The Children's Era: "Foreign Policy: Without Birth Control, Planet Doomed" by Malcolm Potts and Martha Campbell (May 11, 2011)

    The Children's Era: "Foreign Policy: Without Birth Control, Planet Doomed" by Malcolm Potts and Martha Campbell (May 11, 2011)

      Writing for NPR in 2011, public health experts Malcolm Potts and Martha Campbell reprised some of the concerns about growing population size that were important to the Neo-Malthusians.

      Their article focuses on how lack of access to contraceptives keeps family size high, particularly in less industrialized nations where large families and poverty go together. In other words, poor women lack access to birth control, and lack of birth control leads to large families, which in turn keeps both individual families and entire nations in inescapable poverty conditions.

      But this isn't a concern only in the developing world. It's a planet-wide issue. Discussing predictions for population in 2100, they write:

      With so many people reproducing, very small differences in family size have a dramatic impact over time. The difference between a world of 6.2 billion and 15.8 billion will depend on a change in the average number of children that women have—a change that is so small that demographers are reduced to using the odd image of 'half a child' to describe it. (Source)

      Potts and Campbell don't want to tell women not to have children. Rather, they want to make sure that women have access to contraceptives and information about reproductive health that allows them to plan their families and have only the children they actually want to have.

      We have to ensure that the population can be slowed by purely voluntary means and within a human rights framework. We need to galvanize the political will to make it happen and invest now so that family planning options are universally available. Fail to do so, and we may give birth to a new, difficult era of poverty instead. (Source)

      Bummer.