Population Control-Today and Tomorrow - J. Kasun
Population Control-Today and Tomorrow - J. Kasun
Population Control-Today and Tomorrow - J. Kasun
ANALYSIS
Population Control
Todayand Tomorrow?
by Jacqueline R. Kasun
ROOTS OF THE
MOVEMENT
The quest of those in power to control
population is at least as old as the Exodus
story of Pharaoh killing Hebrew baby
boys. In our time, the movement has received stimuli from both eugenics and
environmental worries.
Eugenics was a rather popular cause
in the first half of the twentieth century
in the United States and England. More
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THE EXPLOSION
New concerns emerged in the postwar
years. A sudden spurt in population
growth occurred in the 1960s as antibiotics and improvements in sanitation
sharply reduced death rates. (Birthrates
had been declining throughout the century as women joined the workforce and
curtailed childbearing.) As death rates
plunged below the falling birthrates,
world population grew at an unprecedented pace. The response was intense.
Population Negation
Birthrates have been declining
precipitously around the world.
Forty-four percent of the worlds
people live in nations whose
population has shrunk or at least
stalled in its growth.
If present trends continue, Europes population will fall by
100 million and Japans by 21
million in the next 50 years.
Yet funding and programs for
population control are increasing.
The population-control market
is saturated, with a surfeit of
contraceptives in many developing countries that otherwise lack
basic medicines.
Many Third World countries are
suffering from the cultural seeds
planted by the family planning
movement, especially promiscuity, which spreads sexually
transmitted diseases.
providing for the worlds largest program of publicly financed birth control,
targeted both at home and abroad.
In 1970, President Nixon appointed
the Commission on Population and the
American Future, under the chairmanship of John D. Rockefeller III, founder
of the Population Council. That same
year, Planned Parenthood published a
list of proposed measures to reduce
U.S. fertility, among them putting fertility control agents in the water supply,
encouraging homosexuality, imposing a
substantial marriage tax, discouraging
home ownership, requiring permits for
couples to have children, making abortion compulsory, and mandating sterilization of all women who had borne two
children. The United Nations proclaimed
a World Population Year in 1974.
In a document that remained classified from 1974 to 1980, the U.S. State
Department warned that mandatory
population control measures might be
necessary to bring about a two-child
family on the average throughout the
world by the year 2000. By 1975, the
U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) was the worlds chief player
in world population control, spending
more money on it than did all other countries combined.
In 1978, AID officials initiated and
Congress enacted Section 104(d) of the
new foreign aid legislation, which stipulated that all activities proposed for
financing shall be designed to build
motivation for smaller families. The
World Bank also began to impose population control requirements on its lending, as did other international institutions
and countries. Henceforth, developing
countries seeking international aid
would be required to give evidence of
their commitment to the control of
population growth.
PROMISED CALAMITIES
The justifications were a long, varied
list of calamities that would ensue in the
absence of swift, stern action. Starvation
was looming, according to experts such
as biologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford
University. The Sierra Club published
his book The Population Bomb, which
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ANNUAL EDITIONS
many other programs in the $1215 billion a year U.S. foreign aid budget.)
CONDOM FAILURE
Stephen Karanja, a Kenyan gynecologist, visited the United States in 2000 to
report on what he said were the devastating effects of U.S. population programs
in his country. Under the pretext of
preventing AIDS, he said, foreign-paid
family-planning workers promote promiscuity by indiscriminately distributing
condoms and are taking over the healthcare system to perform sterilizations.
Over and over, we have seen it in Africacondoms do not stop HIV/AIDS,
he said. In the last two years in Kenya,
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The Editor
From The World & I, June 2001, pp. 50-55. 2001 by The World & I, a publication of The Washington Times Corporation. Reprinted by permission.