Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS

The good news is that the country’s “newspaper of record” has finally realized that the horrors of the so-called population explosion are a myth; the bad news is that they have conveniently “edited out” all the damage done during the decades-long reign of this unsubstantiated theory.

According to Steven Mosher and Anne Roback Morse of the Population Research Institute, The New York Times recently published a long delayed retraction of the unrealized horrors of the population explosion that was predicted by Stanford scientist Paul Ehrlich in his book, The Population Bomb.  The book touched off a worldwide scramble to depress population growth that has resulted in leaving countries such as Germany with fertility rates so low that 10 percent of the population are now immigrants.

Had Ehrlich’s predictions been realized, hundreds of millions of people were supposed to have starved to death by now, which hasn’t happened.

The uber-liberal Times finally admitted that Ehrlich’s predictions were wrong and cited numerous reasons why his predicted catastrophe didn’t materialize – such as improved health standards, women’s liberation and a lesser need for large families to work the land.

However, while these horrors never materialized, others did, and the Times utters not a word about them.

“There was no mention of the human costs when governments made population control a priority. No mention of the savage forced abortions and forced sterilizations that followed. No mention of the killing of baby girls through female infanticide and sex-selective abortion. No mention of the wasted money, the age and gender imbalances that continue to unfold and will take effect for years to come. No mention of how the overpopulation panic helped to fuel the rise of birth control use and abortion,” writes Mosher and Morse.

In other words, the New York Times does not even begin to tell the whole story, nor does it confront the fact that the horrors of this misguided campaign continue to this day.

Consider the case of India where less educated women are sterilized at much higher rates than those who can at least read.

“While 47% of Indian women with less than five years of education have been sterilized, only 20% of women with twelve or more years of education have accepted sterilization,” Mosher and Morse report.

Paul Ehrlich

“Lack of consent, painful and pervasive injuries, and death from negligence disproportionately affect India’s most vulnerable. Indian women are not having fewer children because they are becoming ‘more independent,’ but because they are being coerced into undergoing sterilization by abusive population control programs, with their saturation propaganda and sterilization camps.”

India’s elite like to believe that the poor are poor because of too many children rather than facing an uncomfortable truth – that they’re poor because of an unfair and unequal economic system.

India is not alone. In China, the Planned Birth Policy allows the state to control childbearing and anyone who has a child with a “valid birth permit” can be subject to forced abortion and sterilization.

In Myanmar, minority populations are subject to a two-child policy and Uzbekistan’s authoritarian government is presently coercing tens of thousands of women into sterilization. The former president of Peru is on trial for crimes against humanity for the population control program he imposed on indigenous women that saw 300,000 sterilized against their will.

As Mosher and Morse write, “the list goes on and on” – and none of this is mentioned by the Times?

The paper also fails to mention it’s own culpability in fanning the flames of this overpopulation myth.

“It advocated setting up population control programs, and editorialized on behalf of the billions of dollars in funding that continues to fuel the anti-people movement down to the present day. A mea culpa would be nice, but we aren’t holding our breath,” the authors write.

They conclude with a troubling reminder that the “grim game” of population control continues to this day – it’s just called something else – “reproductive health” programs.

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