They're at it again, as Archie Bunker used to say when his daughter, Gloria, and son-in-law, the Meathead, engaged in exchanges of affection. That must be what the do-gooders in the population-industrial complex (I couldn't resist) say when they see Africans reproducing. They don't like it. They don't like it at all.

As demographers John May and Jean-Pierre Geugnant write in the London Financial Times, in the last decade or so, "Benign neglect from African leaders and elites translated into late, weak, and ineffective [population control] programs and the population growth rate in sub-Saharan Africa has remained about 2.5 percent over the past half century...Unless the transition towards lower levels of fertility starts in earnest in sub-Saharan Africa," they add, "rapid population growth will jeopardize Africa's development efforts and its prospects for full integration into the world economy."

African leaders have been "reluctant" to go along with Western plans to shrink their populations, the authors note, but they have to be talked into it, because---well, because all those little Africans are degrading the environment.

Actually, as University of Texas professor J. Budziszewski notes here, "The planet could support far more people than there are now. Children starve because no one on the planet will give them food, not because there is no food on the planet to give them. ...Time and time again the don't-have-children lobby has predicted that we will reproduce beyond the food supply, and each time the doomsayers have ended up with egg on their faces."

And he adds:

Curiously, "overpopulation" is in the eye of the beholder. China, everyone's favorite supposed example, has fewer than 60% as many people per square miles as the United Kingdom...Many people think that population growth prevents the economic growth of poor nations, but a number of economists now suggest the opposite: Every new person brings not only another mouth to feed, but two hands with which to work. Misguided efforts to help poor countries by suppressing their natural population growth may actually hurt them.

Between their attempts to keep Africans from reproducing so much, and their placement of abortion clinics in African-American neighborhoods here in America, I'm starting to think the population control elites--like Archie Bunker--don't like "them people" very much...

Comments

[Jason Taylor]

Is it just me or does it seem like a but of an oddity that those who decry overpopulation often seem to be ideological allies of pacifists?

[Matt]

Hmm, I don't think the elites necessarily choose where abortion clinics are placed but rather I think they are placed where there is a market for their services.

If someone dropped an abortion clinic in the middle of suburbia, would suburbanites suddenly start having more abortions, or would the clinic struggle to stay in business?

[Mike Perry]

I quote: "Hmm, I don't think the elites necessarily choose where abortion clinics are placed but rather I think they are placed where there is a market for their services."

You've obviously not read what Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger wrote in books such as her bestselling The Pivot of Civilization. She believed that her sort of society (civilization) depended (pivots) on keeping down the birthrates of undesirables. In her heyday, that primarily meant Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Catholic immigrants from Southern Europe. That's why she put her first birth control clinic in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, where immigrants lived. That's why her ideological heirs like to put abortion clinics near black neighborhoods. Same agenda. Different target population. And doing that sort of thing has long been one of the core beliefs of liberals, progressives and socialists.

I edited a new edition of her book entitled The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective that provides in great detail the relevant background by quoting the people Sanger was influenced by, including eugenists, population controllers (then called Malthusians), and feminists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who wanted the State to control which women could have children, describing just that in a feminist utopia called Herland.

Like her heirs, Sanger liked to imply that she was helping women who were forced to have too many kids. But if you actually calculated the number of babies per mother in a study she quotes in one chapter of Pivot, it turns out that the average was a little over two kids per mother, at that time well below the replacement rate. She didn't want to help them. She wanted to get rid of them one unconceived or unborn baby at a time.

The central driving force behind abortion legalization was the lag between when the affluent white birthrate began to decline in the 1950s, accelerated by the arrival of the birth control pill in 1960, and the still high birthrates of inner city blacks. That's why there was the artificially manufactured hysteria about a "population bomb" in the late 1960s, as birthrates in the US plummeted, dropping below the replacement level in 1973, if I remember correctly. The U.S. wasn't having too many babies. It was having too many black babies to suit the tastes of liberals.

Read the book I edited if you want to understand why the secular left is driven by the logic of its worldview to believe that the State must control who has children. In part, it's a product of their welfare state advocacy.

--Michael W. Perry, Seattle

[LeeQuod]

Mike Perry wrote: "I edited a new edition of her book"

Wow, Mike! How'd you get permission to do that?

