THE RHETORIC OF POPULATION CONTROL: DOES THE END JUSTIFY THE MEANS? CHAPTER 37: TABLE OF CONTENTS Inflammatory Terminology and Persuasion by Epithet Phony Arguments, Crude and Subtle Grabbing Virtue, Daubing With Sin Why is Population Rhetoric So Appealing? Short-run costs are inevitable, whereas long-run benefits are hard to foresee. Intellectual Subtlety of Adjustment Mechanisms Apparent consensus of expert judgment Population as a cause of pollution Population, natural resources, and common sense Judgments about people's rationality Forces Amplifying the Rhetoric Money Standards of proof and of rhetoric Finally - The Piper Afternote 1: A Rhetorical Analogy Afternote 2: Planned Parenthood's Rhetoric The ranking black lawmaker in the Illinois House and the Republican sponsor of a bill which would offer poor persons a chance for a free sterilization with a $100 bonus thrown in...squared off and traded verbal blasts Wednesday in the House Human Resources Committee where Rep. Webber Borchers was presenting his free vasectomy bill. Though observers said Borchers may have won the battle of insults, Rep. Corneal Davis, an aging and rotund black preacher who has spent 30 of his 70- some years in the House, relished the satisfaction of having the bill defeated.... Davis set the tone for the hearing on the bill soon after the committee sat down. "Where is Borchers?" the Democratic assistant minority leader said, waving an arm at the ceiling. "He ought to take his bill and go back to Nazi Germany." Thirty minutes later Borchers, a Decatur landowner who boasts of his ultraconservatism, arrived to explain his bill. "This bill would allow persons who have an income of $3,000 or less to get a free vasectomy and a $100 bonus...," Borchers began. But Davis had sprung to his feet. "Are you sincere about this?" the Chicago Democrat asked sarcastically. "Sit down," Borchers yelled back. "I am a preacher and I didn't want to lose my cool with you," Davis said. "Why don't you listen? Sit down," Borchers said as both men's words began to get lost in the uproar. Rep. Louis Capuzi, R-Chicago, chairman of the Human Resources Committee, pounded the gavel but it took several minutes for the two men to become silent. Davis sat down and Borchers continued speaking. "This bill was suggested to me by a black woman in Chicago," Borchers said. Davis's eyes flared with rage but he remained silent. Borchers said the bill was similar to one passed in Tennessee. He estimated that more than 19,000 children are born to families receiving public aid each year and that the state would stand to save $20 million in welfare payments under the voluntary sterilization plan. The Davis-Borchers interchange illustrates the subject of this chapter, the passions and the rhetoric found in discussions of resources and population. The next chapter examines how such rhetoric becomes established as "common knowledge," and explores some of the reasoning that underlies common doomsday beliefs about population. INFLAMMATORY TERMINOLOGY AND PERSUASION BY EPITHET Fear of population growth has been inflamed by extravagant language. Examples are the terms "population explosion," "people pollution," and "population bomb." These terms are not just the catchwords of popular wordsmiths, whose rhetoric one is accustomed to discount. Rather, they have been coined and circulated by distinguished scientists and professors. One example comes from demographer Kingsley Davis, who began a recent article in a professional journal, "In subsequent history the Twentieth Century may be called either the century of world wars or the century of the population plague." (Margaret Sanger also wrote of China that "the incessant fertility of her millions spread like a plague." Davis also has said that "Over-reproduction - that is, the bearing of more than four children - is a worse crime than most and should be outlawed." Or biologist Paul Ehrlich: "We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out." And it was in his Nobel Peace Prize speech, of all places, that agronomist Norman Borlaug spoke of "the population monster" and the "population octopus." Writers vie with each other to find the ugliest possible characterization of human beings. From a Greenpeace leader, "[O]ur species [is] the AIDS of the Earth: we are rapidly eroding the immune system of the Earth." Other niceties were quoted in chapter 22. Such language is loaded, pejorative, and unscientific. It also reveals something about the feelings and attitudes of contemporary anti-natalist writers. Psychiatrist Frederick Wertham pointed out that many of these terms have overtones of violence, for example, "bomb" and "explosion," and many show contempt for other human beings, such as "people pollution." Referring to expressions such as "these days of the population explosion and the hydrogen bomb" and "both nuclear weapons and population growth endanger mankind," he wrote, "The atomic bomb is the symbol, the incarnation, of modern mass violence. Are we justified in even speaking in the same vein of violent death and birthrate? And is it not a perverse idea to view population destruction and population growth as twin evils?" There is no campaign of counter-epithets to allay the fear of population growth, perhaps because of a Gresham's law of language: Ugly words drive out sweet ones. Reasoning by epithet may well be part of the cause of the fear of population growth in the U.S. Not only