Population

The United States led the way in research that produced oral contraceptives and a new generation of intrauterine devices (IUDs) in the 1960s, although restrictive contraceptive laws remained in place in many states until the 1965 Supreme Court case Griswald v. Connecticut. Eastern Europe and parts of Scandinavia reformed their abortion laws in the 1960s and England followed in 1967. In 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state laws forbidding abortion in Roe v. Wade. Advocates for family planning were often led by physicians, such as Alan Guttmacher, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of the United States, and Fernando Tamayo, leader of Profamilia in Colombia.

In the 1960s, demographers and economists warned of adverse effects of rapid population growth on development. Paul Erhlich captured public attention with The Population Bomb (1968). The Rockefeller and other foundations began to fund family planning. The Swedish government offered international support for family planning, and in the United States General William Draper Jr. persuaded Congress to follow suit.

However, other demographers, such as Kingsley Davis, continued to emphasize socioeconomic development as a prerequisite for smaller families. Gary Becker and others framed decisions about family size as economic decisions based on a rational analysis of costs and benefits of having children. However, given the frequency of human intercourse in relation to conception, the issue is not to decide when to have a child, but how to turn off the possibility of conception, something that can only be done when a couple has ready access to contraception, backed up by safe abortion. Everywhere poor families had more children than rich ones, but the question remained: was this a choice, or did poor people find it more difficult to access contraception and safe abortion?

Those working in the front lines of family planning, led by Reimert T. Ravenholt, the principal administrator in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), believed improving access to fertility-regulating choices was the key to smaller families. He began to implement large-scale programs offering oral contraceptives, IUDs, condoms, and voluntary sterilization as well as initiating surveys of the family planning knowledge, attitudes, and practices of women in developing countries. These surveys have been broadened into Demographic and Health Surveys, and they remain the largest social science surveys ever conducted. Virtually every survey has demonstrated that women are having more children than they intend, and everywhere that realistic family choices were made available, as in South Korea, Thailand, or Mexico, family size fell. Nevertheless, several schools of thought about population continue to compete for intellectual dominance. All are influential in discussions about population, although only those specifically concerned with family planning have put population center stage.

Economists.

Economists have always played an important, although sometimes contradictory, role in establishing intellectual and public policy related to population. Macroeconomic concerns that the investment required to keep pace with rapid population growth would undermine the economic development of poor countries supported family planning policies in the 1960s and 1970s. In a much-quoted article, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Garrett Hardin saw rapid population growth exceeding the carrying capacity of the land. But, accepting then-current ideas about the demographic transition, Hardin concluded that voluntary family planning would not ameliorate the threat. Other experts saw the relationship between population and the environment as so complex that they were reluctant to provide clear-cut conclusions. Julian Simon, Ben Wattenberg, and others argued that increasing population would drive technical ingenuity to substitute new materials for declining resources. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration free-market policies trumped any adverse effects of rapid growth. In the 1990s, the pendulum began to swing back when it was shown that countries that had undergone a rapid fall in birth rates had reaped a "demographic dividend" benefiting their economies.

Equity group.

A politically influential group in population research has been those who argue that attention to population takes attention away from the excessive consumption of the first world, reflecting economic inequity, which is the primary injustice needing remedy. This school of thought was influential at the Rio Conference on population and development (Rio de Janeiro, 1992) and in certain circumstances it is a valid conclusion. In other situations, however, there is little doubt that population growth per se is the key factor. For example, in 2000, 179 million people in Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia depended on the Nile, which is almost depleted by the time it reaches the Mediterranean. In 2050, 385 million people will compete for the same amount of water.

Women's groups.

Since the mid-1960s, women's groups have played an increasingly important role in discussions of population. In Europe and North America, they were forceful advocates for access to family planning as essential to female equality and empowerment. However, a subgroup of feminists opposed hormonal contraceptives as unnatural and feminists in India have prevented the use of the popular injectable contraceptive, DepoProvera, and objected to the use of a low-cost, nonsurgical method of voluntary sterilization.

National security.

Rapid population growth is associated with a high ratio of younger to older men, and analysts in both academia and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency found a relationship between this ratio and civil disturbances, warfare, and terrorism. It is a theme that was taken up in a secret National Security Study Memorandum requested by President Nixon in 1974, which recommended additional support to international family planning. As can happen in a field permeated with emotions and religious beliefs, and thinking that has no evidential basis, lobbying by Catholic bishops successfully blocked implementation of this memorandum, which was only declassified in 1989.

The Vatican.

The Judeo-Christian association of sex with sin goes back to the Adam and Eve myth, but it was St. Augustine's assertion that coitus can be justified only for procreation that underlies Vatican teaching. In the 1960s, many leading theologians, including the commission the pope himself established, argued that sex had a dual purpose—to express love and to procreate—and that contraception could be used to separate the two. The Catholic physician John Rock, who had played a leading role in developing oral contraceptives, argued in The Time Has Come that the pill was morally acceptable because it imitated the natural suppression of ovulation during pregnancy and lactation. However, Pope Paul IV provided the most wrenching twist in the intellectual history of population of the second half of the twentieth century by reiterating the Augustinian interpretation of sexuality in his 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae. In its wake, priests and communicants left the Catholic Church, and those who remained adopted contraception and safe abortion at the same rate as non-Catholics. While the Holy See continues to oppose family planning on the international stage, Italy voted in two referenda for contraception and safe abortion.