Opinion: Whither Population Control?

China’s ruling Communist Party announced that it would change its decades-old policy governing the number of children an urban family could have, allowing every family to have two children instead of one. While this policy change has been warmly received by most people both inside and outside of China, it provokes serious concerns about the reason a population growth-rate policy was implemented in the first place: the environment.

Population control has been a scholarly topic since 1798, when Thomas Malthus published his “Essay on the Principle of Population.” In 1968, American Paul R. Ehrlich brought the issue back into the spotlight when he compared population growth to cancer with his statement that “people die, often horribly.” An increasing growth-rate is troublesome when one considers the potential environmental ramifications. More people means more emissions, more waste, more fuel, and more land needed for housing and food production—all of which the planet cannot withstand or simply cannot provide.

While China’s strict reproduction policy may seem coercive, and is often what people automatically think of when they hear “population control,” several other nations have adopted population control practices over the years as well. However, these policies and initiatives generally were designed to give citizens greater control of their own reproduction in hopes that they would be the ones limiting themselves, instead of the respective governments directly stifling them like China has done.

First, Title X of the United States’ 1970 Public Health Service Act warrants the distribution of contraceptive services, supplies and information, particularly for low income earners. The Title X Family Planning Program, governed by the Office of Public Health through the Office of Population Affairs, has continuously received less funding from the government since 2010.

India exercises a policy in which individuals are automatically ineligible for local office if they have more than two children, and they also advertise messages of family planning through the Hindu slogan “Hum do, hamare do”, meaning “one family, two children.”  Myanmar’s Population Control Health Care Law requires children of a particular family to be at least three years apart in age, and Iran, up until 2012, would not grant marriage licenses until both parties took a class about the benefits of smaller families and contraception.

In 2012, the government of Uzbekistan reportedly forced and coerced individuals to undergo sterilizations, and President Islam Karimov told President Vladimir Putin that they were “doing everything in our hands to make sure the population growth rate doesn’t exceed 1.2 to 1.3 percent.”

Kenya launched a new policy in 2012 following the decentralization of its government to help manage its rapid population growth. The policy is designed to reduce the number of children a woman has from 5 to 3 by 2030. This policy is part of Kenya’s Vision 2030 project, a comprehensive plan comprised of many long-term development goals.

Overall, women across the globe are having fewer and fewer children. The infant and child mortality rates of most nations, especially developing ones, have decreased significantly in part due to the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, meaning that women no longer feel as great of a need to have more children in case one of them dies prematurely. Additionally, women are also universally more educated, also in part due to the MDGs. They are more educated in regards to contraception and pregnancy prevention, and also are seeking careers instead of motherhood in an attempt to apply the skills they have learned.

None of us wants our governments to tell us how many children we may or may not have. To most, it seems beyond government control or authority, and possibly too personal of a topic in which the government should be meddling. However, with the current state of the environment, our limited natural resources, and a particularly gloomy future where climate change is concerned, pursuing a way to limit the rapid growth of our global population is growing seems rather necessary.

Lucia Green-Weiskel, of the Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation in Beijing, told VICE News that China needs to direct its focus on power plant efficiency and having a more service-oriented economy in order to combat the negative environmental effects associated with large populations, instead of focusing on individual consumption. “China can really tighten its belt in terms of greenhouse gas emissions,” said Green-Weiskel. “If China makes less plastic junk, then it's better for Planet Earth.”