Michael Craven Christian Blog and Commentary

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The Myth of Overpopulation

Last week I wrote about pornographer, Philip D. Harvey's lawsuit against the Bush administration. As you may recall Harvey takes exception to Bush policies that restrict USAID funding to U.S. and foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that do not adopt a policy "explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking." It is also interesting to note Harvey's participation in the population control movement.

Perhaps one of the most persistent and pervasive myths that has shaped the thinking of many people and subsequently public policy is the myth that the world's population is spiraling out of control and ultimately leading to catastrophic shortages of the essential resources necessary to sustain life.

This whole concept of "overpopulation" can be traced to Thomas Malthus, the British economist who, without any specific knowledge other than his own speculations, predicted in 1789 that the planet's rapid increase in population would soon outstrip the planet's ability to produce food resulting in massive worldwide starvation. Malthus' predicted famine never materialized of course; because he could not have predicted the industrial revolution nor the enormous impact that subsequent technological innovations would have on our ability to produce food. Recall that the federal government today actually pays farmers NOT to grow crops due to the abundance of food produced on considerably less farmland than a century ago.

Even the United Nations, historically a rabid advocate of population control, has recently conceded that the world's current infrastructure is capable of supporting a worldwide population of more than 9 billion people. Furthermore, according to the most recent analysis, the planet's population will most likely continue to climb from its current level of 6 billion until 2050, when it will peak at 9 billion; other predictions have the world's population peaking at 7.5 billion in 2040. In either case, it will then go into a sharp decline. If present fertility rates continue the world will soon be facing a massive under-population crisis. (I recently wrote an article illuminating the fact that it is de-population that is the real population problem today.)

You should be aware that the question of "overpopulation" is not merely a topic of conversation, if it ever was. It is a burning matter of public policy and action at the local, national and international level. Our national government is actually committed by law and by international agreement to reducing the worldwide rate of population growth.

Government officials such as former Assistant Secretary of State for Global Affairs in the Clinton Administration, Timothy Wirth, insist that this effort must also apply to the population of the United States. Wirth, as you may recall, was at the center of controversy when the Clinton Administration decided to deport 13 Chinese women who sought asylum in the United States to avoid forced abortion or sterilization under communist China's one-child policy. By offering asylum to the women, Wirth explained, "we could potentially open ourselves up to just about everybody in the world saying 'I don't want to plan my family, therefore I deserve political asylum." Apparently, Wirth believes government forced abortions and sterilization constitutes "family planning."

There are today, governments that sterilize and abort their citizens by force, often with financial help from the United Nations and U.S. government-supported private agencies such as Planned Parenthood.

Motivated in part by the over-population myth along with Darwinism, Margaret Sanger who was the founder of the American Birth Control League in 1934, which later became Planned Parenthood, advocated contraception and abortion as means of "negative eugenics" in order to limit the population of what she termed, "the lower races." (Positive eugenics was the form employed by the Nazi's in their attempt to eradicate the Jewish people.)

For this reason Sanger opposed helping the poor. Humanitarianism and philanthropy, she wrote merely "perpetuate constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents. . . .These dangers are inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have today produced their full harvest of human waste." This same sentiment was common to Darwin and his early advocates who saw Christian compassion as counterproductive to "natural selection" and human evolution. Recall the full title of Darwin's infamous work, The Origin of the Species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.

Frankly, if one wants to be consistent with evolutionary theory they are compelled to think this same way and not borrow from Christian morality and ethics as these have no logical place in the naturalistic worldview. Darwin very clearly understood this fact.

Ironically it was Thomas Malthus' essay on the Principle of Population that had a profound impact on Charles Darwin and according to Darwin proved instrumental in the development of his theory of evolution. Darwin wrote in his autobiography:

"In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work."

The myth of overpopulation first put forth by Malthus coupled with Darwinian theories which promote propagation of the "fit" and reduction of the "unfit" have been instrumental in legitimizing abortion, forced sterilization, government subsidized contraception and in the most extreme cases: eugenics as practiced by the Nazi's. (The term eugenics, which literally means "good births," was coined by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. Eugenics, they believed, would encourage more children from the fit, and fewer or no children from the unfit, with the ultimate goal of engineering the evolutionary ascent of man.)

In every case these false notions undermine God's commandment to be "fruitful and multiply" and further serve to deny the intrinsic value of every human being made in the image of God.

© 2005 National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families. All rights reserved.


S. Michael Craven is the vice president for religion & culture at the National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families and leads the work and ministry of Cultural Apologetics. The Cultural Apologetics ministry works to equip the Church to assert and defend biblical morality and ethics in a manner that is rational, relevant and persuasive in order to recapture the relevance of Christianity to all of life by demonstrating its complete correspondence to reality. For more information on Cultural Apologetics, additional resources and other works by S. Michael Craven visit: www.CulturalApologetics.org

Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.

Send feedback to: mc@nationalcoalition.org