epithets but also value-smuggling neologisms have been used against fertility. The term "childfree" is a neologism coined by NON - the National Organization for Non-Parents - as a replacement for "childless." Their intention is to substitute a positive word, "free," for a negative word, "less." This neologism is an interesting example of skillful propaganda. Whereas the term "less" is only slightly pejorative - you can have less of something good (love) or of something bad (acne) - the term "free" always seems better than "unfree," and one can only be free of something bad. If not having children makes you "free," then this clearly implies that children are bad. In a similar vein, you now hear people speak with pain of "wetlands lost," a phenomenon earlier referred to with pleasure as "swamps drained." PHONY ARGUMENTS, CRUDE AND SUBTLE Some of the anti-natalist propaganda is subtle. While seeming to be only straightforward birth-control information, in reality it is an appeal to have fewer children. Planned Parenthood was responsible for such a campaign on television and radio. The campaign was produced by the Advertising Council as a "public service" and shown on television during time given free by the broadcasters as part of their quid pro quo to the public in return for their licenses; that is, it was indirectly paid for by taxpayers. The following is drawn from a letter written in complaint to the Advertising Council decision-makers - the only letter they said that they had ever received. You may have seen an advertising campaign staged by Planned Parenthood that ran on radio, television, and in many national magazines. There were a number of specific ads in the campaign including one that was headlined "How Many Children Should You Have? Three? Two? One?"; another that adduced "Ten Reasons for Not Having Children" and, finally, the most offensive one was called the "Family Game": the game was staged on a great monopoly board and every time the dice of life were thrown and a child was born - rather like going to jail without passing "go" - the background audio announced the disasters that came in the wake of children - "there goes the vacation," or "there goes the family room...." One of the ads enjoins young people to "enjoy your freedom" before, by having children, you let some of that freedom go. Such a theme...continues the view that the contribution children make to persons and to society is a purely negative one. In this view children are a loss: they take space, constrict freedom, use income that can be invested in vacations, family rooms, and automobiles. We find no consideration here of how children enhance freedom, and of how the advantages of freedom itself are realized when shared rather than prized as a purely personal possession. Finally, one of the ads encapsulates the spirit of the entire campaign: "How many children should a couple have? Three? Two? One? None?" Such an ad belies the claim that the advertising avoids the designation of any specific number of children as "preferred." Why not 12? 11? 10? or six? five? four? In the same ad, in order to lead audience thinking, it is noted that the decision to have children "could depend on their concern for the effect population growth can have on society." The direction of the effect on society is implied, but nowhere is the effect analyzed, or even clearly stated. In summary, the ads not only teach family planning but recommend population control. Moreover, they do this by defining the range of acceptable family size as between zero and three, by placing children as negative objects alongside the positive goods supplied by industry, by equating the bringing up of children with merely equipping them with these same goods, by viewing children as an essential constriction of human freedom, and by suppressing a view of life and children that might lead people to think that having more children is a positive and rewarding act. There are values, not just techniques embodied in those ads. Not all anti-natality rhetoric is that subtle. Some is crude namecalling, especially the attacks on the Catholic church and on people with Catholic connections. An example is the bold black headline on the full-page ad that was run in national magazines: "Pope denounces birth control as millions starve" (Figure 37-1). Another example is the dismissal of opposing views by referring to the happenstance that the opponent is Catholic. Consider, for example, the religion-baiting of Colin Clark - a world-respected economist who presented data showing the positive effects of population growth - by sociologists Lincoln and Alice Day: "Colin Clark, an internationally known Roman Catholic economist and leading advocate of unchecked population growth." (Lincoln Day also likened me to a "defrocked priest"). And Jack Parsons writes, "Colin Clark, the distinguished Roman Catholic apologist ... refrains from discussing optimization of population at all...an extraordinary omission." Gunnar Myrdal is not a Catholic and is a Nobel prize winner, and yet he called the concept of an optimum population level "one of the most sterile ideas that ever grew out of our science." But Parsons feels free to attribute religious motives to Clark's choice of technical concepts and vocabulary when Clark does not mention this "optimization" concept. And in the widely read text of Paul Ehrlich and others, Population, Resources, and Environment, we find a reference