Antinatalism

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism 

Antinatalism, or anti-natalism, is a philosophical position that assigns a negative value to birth. Antinatalists argue that humans should abstain from procreation because it is morally wrong (some also recognize the procreation of other sentient beings as morally wrong). In scholarly and in literary writings, various ethical foundations have been presented for antinatalism. Some of the earliest surviving formulations of the idea that it would be better not to have been born come from ancient Greece. The term antinatalism is in opposition to the term natalism or pro-natalism, and was used probably for the first time as the name of the position by Théophile de Giraud in his book L'art de guillotiner les procréateurs: Manifeste anti-nataliste.

Arguments

In religion

The teaching of the Buddha, among other Four Noble Truths and the beginning of Mahāvagga, is interpreted by Hari Singh Gour as follows:

Buddha states his propositions in the pedantic style of his age. He throws them into a form of sorites; but, as such, it is logically faulty and all he wishes to convey is this: Oblivious of the suffering to which life is subject, man begets children, and is thus the cause of old age and death. If he would only realize what suffering he would add to by his act, he would desist from the procreation of children; and so stop the operation of old age and death.

The Marcionites believed that the visible world is an evil creation of a crude, cruel, jealous, angry demiurge, Yahweh. According to this teaching, people should oppose him, abandon his world, not create people, and trust in the good God of mercy, foreign and distant.

The Encratites observed that birth leads to death. In order to conquer death, people should desist from procreation: "not produce fresh fodder for death".

The Manichaeans, the Bogomils and the Cathars believed that procreation sentences the soul to imprisonment in evil matter. They saw procreation as an instrument of an evil god, demiurge, or of Satan that imprisons the divine element in the matter and thus causes the divine element to suffer.

Theodicy and anthropodicy

Julio Cabrera considers the issue of being a creator in relation to theodicy and argues that just as it is impossible to defend the idea of a good God as creator, it is also impossible to defend the idea of a good man as a creator. In parenthood, the human parent imitates the divine parent, in the sense that education could be understood as a form of pursuit of "salvation", the "right path" for a child. However, a human being could decide that it is better not to suffer at all than to suffer and be offered the later possibility of salvation from suffering. In Cabrera's opinion, evil is associated not with the lack of being, but with the suffering and dying of those that are alive. So, on the contrary, evil is only and obviously associated with being.

Karim Akerma, due to the moral problem of man as creator, introduces anthropodicy, a twin concept for theodicy. He is of the opinion that the less faith in the Almighty Creator-God there is, the more urgent the question of anthropodicy becomes. Akerma thinks that for those who want to lead ethical lives, the causation of suffering requires a justification. Man can no longer shed responsibility for the suffering that occurs by appealing to an imaginary entity that sets moral principles. For Akerma, antinatalism is a consequence of the collapse of theodicy endeavors and the failure of attempts to establish an anthropodicy. According to him, there is no metaphysics nor moral theory that can justify the production of new people, and therefore anthropodicy is indefensible as well as theodicy.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

Peter Wessel Zapffe viewed humans as a biological paradox. According to him, consciousness has become over-evolved in humans, thereby making us incapable of functioning normally like other animals: cognition gives us more than we can carry. Our frailness and insignificance in the cosmos are visible to us. We want to live, and yet because of how we have evolved, we are the only species whose members are conscious that they are destined to die. We are able to analyze the past and the future, both our situation and that of others, as well as to imagine the suffering of billions of people (as well as of other living beings) and feel compassion for their suffering. We yearn for justice and meaning in a world that lacks both. This ensures that the lives of conscious individuals are tragic. We have desires: spiritual needs that reality is unable to satisfy, and our species still exists only because we limit our awareness of what that reality actually entails. Human existence amounts to a tangled network of defense mechanisms, which can be observed both individually and socially, in our everyday behavior patterns. According to Zapffe, humanity should cease this self-deception, and the natural consequence would be its extinction by abstaining from procreation.

Negative ethics

Julio Cabrera proposes a concept of "negative ethics" in opposition to "affirmative" ethics, meaning ethics that affirm being. He describes procreation as manipulation and harm, a unilateral and non-consensual sending of a human being into a painful, dangerous and morally impeding situation.

Cabrera regards procreation as an ontological issue of total manipulation: one's very being is manufactured and used; in contrast to intra-worldly cases where someone is placed in a harmful situation. In the case of procreation, no chance of defense against that act is even available. According to Cabrera: manipulation in procreation is visible primarily in the unilateral and non-consensual nature of the act, which makes procreation per se inevitably asymmetrical; be it a product of forethought, or a product of neglect. It is always connected with the interests (or disinterests) of other humans, not the created human. In addition, Cabrera points out that in his view the manipulation of procreation is not limited to the act of creation itself, but it is continued in the process of raising the child, during which parents gain great power over the child's life, who is shaped according to their preferences and for their satisfaction. He emphasizes that although it is not possible to avoid manipulation in procreation, it is perfectly possible to avoid procreation itself and that then no moral rule is violated.

Cabrera believes that the situation in which one is placed through procreation, human life, is structurally negative in that its constitutive features are inherently adverse. The most prominent of them are, according to Cabrera, the following:

1. The being acquired by a human at birth is decreasing (or "decaying"), in the sense of a being that begins to end since its very emergence, following a single and irreversible direction of deterioration and decline, of which complete consummation can occur at any moment between some minutes and around one hundred years.
2. From the moment they come into being, humans are affected by three kinds of frictions: physical pain (in the form of illnesses, accidents, and natural catastrophes to which they are always exposed); discouragement (in the form of "lacking the will", or the "mood" or the "spirit", to continue to act, from mild taedium vitae to serious forms of depression), and finally, exposure to the aggressions of other humans (from gossip and slander to various forms of discrimination, persecution, and injustice), aggressions that we too can inflict on others, also submitted, like us, to the three kinds of friction.
3. To defend themselves against (a) and (b), human beings are equipped with mechanisms of creation of positive values (ethical, aesthetic, religious, entertaining, recreational, as well as values contained in human realizations of all kinds), which humans must keep constantly active. All positive values that appear within human life are reactive and palliative; they are introduced by the permanent, anxious, and uncertain struggle against the decaying life and its three kinds of friction.

Cabrera calls the set of these characteristics A–C the "terminality of being". He is of the opinion that a huge number of humans around the world cannot withstand this steep struggle against the terminal structure of their being, which leads to destructive consequences for them and others: suicides, major or minor mental illnesses, or aggressive behavior. He accepts that life may be – thanks to human's own merits and efforts – bearable and even very pleasant (though not for all, due to the phenomenon of moral impediment), but also considers it problematic to bring someone into existence so that they may attempt to make their life pleasant by struggling against the difficult and oppressive situation we place them in by procreating. It seems more reasonable, according to Cabrera, simply not to put them in that situation, since the results of their struggle are always uncertain.

Cabrera believes that in ethics, including affirmative ethics, there is one overarching concept which he calls the "Minimal Ethical Articulation", "MEA" (previously translated into English as "Fundamental Ethical Articulation" and "FEA"): the consideration of other people's interests, not manipulating them and not harming them. Procreation for him is an obvious violation of MEA – someone is manipulated and placed in a harmful situation as a result of that action. In his view, values included in the MEA are widely accepted by affirmative ethics, they are even their basics, and if approached radically, they should lead to the refusal of procreation.

For Cabrera, the worst thing in human life and by extension in procreation is what he calls "moral impediment": the structural impossibility of acting in the world without harming or manipulating someone at some given moment. This impediment does not occur because of an intrinsic "evil" of human nature, but because of the structural situation in which the human being has always been. In this situation, we are cornered by various kinds of pain, space for action is limited, and different interests often conflict with each other. We do not have to have bad intentions to treat others with disregard; we are compelled to do so in order to survive, pursue our projects, and escape from suffering. Cabrera also draws attention to the fact that life is associated with the constant risk of one experiencing strong physical pain, which is common in human life, for example as a result of a serious illness, and maintains that the mere existence of such possibility impedes us morally, as well as that because of it, we can at any time lose, as a result of its occurrence, the possibility of a dignified, moral functioning even to a minimal extent.

