sign of progress that India's Parliament debated "population stabilization" this month after largely ignoring the issue for years.

India may just be addressing the tip of the overpopulation iceberg, if in a more sensitive way than China's authoritarian one-child policy. But would that more states considered addressing population concerns as a "sign of progress." To some states a burgeoning population serves as another weapon, along with its armed forces and perhaps nuclear weapons, as a way to equalize its power with larger states. In the United States, meanwhile, overpopulation has become a "third rail" for politicians. First of all, it's contrary to the go-forth-and-procreate agenda of evangelicals and second, it invokes fear that Latinos will soon outnumber whites.

As Focal Points readers are no doubt aware, a sampling of overpopulation's perils include: depletion of natural resources such as oil and water; deforestation and resultant global warming; mass species extinctions; and, along with educational shortfalls, heightened infant and child mortality.

As part of our commitment to the most fundamental issues threatening humanity (not that we won't write about it at all, but climate change is addressed more ably elsewhere), Focal Points intends to feature posts about the earth's "carrying capacity" as we have been nuclear weapons.