to Clark as an "elderly Catholic economist," an innovation in the name-calling by referring to Clark's age as well as to his religion. As a firsthand example in the same vein, my own views - which had already become those of this book - were described by Paul Silverman, a biologist, before a packed auditorium on the first and greatest Earth Day, in 1970, as "inspired by Professor Simon's contact with the Bible.... Indeed, a new religious doctrine has been enunciated in which murder and abstinence from sex are not distinguishable." GRABBING VIRTUE, DAUBING WITH SIN A rhetorical device of the anti-natalists (as of all rhetoricians, I suppose) is to attribute to themselves the most virtuous and humanitarian of motives, while attributing to their opponents motives that are self-serving or worse. Biologist Silverman again: "...people such as Paul Ehrlich and Alan Guttmacher and presumably myself...out of our great concern for the future of the world and the threat to the quality of life... have urged that voluntary means be adopted for bringing about restraints on the overburdening of our environment by overpopulation.... We must, we can, and we will achieve a fine and beautiful world for ourselves and our children to inherit....We can realize a new quality of life, free from avarice which characterizes our current society." (A few minutes before, the same speaker had said, "If voluntary restraints on population growth are not forthcoming, we will be faced with a need to consider coercive measures" - similar to Ehrlich's "by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.") (See my 1991 book, Selection 58, for more discussion of how the population-control organizations assume the moral high ground and deny it to others.) WHY IS POPULATION RHETORIC SO APPEALING? Let us consider some of the reasons that anti-natality rhetoric has won the minds of so many people. (For more extended discussion, see my 1991 book, Selection 52). Short-run costs are inevitable, whereas long-run benefits are hard to foresee. In the very short run, the effects of increased births are negative, on the average. If your neighbor has another child your school taxes will go up, and there will be more noise in your neighborhood. And when the additional child first goes to work, per-worker income will be lower than otherwise, at least for a short while. It is more difficult to comprehend the possible long-run benefits. Increased population can stimulate increases in knowledge, pressures for beneficial changes, a youthful spirit, and the "economies of scale" discussed earlier. That last element means that more people constitute bigger markets, which can often be served by more efficient production facilities. And increased population density can make economical the building of transportation, communication, educational systems, and other kinds of "infrastructure" that are uneconomical for a less-dense population. But the connection between population growth and these beneficial changes is indirect and inobvious, and hence these possible benefits do not strike people's minds with the same force as do the short-run disadvantages. The increase in knowledge created by more people is especially difficult to grasp and easy to overlook. Writers about population growth mention a greater number of mouths coming into the world, and even more pairs of hands, but they never mention more brains arriving. This emphasis on physical consumption and production may be responsible for much unsound thinking and fear about population growth. Even if there are long-run benefits, the benefits are less immediate than are the short-run costs of population growth. Additional public medical care is needed even before the birth of an additional child. But if the child grows up to discover a theory that will lead to a large body of scientific literature, the economic or social benefits may not be felt for 100 years. All of us tend to put less weight on events in the future compared with those in the present, just as a dollar that you will receive twenty years from now is worth less to you than is a dollar in your hand now. The above paragraphs do not imply that, on balance, the effect of increased population will surely be positive in any longer-run period. The fact is that we do not know for sure what the effects will be, on balance, in 50 or 100 or 200 years. Rather, I am arguing that the positive effects tend to be overlooked, causing people to think - without sound basis - that the long-run effects of population growth surely are negative, when in fact a good argument can be made that the net effect may be positive. Intellectual Subtlety of Adjustment Mechanisms In order to grasp that there can be long-run benefits from additional people, one must understand the nature of a spontaneously-ordered system of voluntary cooperation, as described by Mandeville, Hume, Smith, and their successors (see page 000). But this is a very subtle idea, and therefore few people understand its operation intuitively, and believe explanations based on it. Not understanding the process of a spontaneously-ordered economy goes hand-in-hand with not understanding the creation of resources and wealth. And when a person does not understand the creation of resources and wealth, the only intellectual alternative is to believe that increasing wealth must be at the cost of someone else. This belief that our good fortune must be an exploitation of others