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The Myth of Overcrowding, Part 2: Population Politics

By Jim Peron

Population Politics

IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES. AND THE IDEA THAT the world is overpopulated leads to certain inescapable conclusions. If there are too many people in the world, then each newborn is a threat to every other human being. If these babies are threats, then it would be acceptable to eradicate the threat. Now, this may sound harsh and unrealistic. After all, most population control groups don't actually advocate the eradication of children.

But many of these groups come very close to this view when they argue that unless people "voluntarily" restrict their family size it should be done "coercively." In his book Population, Resources, Environment, Ehrlich acknowledges that "compulsory control of family size is an unpalatable idea to many, but the alternatives may be much more horrifying." Quoted in John Maddox, The Doomsday Syndrome, p. 47.Note On another occasion, Ehrlich compares children to cancer: "We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out." Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968), p. xi.Note Another advocate of population control, Kingsley Davis, says, "Over-reproduction--that is, the bearing of more than four children--is a worse crime than most and should be outlawed." Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource, p. 311.Note Biologist Paul Silverman told one university audience, "If voluntary restraints on population growth are not forthcoming we will be faced with a need to consider coercive measures." Ibid, p. 315.Note

Myths affect public policy. An interesting example of this is Adolph Hitler's policy of Lebensraum. Hitler wanted to expand the territory under German control because he believed that Germany was becoming overpopulated and soon would not be able to feed its people. On January 21, 1938 Hitler told his generals:

A good harvest provides just enough food for our present population for one year. If the harvest is only mediocre, we lose several months' food supplies. If the harvest is poor--and this will certainly happen one day--the German people will only get enough food for quarter or half a year-on the basis of the present population, that is. But Germany's population growth is 600,000 new heads every year. That's six million in ten years. How can Germany continue to feed her people? That is only possible if we acquire new territory--and we must get that by brute force. David Irving, The War Path: Hitler's Germany 1933-1939 (London: Papermac, 1985) p. 67.Note

The flaw in Hitler's reasoning was that he assumed that agricultural output couldn't be increased more rapidly than population growth without territorial conquest. This same logic is behind the entire overpopulation hysteria. The proof of his error is that Germany today has a much larger population than it had in 1938, and yet it is one of the richest countries in the world. The two projections that Hitler made--that population would continue to grow and that agricultural output would be stagnant--were both wrong. Food production grew faster than did the population, and today the German birth rate is well below the replacement level.

Ehrlich begins with the same premises as Hitler, but he tackles the issue from the opposite direction; in other words, whereas Hitler's solution was to forcibly expand agricultural output, Ehrlich's solution is to forcibly limit population growth.

Coercive methods of birth control have been used in a number of Third World countries. Anthropologist Steven Mosher, who lived in rural China when the "one child" policy of the government was implemented, describes what happened there:

... there were eighteen women, all from five- to nine-months pregnant, and many red-eyed from lack of sleep and crying. They sat listlessly on short plank benches in a semicircle about the front of the room, where He Kaifeng [a top cadre and party member] explained the purpose of the meeting in no uncertain terms. "You are here because you have yet to `think clear' about birth control, and you will remain here until you do." . . . Looking coldly around the room, he said slowly and deliberately, "None of you has any choice in this matter. . . . " Then, visually calculating how far along the women in the room were, he went on to add, "The two of you who are eight or nine months pregnant will have a Caesarean; the rest of you will have a shot which will cause you to abort." Quoted in Nick Eberstadt, The Poverty of Communism, p. 117.Note

The New York Times reported in 1982 that Chinese women were "rounded up and forced to have abortions." The article by Christopher Wren said that "vigilantes abducted pregnant women on the streets and hauled them off, sometimes handcuffed or trussed, to abortion clinics." Christopher Wren, "Chinese Region Showing Resistance to National Goals for Birth Control", New York Times, May 16, 1982.Note

Mosher describes the pain of one woman whose pregnancy was discovered at the last minute. She pleaded to be allowed to have one more child. "In the village there is no way to survive if you don't have a son," she cried. In the rural areas of China as in many other parts of the underdeveloped world, children were regarded as a means of support for parents in their old age. Since a son was more likely than a daughter to be able to provide for his parents, many families wanted to have at least one son. But if they were allowed only one child and that child was a girl, they were faced with a problem. Many rural families solved this problem by simply allowing female babies to die. In an article for the Wall Street Journal Mosher wrote that the People's Republic Press openly spoke of the "butchering, drowning, and leaving to die of female infants and the maltreating of women who have given birth to girls." Steven Mosher, "Why Are Baby Girls Being Killed in China?" Wall Street Journal, July 25, 1983.Note A policy to "limit" population growth actually resulted in the genocide of female children.

