Policy makers must see error of population control

FOR a century now, some analysts of mankind’s situation have been warning against the overpopulation myth.

In modern times, with the help of the most industrialized nations and the United Nations, it became conventional wisdom to see poverty and underdevelopment as the result of overpopulation. Those who oppose this thinking have not only been labeled wrong, they have also been called medieval.
This is because some of them have sound social scientific reasoning but also the doctrines of the Church on human life and dignity (and what the late Pope John Paul II and now Pope Benedict XVI call the “Civilization of Love” versus the “Culture of Death) behind their espousal of people—and large populations—as valuable assets.

For years before his book, The Empty Cradle, was published (Basic Books, 2004), Philip Longman and like-minded social scientists have been arguing that it is very wrong to think that overpopulation is the worst or one of the worst dangers facing the globe. Phillip Longman is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

He and some others were saying in forums and writing in newspapers and magazines that occasionally allow their voices to be heard that it is in fact the declining population that has become a grave problem.

For as the countries get richer, their populations decline, their birthrate plummets and their populations age. It is a problem that hits both rich industrialized countries and the developing ones. For the latter, like China, are aging fast—with their policy of fighting births by all means to catch up with the advances of the rich world.

Falling birthrates seem to bring advantages at first but then prove to be a curse.

This call to avoid the curse of the empty cradle that many Philippine leaders in government, politics and media reject, is now receiving serious attention from policy makers in the West.

The media have been the most rabid enemy of this viewpoint, which they associate with “conservative
and Church-dictated” thinking.

Now more and more policy makers are realizing the virtues of that outlook. Time magazine and Newsweek have, at least tentatively, given this viewpoint a hearing.

The latest and most respected publication to do so is Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, and the world’s most respected English-language magazine on international policy.

The article by Jack Goldstone, “The New Population Bomb—The Four Megatrends That Will Change the World,” is the cover story of Foreign Affairs’ January-February issue.

The article tells us that a series of looming demographic trends will greatly affect international security in the 21st century. How policymakers adjust to these changes today will determine the course of global political and economic stability for years to come.

In our country, Father Gregory Gaston, perhaps our most respected expert on the subject, has written about these trends that Filipinos should attend to and learn from.

While his greatest academic achievement is his doctorate in sacred theology, Gaston’s treatise is deeply meritorious as a work of social science.

It tells us that if we really want to escape the problems of an aging population and at the same time wish to achieve a position of greatness and prosperity, we must in fact arrest our already declining total fertility rate (TFR).

We publish his article hoping that those lawmakers, government officials and media pundits who are still pushing the Reproductive Health bill and its intent to control population growth would be persuaded to change and think and act in tune with the better angels that are now persuading the leaders of the West about the grave error of the overpopulation myth.

I end with these quotes from a statesman who has consistently and fearlessly championed the dignity of life and the opposition to the anti-population culture, former Sen. Francisco Tatad:

“There is no ‘population explosion,’ despite the highly orchestrated media hype about it. Our women are not multiplying like rabbits; ‘overpopulation’ is a myth.

“According to the proponents’ own statistics, the country’s population growth rate is down to 2.04 pecent; the total fertility rate, or the number of children a woman of reproductive age can have in her lifetime, down to 3.02. This is all according to the National Statistics Office [NSO].

“According to the CIA World Factbook, 2008, however, the [Philippine] birth rate is down to 1.72 percent; the TFR down to 3.0. The UN Population Division projects that by 2020 the TFR will drop to 2.29—just a breath away from the replacement level of 2.1. Thereafter, it will all be downward until the rate falls below replacement level.”

“Were the birth rate to drop to zero, and half or more than half of the country’s population to evaporate into the ether, would it alter the ratio of 80 percent, or more of the people sharing 20 percent or less of the nation’s wealth while 20 percent, or less of the people share 80 percent or more of it?

“Would it automatically eliminate the notoriously bad governance, the unbridled official corruption, the humungous and ever ballooning foreign and public debt, the unmitigated conspicuous consumption and rampant smuggling and cheating on taxes among the predatory elite?

“Would it allocate more resources to quality education, reputable health care, environmental protection, socialized housing, basic public infrastructure for transport, communication, energy and food production?

“Would it provide greater public access to technology and greater attention to scientific research and development?

“Would it transform the Philippines into a welfare state? Would it make people more morally upright, less pleasure-seeking, self-indulgent and selfish? “Not likely.” –RENE Q. BAS EDITOR IN CHIEF, Manila Times