Kantian imperative

Julio Cabrera, David Benatar and Karim Akerma all argue that procreation is contrary to Immanuel Kant's practical imperative (according to Kant, a man should never be used as merely a means to an end, but always be treated as an end in himself). They argue that a person can be created for the sake of his parents or other people, but that it is impossible to create someone for his own good; and that therefore, following Kant's recommendation, we should not create new people. Heiko Puls argues that Kant's considerations regarding parental duties and human procreation, in general, imply arguments for an ethically justified antinatalism. Kant, however, according to Puls, rejects this position in his teleology for meta-ethical reasons.

Impossibility of consent

Seana Shiffrin, Gerald Harrison, Julia Tanner and Asheel Singh argue that procreation is morally problematic because of the impossibility of obtaining consent from the human who will be brought into existence.

Shiffrin lists four factors that in her opinion make the justification for having hypothetical consent to procreation a problem:

1. great harm is not at stake if the action is not taken;
2. if the action is taken, the harms suffered by the created person can be very severe;
3. a person cannot escape the imposed condition without very high cost (suicide is often a physically, emotionally, and morally excruciating option);
4. the hypothetical consent procedure is not based on the values of the person who will bear the imposed condition.

Gerald Harrison and Julia Tanner argue that when we want to significantly affect someone by our action and it is not possible to get their consent, then the default should be to not take such action. The exception is, according to them, actions by which we want to prevent greater harm of a person (for example, pushing someone out of the way of a falling piano). However, in their opinion, such actions certainly do not include procreation, because before taking this action a person does not exist.

Asheel Singh emphasizes that one does not have to think that coming into existence is always an overall harm in order to recognize antinatalism as a correct view. In his opinion, it is enough to think that there is no moral right to inflict serious, preventable harms upon others without their consent.

Death as a harm

Marc Larock presents a view which he calls "deprivationalism". According to this view:

• Each person has an interest in acquiring a new satisfied preference.
• Whenever a person is deprived of a new satisfied preference this violates an interest and thus causes harm.

Larock argues that if a person is deprived of an infinite number of new satisfied preferences, they suffer an infinite number of harms and that such deprivation is death to which procreation leads.

All of us are brought into existence, without our consent, and over the course of our lives, we are acquainted with a multitude of goods. Unfortunately, there is a limit to the amount of good each of us will have in our lives. Eventually, each of us will die and we will be permanently cut off from the prospect of any further good. Existence, viewed in this way, seems to be a cruel joke.

Larock believes that it is not correct to neutralize his view by stating that death is also an infinitely great benefit for us, because it protects us from the infinite number of new frustrated preferences. He proposes a thought experiment in which we have two people, Mary and Tom. The first person, Mary, dies at the age of forty years as a result of complications caused by a degenerative disease. Mary would live for some more time, if not for the complications, but she would only experience bad things in her life, not good ones. The second person, Tom, dies at the same age from the same illness, but in his case, the disease is at such a stage of development that his body would no longer be able to function. According to Larock, it is bad when someone, like in the case of Tom, encounters the impossibility of continuing to derive good things from his life; everybody's life leads to such a point if someone lives long enough and our intuitions do not tell us that this is generally good or even neutral. Therefore, we should reject the view that death is also an infinitely great benefit: because we think that Tom has been unlucky. In the case of Mary, our intuitions tell us that her misfortune is not as great as Tom's misfortune. Her misfortune is reduced by the fact that death saved her from the real prospect of experiencing bad things. We do not have the same intuition in Tom's case. No evil or good future was physically possible for him. Larock thinks that while the impossibility of experiencing future good things seems to us to be a harm, the mere lack of a logical possibility of experiencing future bad things does not seem to be a compensatory benefit to us. If so, there would be nothing strange in recognizing that Tom had not suffered any misfortune. But he is a victim of misfortune, just like Mary. However, Mary's misfortune does not seem to be so great because her death prevents great suffering. Larock is of the opinion that most people will see both cases in this way. This conclusion is supposed to lead to the fact that we recognize that there is an asymmetry between the harms and benefits that death brings.

Larock summarizes his view as follows:

The existence of every moral patient in our world rests on a crude moral miscalculation. As I see it, non-procreation is the best means of rectifying this mistake.

Negative utilitarianism

Negative utilitarianism argues that minimizing suffering has greater moral importance than maximizing happiness.

Hermann Vetter agrees with the assumptions of Jan Narveson:

1. There is no moral obligation to produce a child even if we could be sure that it will be very happy throughout its life.
2. There is a moral obligation not to produce a child if it can be foreseen that it will be unhappy.

However, he disagrees with the conclusion that Narveson draws:

3. In general – if it can be foreseen neither that the child will be unhappy nor that it will bring disutility upon others – there is no duty to have or not to have a child.

Instead, he presents the following decision-theoretic matrix:

	Child will be more or less happy	Child will be more or less unhappy
Produce the child	No duty fulfilled or violated	Duty violated
Do not produce the child	No duty fulfilled or violated	Duty fulfilled

Based on this, he concludes that we should not create people:

It is seen immediately that the act "do not produce the child" dominates the act "produce the child" because it has equally good consequences as the other act in one case and better consequences in the other. So it is to be preferred to the other act as long as we cannot exclude with certainty the possibility that the child will be more or less unhappy; and we never can. So we have, instead of (3), the far-reaching consequence: (3') In any case, it is morally preferable not to produce a child.

Karim Akerma argues that utilitarianism requires the least metaphysical assumptions and is, therefore, the most convincing ethical theory. He believes that negative utilitarianism is the right one because the good things in life do not compensate for the bad things; first and foremost, the best things do not compensate for the worst things such as, for example, the experiences of terrible pain, the agonies of the wounded, sick or dying. In his opinion, we also rarely know what to do to make people happy, but we know what to do so that people do not suffer: it is enough that they are not created. What is important for Akerma in ethics is the striving for the fewest suffering people (ultimately no one), not striving for the happiest people, which, according to him, takes place at the expense of immeasurable suffering.

Bruno Contestabile cites the story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin. In this story, the existence of the utopian city of Omelas and the good fortune of its inhabitants depend on the suffering of one child who is tortured in an isolated place and who cannot be helped. The majority accepts this state of affairs and stays in the city, but there are those who do not agree with it, who do not want to participate in it and thus they "walk away from Omelas". Contestabile draws a parallel here: for Omelas to exist, the child must be tortured, and in the same way, the existence of our world is related to the fact that someone is constantly harmed. According to Contestabile, antinatalists can be seen just as "the ones who walk away from Omelas", who do not accept such a world, and who do not approve of its perpetuation. He poses the question: is all happiness able to compensate for the extreme suffering of even one person?

David Benatar

Asymmetry between pleasure and pain

David Benatar argues that there is a crucial asymmetry between the good and the bad things, such as pleasure and pain:

1. the presence of pain is bad;
2. the presence of pleasure is good;
3. the absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone;
4. the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation.

Scenario A (X exists)	Scenario B (X never exists)
1. Presence of pain (Bad)	3. Absence of pain (Good)
2. Presence of pleasure (Good)	4. Absence of pleasure (Not bad)

Regarding procreation, the argument follows that coming into existence generates both good and bad experiences, pain and pleasure, whereas not coming into existence entails neither pain nor pleasure. The absence of pain is good, the absence of pleasure is not bad. Therefore, the ethical choice is weighed in favor of non-procreation.

