Is the World Overpopulated?
Spirit and Life Video Email for Friday, April 27, 2007
Hello again; I am Fr. Tom Euteneuer, President of Human Life International, and welcome to the third installment in this series on contraception. Thank you for your faithfulness to this educational effort and for passing these mini-lessons on to your friends and family. So far, the responses have indicated that you are indeed spreading the truth both far and wide. We are all trying to fortify the Church Militant so let us continue to move forward with faith and hope for the future.
I want to talk today about what I call the “myth of overpopulation.” As always, let’s start with some facts:
The world has 6.5 billion people. That sounds like a lot of people because numbers in the billions are often intimidating, but raw numbers have to be interpreted in order for us to understand their meaning.
Let’s put those numbers into a visual context. Imagine for a moment, the state of Texas. If we were to transport each of those 6.5 billion people to Texas, we could provide enough two bedroom homes with 1200 square feet of living space for every single person on the planet! If we took them to Alaska instead, we could literally double the amount of living space for each person. Now that’s incredible!
In other words, it’s absurd for people to claim that the population is a ticking bomb that is about to explode and cause the destruction of the world. The so-called “population bomb” has fizzled, fertility and population growth rates are plummeting everywhere and the world’s population will never double again.
Was there rapid population growth in the era following the Second World War? Yes, but it was not the result of too many babies… it was the result of better healthcare. Not one of us could object to the advances of the medical world…thanks to them, we keep our loved ones around longer! More children live beyond their fifth birthdays and fewer women die in childbirth. The population scaremongers made it look like the world’s population was expanding simply due to the number of children being born. But that’s not the case: as one writer put it, the real reason for the population increase is not that people are breeding like rabbits but that they are not dying like flies. Well-said.
Americans worried about exponential population growth in other regions of the world run the risk of great hypocrisy. Our US population has increased more than 900% since the time of the Civil War, but no one claims that the US is overpopulated. Why should such massive population growth be fine for rich countries and not for poor countries? To think like that is to become what Margaret Sanger and Adolf Hitler were: racists and eugenicists who believed that some races were more inherently worthy of life than others.
The real issue of overpopulation is not people, but the production and distribution of resources needed to feed them and give them a decent standard of living. When put in this context, the population problem is almost always related to political problems, corruption and mismanagement. Massive starvation of populations is not because people have too many children but because starvation is used as an instrument of war and social coercion. This abundant world has enough resources to feed twice its total population every year but the massive scale of human misery is almost entirely manufactured by human evil, not human reproduction.
This is also where the issue of contraception comes in again. The rich countries of the world decided decades ago that the way to maintain their economic prosperity and world dominance was to suppress the populations of the Third World nations by means of population control. This is an awfully strong motivation to spread the ideology of contraception which is the tool that “controls population.” By frightening the masses, a few very powerful men and their billions of dollars is able to keep a tight lid on the numbers of people in Third World nations, all the while stripping them of the manpower and the resources that would enable them to strengthen their economies and escape the scourge of poverty.
No, the world is not overpopulated because the blessed earth that God gave us has resources to sustain many more times the number of people that exist today. Would people of faith expect anything less?
I have said a number of times in this mini-series that contraception is not only a method, but a mentality that rejects the gift of fertility and God’s sovereignty over the conjugal act. The contraceptive mentality has truly permeated our world and its legacy deprives people and nations of their futures. A nation or a couple that does not have children literally has no future.
Because the population controllers have unlimited resources of power, money and the media at their disposal, I am asking you to double your efforts this week and send this video email to even more friends, co-workers and family members than you have done before. Join me in my attempt to dismantle the myth that has frightened our world into contracepting the hope of the future. Church Militant—Keep up the good fight to save the soul of our nation! God bless you!
Copyright 2007. Human Life International. Permission granted for unlimited use.
