Social Justice is the Only Ethical Population Policy
Science does not have a distinguished record when it comes to assessing population growth. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, there were scholarly treatises depicting child-bearing and child-rearing as burdens, some expressing the fear that people would soon have so few children that the very survival of the human species was at stake. 1 I was reading these scary books, telling me that children are on the wane at the very time that the post-World War II baby boom was beginning, and death rates in many parts of the world were coming down, fueling population growth. But soon some academics spawned a whole new literature and a new fear. The new fear you can guess from the titles of some books published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as The Population Bomb; Famine 1975; and World Population Crisis: The United States Response. 2 Once again, academics led the way in yet another of history's ironies: When in 1965 I became a member of a newly formed, heavily endowed, Center for Population Studies at Harvard University, a great deal of money, energy, and scholarship was being generated at the very time when the rate of population growth in the world was beginning to decline.3 Indeed, according to a recent United Nations medium projection, the world's population will stabilize (that is, attain replacement level fertility rates [about 2.1 children per woman] shortly after 2200.4 The crisis orientation to population growth died down from about the late 1970s until more recently. I see some signs of its revival presently. But the push for controlling popUlation growth and government sponsored family planning programs for the purpose of bringing down birth rates has never seriously waned. Academics with this orientation are represented in significant numbers in the American Public Health Association and the Population Association of America; they are also found in foundations, planned parenthood organizations, and the United Nations, particularly its Population Division. How should we