Benatar explains the above asymmetry using four other asymmetries that he considers quite plausible:

• We have a moral obligation not to create unhappy people and we have no moral obligation to create happy people. The reason why we think there is a moral obligation not to create unhappy people is that the presence of this suffering would be bad (for the sufferers) and the absence of the suffering is good (even though there is nobody to enjoy the absence of suffering). By contrast, the reason we think there is no moral obligation to create happy people is that although their pleasure would be good for them, the absence of pleasure when they do not come into existence will not be bad, because there will be no one who will be deprived of this good.
• It is strange to mention the interests of a potential child as a reason why we decide to create them, and it is not strange to mention the interests of a potential child as a reason why we decide not to create them. That the child may be happy is not a morally important reason to create them. By contrast, that the child may be unhappy is an important moral reason not to create them. If it were the case that the absence of pleasure is bad even if someone does not exist to experience its absence, then we would have a significant moral reason to create a child and to create as many children as possible. And if it were not the case that the absence of pain is good even if someone does not exist to experience this good, then we would not have a significant moral reason not to create a child.
• Someday we can regret for the sake of a person whose existence was conditional on our decision, that we created them – a person can be unhappy and the presence of their pain would be a bad thing. But we will never feel regret for the sake of a person whose existence was conditional on our decision, that we did not create them – a person will not be deprived of happiness, because he or she will never exist, and the absence of happiness will not be bad, because there will be no one who will be deprived of this good.
• We feel sadness by the fact that somewhere people come into existence and suffer, and we feel no sadness by the fact that somewhere people did not come into existence in a place where there are happy people. When we know that somewhere people came into existence and suffer, we feel compassion. The fact that on some deserted island or planet people did not come into existence and suffer is good. This is because the absence of pain is good even when there is not someone who is experiencing this good. On the other hand, we do not feel sadness by the fact that on some deserted island or planet people did not come into existence and are not happy. This is because the absence of pleasure is bad only when someone exists to be deprived of this good.

Suffering experienced by descendents

According to Benatar, by creating a child, we are responsible not only for this child's suffering, but we may also be co-responsible for the suffering of further offspring of this child.

Assuming that each couple has three children, an original pair's cumulative descendants over ten generations amount to 88,572 people. That constitutes a lot of pointless, avoidable suffering. To be sure, full responsibility for it all does not lie with the original couple because each new generation faces the choice of whether to continue that line of descendants. Nevertheless, they bear some responsibility for the generations that ensue. If one does not desist from having children, one can hardly expect one's descendants to do so.

Consequences of procreation

Benatar cites statistics showing where the creation of people leads. It is estimated that:

• more than fifteen million people are thought to have died from natural disasters in the last 1,000 years,
• approximately 20,000 people die every day from hunger,
• an estimated 840 million people suffer from hunger and malnutrition,
• between 541 and 1912, it is estimated that over 102 million people succumbed to plague,
• the 1918 influenza epidemic killed 50 million people,
• nearly 11 million people die every year from infectious diseases,
• malignant neoplasms take more than a further 7 million lives each year,
• approximately 3.5 million people die every year in accidents,
• approximately 56.5 million people died in 2001, that is more than 107 people per minute,
• before the twentieth century over 133 million people were killed in mass killings,
• in the first 88 years of the twentieth century 170 million (and possibly as many as 360 million) people were shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hanged, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners,
• there were 1.6 million conflict-related deaths in the sixteenth century, 6.1 million in the seventeenth century, 7 million in the eighteenth, 19.4 million in the nineteenth, and 109.7 million in the twentieth,
• war-related injuries led to 310,000 deaths in 2000,
• about 40 million children are maltreated each year,
• more than 100 million currently living women and girls have been subjected to genital cutting,
• 815,000 people are thought to have committed suicide in 2000^[50] (currently, it is estimated that someone commits suicide every 40 seconds, more than 800,000 people per year).^[51]

Misanthropy

In addition to the philanthropic arguments, which are based on a concern for the humans who will be brought into existence, Benatar also posits that another path to antinatalism is the misanthropic argument that can be summarized in his opinion as follows:

Another route to anti-natalism is via what I call a "misanthropic" argument. According to this argument, humans are a deeply flawed and destructive species that is responsible for the suffering and deaths of billions of other humans and non-human animals. If that level of destruction were caused by another species we would rapidly recommend that new members of that species not be brought into existence.

Harm to non-human animals

David Benatar, Gunter Bleibohm, Gerald Harrison, Julia Tanner, and Patricia MacCormack are attentive to the harm caused to other sentient beings by humans. They would say that billions of non-human animals are abused and slaughtered each year by our species for the production of animal products, for experimentation and after the experiments (when they are no longer needed), as a result of the destruction of habitats or other environmental damage and for sadistic pleasure. They tend to agree with animal rights thinkers that the harm we do to them is immoral. They consider the human species the most destructive on the planet, arguing that without new humans, there will be no harm caused to other sentient beings by new humans.

Some antinatalists are also vegetarians or vegans for moral reasons, and postulate that such views should complement each other as having a common denominator: not causing harm to other sentient beings. This attitude was already present in Manichaeism and Catharism.

Environmental impact

Volunteers of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement argue that human activity is the primary cause of environmental degradation, and therefore refraining from reproduction is "the humanitarian alternative to human disasters". Others, in the United States and other developed countries, are similarly concerned about contributing to climate change and other environmental problems by having biological children.

Realism

Some antinatalists believe that most people do not evaluate reality accurately, which affects the desire to have children.

Peter Wessel Zapffe identifies four repressive mechanisms we use, consciously or not, to restrict our consciousness of life and the world:

• isolation – an arbitrary dismissal from our consciousness and the consciousness of others about all negative thoughts and feelings associated with the unpleasant facts of our existence. In daily life, this manifests as a tacit agreement to remain silent on certain subjects – especially around children, to prevent instilling in them a fear of the world and what awaits them in life, before they will be able to learn other mechanisms.
• anchoring – the creation and use of personal values to ensure our attachment to reality, such as parents, home, the street, school, God, the church, the State, morality, fate, the law of life, the people, the future, accumulation of material goods or authority, etc. This can be characterized as creating a defensive structure, "a fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness", and defending the structure against threats.
• distraction – shifting focus to new impressions to flee from circumstances and ideas we consider harmful or unpleasant.
• sublimation – refocusing the tragic parts of life into something creative or valuable, usually through an aesthetic confrontation for the purpose of catharsis. We focus on the imaginary, dramatic, heroic, lyric or comic aspects of life, to allow ourselves and others an escape from their true impact.

According to Zapffe, depressive disorders are often "messages from a deeper, more immediate sense of life, bitter fruits of a geniality of thought". Some studies seem to confirm this, it is said about the phenomenon of depressive realism, and Colin Feltham writes about antinatalism as one of its possible consequences.

David Benatar citing numerous studies lists three phenomena described by psychologists, which, according to him, are responsible for making our self-assessments about the quality of our lives unreliable:

• Tendency towards optimism (or Pollyanna principle) – we have a positively distorted picture of our lives in the past, present and future.
• Adaptation (or accommodation, habituation) – we adapt to negative situations and adjust our expectations accordingly.
• Comparison – for our self-assessments about the quality of our lives, more important than how our lives go is how they go in comparison with the lives of others. One of the effects of this is that negative aspects of life that affect everyone are not taken into account when assessing our own well-being. We are also more likely to compare ourselves with those who are worse off than those who are better off.

Benatar concludes:

The above psychological phenomena are unsurprising from an evolutionary perspective. They militate against suicide and in favour of reproduction. If our lives are quite as bad as I shall still suggest they are, and if people were prone to see this true quality of their lives for what it is, they might be much more inclined to kill themselves, or at least not to produce more such lives. Pessimism, then, tends not to be naturally selected.

Thomas Ligotti draws attention to the similarity between Zapffe's philosophy and terror management theory. Terror management theory argues that humans are equipped with unique cognitive abilities beyond what is necessary for survival, which includes symbolic thinking, extensive self-consciousness and perception of themselves as temporal beings aware of the finitude of their existence. The desire to live alongside our awareness of the inevitability of death triggers terror in us. Opposition to this fear is among our primary motivations. To escape it, we build defensive structures around ourselves to ensure our symbolic or literal immortality, to feel like valuable members of a meaningful universe, and to focus on protecting ourselves from immediate external threats.

Practical implications

Abortion

Antinatalism can lead to a particular position on the morality of abortion.

According to David Benatar, one comes into existence in the morally relevant sense when consciousness arises, when a fetus becomes sentient, and up until that time an abortion is moral, whereas continued pregnancy would be immoral. Benatar refers to EEG brain studies and studies on the pain perception of the fetus, which states that fetal consciousness arises no earlier than between twenty-eight and thirty weeks of pregnancy, before which it is incapable of feeling pain. Contrary to that, the latest report from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists showed that the fetus gains consciousness no earlier than week twenty-four of the pregnancy. Some assumptions of this report regarding sentience of the fetus after the second trimester were criticized. In a similar way argues Karim Akerma. He distinguishes between organisms that do not have mental properties and living beings that have mental properties. According to his view, which he calls the mentalistic view, a living being begins to exist when an organism (or another entity) produces a simple form of consciousness for the first time.

