Evidence that the abortion-minded are ecstatic over the accession of Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency is all over the news. Population control advocates, in particular, are thrilled that Obama will clamp down on global birth rates (at the same time that he restores economic prosperity, creates millions of new jobs, and single-handedly carves his face on Mt. Rushmore beside that of Abraham Lincoln, mind you).
Those fixated-upon-the-numbers types are an odd lot. Take David Paxson of World Population Balance, an advocacy organization located in Minneapolis, MN. Mr. Paxson has a metronome-like device on his desk “that makes 140 ticks a minute.” He tells visitors that “that’s the number of people added to the world every minute, that is, births exceeding deaths. That amounts to about 200,000 people a day.”1 With all that frantic ticking going on, one wonders how he sleeps at night.
Another thing that apparently keeps Mr. Paxson awake is his fear that the world’s population is “headed toward 9 billion by 2050.” But his metronome, if he hasn’t noticed, is slowing down much faster than this. It will actually stop ticking around 2040 or so, when the world’s population peaks at 8 billion. After a brief pause, it will start again, only this time in reverse, as it ticks down the world’s population.
The population clock, regular readers of the PRI Review know, has already begun its great unwind in Europe and many other parts of the world, Mr. Paxson ought to wake up and smell the coffee.
Speaking of population alarmists, one of my “favorite” groups is Negative Population Growth (NPG), whose credo begins, “We believe that our nation is already vastly overpopulated in terms of the long-range carrying capacity of its resources and environment.” These friendly folks want to reduce America’s population from 305 million to 90 million or so.
We would all be better off, or so they tell us. (The “we” here presumably refers to the lucky survivors; the rest would simply be “better offed.”) NPG understands that this will not happen naturally. “[F]amily planning is necessary, but alone it is not sufficient. to achieve a sub-replacement level of fertility. For that, we need (by non-coercive incentives) to change desired family size so that couples will not have more than two children.2
They assure us that, unlike China’s population czars, they want to use “non-coercive incentives” like taxes and propaganda campaigns, to achieve this radical reduction in population. Of course they do — at least at the outset of their population program.
But what will they do when the punitive taxes they levy against families fail to stop them from having children? What will they do to young couples who ignore their anti-baby propaganda, and set out to have large families anyway? It is then that they will start glancing enviously at China’s program and speaking in hushed voices about the need for “sterner measures.” Such is the way of overpopulation fanatics.
