Baby Boom :
How American “culture of life” policies are helping balloon the world population

The world is changing.

Sociologists are already writing epitaphs for many of Earth’s declining industrialized nations on one hand, while scratching their heads over how to curb ballooning populations in the third world with the other.

It took 200 years to go from one billion to six billion people worldwide and it may only take 50 years to double that figure. Even the most opportunistic projections hit nine billion. What are the potential impacts that nine to eleven billion hungry mouths will have on the global economy? Food production and distribution? Immigration?

There are fixes on the table, but if you think America is charging ahead with the lead, you’re dead wrong.

It’s another inconvenient truth, but the axis of Earth’s population is shifting rapidly. Baby booms, coupled with low death rates in places like India and Kenya, are bringing an unprecedented number of youth into their reproductive years, and efforts to rein in the population bloom are being stymied by American “culture of life” polices that deny funding to overseas family planning.

Don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard much about this. President Bush’s first order of business after his inauguration in 2001 was to reinstitute a Reagan-era ban on funding for overseas family planning. President Clinton had rescinded the ban in 1993.

It was contentious for about nine months, with advocacy groups becoming vocal about the need for increased women’s health programs and available contraception to help curb the spread of HIV/AIDS, and the exponentially growing populations in poor and undereducated nations.

Then September 11th happened and everyone essentially forgot. Everyone except the nations grappling with the problem, that is.

The Mexico City Policy, known to opponents as the Global Gag Rule, denies non governmental organizations the option to use any money — their own or U.S. provided — for abortion related activities, including education or counseling. To do so would cut them off from all American funding provided by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which accounts for the bulk of worldwide aid assistance.

The key component is that organizations who do not abide by the gag rule lose access to American donated contraception, including condoms.
Well, so what if they can’t get American money, you say. Big deal. Why should we fund the promiscuous lifestyles of poor folks in Africa who probably hate us anyway?

Well, without American led efforts to bring contraception to the masses, poor and undereducated nations already in the throes of a population bloom will be unable to stem their birth rates. When birth rates far exceed the death rates — like in India and much of Sub-Saharan Africa — huge strain is put on social systems and infrastructure. Conflict and pestilence is inevitable and people suffer.

Consider this: The places where life is already nasty, brutish and short are hotbed breeding grounds for terrorist and extremist militias. Now consider what would happen if those places are swelled by another five billion people.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the average family has six children, making the region one of the fastest growing populations centers in the world. By 2050 it will be triple the size of Europe’s population, despite a high AIDS-related death rate.

And the HIV cycle there is tragic. Many young women, undereducated in a patriarchal culture, are caring for large families of siblings, some by selling their bodies to pay for food and shelter. They inevitably contract HIV, die, and leave behind a family of children doomed to repeat the cycle.

In India, where the population will soon surpass China at over a 1.5 billion, cultural mores place a higher emphasis on male than female children and low education means low contraception use. Women are pressured to have several male babies — or keep reproducing until they do. The boys will supposedly care for the elders in old age.

Population models show that for the Earth’s population to stabilize at nine billion, the global average fertility rate needs to hover just above two children per couple (2.35, to be exact). But even a slight increase in that two-child rate could cause the population to soar to 11 billion.
Now, regardless of your stance on abortion, denying widespread access to education and contraception in the face of these concerns seems counter-productive to say the least. American family planning assistance does not — and has never — funded abortions. The 1973 Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act already prohibits funding abortion overseas. No violations have ever been reported.

The gag rule would also undoubtedly be ruled unconstitutional in the United States. Several court decisions have determined the conditioning of federal funds on adherence to such a requirement over how private funds are used violates free speech protections.

And family planning can work. It did in Kenya. The nation was a prime example of population explosion in the 1970s before AIDS threw off the demographic curve. Decades of family planning had dropped the fertility rate from seven to four children.

But the gag rule has forced budget cuts to women’s health care providers in Kenya. Clinics have closed. Staff has been laid off. These clinics were often the sole source of contraception and healthcare for the area. As result, the fertility rate has inched back up to five children per woman — and of the 34 million people; a whopping 65 percent are under age 25. Imagine all of them having 5 to 7 children in the next few years and you begin to see how models are predicting 11 billion.

In the end, it comes down to a cultural perspective. Because contraception inevitably leads to discussion of abortion, the preventative measure to such necessary population control policies are derailed. A “culture of life” sounds like a nice utopia, but what kind of life is it breeding? Our gag rule is certainly not the only contributing factor to blooming populations, but it’s not helping.

And not controlling this problem seems like a surefire way to shoot yourself in the foot as the world’s most powerful nation.

By Ted Grayson

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