Julio Cabrera believes that the moral problem of abortion is totally different from the problem of abstention of procreation because in the case of abortion, there is no longer a non-being, but an already existing being – the most helpless and defenseless of the parties involved, that someday will have the autonomy to decide, and we cannot decide for them. From the point of view of Cabrera's negative ethics, abortion is immoral for similar reasons as procreation. For Cabrera, the exception in which abortion is morally justified is cases of irreversible illness of the foetus (or some serious "social illnesses" like American conquest or Nazism), according to him in such cases we are clearly thinking about the unborn, and not simply of our own interests. In addition, Cabrera believes that under certain circumstances, it is legitimate and comprehensible to commit unethical actions, for example, abortion is legitimate and comprehensible when the mother's life is at risk.

Adoption

Herman Vetter, Théophile de Giraud, Travis N. Rieder, Tina Rulli, Karim Akerma and Julio Cabrera argue that presently rather than engaging in the morally problematic act of procreation, one could do good by adopting already existing children. De Giraud emphasizes that, across the world, there are millions of existing children who need care.

Famine relief

Stuart Rachels and David Benatar argue that presently, in a situation where a huge number of people live in poverty, we should cease procreation and divert these resources, that would have been used to raise our own children, to the poor.

Non-human animals

Some antinatalists recognize the procreation of non-human sentient animals as morally bad, and some view sterilization as morally good in their case. Karim Akerma defines antinatalism, that includes non-human sentient animals, as universal antinatalism and he assumes such a position himself:

By sterilising animals, we can free them from being slaves to their instincts and from bringing more and more captive animals into the cycle of being born, contracting parasites, ageing, falling ill and dying; eating and being eaten.

David Benatar emphasizes that his asymmetry applies to all sentient beings, and mentions that humans play a role in deciding how many animals there will be: humans breed many species of animals.

Magnus Vinding argues that the lives of wild animals in their natural environment are generally very bad. He draws attention to phenomena such as dying before adulthood, starvation, disease, parasitism, infanticide, predation and being eaten alive. He cites research on what animal life looks like in the wild. One of eight male lion cubs survives into adulthood. Others die as a result of starvation, disease and often fall victims to the teeth and claws of other lions. Attaining adulthood is much rarer for fish. Only one in a hundred male chinook salmon survives into adulthood. Vinding is of the opinion that if human lives and the survival of human children looked like this, current human values would disallow procreation; however, this is not possible when it comes to non-human animals, who are guided by instinct. He takes the view that even if one does not agree that procreation is always morally bad, one should recognize procreation in wildlife as morally bad and something that ought to be prevented (at least in theory, not necessarily in practice). He maintains that non-intervention cannot be defended if we reject speciesism and that we should reject the unjustifiable dogma stating that what is happening in nature is what should be happening in nature.

We cannot allow ourselves to spuriously rationalize away the suffering that takes place in nature, and to forget the victims of the horrors of nature merely because that reality does not fit into our convenient moral theories, theories that ultimately just serve to make us feel consistent and good about ourselves in the face of an incomprehensibly bad reality.

The Population Bomb

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb 

 

The Population Bomb

Author	Paul R. Ehrlich
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Population
Publisher	Sierra Club/Ballantine Books
Publication date	1968
Pages	201
ISBN	1-56849-587-0

The Population Bomb is a best-selling book written by Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich (who was uncredited), in 1968. It predicted worldwide famine in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Fears of a "population explosion" existed in the 1950s and 1960s, but the book and its author brought the idea to an even wider audience.

The book has been criticized since its publication for its alarmist tone, and in recent decades for its inaccurate predictions. The Ehrlichs stand by the book despite its flaws stating in 2009 that "perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future" and believe that it achieved their goals because "it alerted people to the importance of environmental issues and brought human numbers into the debate on the human future."

General description of the book

Graph of human population from 10,000 BC to 2017 AD. It shows the extremely rapid growth in the world population since the eighteenth century.

The Population Bomb was written at the suggestion of David Brower, the executive director of the environmentalist Sierra Club, and Ian Ballantine of Ballantine Books following various public appearances Ehrlich had made regarding population issues and their relation to the environment. Although the Ehrlichs collaborated on the book, the publisher insisted that a single author be credited, and also asked to change their preferred title: Population, Resources, and Environment. The title Population Bomb was taken (with permission) from General William H. Draper, founder of the Population Crisis Committee and a pamphlet issued in 1954 by the Hugh Moore Fund. The Ehrlichs regret the choice of title, which they admit was a perfect choice from a marketing perspective, but think that "it led Paul to be miscategorized as solely focused on human numbers, despite our interest in all the factors affecting the human trajectory."

Early editions of The Population Bomb began with the statement:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...

Much of the book is spent describing the state of the environment and the food security situation, which is described as increasingly dire. Ehrlich argues that as the existing population was not being fed adequately, and as it was growing rapidly, it was unreasonable to expect sufficient improvements in food production to feed everyone. He further argued that the growing population placed escalating strains on all aspects of the natural world. "What needs to be done?" he wrote, "We must rapidly bring the world population under control, reducing the growth rate to zero or making it negative. Conscious regulation of human numbers must be achieved. Simultaneously we must, at least temporarily, greatly increase our food production." Ehrlich described a number of "ideas on how these goals might be reached." He believed that the United States should take a leading role in population control, both because it was already consuming much more than the rest of the world, and therefore had a moral duty to reduce its impact, and because the US would have to lead international efforts due to its prominence in the world. In order to avoid charges of hypocrisy or racism it would have to take the lead in population reduction efforts. Ehrlich floats the idea of adding "temporary sterilants" to the water supply or staple foods. However, he rejects the idea as unpractical due to "criminal inadequacy of biomedical research in this area." He suggests a tax scheme in which additional children would add to a family's tax burden at increasing rates for more children, as well as luxury taxes on childcare goods. He suggests incentives for men who agree to permanent sterilization before they have two children, as well as a variety of other monetary incentives. He proposes a powerful Department of Population and Environment which "should be set up with the power to take whatever steps are necessary to establish a reasonable population size in the United States and to put an end to the steady deterioration of our environment." The department should support research into population control, such as better contraceptives, mass sterilizing agents, and prenatal sex discernment (because families often continue to have children until a male is born. Ehrlich suggested that if they could choose a male child this would reduce the birthrate). Legislation should be enacted guaranteeing the right to an abortion, and sex education should be expanded.

After explaining the domestic policies the US should pursue, he discusses foreign policy. He advocates a system of "triage," such as that suggested by William and Paul Paddock in Famine 1975!. Under this system countries would be divided into categories based on their abilities to feed themselves going forward. Countries with sufficient programmes in place to limit population growth, and the ability to become self-sufficient in the future would continue to receive food aid. Countries, for example India, which were "so far behind in the population-food game that there is no hope that our food aid will see them through to self-sufficiency" would have their food aid eliminated. Ehrlich argued that this was the only realistic strategy in the long-term. Ehrlich applauds the Paddocks' "courage and foresight" in proposing such a solution. Ehrlich further discusses the need to set up public education programs and agricultural development schemes in developing countries. He argues that the scheme would likely have to be implemented outside the framework of the United Nations due to the necessity selecting the targeted regions and countries, and suggests that within countries certain regions should be prioritized to the extent that cooperative separatist movements should be encouraged if they are an improvement over the existing authority. He mentions his support for government mandated sterilization of Indian males with three or more children.

In the rest of the book Ehrlich discusses things which readers can do to help. This is focused primarily on changing public opinion to create pressure on politicians to enact the policies he suggests, which he believed were not politically possible in 1968. At the end of the book he discusses the possibility that his forecasts may be wrong, which he felt he must acknowledge as a scientist. However, he believes that regardless of coming catastrophes, his prescriptions would only benefit humanity, and would be the right course of action in any case.

The book sold over two million copies, raised the general awareness of population and environmental issues, and influenced 1960s and 1970s public policy. For the 14 years prior the book's appearance, the world population had been growing at accelerating rates, but immediately after the book's publication, the world population growth rate began a continuing downward trend, from its 1968 peak of 2.09% to 1.09% in 2018.

