World Population Conference

The great population hoax

John Linklater

Bucharest the most important single benefit that many delegates have derived from two sweltering weeks in a Balkan heatwave, is their insight into the basic fallacies of the Malthusian theory of population expansion. When Thomas Malthus drew the attention of his late eighteenth-century readers to the phenomenon of large families in the poorest, underprivileged sections of society, he was widely acclaimed for postulating that the poor were poor largely because they bred too freely, too ignorantly and too irresponsibly.

Since the days of Malthus our concept of society has broadened, and the underprivileged section has become duskier and more distant, but self-righteous, Malthusian thinking-has continued to dominate demography and has provided the motivating rationale for the contraception and birth control campaigns that have swept the world in the last two decades, ending in Bucharest two weeks ago when the Western powers produced overwhelming statistical data to try to prove to the poverty-stricken nations of the Third World that their unsociable breeding habits would keep them on an everlasting breadline and that salvation was, therefore, to be equated with contraception and with abortion, if necessary, since restraint could clearly not be expected.

It was on this basis that the Rockefeller, and other funding trusts, began to operate massive multi-million dollar, family planning campaigns on a global scale, and to acquire and publicise and extrapolate from the necessary collated statistics in support. This was how we came to be able to show that 352 million Africans are breeding at a rate that will produce 830 million by the year 2000 when south-east Asia will, likewise, have more than doubled their present 1,100 million whereas the European. population of 460 million will only have increased to 540 million, and the North American population of 226 million will only have increased to 296 million. '

The Bucharest conference was unique in many ways. Not only was it the first ever United Nations World Population Conference at government level, but it was also the first worldwide United Nations conference at that level to ,ke place behind the iron curtain.

The Romanian Government rose to the occasion splendidly. Hundreds of telephone and intercommunication links were installed, and a large fleet of new taxis were painted United Nations blue and reserved for the delegates. They assembled teams of fluent interpreters, thousands of portable radio receivers and headsets for the multi-channel simultaneous transmission of speeches, dozens of closed-circuit television links and hundreds of willing receptionists.

Some 5,000 people took part in all. This included 1,500 government delegates from about 150 countries and 2,500 delegates from interested non-governmental organisations, and press representatives. The United Nations had announced that it intended to canvas as wide a section of informed public opinion as possible but it was clear that only those organisations which supported neo-Malthusian policies, such as the Family Planning Association and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, had any official position in the Tribune, or any official return of fares and expenses. , By contrast, medical delegates from the World Federation of Doctors who respect Human Life and from the huge United States Pro-life Coalition paid their own fares and expenses, and were denied an but the most fleeting appearance on the official platforms.

Another curious and disconcerting feature of the conference was that at least half of the governmental delegates came armed with national axes to grind, hell-bent on discussing these to the exclusion of the postulated population explosion on the agenda. The Chinese delegate, for example, took the stage with a warm welcome for the various illegal groups that were attending as observers, and pledged Chinese support for Prince Norodom of Cambodia against the Lon No! 'national scum,' and for the 'Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam.'

From all accounts China does appear to have made a reasonable and well-pi -rind effort to expand her er 1.0my while restraining her populaion growth but, instead of revealing the details of how this is being achieved, the Chinese delegate launched into a lengthy, inflammatory tirade against the 'superpowers' and declared that the woes of the Third World were due to "depradation, fraud, glib talk and exploitation with fabulous profits for the imperialists, colonialists, neo-colonialists, zionists and hegemonists," and that the remedy lay in revolution and an increase, rather than a decrease, in the birth rate of developing countries.

The somewhat bewildering Chinese declaration in fact constituted a fair bid for leadership of the Third World countries by attempting to polarise the conference into Malthusian and antiMalthusian dispute. China points out that her own population had risen from 600 million to 800 million during the last quarter century but that good organisation had raised her annual grain production from 110 million to 250 million tons, and that she had still only cultivated and developed ten per cent of her land surface. The Malthusian prediction for China had therefore been proved to be utterly wrong in the event.