[Bill]

That is very scary indeed. But then again, we are such a scary species that nothing would surprise me. We have abused our intellect to the point where we could very well just make the human species completely extinct. The other species on our beautiful planet would gladly welcome that, because it's obvious we do not belong here and they would thrive without us just as they were meant to before we came along to ruin everything. We, as a species, are seriously overrated. At the rate we're going we'll probably just junk planet Earth and colonize another planet and repeat the process over and over until, hopefully, we get it right.

[SolarGoddess]

Very elucid observation, Bill, because that is exactly what a number of experts think has happened in the past. The past that we are no longer privy to. There is a concerted camp that believes that Caucasians came originally from Mars. That planet was decimated by the same money-based, world scouring beliefs that we employ today. Once scoured and decimated the planet was left to its own devices while the blue planet on the horizon could still be occupied. Personally and in earnest, I can not help but to believe that the white race CAN NOT possibly be of this world because of the desire to desecrate, destroy, and manipulate any and all of its resources to create a fictional dollar.

[Steve (SBK)]

SolarGoddess,
How did these 'experts' (of astrology? references please) come into their 'expert' knowledge given they have no history to be privy to?

(To be honest, this sounds like a good Sci-Fi read. I like Sci-Fi, except when it's proported with no foundation (Asimov anyone?) to be Sci-Fact).

If it appeared I wasn't reading someone having trouble with reality, I would suggest you were being quite racist SolarGoddess. (Are you sure only whites, uh, burn coal or engage in capitalism? Also, no whites are concerned environmentalists, right?)

I'm offended that you call whites Caucasians. They should obviously be called Olympians, since they departed Mars from the highest point: Olympus Mons (which as we all know is actually a large pile of white-produced trash, and not really a volcano).

Thanks for the smile.

[LeeQuod]

Indeedy, SBK, this is no foundation, but an empire nonetheless. (Cut my SF teeth on Dr. A.)

And to the racial issue, if white men are from Mars (and white women are, of course, from...), and African races are merely evolved apes (per Louis Leakey's mythos), then where are Asians from? Of course, we know that the Japanese are descended directly from the sun goddess Amaterasu - at least, those Japanese born before WWII. :-) And presumably SolarGoddess is a descendant, as evidenced by the same last name. :-) But how did all the Chinese, Indians, Malaysians, and others get here? Maybe Easter Island offers a clue. :-) Even so, it's odd that races with such different origins would be able to interbreed - you'd think a mere blood transfusion would be problematic. Maybe Obama is more The One than we previously thought. ;-)

Lotsa miracles here. I'm stropping Occam's Razor as we speak.

[Steve (SBK)]

Ha. I hoped LeeQuod would comment after I put in the Foundation allusion.

I'm guessing Easter Island is the answer to most questions... (or at least, perhaps, Easter is).

I, being born in the 70's, didn't get to the Foundation "trilogy" until quite late. I found it interesting how the Space Travel calculations were all done by hand. (Which of course, would have been required by our Martian Predecessors). The 4th and 5th books didn't seem as memorable (though the planet run by one person's transducer brain lobes would solve a lot of our overpopulation and pollution problems *wink*).

[LeeQuod]

Steve, of course you realize that this sub-thread would fit far better into a Regis post than one by Anne. Even so, I distinctly remember a short story (not by Asimov) where the only two characters on a starship were each wanting to go on a solo suicide mission so the other could survive. (Ya gotta love those anti-Darwinian moments!) One of them suggested that the first to calculate the cube of 14 in his head would be the one to go, then after a pause of one beat, said "2744!" Later, the other one realized that the first had worked it out in advance, so it was a setup.

I offer this as proof positive that evolution is working in reverse among the Caucasians (old SF was just engaging in wishful thinking), who are losing their math skills while Asians are honing theirs. SolarGoddess has merely to wait for the crumbling of the Empire and the rise of the Second Foundation. She can then claim her rightful place as foreordained by the ancients (whose predictions are only wrong for a limited span of time).

Hmmm, all the Kwanzaa stories I've read (which isn't that many, really) talk about evil people getting their comeuppance. Few talk about how to avoid corrupt dictatorships in the first place. So to Anne's original point (trying to stay a little on topic, thereby avoiding the editorial Fist of Death), it's not clear even with sufficient food for the population that distribution would be equitable. On the one hand you have despots who see food as a commodity by which to line their coffers. On the other you have capitalists who do the same. In the middle are the starving people who just need someone (more than a few missionaries) to care about them.

But since we're a wholly separate species, why should we?