Context

In 1948, two widely read books were published that would inspire a "neo-Malthusian" debate on population and the environment: Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet and William Vogt’s Road to Survival. These inspired works such as the original Population Bomb pamphlet by Hugh Everett Moore in 1954, as well as some of the original societies concerned with population and environmental matters. D.B. Luten has said that although the book is often seen as a seminal work in the field, the Population Bomb is actually best understood as "climaxing and in a sense terminating the debate of the 1950s and 1960s.” Ehrlich has said that he traced his own Malthusian beliefs to a lecture he heard Vogt give when he was attending university in the early 1950s. For Ehrlich, these writers provided “a global framework for things he had observed as a young naturalist."

Criticisms

Restatement of Malthusian theory

The Population Bomb has been characterized by critics as primarily a repetition of the Malthusian catastrophe argument that population growth will outpace agricultural growth unless controlled. Ehrlich observed that since about 1930 the population of the world had doubled within a single generation, from 2 billion to nearly 4 billion, and was on track to do so again. He assumed that available resources on the other hand, and in particular food, were nearly at their limits. Some critics compare Ehrlich unfavorably to Malthus, saying that although Thomas Malthus did not make a firm prediction of imminent catastrophe, Ehrlich warned of a potential massive disaster within the next decade or two. In addition, critics state that unlike Malthus, Ehrlich did not see any means of avoiding the disaster entirely (although some mitigation was possible), and proposed solutions that were much more radical than those discussed by Malthus, such as starving whole countries that refused to implement population control measures.

Ehrlich was certainly not unique in his neo-Malthusian predictions, and there was a widespread belief in the 1960s and 70s that increasingly catastrophic famines were on their way.

Predictions

The Ehrlichs made a number of specific predictions that did not come to pass, for which they have received criticism. They have acknowledged that some predictions were incorrect. However, they maintain that their general argument remains intact, that their predictions were merely illustrative, that their and others' warnings caused preventive action, or that many of their predictions may yet come true (see Ehrlich's response below). Still other commentators have criticized the Ehrlichs' perceived inability to acknowledge mistakes, evasiveness, and refusal to alter their arguments in the face of contrary evidence. In 2015 Ehrlich told Retro Report, "I do not think my language was too apocalyptic in The Population Bomb. My language would be even more apocalyptic today."

In The Population Bomb's opening lines the authors state that nothing can prevent famines in which hundreds of millions of people will die during the 1970s (amended to 1970s and 1980s in later editions), and that there would be "a substantial increase in the world death rate." Although many lives could be saved through dramatic action, it was already too late to prevent a substantial increase in the global death rate. However, in reality the global death rate has continued to decline substantially since then, from 13/1000 in 1965–74 to 10/1000 from 1985–1990. Meanwhile, the population of the world has more than doubled, while calories consumed/person have increased 24%. The UN does not keep official death-by-hunger statistics so it is hard to measure whether the "hundreds of millions of deaths" number is correct. Ehrlich himself suggested in 2009 that between 200-300 million had died of hunger since 1968. However, that is measured over 40 years rather than the ten to twenty foreseen in the book, so it can be seen as significantly fewer than predicted.

Famine has not been eliminated, but its root cause has been political instability, not global food shortage. The Indian economist and Nobel Prize winner, Amartya Sen, has argued that nations with democracy and a free press have virtually never suffered from extended famines. And while a 2010 UN report stated that 925 million of the world's population of nearly seven billion people were in a constant state of hunger, it also notes that the percentage of the world's population who qualify as "undernourished" has fallen by more than half, from 33 percent to about 16 percent, since Ehrlich published The Population Bomb.

Ehrlich writes: "I don't see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." This view was widely held at the time, as another statement of his, later in the book: "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks that India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971." In the book's 1971 edition, the latter prediction was removed, as the food situation in India suddenly improved.

As of 2010, India had almost 1.2 billion people, having nearly tripled its population from around 400 million in 1960, with a total fertility rate in 2008 of 2.6. While the absolute numbers of malnourished children in India is high, the rates of malnutrition and poverty in India have declined from approximately 90% at the time of India's independence (1947), to less than 40% on 2010 (see Malnutrition in India). Ehrlich's prediction about famines did not come to pass, although food security is still an issue in India. However, most epidemiologists, public health physicians and demographers identify corruption as the chief cause of malnutrition, not "overpopulation". As Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen noted, India frequently had famines during British colonial rule. However, since India became a democracy, there have been no recorded famines.

Journalist Dan Gardner has criticized Ehrlich both for his overconfident predictions and his refusal to acknowledge his errors. "In two lengthy interviews, Ehrlich admitted making not a single major error in the popular works he published in the late 1960s and early 1970s … the only flat-out mistake Ehrlich acknowledges is missing the destruction of the rain forests, which happens to be a point that supports and strengthens his world view—and is therefore, in cognitive dissonance terms, not a mistake at all. Beyond that, he was by his account, off a little here and there, but only because the information he got from others was wrong. Basically, he was right across the board."

Jonathan Last called it "one of the most spectacularly foolish books ever published".

Persistence of trends

Economist Julian Simon and medical statistician Hans Rosling pointed out that the failed prediction of 70s famines were based exclusively on the assumption that exponential population growth will continue indefinitely and no technological or social progress will be made. In The Ultimate Resource Simon argued that resources, such as metals, which Ehrlichs extensively discuss in their books as examples of non-sustainable resources, are valued exclusively for the function they provide, and technological progress frequently replaces these: for example, copper was largely replaced by fiber optic in communications, and carbon fiber replaced a wide range of alloys and steel in construction (see Simon-Ehrlich wager and The Ultimate Resource). Simon also argued that technological progress tends to happen in large steps rather than linear growth, as happened with the Green revolution. Hans Rosling in Factfulness demonstrated that fertility rate has significantly decreased worldwide and, more importantly, high fertility is a natural response to high mortality in low-income countries and once they enter higher income group, fertility drops quickly (see Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think). According to environmental Stewart Brand, himself a student and friend of Ehrlich, the assumption made by the latter and by authors of The Limits to Growth has been "proven wrong since 1963" when the demographic trends worldwide have visibly changed.

Showmanship

One frequent criticism of The Population Bomb is that it focused on spectacle and exaggeration at the expense of accuracy. Pierre Desrochers and Christine Hoffbauer remark that "at the time of writing The Population Bomb, Paul and Anne Ehrlich should have been more cautious and revised their tone and rhetoric, in light of the undeniable and already apparent errors and shortcomings of Osborn and Vogt’s analyses." Charles Rubin has written that it was precisely because Ehrlich was largely unoriginal and wrote in a clear emotionally gripping style that it became so popular. He quotes a review from Natural History noting that Ehrlich does not try to "convince intellectually by mind dulling statistics," but rather roars "like an Old Testament Prophet." Gardner says, "as much as the events and culture of the era, Paul Ehrlich's style explain the enormous audience he attracted." Indeed, an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson helped to propel the success of the book, as well as Ehrlich's celebrity.

Desrochers and Hoffbauer go on to conclude that it seems hard to deny that using an alarmist tone and emotional appeal were the main lessons that the present generation of environmentalists learned from Ehrlich's success.

Social and political coercion

On the political left the book received criticism that it was focusing on "the wrong problem", and that the real issue was one of distribution of resources rather than of overpopulation. Marxists worried that Ehrlich's work could be used to justify genocide and imperial control, as well as oppression of minorities and disadvantaged groups or even a return to eugenics.

Eco-socialist Barry Commoner argued that the Ehrlichs were too focused on overpopulation as the source of environmental problems, and that their proposed solutions were politically unacceptable because of the coercion that they implied, and because the cost would fall disproportionately on the poor. He argued that technological, and above all social development would lead to a natural decrease in both population growth and environmental damage. Commoner engaged in a fierce debate with Ehrlich on an environmental United Nations convention in Stockholm:

A feud about how to deal with overpopulation surfaced in Stockholm, between Ehrlich and his nemesis, Barry Commoner, whose popular book, The Closing Circle (1971), directly criticized Ehrlich’s population-bomb thesis. Both were on panels in Stockholm, with Commoner slyly planting invidious questions aimed at Ehrlich among various Third World participants in the conference, and Ehrlich yelling back. Commoner’s argument was that population policies weren’t needed, because what was called “the demographic transition” would take care of everything—all you had to do was help poor people get less poor, and they would have fewer children. Ehrlich insisted that the situation was way too serious for that approach, and it wouldn’t work anyway: You needed harsh government programs to drive down the birthrate. The alternative was overwhelming famines and massive damage to the environment.

— Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline, 2010

Ehrlich's response

In a 2004 Grist Magazine interview, Ehrlich acknowledged some specific predictions he had made, in the years around the time The Population Bomb was published, that had not come to pass. However, as to a number of his fundamental ideas and assertions he maintained that facts and science proved them correct.

In answer to the question: "Were your predictions in The Population Bomb right?", Ehrlich responded:

Anne and I have always followed UN population projections as modified by the Population Reference Bureau -- so we never made "predictions," even though idiots think we have. When I wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, there were 3.5 billion people. Since then we've added another 2.8 billion -- many more than the total population (2 billion) when I was born in 1932. If that's not a population explosion, what is? My basic claims (and those of the many scientific colleagues who reviewed my work) were that population growth was a major problem. Fifty-eight academies of science said that same thing in 1994, as did the world scientists' warning to humanity in the same year. My view has become depressingly mainline!

In another retrospective article published in 2009, Ehrlich said, in response to criticism that many of his predictions had not come to pass:

the biggest tactical error in The Bomb was the use of scenarios, stories designed to help one think about the future. Although we clearly stated that they were not predictions and that “we can be sure that none of them will come true as stated,’ (p. 72)—their failure to occur is often cited as a failure of prediction. In honesty, the scenarios were way off, especially in their timing (we underestimated the resilience of the world system). But they did deal with future issues that people in 1968 should have been thinking about – famines, plagues, water shortages, armed international interventions by the United States, and nuclear winter (e.g., Ehrlich et al. 1983, Toon et al. 2007)—all events that have occurred or now still threaten

Human population planning

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_planning 

Map of countries by fertility rate (2020), according to the Population Reference Bureau

Human reproduction planning is the practice of intentionally controlling the rate of growth of a human population. Historically, human population planning has been implemented with the goal of increasing the rate of human population growth. However, in the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, concerns about global population growth and its effects on poverty, environmental degradation and political stability led to efforts to reduce human population growth rates. More recently, some countries, such as China, Iran, and Spain, have begun efforts to increase their birth rates once again. While population planning can involve measures that improve people's lives by giving them greater control of their reproduction, a few programs, most notably the Chinese government's "one-child policy and two-child policy", have resorted to coercive measures.

Types

Three types of population planning goals pursued by governments can be identified:

1. Increasing or Decreasing the overall population growth rate
2. Decreasing the relative population growth of a less favored subgroup of a national population or ethnic group, such as people of low intelligence or people with disabilities. This is a form of eugenics.
3. Instead of trying to control the rate of population growth per se, trying to arrange things so that all population groups of a certain type (e.g. all social classes within a society) have the same average rate of population growth.

Methods

While a specific population planning practice may be legal/mandated in one country, it may be illegal or restricted in another, indicative of the controversy surrounding this topic.

Reducing population growth

Population planning that is intended to reduce a population or sub-population's growth rates may promote or enforce one or more of the following practices, although there are other methods:

• Contraception

• Abstinence
  

• World infant mortality rates in 2012
• Reducing infant mortality so that parents do not need to have many children to ensure at least some survive to adulthood.
• Abortion
• Changing status of women causing departure from traditional sexual division of labour.
• Sterilization
• One-child and Two-child policies, and other policies restricting or discouraging births directly.
• Family planning
• Migration from rural areas to urban areas: having more children is financially more beneficial (for farming families) in rural areas than in urban areas.
• Create small family "role models"
• Changes to immigration policies
• War (Wars that are done on purpose can cause casualties that lower the population)
• Higher taxation of parents who have too many children
• Emigration.

The method(s) chosen can be strongly influenced by the religious and cultural beliefs of community members. The failure of other methods of population planning can lead to the use of abortion or infanticide as solutions.

Increasing population growth

Population policies that are intended to increase a population or subpopulation growth rates may use practices such as:

• Higher taxation of married couples who have no, or too few, children
• Politicians imploring the populace to have bigger families
• Tax breaks and subsidies for families with children
• Loosening of immigration restrictions, and/or mass recruitment of foreign workers by the government

History

Ancient times through Middle Ages

A number of ancient writers have reflected on the issue of population. At about 300 BC, the Indian political philosopher Chanakya (c. 350-283 BC) considered population a source of political, economic, and military strength. Though a given region can house too many or too few people, he considered the latter possibility to be the greater evil. Chanakya favored the remarriage of widows (which at the time was forbidden in India), opposed taxes encouraging emigration, and believed in restricting asceticism to the aged.

In ancient Greece, Plato (427-347 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC) discussed the best population size for Greek city-states such as Sparta, and concluded that cities should be small enough for efficient administration and direct citizen participation in public affairs, but at the same time needed to be large enough to defend themselves against hostile neighbors. In order to maintain a desired population size, the philosophers advised that procreation, and if necessary, immigration, should be encouraged if the population size was too small. Emigration to colonies would be encouraged should the population become too large. Aristotle concluded that a large increase in population would bring, "certain poverty on the citizenry and poverty is the cause of sedition and evil." To halt rapid population increase, Aristotle advocated the use of abortion and the exposure of newborns (that is, infanticide).

Confucius (551-478 BC) and other Chinese writers cautioned that, "excessive growth may reduce output per worker, repress levels of living for the masses and engender strife." Confucius also observed that, "mortality increases when food supply is insufficient; that premature marriage makes for high infantile mortality rates, that war checks population growth."

Ancient Rome, especially in the time of Augustus (63 BC-AD 14), needed manpower to acquire and administer the vast Roman Empire. A series of laws were instituted to encourage early marriage and frequent childbirth. Lex Julia (18 BC) and the Lex Papia Poppaea (AD 9) are two well-known examples of such laws, which among others, provided tax breaks and preferential treatment when applying for public office for those that complied with the laws. Severe limitations were imposed on those who did not. For example, the surviving spouse of a childless couple could only inherit one-tenth of the deceased fortune, while the rest was taken by the state. These laws encountered resistance from the population which led to the disregard of their provisions and to their eventual abolition.

Tertullian, an early Christian author (ca. AD 160-220), was one of the first to describe famine and war as factors that can prevent overpopulation. He wrote: "The strongest witness is the vast population of the earth to which we are a burden and she scarcely can provide for our needs; as our demands grow greater, our complaints against Nature's inadequacy are heard by all. The scourges of pestilence, famine, wars, and earthquakes have come to be regarded as a blessing to overcrowded nations since they serve to prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race."

Ibn Khaldun, a North African polymath (1332–1406), considered population changes to be connected to economic development, linking high birth rates and low death rates to times of economic upswing, and low birth rates and high death rates to economic downswing. Khaldoun concluded that high population density rather than high absolute population numbers were desirable to achieve more efficient division of labour and cheap administration.

During the Middle Ages in Christian Europe, population issues were rarely discussed in isolation. Attitudes were generally pro-natalist in line with the Biblical command, "Be ye fruitful and multiply."

16th and 17th centuries

European cities grew more rapidly than before, and throughout the 16th century and early 17th century discussions on the advantages and disadvantages of population growth were frequent. Niccolò Machiavelli, an Italian Renaissance political philosopher, wrote, "When every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove themselves elsewhere... the world will purge itself in one or another of these three ways," listing floods, plague and famine. Martin Luther concluded, "God makes children. He is also going to feed them."

Jean Bodin, a French jurist and political philosopher (1530–1596), argued that larger populations meant more production and more exports, increasing the wealth of a country. Giovanni Botero, an Italian priest and diplomat (1540–1617), emphasized that, "the greatness of a city rests on the multitude of its inhabitants and their power," but pointed out that a population cannot increase beyond its food supply. If this limit was approached, late marriage, emigration, and the war would serve to restore the balance.