In the Dongpu district of Canton, birth control regulations that came into effect in 1987 stated that any unmarried pregnant woman "should be ordered to have an abortion." A woman was required to have an IUD inserted within four months of having her first child. Any woman "who has had one child [who] fails at birth control" would be forced to have an abortion and undergo sterilization. According to China Spring, the regulations further stated, "If any unauthorized baby dies within three months of birth, the penalty will be only 300 yuan." This penalty is less than a mother would have to pay for having an "unauthorised" child and it is therefore a blatant attempt to encourage infanticide. Quoted in Julian Simon, Population Matters, p. 231.Note

In another case, the Chinese government tried to force a Chinese woman, studying with her husband in the United States, to have an abortion. The woman, who was pregnant with her second child, received a letter from the Population Control Office of the Manchurian factory where she had previously worked. The letter said:

The punishment for this kind of violation is very severe, and we strongly advise you not to risk it.

If you cannot have this abortion done abroad, then the factory director orders you to return to China immediately. Any further delays, and you will be punished according to the law.

There is nothing ambiguous about our order! Make up your mind immediately. Washington Post, April 10, 1988, p. B1.Note

The U.S. government, through the Agency for International Development, was involved in this "birth control" program. AID "disclaimed direct involvement in the program, although it was a major contributor to the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), both of which supplied funds to the Chinese program." Jacqueline Kasun, The War Against Population, p. 90.Note

Forced abortion and the murder of babies in Communist China, like Hitler's Lebensraum policy, were direct results of accepting the overpopulation myth. Nick Eberstadt writes that the Chinese policy was implemented because the government "had decided that its modernization program was being threatened by `excessive' childbearing in the provinces (the role of the government in depressing the production of food or restricting the expansion of consumer industries was not a subject for public discussion)." Nick Eberstadt, The Poverty of Communism, p. 117.Note The Chinese saw coercive birth control as just another form of socialism. According to a member of China's Family Planning Commission,

social production is composed of material production and human reproduction. . . . The socialist system in China [emphasizes both] material production and human reproduction, and [must] regulate population growth in a planned way, as we regulate material production following plans. Quoted in Julian Simon, Population Matters, p. 235.Note

The Chinese program was not condemned by the population control movement. On the contrary, many groups applauded the use of raw coercion. UNFPA gave an award to China for its attempts to control population growth. Another group, Californians for Population Stabilization, held an "Award Dinner in Honour of The People's Republic of China" to honour the Communist Chinese "for acknowledging overpopulation and encouraging family planning." The main speaker at the award dinner was the president of the Population Institute.

When a number of individuals within the American government became disturbed that taxpayers' money was being channelled through private groups to help finance coercive "population control" in China and attempted to stop these grants, Planned Parenthood, which receives millions in taxpayer funding, launched a vigorous lobbying effort to counter the proposal. The campaign scrupulously avoided all mention of the Chinese connection, implying instead that right-wing fanatics were trying to destroy birth control around the world. One ad, which ran in The Washington Post, was headed "The Right-Wing Coup in Family Planning." It claimed:

For two decades, poverty-stricken Third World countries have turned to the United States for help with their vital family planning efforts.

The aid has only cost you about a dollar a year, but the impact has been tremendous. Rapid population growth has slowed in some countries. In others, even the poorest families have been given the means to plan their own futures.

Millions of children have been spared the ravages of hunger. Thousands of women are alive today who would have died in their ninth or tenth or sixteenth pregnancy.

Planned Parenthood is proud to have played a leading role in helping the people in more than fifty nations help themselves. Where there was only desperation, we have brought hope.

Incredibly, however, everything we have achieved is now in jeopardy. In hot pursuit of an ideological victory, a handful of extremists at the White House and the Agency for International Development (A.I.D.) aim to destroy America's international family planning program--and Planned Parenthood in particular.

Their motive? Unable to impose their fanatical anti-family planning agenda on the American people they have decided to victimize people who can't fight back.

It looks like an easy win to them. And the fact is, unless we fight back, hardship and suffering will come to those who rely on us for help.

