Some 40 million people have been plunged into chronic hunger this year because of the global food crisis, taking the estimated number of the hungry to more than 960 million, the head of the UN food agency said last month.
A billion people hungry, even more living without clean water; in the face of such looming disaster, it's time to get back to talking about something it's been oddly unfashionable to talk about for a long time: population. In 1950 there were 3.5 billion of us; by 2040 there will likely be 9 billion. Do we want war and famine to be the winnowers, or do we want to hold the line in a reasoned way?
A reticence has attached itself to this subject, which was not only acceptable but almost stylish fodder for conversation in the '60s and '70s, when the acronym ZPG (for Zero Population Growth) was as much a part of the language as the hip farewell "It's been real." Perhaps those conversations have faded out because some feel that discussions of population growth are loaded with an implication that there can be too many human beings, and that that idea detracts from the value of persons.
It's not true: no human being is less valuable for being born at a time when there are more of us rather than at a time when there were fewer of us. But the best way to enhance the value of persons is to face the fact that there are limits to the planet's carrying capacity, and to create the best possible conditions for all of them.
Since the Reagan era, a popular payback to the religious right from politicians wanting to buy its support has been a kind of dumping on foreign countries. It's like our dumping chemicals abroad that aren't legal to use or dispose of here, except that what's being dumped is not chemicals or drugs but a policy—a gag order on family planning agencies that interferes with the right to birth control in a way that would never fly in the U.S.
American administrations have denied funding to groups serving populations that desperately want birth control if it's known, in some cases even suspected, that they refer clients for abortions. A recent example is the Bush administration's order that no birth control pills, condoms or intrauterine devices be given to Marie Stopes International, a British agency operating clinics in Africa. The potential consequences have been wrenchingly described by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Nicholas Kristof:
"Retrograde decisions on reproductive health are reached in conference rooms in Washington, but I've seen how they play out in African villages. A young woman lies in a hut, bleeding to death or swollen by infection, as untrained midwives offer her water or herbs. Her husband and children wait anxiously outside the hut, their faces frozen and perspiring as her groans weaken. When she dies, her body is bundled in an old blanket and buried in a shallow hole, with brush piled on top to keep wild animals away. Her children sob and shriek and in the ensuing months they often endure neglect and are far more likely to die of hunger or disease."
Which shows the greater respect for the value of persons, rational family planning assistance—or this?
The Bush administration withheld contraceptive devices from Marie Stopes because the group is funded by the United Nations Population Fund, which, the administration claims, aids China in its harsh family planning program, which has included forced abortions. Though that claim has been shown to be false by a fact-finding team from our State Department and by U.N. and British investigators, since 2002 the administration has withheld $127 million appropriated by Congress from the UNPF.
But the American people's choice in November's election may bring a more hopeful result on this front as well as many others. "With the incoming Obama administration," Kristof writes, "comes the welcome prospect of an end to an American policy in which the lives of women and children in faraway places are no more than a sop thrown to the right wing at home for political reasons."