Richard Hakluyt, an English writer (1527–1616), observed that, "Through our longe peace and seldom sickness... we are grown more populous than ever heretofore;... many thousands of idle persons are within this realme, which, having no way to be sett on work, be either mutinous and seek alteration in the state, or at least very burdensome to the commonwealth." Hakluyt believed that this led to crime and full jails and in A Discourse on Western Planting (1584), Hakluyt advocated for the emigration of the surplus population. With the onset of the Thirty Years' War (1618–48), characterized by widespread devastation and deaths brought on by hunger and disease in Europe, concerns about depopulation returned.

Population planning movement

In the 20th century, population planning proponents have drawn from the insights of Thomas Malthus, a British clergyman and economist who published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. Malthus argued that, "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio." He also outlined the idea of "positive checks" and "preventative checks." "Positive checks", such as diseases, wars, disasters, famines, and genocides are factors which Malthus believed could increase the death rate. "Preventative checks" were factors which Malthus believed could affect the birth rate such as moral restraint, abstinence and birth control. He predicted that "positive checks" on exponential population growth would ultimately save humanity from itself and he also believed that human misery was an "absolute necessary consequence." Malthus went on to explain why he believed that this misery affected the poor in a disproportionate manner.

World population growth rate 1950–2050

There is a constant effort towards an increase in population which tends to subject the lower classes of society to distress and to prevent any great permanent amelioration of their condition…. The way in which these effects are produced seems to be this. We will suppose the means of subsistence in any country just equal to the easy support of its inhabitants. The constant effort towards population... increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased. The food, therefore which before supplied seven million must now be divided among seven million and a half or eight million. The poor consequently must live much worse, and many of them are reduced to severe distress.

Finally, Malthus advocated for the education of the lower class about the use of "moral restraint" or voluntary abstinence, which he believed would slow the growth rate.

Paul R. Ehrlich, a US biologist and environmentalist, published The Population Bomb in 1968, advocating stringent population planning policies. His central argument on population is as follows:

A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. Treating only the symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but eventually, he dies - often horribly. A similar fate awaits a world with a population explosion if only the symptoms are treated. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance to survive.

World population 1950–2010

World population 1800-2000

In his concluding chapter, Ehrlich offered a partial solution to the "population problem," "[We need] compulsory birth regulation... [through] the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size".

Ehrlich's views came to be accepted by many population planning advocates in the United States and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. Since Ehrlich introduced his idea of the "population bomb," overpopulation has been blamed for a variety of issues, including increasing poverty, high unemployment rates, environmental degradation, famine and genocide. In a 2004 interview, Ehrlich reviewed the predictions in his book and found that while the specific dates within his predictions may have been wrong, his predictions about climate change and disease were valid. Ehrlich continued to advocate for population planning and co-authored the book The Population Explosion, released in 1990 with his wife Anne Ehrlich.

However, it is controversial as to whether human population stabilization will avert environmental risks.

Paige Whaley Eager argues that the shift in perception that occurred in the 1960s must be understood in the context of the demographic changes that took place at the time. It was only in the first decade of the 19th century that the world's population reached one billion. The second billion was added in the 1930s, and the next billion in the 1960s. 90 percent of this net increase occurred in developing countries. Eager also argues that, at the time, the United States recognised that these demographic changes could significantly affect global geopolitics. Large increases occurred in China, Mexico and Nigeria, and demographers warned of a "population explosion," particularly in developing countries from the mid-1950s onwards.

In the 1980s, tension grew between population planning advocates and women's health activists who advanced women's reproductive rights as part of a human rights-based approach. Growing opposition to the narrow population planning focus led to a significant change in population planning policies in the early 1990s.

Population planning and economics

Opinions vary among economists about the effects of population change on a nation's economic health. US scientific research in 2009 concluded that the raising of a child cost about $16,000 yearly ($291,570 total for raising the child to its 18th birthday). In the US, the multiplication of this number with the yearly population growth will yield the overall cost of the population growth. Costs for other developed countries are usually of a similar order of magnitude.

Some economists, such as Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams, have argued that poverty and famine are caused by bad government and bad economic policies, not by overpopulation.

In his book The Ultimate Resource, economist Julian Simon argued that higher population density leads to more specialization and technological innovation, which in turn leads to a higher standard of living. He claimed that human beings are the ultimate resource since we possess "productive and inventive minds that help find creative solutions to man’s problems, thus leaving us better off over the long run". He also claimed that, "Our species is better off in just about every measurable material way."

Simon also claimed that when considering a list of countries ranked in order by population density, there is no correlation between population density and poverty and starvation. Instead, if a list of countries is considered according to corruption within their respective governments, there is a significant correlation between government corruption, poverty and famine.

Views on population planning

Birth rate reductions

Support

As early as 1798, Thomas Malthus argued in his Essay on the Principle of Population for implementation of population planning. Around the year 1900, Sir Francis Galton said in his publication Hereditary Improvement: "The unfit could become enemies to the State if they continue to propagate." In 1968, Paul Ehrlich noted in The Population Bomb, "We must cut the cancer of population growth", and "if this was not done, there would be only one other solution, namely the 'death rate solution' in which we raise the death rate through war-famine-pestilence, etc.”

In the same year, another prominent modern advocate for mandatory population planning was Garrett Hardin, who proposed in his landmark 1968 essay Tragedy of the commons, society must relinquish the "freedom to breed" through "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon." Later on, in 1972, he reaffirmed his support in his new essay "Exploring New Ethics for Survival", by stating, " We are breeding ourselves into oblivion." Many prominent personalities, such as Bertrand Russell, Margaret Sanger (1939), John D. Rockefeller, Frederick Osborn (1952), Isaac Asimov, Arne Næss and Jacques Cousteau have also advocated for population planning. Today, a number of influential people advocate population planning such as these:

• David Attenborough
• Jonathon Porritt, UK sustainable development commissioner
• Sara Parkin
• Crispin Tickell
• Christian de Duve, Nobel laureate
• Bernie Sanders

The head of the UN Millennium Project Jeffrey Sachs is also a strong proponent of decreasing the effects of overpopulation. In 2007, Jeffrey Sachs gave a number of lectures (2007 Reith Lectures) about population planning and overpopulation. In his lectures, called "Bursting at the Seams", he featured an integrated approach that would deal with a number of problems associated with overpopulation and poverty reduction. For example, when criticized for advocating mosquito nets he argued that child survival was, "by far one of the most powerful ways," to achieve fertility reduction, as this would assure poor families that the smaller number of children they had would survive.

Opposition

The Roman Catholic Church has opposed abortion, sterilization, and artificial contraception as a general practice but especially in regard to population planning policies. Pope Benedict XVI has stated, "The extermination of millions of unborn children, in the name of the fight against poverty, actually constitutes the destruction of the poorest of all human beings." The reformed Theology pastor Dr. Stephen Tong also opposes the planning of human population.

Many Muslim Majority countries criminalize abortion under the premise that it is "against the word of god".

Pro-natalist policies

In 1946, Poland introduced a tax on childlessness, discontinued in the 1970s, as part of natalist policies in the Communist government. From 1941 to the 1990s, the Soviet Union had a similar tax to replenish the population losses incurred during the Second World War.

The Socialist Republic of Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu severely repressed abortion, (the most common birth control method at the time) in 1966, and forced gynecological revisions and penalties for unmarried women and childless couples. The surge of the birth rate taxed the public services received by the decreţei 770 ("Scions of the Decree 770") generation. A consequence of Ceaușescu's natalist policy is that large numbers of children ended up living in orphanages, because their parents could not cope. The vast majority of children who lived in the communist orphanages were not actually orphans, but were simply children whose parents could not afford to raise them. The Romanian Revolution of 1989 preceded a fall in population growth.

Balanced birth policies

Nativity in the Western world dropped during the interwar period. Swedish sociologists Alva and Gunnar Myrdal published Crisis in the Population Question in 1934, suggesting an extensive welfare state with universal healthcare and childcare, to increase overall Swedish birth rates, and level the number of children at a reproductive level for all social classes in Sweden. Swedish fertility rose throughout World War II (as Sweden was largely unharmed by the war) and peaked in 1946.

Modern practice by country

Australia

Australia currently offers fortnightly Family Tax Benefit payments plus a free immunization scheme, and recently proposed to pay all child care costs for women who want to work.