The Russian bloc are also openly encouraging population growth within their own territories as an essential element of their future industrialisation programmes, and delegates had many examples presented to them of the way that population drift into urban centres, or industrialisation, leads to a spontaneous decline in birth-rate; especially when coupled with greater affluence and socio-economic advances and the security of adequate pension in old age.

The rather variable United Kingdom delegation, selected by the Labour Government, no doubt largely for their Trade Union affiliation or interest, nevertheless seems to have done an admirable job of work behind the scenes, as skilled mediators and conciliators, to prevent the ever-threatening split between the ardent advocates of force-fed contraception on the one hand, and the Russian bloc and Third World on the other. As a nation we still appear to have retained a considerable know-how in colonial administration and conference technique, and it is virtually certain that without our placid expertise, the much vaunted World Plan of Action for population would have been torn into a thousand shreds.

Abortion was scarcely mentioned explicitly in the conference itself, and the unborn child was known, for conference purposes as "the foetus," but there w^..tacit acceptance of abortion on demand, as a method of population control, in the draft plan target intention that all couples should have "the right to determine . . . the number and spacir g of their children." Specific reference to the unanimously agreed United Nations declaration (1969), which protects the "rights of the child before, as well as after, birth" was deleted in committee.

In the non-governmental Tribune, abortion was admitted to be the most widely used method of birth control, at least in many western nations and in Japan, and it is ironical that our high degree of obstetric technical skill and antenatal care in 1974 therefore results

Spectator September 7, 1974 in an immeasurably greater mortality rate for the unborn child than at any time in the history of mankind. The only real hope for the future is that we will eventually thus selectively breed a race of women with a deeper sense of the duty of motherhood. Abortion cannot run strongly in families, and it must ultimately, therefore, be self-limiting. An interesting development at Bucharest was the high pressure lobby of feminist groups who seem to have amalgamated abortion on demand with equality of status as a package deal. This bodes ill for the results of the next United Nations jamboree, in 1975, the highlight of Women's International Year. Lapel badges, assuring us that their bodies belonged to them, were being freely distributed until ruled "out of order and provocative," by conference officials.

Many of the official delegates were women. The United Kingdom delegation, for example, included Marie Patterson, who is currently being tipped to take over as chairman of the TUC, and it was probably because of female influence that the final World Plan of Action contains a substantial number of proposals relating fo women's rights and status. Indeed, when the plan becomes generally available it should repay detailed study, since it will almost certainly be reflected in the Labour manifesto for the forthcoming election, not only in the matter of sex discrimination on which a government white paper is due shortly, but also, presumably, in such matters as the re-cycling of industrial waste, which was an important part of the discussion in committee at Bucharest. This particularly affects Britain as one of the highly industrial nations.

Euthanasia was not specifically, or explicitly, mentioned. This represents an interesting change of coney, since the groundwork had been well laid. There was frequent referenceto the 'problem' of ageing populations and the conference background papers produced by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population stated that -"the problem of 'medicated survival' will have to be given more attention." Those of us who are over fifty years Of age might ao well to stock up, at least on penicillin.

Some delegates felt that the conference end-product was a sort of expensive, explosive, curate's egg, but it did at least reveal that the industrialised world, and especially Britain, is suffering not from over-population but from a too rapid fall in birthrate which must inevitably lead to a grave problem of top-heavy age structure. The developing countries, on the'-oflOr hand, are seen to be experiendliis'a natural, cyclical population increase which will tail off as they become industrialised and introduce social security, unemployment benefits and old age tiehMans. We have at last understood the true interpretation of the phenomenon which Malthus described. The poor nations have large families because they lack confidence in the future, and because the present holds Spectator September 7, 1974

nothing elseof value.

The contraception campaigners have been attempting to solve the Postulated problem of overcrowding by palliative treatment of a symptom. The cause is insecurity. They breed to ensure the survival of their race. It is a ridiculous waste of time and money to preach family Planning in a country in which men pray daily for more children to help them work their patch of unproductive soil and then to look after them in their old age. We are all suffering, in one way or another, from various undesirable sideeffects of the over-enthusiastic contraception-abortion campaign. We have fallen for a monumental, Malthusian, population hoax.