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What Religious Liberty?
The Incredible Ever-Expanding Dead End
Anti-Cure, Anti-Life
Whose Values in Education?
Toppling Dominos
Anti-Christians don't have to be Hypocrites but Many Volunteer
Intolerant Tolerance
The Emperor's Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of Hitler's Pope, Part I
The Myth of Hitler's Pope, Part II
Embryonic Stem Cell Research Again
The Madness of Secularism
"Don't Impose Your Religion on Me"
Dictatorship of Relativism
Two Babies at Christmas
Living Will or Death Warrant?
Court Ordered Slow Motion Torture-Death Sentence
Men in Black
A Lot of Hot Air
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"Stay with us, Lord"
Secular-to-English Dictionary
Moral Guidance for Catholics in this Election
Christians Losing America
Stem Cell Wars
Catholic Pro-Abortion Politicians and Communion
Useful Idiots
Who Killed Jesus?
A Primer on Gay Marriage
Whose Side are You on?
Vouchers Revisited
Real and Fake Cloning Bans
Broken Compasses
No Room in the Inn
Killing Fields Revisited
Gay but not Merry
Adam and Steve?
The Battle for the Court
Victimless Crimes
More Salt, Please
The Next Big Fight
When Religion Becomes Evil
Virginity Making a Comeback?
You've Come a Long Way, Baby
The Incarnational Approach
The Many Meanings of ACLU
Things Your Media Never Told You
A Nasty Little Secret
Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them.  How Else Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
How Do You See Christ Today?
Now that there is Another Ewe, will there be Another You?
What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
What is a Covenant?
I Wish I had Your Faith
Are there Too Many Decrees of Nullity?
Dutch Treats
Ecumenism
Going from Baby Doe to Granny Doe
Comments of Evangelium Vitae
The Exception Corrupts the Rule
Good Morality or Good Medicine
Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But One
A Matter of Good Breeding
Herod and Pontius Pilate at the Polls
Hitler's Pope or Righteous Gentile?
The Unknown God
What exactly is wrong with homosexuality?
Ideology Trumps Science, Reality, and Common Sense
What Exactly is an Indulgence?
Infallibility and Error in the Church
Pilate Asked, "What is Truth?"
The Truth about Families
New Killing Fields
Choice of Language and Language of Choice
A Lexicon for Our Day
Why are there so many bodies?
Marijuana, Medicine or Menace?
Medical Research and Ethics
Meditation
"You Taught me well, Mommie dearest"
Moral Fallout
Neutral on the Wrong Side
"These are the Nineties After All"
Many are Wed but Few are Married
"...Prepare him for additional obligations"
A Useful Lie
A Partridge in a Pear Tree
Religious Persecution in the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a Person?
The Point of a Point of View
Politically Correct, Morally Depraved
Population Controllers out of Control
Practical Dreamers
Social Progress through Immorality
Shall we Do Evil for Goodness Sake?
Reason and Faith
Resurrection Glory
Same Sex Marriages?
Pearl of Great Price
"I used to be schizophrenic, but we're all right now"
Sexual Morality Irrelevant in Judging Public Officials?
Undesirable Side Effects
Some News is Good News
SOSSLQ's, not POSSLQ's
Spoils of Splits
Why Attend Mass Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
Topics Catechetical
A Voting Catechism
A Moral Guide to Voting
Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal if...
Get Rid of that Worthless Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues Prior to Voting

by Monsignor James C. Brunner

Faith Points

Many persons think that the eugenics movement was buried in the rubble of Berlin after World War II because of its documented admiration for the Nazi program of racial purification. Not so. After World War II the eugenics movement simply mutated and channeled its activities into other activities beyond compulsory sterilization of those it pronounced unfit. These activities include contraception, abortion, and population control. The same leaders were involved, the same foundation money, and the same goals of eliminating the "degenerate" were pursued except now there were new excuses.

From 1952 onward the eugenics movement invented the population explosion and promoted population control programs. One indicator of their influence is the staging of three worldwide meetings under the sponsorship of the United Nations Population Fund to develop a global population control strategy: in Bucharest (1974), in Mexico City (1984), and in Cairo (1994). The World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and nearly all industrialized nations have contributed billions of dollars for programs to slow down world population growth. Our foreign assistance dollars are accompanied by tremendous pressure on third-world women to accept contraception and sterilization that they do not want. Food aid is given in a manner that forces individuals into population reduction programs.

