Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits

“For over half a century, policymakers committed to population control have perpetrated a gigantic, costly, and inhumane fraud upon the human race, defrauding the people of the developing countries of their progeny and the people of the developed world of their pocketbooks.” So argues Stephen W. Mosher, president of Population Research Institute and recognized as one of the leading authorities on population studies. Now, in “Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits,” Mosher details how the population control movement has carried out a virtual war on the people of the world, harming hundreds of millions of women, children and families in the process.

Mosher, an eyewitness to the brutality of China’s one-child policy, draws from personal experience and a lifelong passion for demographics to craft a compelling argument against population control. From its origins in racial

hysteria and demographic ignorance to its state-sanctioned and funded rise to the mainstream, Mosher describes the population control movement as it really is: as the world’s Number One violator of human rights.

“Human rights are nonnegotiable, or they are not rights at all,” Mosher writes. “Abuses of basic rights, such as the right to bear children, cannot be expunged by reference to any calculus of costs versus benefits, any more than comparable violations of other basic human rights can be explained away, excused, or justified by reference to a supposedly larger social good.” Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits explains exactly how the population control movement continues to violate these basic rights, in the pursuit for a highly questionable “good” — fewer children.

Meet the population controllers — and their victims:

• How, in their determination to stop population growth at all costs, population controllers have abused women, targeted racial and religious minorities, undermined primary health care programs, and encouraged dictatorship
• How they have skewed the foreign aid programs of the United States and other developed countries in an anti-natal direction
• How they have corrupted dozens of well-intentioned nongovernmental organizations, and impoverished authentic development programs
• How, in their zealotry they have even embraced the most brutal birth control campaign in history: China’s infamous one-child policy, with all its attendant horrors
• How in the absence of a workable demographic definition of “overpopulation,” they conjure up images of poverty, low incomes, poor health, unemployment, malnutrition, overcrowded housing to justify anti-natal programs
• How their war on people has in many ways caused what it predicted — a world which is poorer materially, less diverse culturally, less advanced economically, and plagued by disease
• How the population controllers have not only ignored mounting evidence of their multiple failures, they tiptoe around the biggest story of them all: fertility rates are in free fall around the globe, and the number of “dying countries” which fill more coffins than cradles each year is mounting rapidly
• Why many in the population-control movement want to see our current population reduced to one or two billion — a goal that would keep them fully employed for centuries while they implement a global one-child policy

“Countries like France and Japan became rich before they grew old. Now much of the developing world is growing old before it before it becomes rich, due primarily rapid declines in birthrates that are unprecedented in human demographic history. Mosher correctly shows how the debate over reproductive rights and population control has to come terms with a world in which population growth is decelerating, and what remains will come mostly from increases in the ranks of the elderly.” — Phillip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity

“Crisp and compelling; the message both disturbing and illuminating; the concluding call for a pro-natalist future hopeful.” — Allan Carlson, The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society

Tags: Population Control: Real Costs Illusory Benefits, Steven Mosher