I am unapologetically pro-life, but there are some things that are brought out into the public regarding the myth of overpopulation that makes me think that these organizations that come out with it believe that people are just utterly stupid.
An organization called One Planet, One Child (which is seriously funny because if there was only one child on the planet, how can a population ever grow, unless the Earth is visited by aliens, and that single human being is impregnated by it!) has paid thousands of dollars to put up billboards all over Vancouver giving the message that overpopulation is a problem and the only solution is for families to have only one child. One billboard posts, “Traffic congestion begins at conception,” with a man and woman canoodling on the floor. Another reads, “The most loving gift you can give your child is not to have another,” with a Black baby on the ad. And yet another shows a movie-billboard like ad with the movie title Over Population and subtitles Species Extinction, Deforestation, Climate Crisis, Pollution. The ads have gained much infamy, as many folks, from the Black community to the disabled community, have cried foul over what seems to be an ad that demeans their communities, as well as people who actually have big families. Some say that the theory of scarcity is especially alarming to disabled people, who may not be highly productive in the eyes of capitalism while consuming medical and other resources. This thinking has led some modern academics to call for forced birth control and government-mandated licensing for parenthood, as well as a new ‘frailty scale’ used to determine eligibility for health-care services in Ontario, which discriminates against people with disabilities.
When you check out the One Planet, One Child website, it automatically brings you to a white screen that says “Service Unavailable”, either due to a heavy traffic of people sending them bad joojoo, or simply the fact this organization probably doesn’t exist at all, or is a banner carrier for Planned Parenthood and their posse.
By blaming overpopulation for climate change and environmental degradation, the billboards revive a debunked theory known as Malthusianism, named for 18th century English economist and reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, who warned humanity would soon outgrow its food supply. Of course, Malthus’ dire predictions never happened, but that didn’t stop others, including Nazi eugenicists (including Planned Parenthood Queen Margaret Sanger) and the author of The Overpopulation Bomb, Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich, from remixing Malthus’s ideas to bolster their beliefs that overpopulation will kill the economy. Not to mention Henry Kissinger’s Report on why the US needed to provide contraception and abortion to thirteen poor countries in the 1960s, including the Philippines, which turned out to be a ploy to monopolize these countries’ rich natural resources for the use of the good ole USA. (Read the declassified report from this website: https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PCAAB500.pdf)
Another thing that makes the whole thing a farce is that, demographically, Canadian population is already reducing anyway. The 2016 census found Canada had a fertility rate of 1.5 children per woman which is below the replacement rate needed to maintain the existing population, and is increasingly dropping. The rate will drop rapidly as the economic uncertainty brought on by the coronavirus pandemic discourages people from having kids. If, at all, Canada needs to increase its population or end up like countries in Europe and Japan, whose numbers have fallen way below the one child mark, and has had negative population growth in the last decade.
Besides, why does Canada, whose total population is 37.06 million on a total land area of 9,984,671 square kilometers, need to control its population? When did we become China all of a sudden, whose current population is 1.4 billion despite its one-child policy? Unfortunately, even without One Child, One Planet’s ads, the one-child or no-child policy is happening right now, with many government sanctioned after-birth abortions made into law recently in the US. And in Canada, we still don’t have a law, so all is fair game, before-birth or after-birth, at-any-age abortion (and not infanticide as it should be called).
Why, in the midst of this time of chaos, confusion and fear, do we have to argue all of the things that history has already sorted out? Neither Canadian nor global populations are ballooning out of control, and the United Nations predicts the world population will rise from its current 7.8 billion to roughly 11 billion near the end of the century before steadily declining thanks to dropping fertility rates. There is really no fear that poor people will take over the world – they simply can’t. What we need to be worried about is that we are not sharing our resources enough to give them a chance to live.
*(To know why overpopulation is a myth, visit overpopulationisamyth.com.)
