Population-control explosion.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Editorial

There are too many people who think there are too many people.

THOUGH IT WAS ADVERTISED AS A FOrum for deliberation, the fix was already in on the United Nations' International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo last month. The international popucrats just wanted to stage a media event to rubber-stamp a foregone conclusion to maximal p.r. effect. Sadly, they got away with it.

The headlines on the conference played up the phony conflict over abortion and contraception. By calling the conflict phony, I don't mean to imply that the Vatican and the handful of other countries joining in its disapproval were insincere in their objections to the conference document's stance on abortion and other artificial birth controls.

But their objections did play a useful role for their opponents, who had no intention of heeding them. Popucrats and the press were able to portray only superstitious reactionaries straight out of the Middle Ages as fighting the self-evidently humane and necessary goal of tripling world government spending on birth prevention to $17 billion a year. Thus, even the thought that there might be informed secular arguments against centralized population control was shut out of the debate. Cries of "Will no one save me from this meddlesome priest?" echoed through the still Cairo air, but it was howled with a wink. The pope played perfectly his role as Court Reactionary in the judgment hall of world opinion.

SINCE THE VATICAN IS AS MUCH AGAINST genuine reproductive freedom as the mainstream popucrats, the real question about overpopulation wasn't asked at Cairo. What are we talking about when we talk about "overpopulation"?

In his statements at the conference, Vice President Al Gore indulged in the usual anti-natalist trick of merely tossing out growing population numbers ominously, as if they were self-evidently frightening. Are they?

The total population density of the Earth fight now is around 10.6 people per square mile (not counting Antarctica)--less than 1/80th the population density of Los Angeles, and less than 1/1,120th that of Dhaka, Bangladesh, a country often used as an example of the ultimate nightmare awaiting all of us through overpopulation. To put it into perspective, if everyone on earth were divided into families of four and given a quarter acre of land to live on (a good-sized suburban plot), they could all fit into one-sixth of the land mass in the United States alone.

Of course, the world's...