The worldwide fascination with the idea of overpopulation began with the speculation expressed in Thomas Malthus’ (1766–1834) book An Essay on the Principle of Population (published in 1798, the book was reprinted five times before his death). It was Malthus who attempted to predict, by means of calculations, the critical point of population growth; he set the date of the catastrophe for 1890. Malthus’ followers subsequently began to postpone the supposed date of humanity’s demise over and over again.
Another English thinker, Francis Galton (1822–1911), a cousin of Charles Darwin, became the mouthpiece of another scientific trend, the notorious eugenics (“good birth”, the improvement of the human race by allowing the birth of the “right persons” only). These two movements, overpopulation ideology and eugenics, have combined to create a population control and birthrate reduction movement that is destroying the lives of billions of people around the world, not at the level of ideas, but at the level of destinies.
And for what? Naturally, all birth control companies and institutions are just “looking out for the good of people and the planet.” As sad as it is, they are a substitute for the noble ecological goals of environmental protection and sensible consumption. What is important is that these ideologies contrast the protection of nature by directly and bluntly calling newborns the destroyers of the earth. They claim that it is necessary to reduce the birth rate, and to do this they preach contraception, eugenics, sterilization, abortion, same-sex relationships, child molestation, and the eradication of the family as a phenomenon.
Margaret Sanger played a major role in promoting this ideology around the world by founding the American Birth Control League in 1921, from which the Planned Parenthood (International Planned Parenthood Federation) abortion empire emerged. She and many of her colleagues promoted primarily eugenic ideas – laws on forced sterilization of persons “unsuitable” for reproduction were passed in more than ten US states at the time. One would think that after the horrors of Nazism, eugenics and human experimentation for the purpose of destroying fertility would be a thing of the past, but no. Since 1961, population reduction has been part of US international policy. In 1965, USAID created its Population Division (now banned in Russia), which continues the policies initiated by Malthus, Galton, Sanger, the Nazi doctors, etc.
The overpopulation theory is false and has now been convincingly disproved. What really exists is the exact opposite problem: global depopulation. In order for human kind to survive, it is actually necessary for more people to be born, because as the population grows, human civilization develops, wealth increases, and poverty decreases. Moreover, there is a natural mechanism for regulating population size. Scientists have calculated that the entire population of the Earth, all 7 billion-plus, is now in the process of being destroyed. All of the people can be settled in the State of Texas alone, subject to the issuance of a plot for the subsistence of each family.
In order for the population not to die out, the total fertility rate (the average number of children each woman bears) must be 2.1, which is necessary to maintain the current population level. At the moment the rate is steadily falling, and in many countries it has already fallen below the required level. Unfortunately, there is a worldwide decline in the birth rate, and a number of countries are dying out, including Russia.
In Russia, the birth rate is 1.7–1.8, i.e. there is a decrease in population. This problem requires a serious solution, but Russia is not taking measures aimed at protecting and strengthening the family, which would truly support fertility. Instead, it follows the trends introduced by overpopulation ideologues: it does not restrict abortion and contraception, and it’s not doing any real work to raise the status of motherhood in society. The RIA Novosti news agency did a piece on the propaganda of Paul Ehrlich’s overpopulation theory.
Ehrlich (born 1932) is the author of The Population Bomb (1968), a book that follows Malthus again and again in predicting the population “end of the world”. He is one of the figures pushing the “global warming” agenda, leading the whole world to believe that this is the worst problem of the modern world, and its cause is, in short, the birth of more babies. Many people still don’t know that the story of climate change and global warming is a story about destroying people, not about protecting nature, because everything is so plausibly “packaged”.
This is also what Victor Marakhovsky, another contributor to RIA Novosti news agency, writes: “The world – though it does not like to talk about it much – is going to have some pretty tough decades ahead. For it will be decades with a growing percentage of helpless old people in need of care; it will be decades with very expensive energy (especially if the “green plan” plays out as intended) and a catastrophic birth rate; and it will be decades with the active replacement of the population of advanced and medium-developed countries by young people from countries that are not so developed. And maintaining a more or less decent level of citizens’ well-being, expressed in purchasing power, will be possible either for countries that manage to maintain their industry and citizens’ access to cheap energy, or for those that, by some miracle, manage to convince their citizens to reproduce. I write “by some miracle” because the global collective response of citizens themselves to such a call sounds like “first, provide us with conditions worthy of us, and then we will think about it.” Experience shows, however, that even in countries that have provided their citizens with everything, this does not prevent them from refusing to procreate, as we can see in the notorious Europe in general and Scandinavia in particular.
The French historian Pierre Chauny has called what is happening a “white pestilence ” – a bloodless extinction in which cradles are left empty. Meanwhile, all the components of the overpopulation theory have become so entrenched in our lives, descending into its most everyday layers, that the proposal to ban abortions is perceived by many as “animalism” (no more, no less!), and a large family is perceived a priori as dysfunctional and “generating poverty”. And the whole world today needs to cast off this morass that makes it welcome the disabling of women, the murder of children, the totalitarian control of families and the promotion of depravity, and that suggests valuing animal lives more than human ones.
To learn more about this topic, visit the website of project Overpopulation is a Myth, which has prepared excellent videos debunking this devastating myth.