A Better World for Fewer Children
Wald, George
A Better World for Fewer Children by GEORGE WALD None of the things that now most need to be done for our country and for the world have much chance of working unless coupled with the control of...
...And whatever is done now must be done quickly, not only because the population is increasing so explosively, but because as one consequence the quality of human life has already been eroded...
...I do not think it irrelevant that the quality of our production in the arts has declined greatly in the last century or two...
...If we were in fact taking proper care of children all over the world, raising them with enough food and shelter and clothing so that they had the chance to fulfill their genetic potentialities, then we might have the privilege of feeling that every embryo should be born...
...They regard abortion as highly immoral, indeed a form of murder...
...What is killing those children is war, famine, disease, and poverty...
...This is the widely prevalent view that the poor are over-reproducing, the well-to-do are under-reproducing, and the quality of the human race is hence going downhill...
...That is true individually, and has its national aspects...
...I think we must as rapidly as possible make convenient, safe, altogether legal, and cheap—again I would rather say free—means of abortion universally available...
...We are beginning to realize now that it is precisely the well-to-do and their children who make the most trouble—who are at once the biggest consumers and the biggest polluters...
...there would be no place for cows, sheep, or pigs in such a world...
...One is interested not in the quantity but in the quality of human life...
...The point then is not how many people one can feed oh this planet, but what population can best fulfill human potentialities...
...Lately it has at least considered accepting contraception, before officially deciding against it...
...The concept that food is the primary problem is a prevalent and dangerous misunderstanding...
...11 Orily a little more than half of those who survive to school age will ever set foot in a classroom...
...A distinguished demographer recently estimated that with what he calls "proper management" we could support a world population of forty billions...
...THE EDITORS George Wald is Higgins professor of biology at Harvard University and 1968 Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine...
...Having got there, we can take stock and see whether that is yet enough...
...The Western world also is becoming crowded...
...In that sense we may be the last generation that can save humanity...
...Secretary General U Thant said recently, there are more sick, undernourished, and uneducated children in the world now than there were ten years ago, and "the next ten years will find the number of neglected children increased by millions"'unless the international community undertakes a massive effort to prevent it...
...In numbers of underdeveloped countries, through ignorance, poverty, and the low state of technology, abortion is the principal method of birth control...
...Abortion, however, is not only rejected by the Catholic hierarchy, but apparently also by large numbers of Catholic laymen...
...Using data on these countries compiled by U.N...
...Quite apart from the naive assumption that the economically poor are necessarily also genetically inferior, there are other, almost as serious troubles with this view of the problem...
...That is our present condition, one in which we turn the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse loose upon the children of the earth...
...But this is the fate known to await millions who would never be conceived if birth control were practiced throughout the world to the degree that the planet's limited resources of food and arable land require...
...As it is, however, the world's population is now mainly held down through infant mortality...
...We are not being asked, but told to control world population...
...What goes as morality, in this as in so many other things, sits more lightly on the well-to-do...
...There are recent reports of encouraging work in this direction, from England and Sweden, with one of the prostaglandins...
...Until a moral and sane approach to birth control is adopted, death awaits millions of infants and children...
...Of course, under those conditions people would not eat meat...
...Surely we can and must do better than that...
...We might begin some of those procedures much sooner: for example, legislate tax discouragements rather than incentives for bearing children, particularly beyond the first two...
...They did, however, have peace and quiet, the chance to walk through green fields, along quiet rivers, and to find relief from all the crowding, noise, filth, and endless distractions of modern urban life...
...Death Sentence The most savage, immoral, and heartbreaking form of population control is to permit children to enter the world sentenced to death in their earliest years...
...If it were, one would have some small reason for optimism...
...I hope for the early advent of a safe and efficient abortion pill...
...That is now our only chance of a meaningful survival...
...and then we shall have to go on with a variety of other reasonable procedures...
...Three-quarters of the world's children— nearly a billion—live in developing countries, U Thant pointed out...
...For as U.N...
...U Thant said that the death rate of children in the one to five age groups is ten to fifty times higher in the developing than in the developed countries...
...Public Health Service, writing in Dissent, July-August, 1969...
...Alice S. Rossi, U.S...
...It seems to me likely that having once opened the question of contraception, it will now prove very difficult to close...
...This would be an altogether bankrupt view of the human enterprise...
...but those aspects of Indian and Chinese culture declined centuries ago for reasons associated, I think, with overpopulation...
