Steve Mosher: World (Over) Population Day, 2008
By Steven W. Mosher
7/11/2008
Population Research Institute (www.pop.org)
"We are not facing a cataclysmic population explosion, but rather a population implosion, as entire peoples age and die."
FRONT ROYAL, VA (PRI) - By the weekend, World Population Day, July 11, will have come and gone, with its usual spate of articles bemoaning the fact that there are too many people in the world.
This year the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), which came up with the idea of a World Population Day in the first place, argued that population growth can and should be restrained by "empowering women."
By this fine phrase they mean that women should be taken out of the home--and the business of bearing and raising children--and put to work producing goods and services for strangers. The UNFPA claims that only the wholesale employment of women will save us from being overrun by people.
Now I have to admit that this is a clever argument.
To oppose it puts one in the position of seeming to oppose women joining the workforce and having a career outside the home. But that is not my position at all. Rather, I would defend the right of women to exercise their special gift--one not given to men--to not only bring new life into the world, but to nurture it on a full-time basis, especially in through the vital years on infancy and early childhood.
This is, after all, what most women want during this special chapter of their lives, even if they pursue careers before and after this time.
The population controllers have always feared that if women were to be allowed to act on their pro-natal impulses, the world would become overpopulated. But it is not overpopulated at present, nor is it likely to become so.
Let me give you an illustration I use in my book, Population Control.
You could, as it turns out, put the entire population of the world in single-family homes in the state of Texas. Now, let me make clear that I'm not suggesting everyone move to Texas. I like Texas the way is. Rather, this is just a way of saying that the world is still a pretty empty place--and about to become emptier.
When I make this point in my talks, there are invariably people in the audience who ask about "the population bomb." They have been propagandized into believing that the population of the world will just keep on doubling until there is no room for any of us.
Most people don't know that the population of the world will never double again. Rather, according to the best estimates that we now have, it will peak in 2040 or so at around 8 billion, and then begin to decline.
In other words, we are not facing a cataclysmic population explosion, but rather a population implosion, as entire peoples age and die. This thinning of the ranks is already well underway in dying Europe. This is why The New York Times has called overpopulation "one of the myths of the Twentieth Century."
The UNFPA's current call for empowering women seems fairly innocuous, but the UN agency has also been a principal cheerleader of China's one-child policy.
In China, women are arrested for the crime of being pregnant, locked up for weeks on end, and in the end aborted and sterilized against their will. The suffering that this policy has caused Chinese families and, especially, women, is almost beyond belief.
Yet it is not just China. Many other countries have, with UN and U.S. encouragement and urging, adopted policies not that far removed from China's.
In fact, it is the height of hypocrisy for the UNFPA to talk of empowering women, when its population control programs around the world invariably target and abuse young, vulnerable women.
Take Indonesia, where a few years ago the military was used to herd young women at gunpoint into clinics for sterilizations. Or Mexico, where women in labor--experiencing the pangs of childbirth--are pressured by government doctors and nurses to accept sterilization.
The only campaign focused on sterilizing men took place in India in the 1970s at a time when Indira Gandhi, a woman, was Prime Minister. And it ended eighteen months later when men by the hundreds of thousands rioted in the streets against it.
Women are targeted because they don't generally fight back.
The UNFPA also targets the poor, along with racial and religious minorities. Not everyone who advocates population control--or family planning, as it is often called these days--is racist, but look at the way these anti-people campaigns play out on the ground.
The Chinese enforce their one-child policy on their "troublesome" Tibetan and Muslim minorities (despite claiming not to).
Peru's infamous sterilization campaign of the late 1990s focused on the Quechua-speaking Indians of the High Andes, not the good citizens of Lima and other major cities.
And the Indian campaign mentioned above collapsed because the Untouchables and the Muslims realized that they, not the high caste Hindus who were ...
Read the rest of the article at www.catholic.org
Humanae Vitae is right.