The very survival of women and children is at stake in this battle. So are the long-term prospects for dozens of developing countries. The Washington Post, March 12, 1987, p. A17.Note

The ad is a masterpiece. It totally ignores the main issue of the debate, which is whether American taxpayers should subsidize coercive programs of birth control. Readers are led to believe that Third World women beat a path to Planned Parent-hood's door begging for assistance, whereas in fact, PP and other organizations put enormous pressure on these women to accept programs they don't want. And when persuasion doesn't work, they applaud coercive measures such as those in China. Food aid is given in such a manner as to force individuals into family planning programs. The ad claims, "Millions of children have been spared the ravages of hunger," but doesn't say how: they were never allowed to be born. It implies that low birth rates promote economic development, whereas it is economic development that reduces birth rates. The ad also ignored a question that many taxpayers would have liked answered: should a tax-funded organization be directly involved in a lobbying campaign to affect legislation?

In 1966, India was suffering from massive starvation. Advisers to President Lyndon Johnson suggested that the U.S. ship wheat to India. Johnson "demanded that the Indian government first agree to mount a massive birth control program. The Indians finally moved and Johnson released the wheat over a sufficiently extended period to make certain the birth control program was off the ground." Joseph Califano, Governing America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), p. 52.Note

Through AID and other groups, the U.S. government continued to promote this agenda. Some programs achieved their goals through the cynical manipulation of greed and peer pressure. Entire villages, for example, were promised food or money in exchange for "persuading" child-bearing couples to stop having children.

In one case, villagers in India were offered cash payments on condition that 75 percent of all men in the village submit to vasectomy; and in another Indian village, `100 percent of the eligible couples' accepted family planning, mostly vasectomy, in exchange for a new village well. Though the next step, the compulsory sterilization campaign, gave Indian family planning a rather bad press, with 3 million sterilized within six months in 1976 over the protests of numerous killed or wounded, the principle of `motivation' stands unchallenged in foreign aid circles. Kasun, The War Against Population, p. 85.Note

In Indonesia, AID programs gave bonuses to individuals for "recruiting" clients for contraceptive services. Villages were assigned quotas, and if these quotas were met, the entire village was rewarded with food, health services, or other benefits. Ibid, p. 84.Note Kasun says that the "foreign aid establishment" prefers this system of group incentives "because they avoid the appearance of paying individuals to use birth control or to have themselves sterilized." She writes, "The woman who volunteers for IUD insertion in Indonesia will not only enjoy the village's food bonus but will earn her neighbours' gratitude for their share of the booty. Conversely, those who refuse this `service' will be depriving their neighbours as well as themselves of food." Ibid.Note

In some cases, the methods used in Indonesia were less subtle. Harvard Professor Donald P. Warwick says, "In the presence of civilian, military, and police leaders, women were taken to a house in which IUDs were being inserted. They were asked to go in one door and put under very strong pressure to accept an IUD before they could leave by another door. Whether this was coercion or heavy persuasion, it denied voluntary choice to acceptors." Simon, Population Matters, p. 226.Note

But what is behind all this preoccupation with "overpopulation"? Is it really concern for the welfare of the world's people? We have already seen that the population fear-mongers point to India, China, Africa, and Pakistan while ignoring New Jersey and England. In a fund-raising letter Planned Parenthood said:

Thai women and millions of other women like them in India, China, Africa, and throughout the developing nations control our destiny. Their decisions--decisions of hundreds of millions of young women--about their family's size--control your future more securely, more relentlessly than the oil crisis or the nuclear arms race.

. . . unless population growth is harnessed and slowed to meet the limited resources and human services of these nations, development of nations will be shattered. Chaos, mass famine and war will continue to increase. We will be affected for better or worse. Simon, The Ultimate Resource, p. 327.Note

Notice the fear-mongering of this letter. It tells its predominantly white readers that women in India, China, and Africa control their destinies, and that these women cause "chaos, mass famine, and war." There is no reference to the child-bearing women or high population density of any white country. It appears that overpopulation is a term used to describe countries inhabited by non-whites only. Thomas Sowell notes the selective use of the "overpopulation" accusation as well. He points out, "It should be noted, first of all, that rich people are never called `teeming masses,' no matter how many of them there are per square mile. Wealthy Park Avenue neighbourhoods have concentrations of people that will compare with slums around the world." Sowell, The Economics and Politics of Race, pp. 209-210.Note Perhaps "overpopulation" is the chic form that racism takes amongst white liberals. In the guise of concern, and in the name of environmentalism, white leftists can advocate coercive population control of blacks in Africa or of Asians in Thailand.

This is not a coincidence. In the early 1900s, a movement spread across the world to promote "scientific" breeding of people. Called eugenics, this movement was influential in all the major Western nations. Much concern was voiced about how the "unfit" over-reproduce. And, of course, the "unfit" were usually non-white (though some whites were deemed "unfit," usually Catholics in a Protestant country, or the poor).

