Ruth Institute Blog

by Susan E. Wills

November 9, 2011 http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/11/4265

Think overpopulation, poverty, climate change, and abortion can all be solved by more birth control? Think again.

Who knew that the intractable global problems of “overpopulation,” poverty, carbon emissions, climate change, deforestation, civil wars, unplanned pregnancies, and abortions could all be solved by the simple expedient of more birth control? Nicholas Kristof, for one. Read more…

by Joel Kotkin

The world’s population recently passed the 7 billion mark, and, of course, the news was greeted with hysteria and consternation in the media. “It’s not hard to be alarmed,” intoned National Geographic. “We should all be afraid, very afraid,” warned the Guardian. Read more…

by Michael Cook

Demographic denialists are ignoring the perils of an ageing population.

Like many others, the US-based Center for Biological Diversity was aghast at the arrival of the 7 billionth person today. “Overpopulation and overconsumption are the root causes of environmental destruction. They’re driving species extinct, destroying wildlife habitat, and undermining the basic needs of all life at an unprecedented rate. It has to stop.” Read more…

by Marcus Roberts

One of the common concerns that is about our expanding world population : is that our planet will not be able to feed this growing population.  (As an aside, here is an interesting and visually appealing video on the continuing rise in the world’s population despite the slowing growth rate): Read more…

by Steven W. Mosher

Over the years, I have been asked many times to estimate how many lives have been lost in China as a result of the one-child policy. Given that the policy has been in place for 30 years, I respond, and given that each year the government aborts between 10 to 15 million women, the total number of unborn children whose lives have been sacrificed is somewhere between 300 and 450 million. It is impossible to be more precise, I add, because of the Chinese Communist party’s penchant for secrecy about such sensitive matters. Read more…

by Marcus Roberts

I’m sure that you, dear reader, are far too mature and sensible to ever watch the satirical (and far too crass) cartoon programme, South Park. I was not always as sensible and mature as I am now, and so in my younger years I often enjoyed watching an episode or two.  Two of South Park’s characters were a pair of redneck hunters called Jimbo and Ned who hosted a TV show called Hunting an’ Killing.  The state of Colorado (where South Park is set) kept on passing more and more restrictive hunting laws to stop Jimbo and Ned killing the state’s fauna. In the end hunters are only allowed to cull wildlife if the species is overpopulated and overburdening the ecosystem. This leads the two hunters to go out into the wild to “thin out the numbers” of the local deer population. Once they have done this – with a flame thrower of course – Jimbo surveys the charred skeletons and proudly states that “we saved those deer from extinction.” Read more…

by Sheila Liaugminas

The myth of overpopulation has been widely debunked for a while now. So did activists who based their global ‘reproductive health’ efforts shift attention to real human needs? No. They changed the language and spun it.

It’s a new messaging campaign, says C-Fam.

The pro-abortion UN Population Fund launched the 7 Billion Actions campaign this week on World Population Day with many new corporate and social media partners. Read more…

Malthus, Ehrlich, Gore And Other Population Mystics – a speech by Don Feder to the Moscow Demographic Summit, June 30, 2011

Something that happened to me a few years ago may throw light on the popular mindset regarding what’s called overpopulation. Read more…

Here’s a little tidbit of info that bucks the mainstream media’s overpopulation decrees. Thank you, C IA, for this wonderful information.

Vincenzina Santoro

The next big population bogeyman could well be ‘overcrowding’. Should we worry?

“Stop the World — I Want to Get Off” was the title of a hit Broadway play some years ago. Today, getting people off the planet is what the United Nations population control crowd would like to do in order to “save” it. After the failed Copenhagen climate control confabulation last December, they will be refocusing their strategy and may target the presumed horrors of overpopulation in the form of large concentrations of people in any given place. Read more…

Michael Cook, Mercatornet.com

The message is finally getting through: the population bomb has fizzled out and fertility is falling nearly everywhere in the world.

Sometime in the next few years (if it hasn’t happened already) the world will reach a milestone: half of humanity will be having only enough children to replace itself. That is, the fertility rate of half the world will be 2.1 or below. This is the “replacement level of fertility”, the magic number that causes a country’s population to slow down and eventually to stabilise… The move to replacement-level fertility is one of the most dramatic social changes in history. Read more…

William West

Britain is bracing itself for the ageing of its population with the latest figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing that the proportion of people aged over 65 is set to rise dramatically. The release of the latest figures come at a time when Britain is already struggling to fund its benefits and health care systems moving commentators to warn that too little is being done to prepare for the ageing of the population. Read more…