...It implies that the main point of the human enterprise from now on will be to see how many persons can be kept alive on the surface of the earth...
...It would take four to six top scientists of the present generation to approach in productivity, scope, and quality the contributions of Charles Darwin, Hermann von Helmholtz, or James Clerk Maxwell...
...Indeed, it will be so difficult that we would be well advised to choose any viable alternative...
...Data on the extent of illegal abortion are difficult to obtain and not altogether reliable...
...It is that or disaster...
...This would degrade it to simple production—a meaningless venture in simple multiplication...
...But there is none...
...We need to make a world in which fewer children are born, and in which we take better care of all of them...
...agencies, he disclosed: f One hundred children are born every half-minute in these areas, and twenty of them will die in their first year...
...Our country, which contains only about six per cent of the world's population, uses about forty per cent of the world's resources, and accounts for about fifty per cent of the world's industrial pollution...
...Those men had no labor-saving devices, so far as I know not even secretaries—no dictaphones, microfilm, computerized information, retrieval services, and the like...
...First, as rapidly as possible make convenient, safe, and cheap—I would rather say free— means of birth control universally available...
...Of course the Roman Catholic Church is deeply opposed to it...
...Being born unwanted is no favor to any child...
...So that is my program: a better world for fewer children...
...A Better World for Fewer Children by GEORGE WALD None of the things that now most need to be done for our country and for the world have much chance of working unless coupled with the control of population...
...That, however, will certainly not be enough...
...Very likely not...
...China and India were once great cultures, enormously creative in the sciences, the visual arts, and literature...
...However, a recent study estimates that in France there is one abortion for each live birth...
...I think the condition we must try to achieve everywhere and as rapidly as possible is to see to it that nowhere in the world need a woman have an unwanted child...
...Yet this in itself is not the heart of the problem...
...that in Latin America as a whole there is one abortion for every two live births...
...The poor must bear it in suffering and terror, and at times must pay for it with their lives...
...and that in Uruguay, there are three abortions to each live birth...
...Long before that, we can expect famine on an unprecedented scale in many parts of the world...
...Indeed, some recent statistics seem to show that it is particularly prevalent in a number of Roman Catholic countries, in which other means of birth control are not available...
...That won't be easy or altogether pleasant...
...In spite of the appalling infant mortality rates in the developing countries, and in the face of what birth control efforts do exist in these areas, their total population, according to U Thant, is expected to increase by a half billion during the 1970s...
...for in the last decade the world's food supplies have increased more rapidly than its population...
...Fewer than four out of ten of those who do enter school will complete the elementary grades...
...Even that, however well managed, must come to an end, as the potential resources of the planet become insufficient to feed further numbers of people...
...Sixty of the eighty will be malnourished, with the possibility of irreversible physical and mental damage...
...Western science is flourishing, but the productivity of the individual scientist is nothing like what it was up to a century ago...
...Many people still have trouble with the thought of legalized abortion...
...It is precisely a high concern for human life, and most of all for children and what becomes of them, that makes me believe that we must achieve as rapidly as possible universally available, and preferably free, birth control and abortion...
...It is difficult for me to appreciate the morality of that position in view of the present condition of the world's children...
...It is not as though we were asked to introduce abortion into a world that is not already practicing it...
...It is claimed by reliable sources that an American child uses fifty times as much of the world's resources as an Indian child...
...All of them suffer, and many of them die...
...From that point of view the world is probably already over-populated...
...The women do it to themselves, or to one another, or at best with the help of some self-taught midwife...
...By present indications our present population of 3.5 billions will have doubled by the end of this century...
...A second profound misunderstanding has plagued many earlier discussions of the population problem...
...It is one of the penalties of poverty...
...A lot of this happens under brutal circumstances...
...So what to do...
...Being born to hunger, want, disease, and the ravages of total war is no favor to any child...
...Humanity still has a chance at creating an ever wider, richer, and more meaningful culture...
...It is in fact practiced very widely, not only in those few nations where it is legal, but in others where it is illegal, and frowned upon by tradition and religion...
...Of the eighty who survive, sixty will have no access to modern medical care during their childhood...
...We must be aware of the danger that persons of future generations, even more out of contact than we with the potentialities of a less crowded world, will have lost a wider human view, and will have become unable to help themselves...
...So it is essential that we bring world population under control, not only to keep it from increasing further, but if possible cut it down from its present level...
Vol. 34 • April 1970 • No. 4
