Population

The lack of consensus in intellectual thinking, the strength of faith-based assertions about human reproduction, and competition over limited funds have all fed large and sometimes contradictory swings in domestic and international policies. The first of three landmark decennial international conferences on population in Bucharest in 1974 was summed up by the aphorism that "development is the best contraceptive." Shortly afterward, however, China instituted a one-child policy and India passed (although it was never implemented) a compulsory sterilization law. By the 1984 conference in Mexico City, the developing countries were asking for mainline family support but the Reagan administration proclaimed that free markets trumped the population explosion.

The 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) saw yet another policy change. Some in the women's movement began to portray organized family planning as intrinsically coercive and sought to secure the transfer of international resources to broader aspects of women's health. The ideological shift altered the vocabulary in revealing ways, as gender was substituted for sex and reproductive health replaced family planning. For many, Cairo was an intellectual turning point, but shortfalls in funding have stymied large-scale implementation of the Cairo Program of Action.

The ICPD occurred as the number of AIDS infections was growing exponentially, although calls for action in this area were buried in a plethora of less important issues. In the early twenty-first century AIDS has reached catastrophic levels in some countries, but it will not change the trajectory of global population by much. It has, however, taken priority away from family planning in foreign aid budgets and, as a result, in parts of Africa the trend toward lower birth rates stalled or has been reversed.

In the 1990s, as access to contraception and safe abortion increased in Europe, birth rates fell to below replacement level, while in the rest of the world increases in population fed internal and cross-border migrations, with more and more people crowding into big cities. In 1975, 40 percent of four billion people lived in cities (twenty-six cities had more than five million people); it is estimated that in 2025, of almost eight billion people, 60 percent will live in cities (seventy cities with more five million people). Migration between countries is driven by economic pressures, long exposed borders between high-and low-income regions in North America and Europe, and the relatively low cost of air travel. In Europe, the right of citizens from the British Commonwealth or former French colonies to enter the mother country broke down because of the scale of the populations seeking to migrate. In the United States, policy differences between employers and free-market economists, both endorsing a free flow of labor, and those concerned with the environment remain unresolved.

In the history of ideas about population, abortion has proved the single most divisive topic. Abortion is one way women can limit the number of children they have and an important variable in family size. Globally, it is estimated that, on average, every woman now alive will have one abortion in her reproductive lifetime. Intellectually, the abortion debate has been framed in two ways: either as fetal rights or the mother's right to control her body—a dichotomy that preempts further debate—or as an ethical question of "when life begins." The U.S. Supreme Court, however, concluded "that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interest in regulation." The abortion debate deeply divides the United States, both because of strongly held religious views and because the Supreme Court, Congress, and state legislators can all set policy. In 1973, Jesse Helms, a conservative U.S. senator from North Carolina, amended the Foreign Assistance Act to exclude any support of abortion, forcing U.S. international family-planning policies into a more conservative mode.

The two most important responses to population growth occurred far outside the Western intellectual tradition. The first was the Chinese one-child policy of 1979, which was driven by intellectual analysis of demographic projections, but the policy encountered much external criticism. Yet, however the policy is viewed, without it, the economic growth in China from the 1990s on could not have happened. The second occurred in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the average number of children in a family fell from 5.5 in the late 1980s to 2.0, a decline equal to that of China's, but without a one-child policy. The driving force in the Iranian transition was not socioeconomic change, but a national policy to make all methods of family planning widely available. Iran's demographers noticed that their population was growing faster than the economy, and if average family size did not decline, poverty would increase. The country's religious leadership, whose intellectual framework for policymaking in the 1990s was profoundly different from that of Chinese Communism in the 1980s, and totally unlike the Vatican in the 1970s, agreed to family planning if it was for the woman's health.

On the whole, the intellectual history of population in North America and Europe has been disappointing. There has been increasing methodological sophistication combined with an inability to produce an acceptable paradigm of human reproductive behavior. At the end of the twentieth century, discussion of population growth was pushed off the debating table by competing schools of thought. Yet, serious problems remain. Despite well-publicized declines in birth rates, globally there are one million more births than deaths every 110 hours. India has one million more births than deaths every twenty-three days and China (even with its one-child policy) adds one million people every thirty days.

In the history of ideas, interpretations of population change, appreciation of the consequences, and evidence-based rational responses have a long way to go.