Ideologically driven movements are neither well-equipped nor eager to examine their own assumptions. The population control movement, which is based on the conjecture that the world has — or will soon have — more people than it can reasonably sustain, is no exception. That something called “overpopulation” exists, that it is the principal cause of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation, and that governments must adopt measures to curtail it, are accepted as articles of faith by population activists.
So it fell to the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, which strives to “foster political debate across ideological barricades,” to assemble 26 scholars and practitioners on both sides of the population issue to discuss “World Population Growth.” The 9 Lives of Population Control (Wm. B. Erdmans Publishing, l995, ISBN: 0—8028—0879- 4, 178 pages, $14.00), with contributions by such well-known scholars as Nicholas Eberstadt, Julian Simon, Karl Zinsmeister, Midge Decter and Amartya Sen, is the provocative result.
Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, in an essay entitled “The premises of population policy.” makes short work of the notion that “overpopulation” demands population control activism. “[T]here is no workable demographic definition of ‘overpopulation’.” Eberstadt points out. “The term, though often used as if it had a fixed meaning, cannot be described unambiguously through reference to any combination of demographic variables .… Inadequate incomes, poor health, malnutrition, overcrowded housing, unemployment—images such as these are conjured up by the notion of overpopulation, but they are really images of poverty…”
Neither have scientific “population studies” established a clear causal relationship between population change and economic or social change. “[N]otwithstanding bold assertions to the contrary,” Eberstadt writes, the relationship between population and development is “as yet poorly understand.” Given the dismal state of demographic “science,” he asks, is it prudent for a government to attempt to devise a “policy” to shape the size, composition, and rate of change of its national population?
Since Eberstadt’s arguments are fatal to the case for population control activism, his article not surprisingly elicited a strong reaction from that quarter. Robert Engelman of Population Action International asserts at the outset of his article, “A Response,” that “’Nicholas Eberstadt and I approach the legitimacy of population policies from very different perspectives.” Oddly enough, however, he then goes on to concede Eberstadt’s principal point. “[T]he link between economic growth and population is not firmly established,” Engelman writes, “We are dealing with human beings here, not physics or chemistry… most of those who work in the population field or make policy in the area generally accept the link on simple logic, intuition, personal experience — and substantial documented evidence.”
Leaving aside the appeal to “simple logic, intuition, [and] personal experience” — which strikes the reader as a kind of mystical invocation — the only “evidence” which Engelman adduces is the experience of the Asian tigers, whose government-sponsored (and internationally funded) family-planning programs, he claims, “found an immediate market and contributed substantially to rapidly declining fertility,” This undocumented assertion is highly questionable, however. Most analysts attribute the rapid fertility declines of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea to industrialization, urbanization, increasing education, and greater participation in the work force by women. My own demographic study of rural Taiwan in 1977 led me to conclude that the Republic of China’s population control program — one of the earliest in the world — had almost no effect on fertility outcomes. Village women told me point blank that they ignored visiting family planning workers.
Well-known economist and population theorist Julian Simon, joined by Karl Zinsmeister, editor of The American Enterprise, offer a reasoned dissent from another piece of population control orthodoxy, namely, that population growth leads to ever-increasing hunger, poverty and environmental degradation. In their essay, “How population growth affects human progress,” they marshall compelling evidence that the success of a country’s development depends largely on its political and economic system, not on the size or rate of growth of its population. As far as the relationship between economics and fertility is concerned, Simon and Zinsmeister maintain, “[it] is the reverse of what population-explosionists argue: it is not that slower population growth brings prosperity, but rather that prosperity brings slower population growth.” The real danger is not “overpopulation,” which like Eberstadt they say has never been clearly defined, but rather alarmist visions of overpopulation. The notion that people are somehow social, ecological and economic nuisances predisposes governments and international agencies to treat them as such, intervening to reduce their fertility and putting their freedom seriously at risk.
Rodolfo Bulatao, responding lo Simon and Zinsmeister, is no more eager to join the argument than Robert Engelman before him. Instead of attempting to justify population control in economic terms (“We should not exaggerate the importance of demography for economic growth.” he concedes), Bulatao, a demographer with the World Bank, instead portrays family planning programs as a humane and caring response to the “huge unmet need” for contraception in the Third World. “[L]arge numbers of couples in developing countries want to avoid childbearing,” Bulatao claims. “Women and men should be provided with all the information they need to make such a valued choice [about childbearing] responsibly and should be assisted as much as practicable in implementing it.”
Now, as Midge Decter makes clear in her opening essay, the first population control programs certainly did not originate in such altruistic motives. The latter-day effort by population activists to recast their programs pure philanthropy seems self-serving — an ex post facto rationalization for intrusive policies increasingly seen as not only economic unnecessary but morally unsavory.
Similarly, when Engelman assures us that “people who work in the family planning field see it as a community public—health service that expands freedom and personal options — especially for women, who need it most,” there is a sense of unease. For the question is emphatically not the degree sincerity with which population control workers hold their beliefs, but the validity of the beliefs themselves. For if Zinsmeister, Simon, Eberstadt and company are right, these activists are not helping their target populations by handing them contraceptives and urging them for their own good, to restrict their fertility, but may in fact be hurting them.
One specific area in which the zealotry of population control enthusiasts may work against the interests of Third World women is their promotion of reproductive autonomy. Believing that men are the enemy of demographic progress, they do not hesitate to approach women singly and in secret. As Engelman remarks, “[I]n a number of societies men either oppose any kind of restriction on fertility or do not communicate well at all with their wives or force their wives to have sex against their wishes or insist on large families and take little or no responsibility for the children.” To overcome this “obstacle,” he states openly that the “goal is to give women the right to bear children when they choose and plan.” (italics added) But is it really in the interest of poor women in the Third World to come to think of themselves (like their “sisters” in Manhattan and Hollywood) as radically autonomous individuals who can make decisions about childbearing at will? For many women around the world, the institution of marriage provides the only protection against destitution and exploitation by the larger society.
Two other essays in this volume were not a part of the original conference. Harvard professor Amartya Sen, in an article which first appeared in the New York Review of Books, decried the notion of a population crisis. “There is no imminent emergency that calls for a breathless response,” he writes. “What is called for is systematic support for people’s own decisions to reduce family size through expanding education and health care, and through economic and social development.”
The closing essay by George Weigel, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, assesses the ideas that were debated before and during the remarkable Cairo Conference on Population and Development. Weigel believes that Conference may have set in motion “’moral and cultural dynamics that will, over time, result in the defeat of the radicals’ agenda.” This may be too optimistic a reading of the current situation. We should not expect the population control advocates to abandon their messianic quest merely because, as in the pages of The 9 Lives of Population Control, they lose arguments.
The faith of the Robert Englemans of the world is a resilient thing; part intuition, part personal experience, and part simple logic. On the horizon looms the spectre of the apocalypse wrought by uncontrolled population growth, and the sight of it keeps them from dwelling much on the inconsistencies, errors, and oversights of their position. In the very last paragraph of his essay, Engelman admits that he may be wrong about the “huge unmet demand” for contraceptives on the part of women around the world. Even so, he avers, he will continue his efforts “to reduce population growth.”
One comes away from The 9 Lives with a renewed appreciation for the soundness of population control skeptics’ arguments. This useful primer should be read by all those concerned with human freedom — and concerned about malevolent attempts to stifle it in the name of lighting ‘overpopulation.’