may be the taproot of false prophecy about doom that our evil ways must bring upon us. (See below on the prophetic impulse.) Apparent consensus of expert judgment. Anti-natalists convey the impression that all the experts agree that population is growing too fast in the U.S. and that it is simply a fact that population is growing too fast. An example from Lester Brown: "There are few if any informed people who any longer deny the need to stabilize world population." Other examples come from Paul Ehrlich, "Everyone agrees that at least half of the people of the world are undernourished (have too little food) or malnourished (have serious imbalances in their diet)." And, "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971, if ever." And from a Newsweek columnist and former high State Department official: "Informed men in every nation now know that, next to population growth and avoidance of nuclear war, the despoiling of nature is the biggest world problem of the next 30 years." These "everyone agrees" statements are just plain wrong. Many eminent experts did not agree with them when they were made (and now the consensus disagrees with them, as discussed in Chapter 00). But such assertions that "everyone agrees" may well be effective in manipulating public opinion. Which non-specialist is ready to pit his or her own opinion against that of all the "informed people"? Population as a cause of pollution. Fear of population growth is surely heightened by the linking of population and pollution issues. It has come to seem that if one is for pollution control then one must be against population growth. And pollution control in itself appeals to everyone, for very substantial reasons. To understand why the link-up of population control and pollution control has occurred with such force, we must understand the nature of the rhetoric on both sides of the argument. One can directly demonstrate that more people increase the flow of a pollutant - for example, more cars obviously make more emissions. The argument that more people may reduce pollution is less direct and not so obvious. For example, as more people create a worse auto-emission pollution problem, forces of reaction arise that may eventually make the situation better than ever before. Furthermore, the ill effects of people and pollution can be understood deductively. More people surely create more litter. But whether the endpoint after a sequence of social steps will be an even cleaner environment can only be shown by an empirical survey of experiences in various places: Are city streets in the U.S. cleaner now than they were 100 years ago? Such empirical arguments are usually less compelling to the imagination than are the simplistic deductive arguments. Population, natural resources, and common sense. With respect to natural resources, the population-control argument apparently makes perfect "common sense". If there are more people, natural resources will inevitably get used up and become more scarce. And the idealistic, generous side of young people responds to the fear that future generations will be disadvantaged by a heavy use of resources in this generation. Perhaps such a doomsday view of natural resources is partly accounted for by the ease of demonstrating that more people will cause some particular negative effects - for example, if there are more Americans there will be less wilderness. The logic of the rebuttal must be global and much more encompassing than the logic of the charge. To show that the loss of wilderness to be enjoyed in solitude is not an argument against more people, one must show that an increase in people may ultimately lead to a general expansion of the "unspoiled" space available to each person - through easier transportation to the wilderness, high-rise buildings, trips to the moon, plus many other partial responses that would not now be possible if population had been stationary 100 years ago. It is obviously harder to show how good is the sum effect of these population- caused improvements than it is to show how bad is the partial effect of a decrease in this or that wilderness area that one may enjoy in solitude. Hence the result is a belief in the ill effects of population growth. Judgments about people's rationality. At the bottom of people's concern about population growth often lies the belief that other people will not act rationally in the face of environmental and resource needs. Arguments about the need to stop population growth now often contain the implicit premise that individuals and societies cannot be trusted to make rational, timely decisions about fertility rates. This is the drunkard model of fertility behavior refuted in chapter 24. One of the themes that runs through much of the population movement is that the experts and the population enthusiasts understand population economics better than other persons do. As John D. Rockefeller III put it, "The average citizen doesn't appreciate the social and economic implications of population growth." It is not obvious why a politician or businessman - even though a very rich one - should have a clearer understanding of the costs of bearing children than "an average citizen." But Rockefeller has much power to convert his opinion into national action. FORCES AMPLIFYING THE RHETORIC Media exposure. Anti-natality views get enormously more exposure than pro-natality or neutralist views. Paul Ehrlich has repeatedly been on the