In 1912 the movement held the First International Congress of Eugenics. The purpose of the meeting was "the prevention of the propagation of the unfit." Kasun, The War Against Population, p. 159.Note Vice-presidents of the conference included Winston Churchill; the president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan; and the president emeritus of Harvard University, Charles Elliot. The major debate in the eugenics movement was not whether people should be sterilized, but who should be sterilized. Eugenicists in the U.S. persuaded many state governments to pass laws forcing "unfit" individuals to be sterilized. The state of Indiana passed a law allowing the sterilization of the mentally handicapped in 1907. Within six years, ten other states followed suit. Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 17.Note By 1924 these laws had lead to the sterilization of almost 6,000 people. Ibid, p. 24.Note Almost all of them were poor or black. Compulsory sterilization was on statute books across the United States before it was introduced by the Nazis in Germany.

The American eugenics movement attracted a great deal of attention in Germany and helped legitimize Hitler's theories. Hitler himself praised the efforts of these advocates of "racial" purity. In Mein Kampf he lamented that individuals could be full citizens of a country without passing the necessary racial qualifications. The only bright spot that Hitler could find was the United States. He said:

At present there exists one State which manifests at least some modest attempts that show a better appreciation of how things ought to be done in this matter. It is not, however, in our model German Republic but in the U.S.A. that efforts are made to conform at least partly to the counsels of commonsense. By refusing immigrants to enter there if they are in a bad state of health, and by excluding certain races from the right to become naturalized as citizens, they have begun to introduce principles similar to those on which we wish to group the People's State. Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf (London: Hurst and Blackett Ltd., 1939) p. 367.Note

In 1935, an International Congress for Population Science was held in Berlin. The senior American delegate, Clarence G. Campbell, declared that Hitler had built his race policies on the ideas of eugenicists from around the world. The Nazi program, he said, was "a comprehensive race policy of population development and improvement that promises to be epochal in racial history." These policies set "the pattern which other nations and other racial groups must follow, if they do not wish to fall behind in their racial quality, in their racial accomplishment, and in their prospect of survival." Kühl, The Nazi Connection, p. 34.Note

Eugenic News, a major American publication of the population control movement, said in 1934:

One may condemn the Nazi policy generally, but specifically it remained for Germany in 1933 to lead the great nations of the world in the recognition of the biological foundations for national character. It is probable that the sterilization statutes of the several American states and the national sterilization statute of Germany will, in legal history, constitute a milestone which marks the control by the most advanced nations of the world of a major aspect of controlling human reproduction, comparable in importance only with the states' legal control of marriage. Ibid, p. 46.Note

In 1935, Leon F. Whitney, secretary of the American Eugenics Society, expressed his support for the race policies of Hitler. "Many far-sighted men and women in both England and America have long been working earnestly toward something very like what Hitler has now made compulsory." Ibid, p. 36.Note Eugenicist William W. Peter, secretary for the American Public Health Association, argued that Germany needed to follow radical measures to control the racial purity of the nation. Peter argued that the Germans were forced to "depend more than ever upon their own resources" but that "these resources are much depleted." The conclusion was "the present load of social irresponsibles are liabilities which represent a great deal of waste." Ibid, p. 55.Note

Harry Laughlin, another prominent eugenicist, was so impressed with Nazi efforts that he purchased an English version of a Nazi propaganda film on sterilization. The film, produced by the Racial Political Office of the Nazi Party, was bought for a screening at the Carnegie Institution but later Laughlin raised money to have it edited for wider distribution. The film was retitled Eugenics in Germany, and was widely promoted by the Eugenics Research Association and the Pioneer Fund. Ibid, p. 49.Note The latter group continues to this day spending millions of dollars to promote eugenics and population control.

American support for Hitler and his population policies was not limited to verbal praise. "The Rockefeller Foundation played a central role in establishing and sponsoring major eugenic institutes in Germany, including the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics, and Human Heredity." Ibid, p. 20.Note

Support continued even after the German eugenics movements and these institutions were controlled by the Nazis. The Rockefeller Foundation to this day is a major funder of efforts to control population growth in Third World countries. The rhetoric, of course, has changed somewhat since the 1930s: it wouldn't be acceptable in "liberal" societies today to refer to non-whites as unfit. Instead, the literature focuses on environmental issues. But there is a direct connection between the population control movement of today and the eugenics movement of yesterday. In fact, it was within the eugenics movement that the modern population control organizations were born. Some of the most prominent advocates of birth control, like the sainted Margaret Sanger, were also very active in promoting eugenics. In her magazine, Birth Control Review, Sanger wrote in 1919, "More children from the fit, less from the unfit--that is the child issue of birth control." Kasun, The War Against Population, p. 160.Note Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which became the Birth Control Federation, which is the parent of Planned Parenthood. Sanger opened the pages of her publication to prominent Nazis like Ernst Rüdin who helped formulate German racial policies. His article in Birth Control Review called for state action to "prevent the multiplication of bad stocks" and "increase the birth-rate of the sound average population." Ibid.Note Others, like the Population Reference Bureau of Guy Irving Burch, continue to operate today. Burch, in 1945, called for the compulsory sterilization of "all persons who are inadequate, either biologically or socially." Guy Irving Burch and Elmer Pendell, Population Roads to Peace or War (Washington: Population Reference Bureau, 1945), p. 103.Note It is the PRB that takes credit for inventing the term "population bomb."

