'Negative growth' movement is alive
Picture this: Full page, expensive ads in national publications such as Washington Times, USA Today, and The Monitor Weekly, strategically timed as a hat's-off to Earth Day. The topic? Negative population growth in America. Yes, that translates to telling our growing national populace to have fewer children.
Shocked? I was.
Not that the idea doesn't have practical merit. Higher populations have been correlated worldwide with higher rates of poverty, crime, as well as food and resource shortages. While according to the Census Bureau U.S. birth rates remain higher than death rates, births have been dropping slightly over the last decade. Nevertheless, for much of the nation (rates vary, with some counties actually experiencing negative growth), we're talking about a decrease in annual increases, so net growth continues. No surprise there.
The idea that a national group has the chutzpah to campaign for more birth control in a nation increasingly mixing politics with religion (and birth control is certainly a religious issue for many people) was the eye-widener.
So I looked into this ostensibly well-funded group, expecting it to be new simply because it is new to me. Wrong. "Negative Population Growth, Inc." (NPG) is a national nonprofit with more than 30,000 members founded in 1972 to "educate the American public and political leaders about the devastating effects of overpopulation on our environment, resources, and standard of living." NPG collects and redistributes research indicating the U.S. is vastly overpopulated, considering its resources and current environment; they also offer scholarships to students studying the issue. They favor an "interim period" of negative population growth (slower birth rate than death and emigration rates), followed by policies which better sustain a balance between population and available resources.
This flies in the face, NPG says, of business and economic interests which favor growth and consumerism. To believe in unchecked growth they say is a mathematical absurdity on a finite planet. The rather bold solutions NPG proposes include government policies on immigration, fertility, and more effectively helping the population we have.
Their "10 Principles for a Responsible U.S. Population Policy" are:
1. Unrestricted access to family planning which is safe and inexpensive, including more focus on male contraception and education in public schools
2. Promote (not coerce) smaller family size as part of a "broad public discussion," including school curricula and tax incentives. Redesign parenting subsidies to be generous for first child, less for second, and none after that.
3. For women, increased career and educational incentives and opportunity (which leads to lower birth rates), including equal pay rates which continue to lag behind the wages of men working the same jobs
4. Significantly reduce annual legal immigration limits to 200,000 people (from more than a million now).
5-7. Strictly enforce existing immigration laws against illegal entry, presence and citizenship.
8. Mandate state and local governments' cooperation on all these policies (no opt-out).
9. Enlist America's young people, who must "play a vital role in their future planning," beginning with school curricula.
10. Create a public-private national population commission to study current and future population growth, composition, distribution, and related social, economic, and environmental resource consequences, and make policy recommendations.
Controversial though much of this may be, an overconsuming and fast-growing national and world population is more than fodder for science fiction. That alone creates need for serious discussion and, relatively soon, some form of action. As Earth Day reminds us, leaving the hard decisions for generations of the foreseeable future is unforgivably selfish.
Sholeh Patrick, J.D. is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. Contact her at Sholeh@cdapress.com.