LETTERS
Sir: Charles Moore goes further than the Catholic Church in the reservations he expresses about the Cairo Population and Development Conference. The Vatican is not responsible for those boycotting the conference, but has encouraged attendance to make sure that the conference's consen- sus will recognise the full dimensions of the population problem and the extent of the challenge of development.
Parents in developing countries have large families because, being poor, they cal- culate that children are a net gain, rather than a net drain on their fragile resources. The responsibility for this poverty lies not so much with their supposed feckless incompetence, as with the unjust aid and trade structures which sustain the living of the affluent 20 per cent of the world, main- ly us in the North.
It is not so much that individually and consciously we refuse to share our personal wealth, but that we refuse to look at the effects of our standard of living in terms of consumption of resources and degradation of the environment. This is a flat contradic- tion of the teaching of the Catholic Church as expressed by the present Pope and his predecessors, that the products of the earth are for the benefit of all peoples and that private appropriation of them is always sub- ject to a 'social mortgage'.
The Church agrees that family size should be determined by parental choice and not by the pressure of governmental population programmes — as does the Cairo draft document. But the choice must be a real choice and not the empty freedom of choosing to do what economic and social circumstance force people to do.
Nicholas Coote
Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, Mington House, 136/142 Victoria Street, London SW1
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