THE POPULATION CONTROLLERS ARE STILL AMONG US

Washington Examiner

 

The population controllers are still among us

By Timothy P. Carney

June 18, 2024 11:44 am

 

Given how spectacularly wrong they’ve been proven over the past two generations, you would think the anti-population crowd would be pretty chastened. And to be fair, it is getting quieter and more modest in its aims.

 

Back in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, and even into the 1990s, it was chic to freak out about overpopulation. Most famously, bug scientist Paul Ehrlich became a celebrity in the late ’60s for predicting that overpopulation would cause massive human starvation.

 

Instead, while the world’s population more than doubled from 1968 to today, starvation has plummeted. The poorest humans today have much more food, drinkable water, shelter, and comfort than did their counterparts in Ehrlich’s day, and so does the average human.

 

Humanity’s footprint is shrinking, too. The amount of land used for agriculture peaked a couple of decades ago, and is now shrinking every year.

 

Of course, we are now in a baby bust. Birth rates in the wealthy world are at a record low and falling. Birth rates are so low that every single Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nation except for Israel will soon be losing population, even if their birth rates stabilize. But they won’t stabilize, because every country whose birth rate has fallen significantly below the replacement level of 2.1 has continued to fall. Low birth rates beget lower birth rates.

 

And in the developing world, birth rates are also falling. India is below the replacement level, and China is rapidly in free fall.

 

So today, some of the population doomers are celebrating. Anti-population professional Kirsten Stade published an op-ed in Newsweek:

 

“This is a positive development in large part due to a decline in teen pregnancy, but you would never know it from news coverage of the topic that ranges from anxious to apocalyptic. The birth rate ‘crisis,’ we are told, will have dire consequences for our economy and especially for seniors. Lost in the conversation are the many positive aspects of an aging society, which is the result of people living healthier and longer lives, and common-sense realities like reduced needs for infrastructure and lower ecological impacts. Also lost is the fact that our population still grows by 80 million people every year, from places in the world where women and girls lack reproductive choice and face powerful pronatalist pressures, whether to carry on a family line, grow a religious denomination, or fuel economic growth with more consumers and cheap labor.”

 

There’s a lot wrong with this account. Consider her claim that the population growth comes “from places in the world where women and girls lack reproductive choice.” This is a very important belief for the population controllers because they know it is unseemly to say that their problem is poor women having too many babies.

 

But the premise, an unmet demand for birth control and abortion, is totally unproven and frequently undermined by data. The latest study, titled “The Negligible Effect of Free Contraception on Fertility,” shows that women in Burkina Faso want five or six children, and the actual birthrate is 4.6.

 

Why did free birth control have little impact on birth rates? Largely because the average woman there wants another baby.

 

The sense of deprivation is not on the side of folks having “too many” children, but on the median women or the median couples, who have fewer than they would like.

 

We have low and falling birth rates because people feel the culture doesn’t support parents and because people feel that it’s harder to find a good husband or wife with whom to raise a child.

 

Also, cultures with fewer children are meaner and sadder. I have tons of evidence on this in my book, Family Unfriendly, but the New York Times has one particularly good illustration in a recent op-ed:

 

“Fatherhood can be transformative for their brains and bodies. The brain and hormonal changes we observe in new dads tell us that nature intended men to participate in child-rearing, because it equipped them with neurobiological architecture to do so. They too can show the fundamental instinct for nurturing that’s often attributed solely to mothers.”

 

“Not only that, but men’s involvement in fatherhood can have long-term benefits for their brain health — and for healthy societies. At a time when boys and men seem to be experiencing greater social isolation and declining occupational prospects, the role of father can provide a meaningful source of identity.”

 

On the flip side, a world with more fatherless men is a world with unfulfilled women and immature men. That’s the world the population controllers are cheering.