40th Anniversary, 25 July 2008
By Steven W. Mosher
7/11/2008
Population Research Institute (www.pop.org)
"We are not facing a cataclysmic population explosion, but rather a population implosion, as entire peoples age and die."
FRONT ROYAL, VA (PRI) - By the weekend, World Population Day, July 11, will have come and gone, with its usual spate of articles bemoaning the fact that there are too many people in the world.
This year the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), which came up with the idea of a World Population Day in the first place, argued that population growth can and should be restrained by "empowering women."
By this fine phrase they mean that women should be taken out of the home--and the business of bearing and raising children--and put to work producing goods and services for strangers. The UNFPA claims that only the wholesale employment of women will save us from being overrun by people.
Now I have to admit that this is a clever argument.
To oppose it puts one in the position of seeming to oppose women joining the workforce and having a career outside the home. But that is not my position at all. Rather, I would defend the right of women to exercise their special gift--one not given to men--to not only bring new life into the world, but to nurture it on a full-time basis, especially in through the vital years on infancy and early childhood.
This is, after all, what most women want during this special chapter of their lives, even if they pursue careers before and after this time.
The population controllers have always feared that if women were to be allowed to act on their pro-natal impulses, the world would become overpopulated. But it is not overpopulated at present, nor is it likely to become so.
Let me give you an illustration I use in my book, Population Control.
You could, as it turns out, put the entire population of the world in single-family homes in the state of Texas. Now, let me make clear that I'm not suggesting everyone move to Texas. I like Texas the way is. Rather, this is just a way of saying that the world is still a pretty empty place--and about to become emptier.
When I make this point in my talks, there are invariably people in the audience who ask about "the population bomb." They have been propagandized into believing that the population of the world will just keep on doubling until there is no room for any of us.
Most people don't know that the population of the world will never double again. Rather, according to the best estimates that we now have, it will peak in 2040 or so at around 8 billion, and then begin to decline.
In other words, we are not facing a cataclysmic population explosion, but rather a population implosion, as entire peoples age and die. This thinning of the ranks is already well underway in dying Europe. This is why The New York Times has called overpopulation "one of the myths of the Twentieth Century."
The UNFPA's current call for empowering women seems fairly innocuous, but the UN agency has also been a principal cheerleader of China's one-child policy.
In China, women are arrested for the crime of being pregnant, locked up for weeks on end, and in the end aborted and sterilized against their will. The suffering that this policy has caused Chinese families and, especially, women, is almost beyond belief.
Yet it is not just China. Many other countries have, with UN and U.S. encouragement and urging, adopted policies not that far removed from China's.
In fact, it is the height of hypocrisy for the UNFPA to talk of empowering women, when its population control programs around the world invariably target and abuse young, vulnerable women.
Take Indonesia, where a few years ago the military was used to herd young women at gunpoint into clinics for sterilizations. Or Mexico, where women in labor--experiencing the pangs of childbirth--are pressured by government doctors and nurses to accept sterilization.
The only campaign focused on sterilizing men took place in India in the 1970s at a time when Indira Gandhi, a woman, was Prime Minister. And it ended eighteen months later when men by the hundreds of thousands rioted in the streets against it.
Women are targeted because they don't generally fight back.
The UNFPA also targets the poor, along with racial and religious minorities. Not everyone who advocates population control--or family planning, as it is often called these days--is racist, but look at the way these anti-people campaigns play out on the ground.
The Chinese enforce their one-child policy on their "troublesome" Tibetan and Muslim minorities (despite claiming not to).
Peru's infamous sterilization campaign of the late 1990s focused on the Quechua-speaking Indians of the High Andes, not the good citizens of Lima and other major cities.
And the Indian campaign mentioned above collapsed because the Untouchables and the Muslims realized that they, not the high caste Hindus who were ...
Read the rest of the article at www.catholic.org
Humanae Vitae is right.
40th Anniversary, 25 July 2008
(Photo: Maggie at Wet 'n Wild demonstrating that babies are fun!)
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