Population Research Institute: More people equals less poverty

 I love these informative little videos...cross posted at Jill Stanek.com

Taking on the overpopulation myth...still an

 Still an interesting article with good insights after watching the video.....


REAL COSTS, ILLUSORY BENEFITS
By Steven W. Mosher
REVIEWED BY JOSEPH A. D'AGOSTINO

"'Our health care sector is collapsed,' Kenya obstetrician Stephen Karanja says simply, opening his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. 'Thousands of Kenyan people will die of malaria, the treatment for which costs a few cents, in health facilities whose shelves are stocked to the ceiling with millions of dollars worth of [contraceptive] pills, IUDs, Norplant, Depo-Provera, and so on, most of which are supplied with American money.'"

This one quote from Steven W. Mosher's "Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits," from the former secretary of the Kenyan Medical Association, summarizes the state of Western-funded population control programs in the Third World. Just as Planned Parenthood, founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger (who said she wanted "to create a race of thoroughbreds"), still has 70 percent of its clinics located in minority neighborhoods, foreign aid for health programs still target the black, brown, and yellow populations of the world for reduction.

Now called reproductive health or maternal health programs, these efforts - which continue to receive billions of dollars a year from the United States and Europe even as birthrates decline to below replacement level in most regions of the world - began as population control and still have that effect. Unlike almost all other American scholars of the subject, Steven Mosher, president of Population Research Institute and a China expert, does not consider population control to be a worthy goal. Nor does he think population control programs were a necessary expedient whose time has now passed, or believe the concept was fine in principle while deploring the forced sterilization and abortion campaigns conducted in the Third World as part of the postwar global population control effort. Using plenty of anecdotes from the lives of people in poor countries and a popular, nonacademic style, Mr. Mosher documents how population control has crowded out many of the resources needed for disease prevention and treatment and has often led to massive human rights abuses by governments eager to meet their population reduction goals. (Full disclosure: I used to work at PRI.)

In "Population Control," Mr. Mosher incisively explores the history and effects of the population control movement from a pro-people perspective, based on the belief that because each person has unique value, more people means more for all of us — more economic production, more potential for artistic and scientific achievement, more innovation. Another recent book on population control, "Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population" by Matthew Connelly, a professor of history at Columbia University, criticizes the human rights abuses committed by population controllers but also criticizes efforts by the Catholic Church and others to increase fertility in a world threatened by anti-natal forces. Not only have the facts proved Mr. Mosher's Christian-derived beliefs true — the tremendous increase in global population since World War II has been accompanied by tremendous increases in prosperity and scientific achievement instead of the mass starvation and other disastrous consequences predicted by population controllers — but he sounds the alarm about the coming underpopulation crisis.