The World Population Crisis
Nicholas Eberstadt
Former research fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation
- “With respect to fertility, there are issues attendant to the sub-replacement fertility levels that now characterize nearly half the planet’s populace (e.g. how to finance old-age retirement for a rapidly aging citizenry) and questions for East Asia related to a looming bride shortage (born of sex-selective abortion practices that have strongly favored male descendants ).”
- “Despite the new code-words devised and alliances sought — ’stabilizing world population,’ ’promoting sustainable development,’ ’enhancing women’s reproductive health and freedom,’ and so forth — the population movement is still fixated upon what it once was candid enough to call ’population control’ — implementing ’population targets’ and achieving ’birth goals,’ especially in the low-income regions of the world.”
- Eberstadt points out that “while the pre-war champions of population control represented a variety of ideologies, many supporters were devotees of eugenics. These eugenicists proposed to use sterilization and other means of family limitation to improve the ’quality of the human race’ by restricting breeding of those of “inferior stock.”
- Eberstadt states “the ideological aims of the population movement are simply not shared by ordinary American taxpayers.”
- “Ever since the early 1950s, America’s largest and most prestigious foundations have been in the front lines of the struggle to ’defuse’ what Malthusian activists termed ’the population bomb.’ In no small part, the structure, outlook, and policies of today’s ’population movement’ — the great international edifice that has been erected purposely to reshape the world’s demographic patterns, and most especially to alter fertility levels in Asia, Africa, and Latin America — trace their lineage to institutions, initiatives, and individuals sponsored by the community of American foundations.”
- “While the philanthropic community can point to a number of incontestable beneficial projects from the hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars is has spent on ’the world population crisis,’ the ’population movement’ today stands as a deeply troubled venture.”
- “The contemporary international effort to limit world population, in the language of contemporary pedagogy, is ’challenged’: politically, intellectually, and sad to say, even ethically.”
- A significant factor for population controllers after World War II was “the fact that the pace of population growth for what were then termed ’backward areas’ — Asia, Africa, and Latin America — had come to surpass the population growth rate for Europe and North America, possibly for the first time since the ’Age of European Exploration’ had commenced several centuries earlier.”
- “By the 1980s, . . . research by American demographers and economists was seriously questioning the fundamental premises upon which the ’population movement’ rested.”
- The 1986 National Academy of Sciences’ Population Growth and Economic Development: Policy Questions, “cast doubt upon a number of specific economic tenets of population activists, such as the allegedly adverse impact of population growth on savings rates and educational quality.”
- “The Overseas Development Council . . . acknowledged in 1994, ’available evidence from empirical studies does not clearly show that population growth exerts a negative influence on development.’”
- A study published in 1994 confirmed that “. . . the impact on fertility of subsidized distribution of contraceptives was vastly lower than enthusiasts were claiming — so long, that is, as those population programs were truly voluntary in nature.” The problem became that countries like China replaced voluntary with mandatory programs and “suffice it to say that population officers at American foundations were not among the Chinese program’s most vocal critics.”
“This jarring ethical obtuseness was helping to fuel a strong reaction against activist population policies within an increasing portion of the American public.”
“The moral myopia of key elements within the population movement, and the increasing shrillness of some of its spokespersons, had their own adverse impact on public attitudes toward international population programs.”
THUS, WE CAN SAY THAT: Eberstadt described the population controllers as “ethically obtuse” and displaying a “moral myopia” concerning the programs they push.
