In my own profession of journalism it is common enough to deride economists as practitioners of the "dismal science." Yet in most cases it is the economists who have maintained faith in human ingenuity and initiative and who have rejected counsels of despair and control. The majority of them have never been found on the front lines of the movement for population control.
After years of successful population-control efforts, experts are realizing that their fears were groundless. And as fertility rates continue to drop, well below expected levels, new concerns are emerging.
I am a practicing gynecologist in Kenya and I would like to share with you facts about some of the patients I see daily: A mother brings a child to me with pneumonia, but I had not penicillin to give the child. What I have in the stores are cases of contraceptives. Malaria is epidemic in Kenya. Mothers die from this disease every day because there is no chloroquine, when instead we have huge stockpiles of contraceptives. These mothers come to me and I am helpless.
Whatever problems the world faces and environmental concerns are indeed legitimate reproductive rights are not the solution. The U.N. Population Fund would do a lot better to fight for economic justice and balanced development. Adequate income for families and access to decent education and jobs are what people most need.
In recent years, increasing attention and support has been devoted to population issues by the international community. The large and growing sums of money funneled into population assistance as well as the motivations for focusing on this aspect of development as often the primary development goal, are cause for scrutiny.
PRI recently completed its first-ever survey of the health care needs of the African people. Carried out in the West African country of Ghana, the survey results indicate zero demand for "reproductive health care." There are huge, unmet needs for many kinds of primary health care in Africa, but the claim of the population control lobby that there is an "huge unmet need" for contraception, sterilization, and abortion is demonstrably false.
Be careful what you wish for. After decades of struggling to contain the global population explosion that emerged from the healthcare revolution of the 20th century, the world confronts an unfamiliar crisis: rapidly decreasing birthrates and declining life spans that might set back the progress of human development.
If the predictions in Paul Ehrlich's 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, had been near the mark, Americans would be eating their dogs and children by now and yearning for a condominium - a little elbow room - on the moon.
The eugenics circle held that some races and individual members of the human species were genetically superior to others These superior members should be encouraged to reproduce, while the births of inferior members such as the poor or minorities were to be regulated.
By having relatively few children, people today are eroding the population base that should pay for their pensions in their old age.