Johnny Carson show for an unprecedented hour; no one who holds contrary views gets such media exposure. This is also clear from a casual analysis of the titles of articles listed in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. Money. The leaders of population agencies that have vast sums of money at their disposal - UNFPA and USAID - take as their goal the reduction of population growth in the poorer countries. Scientists who work in population studies and who have a reasonable degree of career prudence are not likely to go out of their way to offend such powerful potential patrons. Individuals and organizations hitch all kinds of research projects to this money-star. Furthermore, various agencies such as UNFAO realize that their own budgets will be larger if the public and government officials believe that there are fearsome impending dangers from population growth, environmental disaster, and starvation. Therefore, their publicity organs play up these threats. Standards of proof and of rhetoric. The standard of proof demanded of those who oppose the popular view is much much more exacting than is the standard of proof demanded of those who share the popular view. One example: Decades ago the scientific procedure of the Limits to Growth study was condemned by every economist who reviewed it, to my knowledge. Yet its findings are still acclaimed and retailed by the "population community." But if I say that the world food situation has been improving year by year, you will either say "Prove it," or "I won't believe it." Or consider an advertisement run in national newspapers (figure 37-2). No one asks for proof of the statements in that advertisement. Figure 37-2 Furthermore, anti-doomsday people are in a double bind rhetorically. The doomsdayers speak in excited, angry, high-pitched voices, using language such as Famine 1975! They say that such tactics are acceptable because "we are faced with a crisis...the seriousness of which cannot be exaggerated." The fears they inspire generate lots of support money from the UN, AID, and popular fund-raising campaigns in full-page advertisements. Many anti-doomsday people, on the other hand, speak in quiet voices - as reassurance usually sounds. They tend to be careful people. And they are totally ignored. The great geologist Kirtley F. Mather wrote a book called Enough and To Spare in 1944 that reassured the public that resources would be plentiful; it was withdrawn from the University of Illinois library just twice - in 1945 and 1952 - prior to my 1977 withdrawal. But there are literally armfuls of books such as Fairfield Osborn's 1953 Limits of the Earth that have been read vastly more frequently. Even a book published by a vanity press and written by a retired army colonel who has Malthus's first name as "Richard" and who believes that Overpopulation (the title of the book) is a plot of the "Kremlin gangsters" had been withdrawn ten times between 1971 and 1980 (when I checked), and untold more times between its 1958 publication and 1971, when the charge slip was changed. FINALLY - THE PIPER Many of those in favor of population control are frank to admit the use of emotional language, exaggerated arguments, and political manipulation (see the next chapter on the issue of truth). They defend these practices by saying that the situation is very serious. Would the environment have gotten cleaner without the exaggerated and untrue scary statements made by the doomsayers starting in the late 1960s? Perhaps they helped speed the cleanup of our air and water - perhaps. But without false alarms, Great Britain started on its cleanup earlier than did the U.S., and went further, faster. And even granting some credit to the doomsayers, were the benefits worth the costs? Billions of dollars were wasted preparing the airplane industry for $3 per gallon gasoline, and tens of billions wasted worldwide on raw-materials purchased in fear that metal prices would soar. Much more expensive was the loss of public morale and the spirit of adventurous enterprise due to false environmental scares. And most costly, in my view, has been the inevitable loss of trust in science and in our basic institutions as people realized that they had been systematically fooled. Exaggeration and untruth run up debts with the piper, who eventually gets paid. Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences, was a strong supporter of environmental and population control programs. But even he worried about the piper. It is imperative that we recognize that we know little and badly require scientific understanding of the nature and magnitude of our actual environmental difficulties. The current wave of public concern has been aroused in large measure by scientists who have occasionally exaggerated the all-too-genuine deterioration of the environment or have overenthusiastically made demands which, unnecessarily, exceed realistically realizable - or even desirable - expectations.... The nations of the world may yet pay a dreadful price for the public behavior of scientists who depart from ... fact to indulge ... in hyperbole. As far back as 1972, John Maddox, the long-time editor of Nature, warned that "there is a danger that much of this gloomy foreboding about the immediate future will accomplish the opposite of what its authors intend. Instead of alerting people to important problems, it may seriously undermine the capacity of the human race to look