For eugenicists family planning is a step in the right direction but they would rather have coercive authority which would include abortion, a commitment to zero population growth, euthanasia, and restrictions on international migration. The coercive China one-child policy that tramples on prenatal life and on women’s privacy was praised in 16 articles in the 1989 International Planned Parenthood Federation quarterly journal, People. Eleanor Smeal and Molly Yard, "pro-choice" feminists, have praised the China policy. They are pro-choice except for Chinese families that must endure forced abortions and murder of second infants. In 1976 the Agency for International Development was given responsibility for defending the United States from the "grave threat of population growth in Africa" and covert depopulation policies were tucked into American foreign aid programs, thus making the United States responsible for much of world population control.

What is overpopulation anyhow? It is supposedly an imbalance between the number of people and the available food supply or living space. In this context new babies are a threat. Paul Ehrlich in 1968 on the basis of the ersatz science typical of population scaremongers predicted that we would populate ourselves into oblivion, that hundreds of millions including Americans would starve to death, and that there would probably be no England in the year 2000. Kingsley Davis condemned over-reproduction, having more than four children, as "a worse crime than most" and wanted it outlawed.

As for the shortage of food threat the former director of the Agricultural Economic Institute at Oxford University, Colin Clark, estimated that using the best farming methods available the world could provide an American diet for 35.1 billion people. The world could sustain 105.3 billion people with a Japanese-style diet. Our food supply has never been more secure. Farmers use less than half of the world’s arable land. The scourge of famine due to natural causes has been almost conquered. Africa is the least densely populated of all the continents and has the ability to feed the world twice over. Yet Africa remains impoverished. Population controllers blame the reproduction rate in Africa for its poverty and starvation. The victims are blamed for their plight but the real causes are inept and corrupt governments. Free economies invariably produce better economic conditions, a decline in mortality, and better education. Socialist or despotic governments squander resources and also crush incentives for people to produce their way out of poverty.

Now let us look at the overcrowding threat. For decades we have heard that China has "teeming masses." But no one says that Maryland or the United Kingdom are overpopulated although their population densities are greater than China’s. Switzerland is more densely populated than Pakistan. The entire world population of 6 and ¼ billion people could be put into the state of Texas leaving the rest of the world vacant. If all people including babies lived separately they could each have a home of about 1200 square feet, larger than most homes in the world. It is odd that only non-white countries have "teeming masses." Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York are more densely populated than China. White populations also know how to teem but never earn the adjective "teeming."

Gordon Rattray Taylor gets the prize for the goofiest theory of the effects of human overcrowding. He suggests that human crowding will produce a great die-off. He bases this on a study of deer released on James Island in Chesapeake Bay. The herd built itself up over a number of years but in 1958 two-thirds of them died. Although the 1958 winter was especially severe Taylor attributed the deaths to stress caused by overcrowding and suggested that the same will happen to humans. It is doubtful that overcrowding caused the deer die-off but, even if it did, what correlation do deer have with human beings? Why has there not been a die-off in London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, or Mexico City? Why do not the doomsday dimwits notice that humans vote with their feet and live in densely populated areas by choice? Crowded cities are typically wealthier than thinly populated areas. Concentrations of people allow economies of scale for highways, subways, hospitals, theaters, electricity, sewerage systems, and other life amenities. Cities have the highest per capita output and income. An exodus from "crowded" cities would not enrich but impoverish the world.

It is not high birth rates that produce poverty. Economic development accompanies low birth rates. In countries where infant mortality is high and where there are no social security programs many children are seen as a necessity.

Instead of worrying about population explosion, a dud, we should worry about underpopulation and aging. Demographers tell us that if humans had 2.1 children per woman the population would be stabilized with no increase or decrease. Fertility rates in the world have plummeted. In Europe the decline in birth rate has fallen below replacement levels matching those of Japan and Russia which have a 1.4 birth rate. Italy has the lowest rate, 1.2. The United States birth rate has been well below replacement rate for 25 straight years. Longer life expectancy has masked the decline, but without immigration the United States will lose population within two or three generations.

While a few countries fret about the bulge in the number of young people with poor job prospects, in the rest of the world the elderly are becoming a growing proportion of the population. This puts pressure on health systems, health insurance plans, social security, and pensions. The United Nations demographers are concerned with the "potential support ratio," the number of people 15 to 64 available as workers to sustain retirees. In 1950 the ratio was 12 to 1; in 2000, 9 to 1. By 2050 it may be 4 to 1. This is a demographic bust due to population control. If the elderly have fewer workers to support them they can blame themselves for either preventing births or aborting those already conceived.