Popcorn: Maternal deaths; The ‘lucky’ 100 million; Reuter goofs

More dead mothers?

The ink was scarcely dry on the recent UNICEF-WHO report alleging that the worldwide maternal mortality toll was 585,000 deaths yearly1 — a figure substantially higher than the previous long-held number of 500,000 deaths — when the hype began to further inflate the new statistic.

Even as the claim of 585,000 deaths was being made, UNICEF and its population control buddies quickly added on an extra 15,000 or so by invariably referring to the figure as “nearly 600,000.”

And now along comes Ingar Brueggemann, Secretary General of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), who, in a 5 September news conference held in London, claimed that “Every year 650,000 women die from pregnancy related causes.…”2 Brueggemann was Speaking at an IPPF function launching the pressure group’s new “Charter on Sexual and Reproductive Rights” initiative.

500,000.… 585,000.… 600,000.… 650,000. Can 700,000 be far behind? Pick a number, anyone, so long as it’s higher!

Maybe a lottery?

Garrett Hardin, a pioneer in the field of “human ecology” and a notorious proponent of population control, recently gave an interview in which he advocated a return of the world’s population to a mere 100 million. This number is (as far as this writer can determine) the lowest by far that anyone has ever proposed.3

Hardin is a Malthusian and eugenicist who worked tirelessly in the 1960s for abortion legalization, and now in the 1990s advocates euthanasia and assisted suicide. He achieved fame with his 1968 essay on overpopulation entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons,” in which he argued that mankind must forfeit some of its freedoms in order to control population, conserve resources, and check pollution.4

Hardin was quoted as saying, “[W]e’re up to six billion now. That’s six thousand million.” He asserted, without offering any evidence, that, “This level is impossible to maintain.”

“If we control our numbers, we might be able to settle on a world population of up to 100 million, living a hell of a good life.”

Since the world’s population is nearing 6 billion, Hardin’s proposal would mean the elimination of more than 98 percent of people currently inhabiting the earth. Even assuming that several generations would be required for such a feat, how could such a thing ever be accomplished short of extermination camps dwarfing Nazi Germany’s?

Hardin himself thinks it can be accomplished through some “form of mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.” “You don’t have to be brutal about it,” he says, “You can use incentives [to control family size].”

(Hardin, incidentally, has 4 children.)

Reuter gets it wrong

No one should be surprised that the general public is often so ignorant about the basic facts concerning global population growth when Reuter, one of the world’s leading news-gathering organizations, makes the enormous claim that currently “the world is adding people at a far quicker pace than ever.”5

Reuter made that assertion in its news release concerning the U.S. Census Bureau’s issuance of its biannual report World Population Profile: 1996, which supposedly provided the documentation for the Reuter claim that population growth is at an all-time high.6

But the Census Bureau itself makes no such claim, nor does its population report support Reuter. To the contrary, in a table on page 8 of The Population Profile, the Bureau gives the “average annual increase in world population” during recent time periods as: 1985-1990; 85.4 million; 1990-1996: 81.8 million; 1996—2000: 79.8 million.

As the Census Bureau’s report documents, the annual growth in world population reached a peak in the mid-1980s, has been declining ever since, and is expected to continue declining into the foreseeable future.