These are some of the organizations that are used by AID to wage the war on population in the Third World. For political reasons, the U.S. government does not directly finance coercive sterilization or other Third World birth control programs. Instead, it channels funds to population groups in the States, which then transfer the money to the less savory programs in the non-white nations. AID also gives "money to international `private' organizations such as the International Planned Parenthood Foundation (IPPF) and UNFPA and has them do the job." Simon, The Ultimate Resource, p. 294.Note In 1977 an Irish newspaper reported a speech in which a top AID official "has said the U.S. is seeking to provide the means to sterilize a quarter of all Third World women." "Population Control of Third World Planned: Sterilisation Storm in U.S.," Evening Press (Dublin, Ireland) May 12, 1977, p. 9.Note

The process for implementing this plan has been described by Julian Simon:

First, U.S. national policy as executed by AID aims to induce all people in other countries to use contraceptives whether or not they initially wish to. Second, in 1969-70 AID was able to exert pressure on U.S. universities, private U.S. foundations, and international organizations to move "toward greater activism." This move was facilitated by the sudden big-bang join-up of population activists and environmentalists. Third, in order to avoid charges of interfering with foreign governments, AID gives U.S. taxpayers' money to private organizations to persuade foreign governments to alter their population policies. AID was not merely trying to help other countries achieve their own aims, but was (and still is) trying to pressure foreign governments to do what the U.S. population activists want to see done abroad. Simon, The Ultimate Resource, p. 297.Note

Margaret Wolfson of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development discussed how AID would use intermediary organizations to channel money into projects that were politically sensitive:

the relationship that has developed between Pathfinder [a private population control organisation] and AID works well and is to the advantage of both parties. AID, which has always made extensive use of intermediary nongovernmental bodies in all sectors of its development program, finds that in the field of population assistance, Pathfinder, with its close and varied contact in developing countries, offers possibilities for action that it would often be difficult for it to take itself, operation on a direct government-to-government basis. Margaret Wolfson, Profiles in Population Assistance, Development Centre of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1983, p. 173.Note

Even a commission of the U.S. government, the Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy, admitted that racism motivated many supporters of birth control for the Third World: "Rapid population growth occurs in nonwhite societies, and its continuation represents a threat to values inherent in western civilization as we know it. Nonwhite populations are less desirable because they are less capable and less productive." The Commission said that this type of thinking motivated "key members of the Congress responsible for foreign aid authorization and appropriations, and some of the private citizens who have been associated with activities to curb rapid population growth." Simon, Population Matters, pp. 228-229.Note

Simon contends that the same factors that motivate birth control programs around the world also motivate the policies of the birth control movement in the United States. For example, birth control clinics are disproportionately placed in black residential areas:

We can also learn about mixed motives from domestic experience with birth-control programs. The date of opening state-supported birth-control clinics was closely related to the concentrations of poor black people in various states. As of 1965, 79 percent of the state-supported clinics in the United States were in the ten states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, which have only 19 percent of the country's population. Analysis that allows for per capita income shows that the proportion of blacks in a local population is closely related to the density of family planning clinics.

Can one be surprised that many white people in the United States want there to be fewer black people in the world? In sad truth, it is no more surprising than Hindus in India and Christians in Lebanon fearing a high Moslem birthrate, blacks in Uganda tossing out Indians, and so on throughout the world. But in this age when prejudice is not publicly acceptable, racist acts are justified on the basis of supposed economic, political, sociological, and environmental considerations. Ibid, p. 229.Note

Thomas Littlewood hit the nail on the head when he said that in population politics, "humanitarian and bigot can find room under the same tent." Ibid.Note

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Back to Part One: Are We Really Overcrowded?

Continue to Part Three: The Shambles of Africa

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Jim Peron is the Executive Director of the Institute for Liberal Values, the editor of the book The Liberal Tide, and the author of the forthcoming book 'The Road Not Taken: Resolving the Crisis on the Roads.'