Population Pressure and "Revenge Fertility".

• Position: From Readers

Thank you for James Gasana's highly informative article on the social conditions that led to the disastrous genocide in Rwanda, important among them the conflict for resources caused by rapid population growth. Unfortunately I can have no optimism for the future of that country. Here I quote at length from an article that appeared in The Economist on February 1,1997: Kigali, Rwanda

The maternity wards are packed. So are the churches, where dozens of young couples get married every Saturday amid soon-to-be grandparents shouting instructions from the pews to be fruitful and multiply. One popular T-shirt proclaims: "Let's Make Babies."

Though the slogan is not government policy, breeding has unofficially become a public duty, especially among the Tutsi minority, who lost maybe 750,000 of their kin in the genocide of 1994. "Too many people died. We want to...