Demographic Bomb - the movie that says demography is destiny

Andrea Mrozek

What should we make of a movie claiming the human family is headed for decline?

When World Population Day came and went on July 11, it was with all the requisite fear mongering about there being too many people on the globe. [1] This accepted view—the fear of people falling off the globe causing grave environmental damage even as they go— is not true. Under population is in fact likely the more pressing problem in our future, not merely in rich industrialized countries, but everywhere. This sounds so foreign as to be false, which is evidence of the ubiquity and success of Malthus and his modern followers— those who believe societal ills could be staved off were there only fewer people on the planet.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/review_demographic_bomb_-_the_movie_the_says_demography_is_destiny/

Iran’s plummeting birth rates

Michael Cook

Despite its fundamentalist Islamic reputation Iran has experimented with birth control with some unexpected, and unwelcome, consequences. If demography is destiny, the family of Farzaneh Roudi is a snapshot of Iran’s past, present and future. A program director at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington DC, Ms Roudi was born in Iran. Her grandmother had 11 children, her father had 6 and she has 2.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/irans_plummeting_birth_rates/

Forcing the Poor to Stop Having Children

by Daniel Patrick Moloney

“Family planning services reduce costs.” That’s what Speaker Nancy Pelosi told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week. She was defending a provision in the original stimulus bill that would have spent hundreds of millions of dollars for birth control. Republicans had criticized this provision, and so the Speaker responded that promoting contraception among poor people would both stimulate the economy and save the government money on welfare payments.

As the video clip shot around the web, public reaction was intense, and overwhelmingly negative—how could anybody think that preventing poor people from being born was the moral way to help poor people out of poverty? It had the air of eugenics about it, as if she were saying that one generation of poor people is enough. Even the liberal partisan Chris Matthews thought Pelosi’s position resembled China’s one-child policy. In response to the backlash, the President told Pelosi to remove the contraception funding from the stimulus bill.

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2009.05.01.002.pdart

Forcing the Poor to Stop Having Children

by Daniel Patrick Moloney

“Family planning services reduce costs.” That’s what Speaker Nancy Pelosi told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week. She was defending a provision in the original stimulus bill that would have spent hundreds of millions of dollars for birth control. Republicans had criticized this provision, and so the Speaker responded that promoting contraception among poor people would both stimulate the economy and save the government money on welfare payments.

As the video clip shot around the web, public reaction was intense, and overwhelmingly negative—how could anybody think that preventing poor people from being born was the moral way to help poor people out of poverty? It had the air of eugenics about it, as if she were saying that one generation of poor people is enough. Even the liberal partisan Chris Matthews thought Pelosi’s position resembled China’s one-child policy. In response to the backlash, the President told Pelosi to remove the contraception funding from the stimulus bill.

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2009.05.01.002.pdart

Not your mother’s birth rate

by Carolyn Moynihan

New Zealand demographers are scratching their heads over an increase in young women having babies. The proportion of girls aged 15 to 19 giving birth rose for the sixth year in a row in 2008, Statistics NZ reported, and the agency’s top demographer, Mansoor Khawaja, said young women appeared to be refusing to follow their mothers’ decisions to have few children later in life. “I reckon they just don’t agree with their mothers, which is not uncommon,” he said. The mothers of the baby-boomers had roughly four children on average, but the boomers have ended up with less than two children each, he pointed out.

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'Stop at two kids' campaign warms up

by Carolyn Moynihan

The population control movement in Britain has found a new and powerful voice in a top government adviser. Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the official Sustainable Development Commission, says people should have no more than two children. He says curbing population growth through family planning must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming. A report by the commission, to be published next month, will say that governments must reduce population growth by funding better family planning -- even if it means shifting money from curing illness to increasing contraception and abortion.

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Japan hopes to increase 'abysmal' birth rate

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow - 2/3/2009

The professional culture of Japan is taking steps to increase the country's population.

When Margaret Sanger launched a clinic in 1916 that later became Planned Parenthood, Japan was the first nation to jump on the bandwagon as the biggest financial supporter. Jim Sedlak of American Life League's Stop Planned Parenthood, or STOPP International, reports the Asian nation promoted family planning and abortion.

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Pill has brought ‘demographic catastrophe’ says Austrian inventor

by Carolyn Moynihan

One of the inventors of the contraceptive pill spoiled the holiday season for some diehard birth-controllers by publicly ruminating on the harm the Pill has done to Europe -- if not the rest of the world. The 85-year-old Carl Djerassi wrote a commentary in the Austrian paper, Der Standard, outlining the “horror scenario” of plunging birth rates the pill had helped to create.

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Japan sees more babies as solution to economic woes

by Carolyn Moynihan

In a week in which leading US politician Nancy Pelosi opined that preventing births was good for the economy, CNN reported that Japanese business leaders see more births as part of the solution to the recession. Keidanren, Japan’s largest business group, with 1300 major international corporations as members, has issued a plea to its members to help break the overwork syndrome that bedevils the country and let workers go home early to spend time with their families.

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US 'baby bust' may come without govt. funding

by Carolyn Moynihan

Another thing Nancy Pelosi should have thought of before trying to justify $200 million for birth control in the stimulus package: during the Great Depression of the 1930s the birth rate in the US fell to an unprecedented low of 2.1 children per woman, without the contraceptive pill or government intervention. During the inflationary “oil shock” of the 1970s, it fell again to 1.7 -- this time, no doubt, with the help of the Pill, but with how much government funding?

Since people seem likely to postpone births anyway during this recession, putting hundreds of millions of dollars at the disposal of Planned Parenthood could make the birthrate sink dangerously low. The Population Reference Bureau -- a population control organisation -- thinks there could be a “baby bust”, but we won’t know until early 2010, “when the recession will probably already be over.”

However, the problems from such a “bust” might only be beginning. ~ PRB, January 2009

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/us_baby_bust_may_come_without_govt_funding/

Calling population control

Amongst the 1800 workers at a New Delhi call centre taking calls for US retail and technology companies are 17 graduates handling enquiries on birth control. Placed there to make their "socially sensitive work" invisible, the mainly female workers are paid by India's National Population Stabilisation Fund - a name that needs no further explanation. The Washington Post gives a run-down on India's 1 billion-plus population, quoting officials who say it will take some Indian states 18 to 45 years to achieve the stabilising fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman. As a matter of fact some states must be below replacement already, as the national fertility rate is already down to 2.76.

The National Population Stabilisation Fund's executive director speaks of "empowering" callers with answers to their queries about contraception and related issues, but power to the people is clearly not the main motive of this -- and other -- population control strategies. And the effects can be drastic: badly-skewed sex ratios in favour of males in some states are largely the result of ultrasound scanning and abortion.

Many calls are made by cellphone and are said to be from areas outside big cities where there are few "health-care and social workers". When the centre opened in June 2008 it received almost 800 calls a day, but slowly the number declined to 250 a day. Staff blame this on the service not being toll-free. If it were free, says one agent, the calls could go up to 1000 a day. ~ Washington Post, Jan 5

The revenge of the cradle

Quebec, the Canadian province whose birth rate plummeted to 1.36 in the mid-1980s and threatened its French culture with extinction, has climbed back to 1.66 children per woman after efforts by the government to get inhabitants to have children. An initial baby-bonus scheme failed to deliver and generous day care subsidies were only partially successful, reports The Economist. But a more recent parental leave scheme that is more generous than anywhere else in North America saw births in the province jump by 8 per cent in 2006 and a further 2.6 per cent in 2007. Early figures for last year show the trend continuing.

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