Danger : people
Sir: One of the disturbing features of the present debate on overpopulation problems is the specious arguments against family planning which are pro- duced in the press by those who have religious or other emotional stops to accepting the truth about the world twin problems of food and popu- lation. J. C. Spence, in his letter (15 September), produces, I think, some of these 'depressingly familiar types' of argument, including the hoary annual, overworked doctors.
Only a very small number of women's lives are saved by the present service for cervical cytology; the women most at risk, mothers of large families in social classes IV and V, are fail- ing to be reached in any great numbers. If the services of family planning and cervical cytology were brought to the doorsteps of these classes, the medical and social services would find their work- load eased, because it is the anxiety about un- wanted conceptions which is one of- the major factors in the causation of anxiety neurosis in both men and women, it is the unwanted child who is maltreated or neglected.
Despite all the fuss the press and doctors make about the side-effects of the pill, millions of women all over the world are taking it and demanding it. It is the breakthrough in the overpopulation problem, but the emotions aroused when it is advocated for a solution make one despair of mankind ever taking rational thought, much less action, about the world's most urgent problem.
Heads continue to be buried in the sand so as not to see the danger to the UK, a country de- pendent on imported food, of the world food crisis which is developing. The starving millions in their misery are largely ignored by the grossly overfed citizens and politicians in the rich countries in the world, but the starving mobs in the past threw stones at the windows of the rich, so we can expect not stones but atomic bombs to be hurled by poor countries on rich ones if the two problems of food and population continue to be ignored by politicians and those who elect them.
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