Body Count: Population and its enemies - the population-control movement is gaining steam

National Review, Oct 25, 1999 by Stephen Moore

Mr. Moore is a director at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

At a Washington reception, the conversation turned to the merits of small families. One woman volunteered that she had just read Bill McKibben's environmental tome, Maybe One, on the benefits of single-child families.

She claimed to have found it "ethically compelling." I chimed in: "Even one child may put too much stress on our fragile ecosystem. McKibben says 'maybe one.' I say, why not none?" The response was solemn nods of agreement, and even some guilt-ridden whispers between husbands and wives.

McKibben's acclaimed book is a tribute to the theories of British economist Thomas Malthus. Exactly 200 years ago, Malthus-the original dismal scientist-wrote that "the power of population is . . . greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man." McKibben's application of this idea was to rush out and have a vasectomy. He urges his fellow greens to do the same-to make single-child families the "cultural norm" in America.

Now, with the United Nations proclaiming that this month we will surpass the demographic milestone of 6 billion peo-ple, the environmental movement and the media can be expected to ask: Do we really need so many people? A recent AP headline lamented: "Century's growth leaves Earth crowded-and noisy." Seemingly, Malthus has never had so many apostles.

In a rational world, Malthusianism would not be in a state of intellectual revival, but thorough disrepute. After all, virtually every objective trend is running in precisely the opposite direction of what the widely acclaimed Malthusians of the 1960s-from Lester Brown to Paul Ehrlich to the Club of Rome-predicted. Birth rates around the world are lower today than at any time in recorded history. Global per capita food production is much higher than ever before. The "energy crisis" is now such a distant memory that oil is virtually the cheapest liquid on earth. These facts, collectively, have wrecked the credibility of the population-bomb propagandists.

Yet the population-control movement is gaining steam. It has won the hearts and wallets of some of the most influential leaders inside and outside government today. Malthusianism has evolved into a multi-billion-dollar industry and a political juggernaut.

Today, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), the State Department, and the World Bank, the federal government pumps some 350 million tax dollars a year into population-containment activities. The Clinton administration would be spending at least twice that amount if not for the efforts of two Republican congressmen, Chris Smith of New Jersey and Todd Tiahrt of Kansas, who have managed to cut off funding for the most coercive birth-reduction initiatives.

Defenders of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) and other such agencies insist that these programs "protect women's reproductive freedom," "promote the health of mothers," and "reduce infant mortality." Opponents of international "family planning," particularly Catholic organizations, are tarred as anti-abortion fanatics who want to deprive poor women of safe and cheap contraception. A 1998 newspaper ad by Planned Parenthood, entitled "The Right Wing Coup in Family Planning," urged continued USAID funding by proclaiming: "The very survival of women and children is at stake in this battle." Such rhetoric is truly Orwellian, given that the entire objective of government-sponsored birth-control programs has been to invade couples' "reproductive rights" in order to limit family size. The crusaders have believed, from the very outset, that coercion is necessary in order to restrain fertility and avert global eco-collapse.

The consequences of this crusade are morally atrocious. Consider the one-child policy in China. Some 10 million to 20 million Chinese girls are demographically "missing" today because of "sex-selective abortion of female fetuses, female infant mortality (through infanticide or abandonment), and

selective neglect of girls ages 1 to 4," according to a 1996 U.S. Census Bureau report. Girls account for over 90 percent of the inmates of Chinese orphanages-where children are left to die from neglect.

Last year, Congress heard testimony from Gao Xiao Duan, a former Chinese administrator of the one-couple, one-child policy. Gao testified that if a woman in rural China is discovered to be pregnant without a state-issued "birth-allowed certificate," she typically must undergo an abortion-no matter how many months pregnant she is. Gao recalled, "Once I found a woman who was nine months' pregnant but did not have a birth-allowed certificate.

According to the policy, she was forced to undergo an abortion surgery. In the operating room, I saw how the aborted child's lips were sucking, how its limbs were stretching. A physician injected poison into its skull, and the child died and was thrown into the trash can."

The pro-choice movement is notably silent about this invasion of women's "reproductive rights." In 1989, Molly Yard, of the National Organization for Women, actually praised China's program as "among the most intelligent in the world." Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, the godfather of today's neo-Malthusian movement, once trumpeted China's population control as "remarkably vigorous and effective." He has congratulated Chinese rulers for their "grand experiment in the management of population."