out for its survival. The doomsday syndrome [the name of his book] may in itself be as much a hazard as any of the conundrums which society has created for itself." This may already have come to pass. In 1992 Theodore Roszak refers to himself as one of "Those of us who presume to act as the planet's guardians" and who agrees that "the important thing is to spread the alarm" because "There is no question in my mind that these problems are as serious as environmentalists contend." He finds himself taken aback by physician Helen Caldicott's warning that "Every time you turn on an electric light you are making another brainless baby" because nuclear power is the cause of anencephalic births along the Mexican border. "Despite my reservations, I do my best to go along with what Dr. Caldicott has to say - even though I suspect...that there is no connection between light bulbs and brainless babies". But he worries that "A fanatical antienvironmental backlash [is] now under way" because of the exaggerations and falsehoods. Were it occurring, a fanatical backlash would not be a good thing; fanaticism of any kind will be destructive in these matters, where cool scientific consideration of the evidence is so desperately needed to assess dangers of all kinds. But this is what Handler and Maddox warned of - the piper that will finally be paid for untruths about population, resources, and environment. This raises the question: To what extent is the current public belief that the U.S. economy and society are on the skids related to false doomsday fears that we are running out of minerals, food, and energy? And to the unfounded belief that the U.S. is an unfair plunderer of the world's resources, a supposed "exploitation" that people believe must bring grave consequences for the U.S.? And when we count the costs of the doomsayers' excesses we must remember the tragedy of the human lives not lived because countries such as China and Indonesia prevent births in the name of the now-discredited doctrine that population growth slows economic development. It will fall to the future historian to balance the questionable benefits against those undeniable costs. More on this subject in the next chapter. AFTERNOTE 1: A RHETORICAL ANALOGY An analogy helps explain the power inherent in the anti-growth rhetoric. Think how much easier it is to argue that the automobile is detrimental to life and health than that the auto is beneficial. To dramatize how dangerous cars are for people, you need only the number of people killed and maimed, plus a few gory pictures of smashups. That's strong stuff. But to argue that the auto is beneficial to health you need to show a lot of relatively small, indirect benefits - the ability to get to a doctor or hospital by car when it could not be done otherwise; the therapeutic results of being able to take a trip into the countryside; the improved transportation know-how that eventually saves lives (the emergency health systems discussed in chapter 18 are an example); and so on. My point here is not to prove that cars are, in fact, beneficial on balance, but only to illustrate how much easier it is rhetorically to show their maleficence than their beneficence. Just so it is with arguments about population growth. AFTERNOTE 2: PLANNED PARENTHOOD'S RHETORIC Just a few examples of Planned Parenthood/World Population's rhetoric are given here. But PP/WP is a very large and important organization, and many people still identify it only with its older aims and find it hard to believe that it engages in the practices that it does. Consider one of its mailings. The only message in the "donor's card" is, "Yes, I will help contain runaway population growth by supporting the crucial work of Planned Parenthood," plus this assertion by Robert McNamara: "Excessive population growth is the greatest single obstacle to the economic and social advancement of most societies in the developing world." Some of the statements in the fund-raising letter are, Thai women and millions of other women like them in India, China, Africa and throughout the developing nations control our destiny. Their decisions - decisions of hundreds of millions of young women - about their family's size - control your future more surely, more relentlessly than the oil crisis or the nuclear arms race. ...unless population growth is harnessed and slowed to meet the limited resources and human services of these nations, development of nations will be shattered. Chaos, mass famine and war will continue to increase. We will be affected for better or worse. The great tinderbox for revolution and international anarchy is rising expectations of the world's masses coupled with unrestrained population growth. Starvation, revolution and violent repression will fill our headlines unless human fertility is reduced to meet the finite limits of available resources and services. International Assistance. In developing countries of the world, the population "time bomb" ticks on, putting ever- increasing strains on the scarce resources of our planet, locking large areas of the globe into self-perpetuating poverty and setting the stage for famine and war. A fund-raising letter by Margaret Mead is shown in figure 37-3. When I included this in the first edition, suggesting as I do that she made a scad of wild assertions for which she had no evidence, and for which there is counter-evidence, friends regretted that I would take on such a