By BRIAN CLOWES
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of chapter 18 of The Facts of Life, “The Worldwide Abortion Situation,” e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
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As we have seen in previous articles, population controllers expose their racist and eugenicist roots when they express their fear of rapid population increase in the developing countries of the Southern hemisphere. They believe that poor nations with large populations will eventually attain significant power and will offer economic competition to the United States, especially with regard to access to mineral resources.
This fear was explicitly outlined in National Security Study Memo 200, the “Kissinger Report.” NSSM-200 and many other documents present exaggerated projections about population growth, then demand massive funding for abortion and birth control programs in developing countries. This inevitably destroys indigenous cultures and tramples the most basic human rights on an enormous scale, as we have seen in Vietnam, India, Peru, the People’s Republic of China, and dozens of other nations.
Scaremongering
For Population Control
The “New Malthusians” seem to delight in painting pictures of mass horrors that will inevitably befall society if certain regions of the world do not get serious about controlling their populations right now. The resulting predictions are invariably wrong and frequently comical.
In the 1970s, the mass media, always ready to hitch their wagon to a politically correct cause, warned us that by 1990, huge artificial islands would be constructed in the middle of the ocean to handle the earth’s exploding population, and that the primary cause of all wars would be attacks on other nation’s food supplies. They also claimed that the world’s oil reserves would be completely depleted by 2000.
In 1980, the population scaremongers predicted that worldwide compulsory birth control would be instituted before the beginning of the 21st century. They said that shortly after that, the Planned Planethood (!) movement would triumph over all other systems of thought, and that conception control would be enforced rigidly by the state.
Males would be sterilized at age 14 after depositing a semen sample in the frozen gamete bank. Conception would require approval of a state or federal committee, which would first investigate the genetic health of the proposed parents and would license conception only if they were of superior human “stock.”
By the year 2000, artificial insemination would be widely used to produce genetically superior offspring — Margaret Sanger’s dream of a “race of thoroughbreds” would finally become a reality.
Such predictions are based upon utter ignorance of the principles of genetics and obviously have no bearing on reality. They are useless for any purpose other than frightening people.
Despite the fact that world population growth is leveling off, population control groups continue to use apocalyptic language. For example, the Population Institute claimed that “in 1997, world population growth turned a little slower. The difference, however, is comparable to a tidal wave surging toward one of our coastal cities. Whether the tidal wave is 80 feet or 100 feet high, the impact will be similar.”
Population control groups present inaccurate and outright false information to scare people into supporting them and to justify their own existence. However, the most recent data shows that the “population explosion” is over.
World Population
Statistics And Projections
According to the United Nations Population Information Network (POPIN), the population of the world on January 1, 2014 will be about 7.19 billion people spread over a total land area of 133,397,188 square kilometers, for an average population density of 54 persons per square kilometer (or 140 people per square mile). The world population growth rate is now only about 0.96 percent per year, which means that we are adding about 68 million people annually.
During the period 1966-1970, the world’s annual population growth rate reached its peak of 2.07%. This means that the world population growth rate has slowed steadily and without interruption since 1970. This long-term trend will undoubtedly continue, and the world population will stop growing in about the year 2050. Then it will enter a phase of negative population growth, and will decline back to its current population by 2090. At that point, the population will be shrinking at a rate of 50 million people per year.
The total fertility rate, or TFR, is the average number of children each woman bears. As recently as 1965, the worldwide TFR was 5.0 children per family. The world’s average TFR is currently at 2.25, and will sink below the replacement level of 2.10 by the year 2015 — in just over a year! The TFR will continue to shrink until the average family has only one child unless pronatalist policies are instituted on a widespread basis.
The people of the world are also rapidly aging. In 1970, the average person was only 21.5 years old. The current average age is about 30 and will hit 41 by 2050 and 49 by the year 2100.
As previously described, several factors indicate that the population growth rate will continue to decline. These include medical technology that reduces infant mortality rates (leading to families having fewer children in the long run), the spread of abortion and sterilization, increased wealth in developing nations causing the birthrate to decline and the marriage age to rise, and the fact that the global trend toward longer lifespans seems to be slowing.
In light of these factors, it is logical to assume that the long-term steady decline in the world population growth rate will continue.
Status Of World
Abortion Laws
There are currently 195 countries, sovereignties, and dependencies with populations greater than 100,000.
About forty percent of these countries (69) protect their preborn citizens completely or allow only strictly monitored exceptions such as for medically documented cases of the life of the mother, rape, incest, and eugenics (birth defects). However, these countries possess only about one-fourth of the world’s population.
One hundred twenty-six of the world’s nations offer little or no legal protection to their preborn citizens. Their laws allow either abortion on demand or the physical and mental “health of the mother” exceptions, which in practice means abortion on demand. The countries that offer little or no protection to preborn babies are home to about 75 percent of the world’s people, and two of these nations (India and the People’s Republic of China) possess 37 percent of the world’s population.
The legal status of abortion often has no bearing on what is actually happening in a country. In at least a third of the pro-life nations of the world, the laws are largely or completely ignored. For example, South Korea only allows abortions for rape, incest, eugenics, and the physical health of the mother, but has the highest abortion rate in the world, 1.5 million abortions per year for a population of 49 million, which is more than seven times higher than the rate in the United States.
All of the developed countries of the world force their taxpayers to pay for all abortions for the mother’s “physical and mental health,” which, of course, means all abortions. The sole exception is the USA, which leaves funding decisions up to the states.
Abortion Statistics
There are currently about 46 million induced surgical and medical abortions being committed in the world each year. This appalling number has steadily increased since 1960, when there were about 40 million induced abortions worldwide.
This means that, during the period 1960-2013, inclusive, abortionists have killed about 2,325,700,000 unborn babies — a number equal to almost one-third of the world’s entire population.
Despite these ghastly statistics, there are encouraging signs that the world is not yet quite ready to commit demographic suicide.
A number of African and Latin American nations have recently proclaimed their pro-life culture and are holding out against the population controllers. Meanwhile, a strong revival of the Culture of Life is beginning in the last place anyone would expect — Eastern Europe, which suffered under the Communists for so long — and this revolution is being led by Russia!
As the United States goes in moral issues, much of the rest of the world follows. This has been a bad thing until now, but Time Magazine noted on the cover of its January 14, 2013 issue, “40 Years Ago, Abortion-Rights Activists Won an Epic Victory with Roe v. Wade. They’ve Been Losing Ever Since.” As pro-lifers in this country relentlessly push back the Culture of Death, the rest of the world is watching attentively. This has exciting implications in many other nations.
There is no doubt that the world is at a moral and ethical tipping point. The Culture of Death is losing momentum as pro-life resistance mounts. This is the time for every pro-life person to get involved in whatever capacity he can, from sidewalk counseling to crisis pregnancy center work.
Only then will we be able to tell our children that we had an important part to play in the final worldwide victory of the Culture of Life.
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Next article: “The Plague of ‘Contraceptive Imperialism’.”
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