A world in which
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A world in which
each new life
is unwelcome
John Cameron
There is a strain of misanthropy which portrays the human race as a horde of vermin whose unconstrained aspirations and appetites endanger nature and the natural order. The founding prophet was the early 19th-century cleric, Thomas Malthus, who gave birth to a pseudoscientific belief that human reproduction always outruns available resources. As a result of his pessimistic and inaccurate assessment of mankind’s ability to develop new resources, oppressive policies led to the starvation of millions in India and Ireland.
While Malthus’s argument is plainly at odds with the historical evidence – which shows global living standards rising with population growth – it nonetheless persists. It gained strength among groups of intellectuals and political leaders in the 20th century and its most pernicious manifestation is the doctrine of population control. This was famously advocated by ecologist Paul Ehrlich, whose bestselling 1968 tract ‘The Population Bomb’ is widely regarded as the bible of modern neo-Malthusianism.
Ehrlich warned of overpopulation and advocated that the US government adopt stringent population control measures for Third World countries receiving American foreign aid. He wrote: ‘We must cut the cancer of population growth because the only alternative is the "death rate solution" in which the death rate is raised through war-famine-pestilence’. The US Congress, responding to the agitation, appropriated federal funds to underwrite first domestic and then foreign programs of mass abortion and forced sterilisation. Among the first to be targeted were native Americans and Medicaid money was used to set up sterilisation programs at federally-funded Indian Health Services hospitals.
Programmes of a comparable character were also set up in clinics funded by the US Office of Economic Opportunity in low-income (predominantly black) neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico, a mass sterilisation programme was implemented with federal funds through the island’s major hospitals as well as a host of smaller clinics. According to the report of a medical fact-finding mission in 1975, the effort successfully sterilised almost one-third of all Puerto Rican women of child-bearing age.
The RAND Corporation (satirised in Dr Strangelove) provided President Johnson with a fraudulent study ‘proving’ Third World children actually had negative economic value. He bought into this toxic nonsense and declared to the United Nations that ‘five dollars invested in population control is worth a $100 invested in economic growth’.
Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act earmarking funds from the US Agency for International Development for population control programmes to be implemented abroad. All US economic aid to foreign nations was made contingent upon that government being willing to establish population control within its own borders. Rulers willing to sterilise their poorer subjects received vast sums and given the nature of Third World dictatorships the success of the programme was virtually guaranteed.
Population control has been an unmitigated disaster and it is necessary
not only to recount the crimes of the population controllers but to rebut
their poisonous pseudoscience.
The situation took a turn for the worse when Robert McNamara, a staunch believer in population control, resigned as secretary of defence and became World Bank president. He dictated a new policy, making loans contingent upon the governments’ submission to population control, with yearly sterilisation quotas set by World Bank experts. But America was not alone in this depravity because, from the time of Malthus, reducing India’s vast population had been a prime target of the British colonial administrators. Both they and the high-caste Brahmins who succeeded them in 1947 looked upon the ‘teeming masses’ of that nation’s lower classes with fear and disdain.
In the aftermath of the war with Pakistan in 1965 the Indian economy was in disarray and the harvests failed, leaving Indira Gandhi little choice but to beg America for food aid. Secretary of state Dean Rusk handed her a memo requiring ‘a massive effort to control population growth’ as a condition for food aid and she had no choice but to capitulate. Indian hospitals did not have the capacity to meet the quotas so hundreds of sterilisation camps were set up in rural areas manned and operated by poorly-trained paramedics. Bribery was used to acquire victims but where that failed irrigation water was denied to villages failing to meet their quotas, leaving impoverished people with no alternative.
Paul Ehrlich applauded this outrage saying that without it ‘I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be ever be self-sufficient in food’. As in so many things, he was wrong and India did achieve food self-sufficiency, not by population control, but through the agricultural techniques of the Green Revolution. The real outcome of this foul experiment was that quotas were met by disposing of infant girls with the result that today in India there are 37 million more men than women.
The Chinese one-child policy is wrongly thought to be in-house; the progenitor Song Jian lifted the ideas from the west’s ‘Limits to Growth’ and ‘Blueprint for Survival’. He set a new trend for dodgy computer models by showing China’s ‘correct’ population to be 700 million people – some 300 million fewer than its actual 1978 population. This analysis delighted the leadership because it proved the reason for China’s continued poverty was not 30 years of disastrous misrule but the existence of too many people. As in India, the real outcome was that one-fifth of all baby girls in China were either aborted or murdered and in some provinces the fraction eliminated was as high as one-half.
Population control has been an unmitigated disaster and it is necessary not only to recount the crimes of the population controllers but to rebut their poisonous pseudoscience. An environmental fixation with the idea that the world’s resources are about to run out and mankind is incapable of finding alternatives means that each new life is unwelcome. The cause of population control is increasingly featured in environmental documentaries and is promoted by such iconic figures as David Attenborough and Jonathon Porritt.
Jeffrey Sachs, head of the UN Millennium Project, made this the theme of his 2007 Reith Lectures (‘Bursting at the Seams’) with chilling suggestions for population control. This muddled and murderous thinking is of a piece with the belief that to save Scotland’s environment we must destroy it by covering it with windfarms and transmission clutter.
It is to be hoped that, as global warming hysteria subsides, a more moral strain of thought will emerge accepting that love of nature does not necessarily entail hatred of humanity.
John Cameron is a physicist and former Church of Scotland parish minister
