The Strange History of Birth Control

Book Review of Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population
by Matthew Connelly.

Recently, a number of family planning advocates have resumed warning us about the dangers of overpopulation. Wars in the Middle East and Africa, food shortages throughout the developing world, and even global climate change have all recently been attributed to “population pressure.” Some of these groups use language that is worryingly similar to that of the “population bomb” alarmists of the 1950s and 1960s.
In fact, population growth alone probably isn’t the political or economic threat that so many people feared. In the 1950s, demographers produced studies showing a modest correlation between economic growth and reduced fertility, but these were largely refuted in the 1980s. In any case, it is debatable whether Congo and Kenya would be more stable and prosperous if there were half as many Congolese and Kenyans. The 1994 Rwanda genocide has sometimes been attributed partly to overpopulation, but the brutal eviction of the Tutsis from many of their farms — which was later seen as a major cause of the genocide — occurred in 1959, when there were only one third as many Rwandans. Likewise, attributing crises in the Middle East to population growth, as The Economist recently did, overlooks underlying issues of politics and justice.

The greatest threats to the global climate come from China and the West, where birthrates are extremely low. The future of the planet depends less on the number of babies born in Uganda than on the choices we in the West make, which, at the moment, are not good ones. As recently as 2004, a Japanese study found that when shopping for cars, Americans cared more about the size of the cup holder than fuel efficiency. Our habits may be shifting, but ever so slowly.

Even the food shortages now causing so much suffering in the developing world would be more effectively addressed by pragmatic policy changes in rich countries than by aggressive population control in poor ones. We could, for example, end the boondoggle of rich-country farm subsidies, especially those for corn-based ethanol “biofuels” which aren’t more energy-efficient than ordinary gasoline. We could also devote more foreign aid to agriculture in developing countries, something that development agencies have long neglected; such aid might include encouraging poor farmers to use new technologies, including genetically modified seeds. We could also do more to improve access to comprehensive education and primary health care, including voluntary family planning, in developing countries. If we did all these things, we could vastly improve the quality of life for millions of people, while population took care of itself.

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