The Nonsense Explosion (Ben Wattenberg, 1970, New Republic)
Finally, we must take note of the new thrust by the Explosionists: population control. Note the phrase carefully. This is specifically not “family planning,” where the family concerned does the planning. This is control of population by the government and this is what the apocalyptics are demanding, because, they say, family planning by itself will not deduce us to a zero growth rate. The more popular “soft” position of government control involves what is called “disincentives;” that is, a few minor measures like changing the taxation system, the school system, and the moral code to see if that won’t work before going onto outright baby licensing.
Accordingly, the demographer Judith Blake Davis of the University of California (Berkeley) complained to a House Committee: “We penalize homosexuals of both sexes, we insist that women must bear unwanted children by depriving them of ready access to abortion, we bind individuals to pay for the education of other people’s children, we make people with small families support the schooling of others. . . .” (Italics mine.)
Now, Dr. Davis is not exactly saying that we should go to a private school system or eliminate the tax exemption for children, thereby penalizing the poor but not the rich – but that is the implication. In essence, Senator Packwood recently proposed just that: no tax exemptions for any children beyond the second per family, born after 1972.
The strong position on population control ultimately comes around to some form of government permission, or licensing, for babies.
Dr. Garret Hardin, a professor-biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says, “In the long run, voluntarism is insanity. The result will be continued uncontrolled population growth.”
Astro-physicist Donald Aiken says, “The government has to step in and tamper with religious and personal convictions – maybe even impose penalties for every child a family has beyond two.”
Dr. Melvin Ketchel, professor of physiology at Tufts Medical School, writes in Medical World News: “Scientists will discover ways of controlling the fertility of an entire population . . . the compound . . . could be controlled by adjustments in dosage, [and] a government could regulate the growth of its population without depending upon the voluntary action of individual couples . . . such an agent might be added to the water supply.”
And Dr. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford: “If we don’t do something dramatic about population and environment, and do it immediately, there’s just no hope that civilization will persist. . . . The world’s most serious population-growth problem is right here in the United States among affluent white Americans. . . .”
What it all adds up to is this: why have a long-range manageable population problem that can be coped with gradually over generations when, with a little extra souped-up scare rhetoric, we can drum up a full-fledged crisis? We certainly need one; it’s been months since we’ve had a crisis. After all, Vietnam, we were told, was “the greatest crisis in a hundred years.” Piker. Here’s a crisis that’s a beauty: the greatest crisis in two billion years: we’re about to breed ourselves right into oblivion.