wonderful woman and scientist. Since then it has become clear beyond a doubt that her most important "scientific" work was based entirely upon a hoax. Such a high degree of foolability then is consistent with being similarly fooled later on by the false claims about the effects of population growth by the population- control establishment on whose behalf she wrote. Letters by other celebrities mention famine, drought, flood, "the crush of visitors [that] forced the National Park Service to close one entrance to Yosemite National Park last summer," packed campgrounds, despoliation of fragile ecology, cars and trucks clogging expressways, people dying in the streets of starvation, and the following: In India entire families commit suicide to escape a lingering death from starvation. In Bangladesh famished infants are thrown into rivers to drown. Hungry hordes of abandoned children roam the cities of Latin America looting, terrorizing and scavenging for food. By conservative estimates 400 million people - a tenth of humanity - live on the ragged edge of starvation, 12,000 a day die of hunger as food-short nations sink deeper into crisis and anguish. Regional crop failures this year will almost certainly mean mass famine. For 10 to 30 million, the Malthusian nightmare may become reality.... A family of thirteen is found living in a basement flooded with water and smelling of sewer gas. The children are cold and hungry. This is "the other America" - a land of limited opportunity, of corrosive poverty. Sixty percent of our poor live in urban centers, in enclaves of misery stretched like scars across the nation. Last spring eleven mayors met to warn of the collapse of U.S. cities, rapidly becoming "repositories for the poor." In Boston one in five gets public assistance; in N.Y.C. one in seven; in Los Angeles one in eight. These agonizing statistics underscore today's welfare crisis. Agonizing because for each person getting aid, someone eligible is not; agonizing because welfare benefits guarantee only a life of grinding poverty, physical survival and little else.... On an afternoon in N.Y. not too long ago four boys were playing in the streets when suddenly from a second story window a shot rang out and a 13-year old fell to the ground dead. The man who killed him said he couldn't bear the noise, that he was a night worker and had to get his sleep. In Paris three recent murders were attributed to noise and now studies in England and America suggest it is a cause of serious mental disorder provoking many to acts of violence. The city dweller is constantly assailed by noise, doubling in volume every 15 years and now approaching levels which can cause permanent damage. Three out of five American men have lost some hearing and growing evidence links noise to heart disease. And still our cities swell until finally 80% of us will live in crowded and festering sinks and pollution will be a personal hazard and affront. We are hastening to what Archibald MacLeish has called "the diminishment of man...." Figure 37-3 [old 22-3] Along with one of the Mead letters came a reprint of Paul Ehrlich's "EcoCatastrophe," a dramatically frightening doomsday document. It predicted - for the 1970s! - "the end of the ocean," falling agricultural yields, smog disasters for New York and Los Angeles ("nearly 200,000 corpses"), "birth of the Midwestern desert"; and "both worldwide plague and thermonuclear war are made more probable as population growth continues;... population control was the only possible salvation suggested." Perhaps most astonishing is Planned Parenthood's prodigal use of money - some of it public money - and phony emotional appeals in a twenty-eight page supplement in the New York Times, whose back cover is shown in figure 37-4, sponsored by PPFA together with the Population Crisis Committee. PP/WP also was a main sponsor of the anti-natal television campaign discussed in this chapter. All these activities make it very clear that Planned Parenthood's goal is fewer births. Figure 37-4. As to the rhetorical tactics used in pursuit of this goal, the arguments used and the issues raised in connection with population growth - parking problems, famine, crime in the streets, mental disorder, and so on - are simply wild speculations, many flatly contradicted by the evidence given elsewhere in this book, for example, with respect to famine. Or worse, they are plain untruths - for example, that population growth increases mental disorder. The best that can be said of these mindless Planned Parenthood activities is that they are undertaken by people who are sincerely motivated by a public spirit but who have never given attention to the facts or thought through to the consequences, and who simply assume that "everyone knows" that the rhetoric is true. That's the most favorable construction I can give to Planned Parenthood's bumper-sticker campaign: POPULATION NO PROBLEM? HOW DENSE CAN YOU GET? SUPPORT PLANNED PARENTHOOD Some Planned Parenthood people say privately that these sorts of appeals do not reflect a change in Planned Parenthood's mission from the original "Children by choice - not chance," but are only used because they are effective in fund raising. If that is so, then what is the moral basis of such behavior? Either PP/WP is getting money under false pretenses, or it is simply altering its behavior to produce maximum contributions ENDNOTES page # \ultres\ tchar37\ February 9, 1994