China

One-child era (1979–2015)

The most significant population planning system in the world was China's one-child policy, in which, with various exceptions, having more than one child was discouraged. Unauthorized births were punished by fines, although there were also allegations of illegal forced abortions and forced sterilization. As part of China's planned birth policy, (work) unit supervisors monitored the fertility of married women and may decide whose turn it is to have a baby.

The Chinese government introduced the policy in 1978 to alleviate the social and environmental problems of China. According to government officials, the policy has helped prevent 400 million births. The success of the policy has been questioned, and reduction in fertility has also been attributed to the modernization of China. The policy is controversial both within and outside of China because of its manner of implementation and because of concerns about negative economic and social consequences e.g. female infanticide. In oriental cultures, the oldest male child has responsibility of caring for the parents in their old age. Therefore, it is common for oriental families to invest most heavily in the oldest male child, such as providing college, steering them into the most lucrative careers, and so on. To these families, having an oldest male child is paramount, so in a one-child policy, a daughter has no economic benefit, so daughters, especially as a first child, is often targeted for abortion or infanticide. China introduced several government reforms to increase retirement payments to coincide with the one-child policy. During that time, couples could request permission to have more than one child.

According to Tibetologist Melvyn Goldstein, natalist feelings run high in China's Tibet Autonomous Region, among both ordinary people and government officials. Seeing population control "as a matter of power and ethnic survival" rather than in terms of ecological sustainability, Tibetans successfully argued for an exemption of Tibetan people from the usual family planning policies in China such as the one-child policy.

Two-child era (2016-)

Map of population density by country, per square kilometer

In November 2014, the Chinese government allowed its people to conceive a second child under the supervision of government regulation.

On October 29, 2015, the ruling Chinese Communist Party announced that all one-child policies would be scrapped, allowing all couples to have two children. The change was needed to allow a better balance of male and female children, and to grow the young population to ease the problem of paying for the aging population. The law enacting the two-child policy took effect on January 1, 2016, and replaced the previous one-child policy.

Hungary

During the Second Orbán Government, Hungary increased its spending on family benefits from one of the lowest rates in the OECD to one of the highest. In 2015, it was almost 4% of GDP.

India

Only those with two or fewer children are eligible for election to a local government.

Us two, our two ("Hum do, hamare do" in Hindi) is a slogan meaning one family, two children and is intended to reinforce the message of family planning thereby aiding population planning.

Facilities offered by government to its employees are limited to two children. The government offers incentives for families accepted for sterilization. Moreover, India was the first country to take measures for family planning back in 1952.

In the south west of India lies the long narrow coastal state of Kerala. Most of its thirty-two million inhabitants live off the land and the ocean, a rich tropical ecosystem watered by two monsoons a year. It's also one of India's most crowded states – but the population is stable because nearly everybody has small families… At the root of it all is education. Thanks to a long tradition of compulsory schooling for boys and girls Kerala has one of the highest literacy rates in the World. Where women are well educated they tend to choose to have smaller families… What Kerala shows is that you don't need aggressive policies or government incentives for birthrates to fall. Everywhere in the world where women have access to education and have the freedom to run their own lives, on the whole they and their partners have been choosing to have smaller families than their parents. But reducing birthrates is very difficult to achieve without a simple piece of medical technology, contraception.

— BBC Horizon (2009), How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth

Iran

After the Iran–Iraq War, Iran encouraged married couples to produce as many children as possible to replace population lost to the war.

Iran succeeded in sharply reducing its birth rate from the late 1980s to 2010. Mandatory contraceptive courses are required for both males and females before a marriage license can be obtained, and the government emphasized the benefits of smaller families and the use of contraception. This changed in 2012, when a major policy shift back towards increasing birth rates was announced. In 2014, permanent contraception and advertising of birth control were to be outlawed.

Israel

In Israel, Haredi families with many children receive economic support through generous governmental child allowances, government assistance in housing young religious couples, as well as specific funds by their own community institutions. Haredi women have an average of 6.7 children while the average Jewish Israeli woman has 3 children.

Japan

Japan has experienced a shrinking population for many years. The government is trying to encourage women to have children or to have more children – many Japanese women do not have children, or even remain single. The population is culturally opposed to immigration.

Some Japanese localities, facing significant population loss, are offering economic incentives. Yamatsuri, a town of 7 000 just north of Tokyo, offers parents $4,600 for the birth of a child and $460 a year for 10 years.

Myanmar

In Myanmar, the Population planning Health Care Bill requires some parents to space each child three years apart. The measure is expected to be used against the persecuted Muslim Rohingyas minority.

Russia

Russian President Vladimir Putin directed Parliament in 2006 to adopt a 10-year program to stop the sharp decline in Russia's population, principally by offering financial incentives and subsidies to encourage women to have children.

Singapore

Singapore has undergone two major phases in its population planning: first to slow and reverse the baby boom in the Post-World War II era; then from the 1980s onwards to encourage couples to have more children as the birth rate had fallen below the replacement-level fertility. In addition, during the interim period, eugenics policies were adopted.

The anti-natalist policies flourished in the 1960s and 1970s: initiatives advocating small families were launched and developed into the Stop at Two programme, pushing for two-children families and promoting sterilisation. In 1984, the government announced the Graduate Mothers' Scheme, which favoured children of more well-educated mothers; the policy was however soon abandoned due to the outcry in the general election of the same year. Eventually, the government became pro-natalist in the late 1980s, marked by its Have Three or More plan in 1987. Singapore pays $3,000 for the first child, $9,000 in cash and savings for the second; and up to $18,000 each for the third and fourth.

Spain

In 2017, the government of Spain appointed Edelmira Barreira, as "minister for sex", in a pro-natalist attempt to reverse a negative population growth rate.

Turkey

In May 2012, Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan argued that abortion is murder and announced that legislative preparations to severely limit the practice are underway. Erdogan also argued that abortion and C-section deliveries are plots to stall Turkey's economic growth. Prior to this move, Erdogan had repeatedly demanded that each couple have at least three children.

United States

Enacted in 1970, Title X of the Public Health Service Act provides access to contraceptive services, supplies and information to those in need. Priority for services is given to people with low incomes. The Title X Family Planning program is administered through the Office of Population Affairs under the Office of Public Health and Science. It is directed by the Office of Family Planning. In 2007, Congress appropriated roughly $283 million for family planning under Title X, at least 90 percent of which was used for services in family planning clinics. Title X is a vital source of funding for family planning clinics throughout the nation, which provide reproductive health care, including abortion.

The education and services supplied by the Title X-funded clinics support young individuals and low-income families. The goals of developing healthy families are accomplished by helping individuals and couples decide whether to have children and when the appropriate time to do so would be.

Title X has made the prevention of unintended pregnancies possible. It has allowed millions of American women to receive necessary reproductive health care, plan their pregnancies and prevent abortions. Title X is dedicated exclusively to funding family planning and reproductive health care services.

Title X as a percentage of total public funding to family planning client services has steadily declined from 44% of total expenditures in 1980 to 12% in 2006. Medicaid has increased from 20% to 71% in the same time. In 2006, Medicaid contributed $1.3 billion to public family planning.

In the early 1970s, the United States Congress established the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future (Chairman John D. Rockefeller III), which was created to provide recommendations regarding population growth and its social consequences. The Commission submitted its final recommendations in 1972, which included promoting contraceptives and liberalizing abortion regulations, for example.

Natalism in the United States

In a 2004 editorial in The New York Times, David Brooks expressed the opinion that the relatively high birthrate of the United States in comparison to Europe could be attributed to social groups with "natalist" attitudes. The article is referred to in an analysis of the Quiverfull movement. However, the figures identified for the demographic are extremely low.

Former US Senator Rick Santorum made natalism part of his platform for his 2012 presidential campaign. Many of those categorized in the General Social Survey as "Fundamentalist Protestant" are more or less natalist, and have a higher birth rate than "Moderate" and "Liberal" Protestants. However, Rick Santorum is not a Protestant but a practicing Catholic.

Uzbekistan

It is reported that Uzbekistan has been pursuing a policy of forced sterilizations, hysterectomies and IUD insertions since the late 1990s in order to impose population planning.