quoting from
this (no I’m not some huge Cato fan but this has good info):
In 1983, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)—then the United Nations Fund for Population Activities—the world’s largest multilateral source of funding for government population programs, began issuing a prize called the Population Award, to be presented annually to “an individual, to individuals, or to an institution for the most outstanding contribution to the awareness of population questions or to their solutions.” The first prizewinners were Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister who declared a national “Emergency” that suspended civil liberties and mandated sterilizations on a massive scale between 1975 and 1977, and Qian Xinzhong, head of China’s State Family Planning Commission and the man in charge of the country’s one‐child policy, which lasted from 1979 to 2015.
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Why did the United Nations (UN) applaud Gandhi and Xinzhong, who had overseen coercive policies that victimized millions of people? Part of the answer can be found in UN Secretary‐General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar’s statement as he presented the Population Award: “If rapid population growth in the developing nations is left unchecked, it will evidently undermine all efforts for economic and social development and could easily lead to widespread depletion of each nation’s resources.” He praised the “vision and foresight” of Gandhi and Xinzhong for their efforts toward “controlling population growth.”
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Others have offered in‐depth critiques of neo‐Malthusian theory. It turns out that birth rates tend to fall without coercion as countries grow richer and that population growth may make resources
more plentiful thanks to humanity’s capacity for innovation. Economist Julian Simon, for example, argued that the human mind is the “ultimate resource,” allowing humanity to increase the supply of other resources, discover alternatives to overused resources, and improve efficiency of resource use. Recent research has found evidence supporting Simon’s view, showing that every 1 percent increase in population is associated with commodity prices falling by around 1 percent. In other words, each additional person helps to decrease resource scarcity on average, suggesting that humans, when free to innovate and engage in market exchange, tend to be net creators rather than net destroyers.
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In both countries, neo‐Malthusian policies have contributed to higher rates of sex‐selective abortion and infanticide. China has the world’s most imbalanced sex ratio at birth, resulting in 30 million more men than women, and India has the world’s fourth most imbalanced ratio despite government and private efforts to combat sex‐selective abortion. China and India have contributed to a
worldwide lopsided sex ratio at birth of 107 boys per 100 girls and to over 160 million “missing” women globally. (The natural sex ratio at birth, when unaltered by sex‐selective abortion or infanticide, is on average 105 boys born for every for every 100 girls.)
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As population increases in any given territory, it encroaches upon all natural resources… . Parenthood should be considered a privilege, not a right… . Those who do not have the individual initiative and intelligence to plan and control the size of their families should be assisted, guided, and directed in every way to eliminate the undesirable offspring, who usually contribute nothing to our civilization but use up the energy and resources of the world.
The year she gave that address, Sanger founded the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), a global nongovernmental family planning organization that went on to provide technical assistance to China’s coercive one‐child program.
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As early as 1959, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations recommended that aid be given to “developing countries who establish programs to check population growth.” In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson made U.S. foreign aid dependent on countries adopting population control policies. In 1967, Congress allocated $35 million via the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for “population programs.” In 1969, President Richard Nixon established the Office of Population within USAID that was dedicated to population control and had a $50 million annual budget. In 1977, the head of that office, Reimert Ravenholt, said he hoped to sterilize a quarter of the world’s women.The World Bank also made aid contingent on population control, embracing “explicit demographic goals.”
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The increasingly popular goal of lowering the population justified coercive policies in the minds of some scholars. In 1970, ecologist Garrett Hardin opined at a meeting convened by the Population Council, “It would be much easier if we have a persuasive campaign first to prepare the way for coercion later.” By 1978, in a survey of Population Association of America members, 34 percent of respondents agreed that “coercive birth control programs should be initiated in at least some countries immediately.”
By the 1980s, the background document to the International Conference on Family Planning, cowritten by the UNFPA, IPPF, and Population Council, decreed, “When provision of contraceptive information and services does not bring down the fertility level quickly enough to help speed up development, governments may decide to
limit the freedomof choice of the present generation.” Many people saw coercion as acceptable because the overpopulation problem was deemed so urgent.