Categories: History

An Argument Against Population Control in the American Culture

In 1999, Gao Xiao Duan, a former Chinese administrator of the one-couple, one-child policy, appeared before the United States Congress to address this policy. In Duan’s testimony, he recalled, “Once I found a woman [in China] who was nine months pregnant but did not have a birth-allowed certificate. According to policy, she was forced to undergo an abortion. In the operating room, I saw how the aborted child’s lips were sucking, how its limbs were stretching. A physician intected poison into its skull, and the child died and was thrown into the trash can.”

China is one of the largest proponents of the population control movement, which has won the approval of some of the most influential people around the world today. However, once these policies have been examined, it seems clear that population control tactics have no place in the American culture.

Our modern-day movement toward population control can be traced back to John D. Rockefeller. In 1952, Rockefeller returned from a trip to Asia where he’d viewed a massive population of people. Convinced that these masses were “the single greatest threat to the earth’s survival”, he quickly began diverting hundreds of millions of dollars from his foundation toward a goal of population stabilization. Apparently, Communist China agreed with Rockefeller’s theories. By 1979, China had instituted their famous one-child policy. It is, by the way, a misconception that this policy was enacted due to dwindling food reserves; Hong Kong, whose population bursts at 75 times more people than mainland china, and who has no land available for agriculture, is one of the best-fed regions in the world.

Of course, the population control movement is still strong and now boasts of many wealthy American supporters. Among these supporters are organizations like Zero Population Growth (ZPG) and Negative Population Growth, whose population goal is 120-150 million fewer U.S. citizens than are alive today. People like David Packard, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, Bill Gates, and media mogul Ted Turner join the movement and contribute a whopping total of about $17 billion to population control foundations like UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund). Ted Turner (according to the United Nations Population Information Network) has been reported to compare the human population to a plague of locusts, and has formulated the “Ted Commandments”. These are a list of obligations that the American people should, in Turner’s opinion, strictly adhere to. One of the commandments includes “a promise to have no more than two children or no more than my nation suggests”. Turner has recently gone on record as deciding that only one child should be allowed.

Upon closer examination of the policies Ted Turner and others so enthusiastically advocate, one must wonder if these advocates have done their research. Population control campaigns often use some form of payment or prize to bring in more women for sterilization. While in India these prizes were often popular electronic appliances, food was used to motivate Peruvians. Sometimes, as in the case of Sra. Espinoza who testified before congress, the women were sterilized without notification or consent. Sra. Espinoza was admitted into a Peruvian hospital for an emergency cescarean section surgery. She had two children and was asked whether or not whe would be sterilized after the birth of this, her third child. Being in a great deal of pain, Sra. Espinoza stated that she said nothing, signed her papers, and awoke from surgery to find that her child had died and that tubal ligation had been performed on her. [As found in Congressional Briefing reports dated Feb. 23 – 1998]

Sra. Espinoza had been a victim of quotas for sterilization imposed on Peruvian doctors like the one who operated on her. The root of coercion does not lie in quotas alone. In countries like Peru, government workers appear on village doorsteps bearing contraceptive devices and drugs. Which of these often poor, illiterate women are going to refuse orders when the contraceptive bearers are often the same officials that control distribution of their food?

The more well-known policies of China sketch a much darker picture. Birth quotas have also been imposed in China, but Chinese policy takes coercion one step further. Not only must all pregnancies be authorized before conception through a birth coupon, but women’s menstrual cycles are publicly monitored and pelvic examinations are performed on all suspected of being pregnant. All pregnancies not accompanied by a birth coupon are terminated by abortion. If a baby is fully developed, the means of “aborting” the child include drowning, smothering, the use of forceps to crush the baby’s skull, and an injection of formaldahyde inserted into the soft cap of a baby’s head during or upon birth. Night raids capture women fleeing abortion, and illegal children are essentially non-existent. They are not entered on the population register and may not receive medical benefits, grain rations, attend school or gain empployment. It is how Americans would live if they didn’t have, and could not receive, a social security number.

Effects of population control are already visible and devastating. 10-20 million Chinese girls are considered “missing” due to “sex selective abortion of female fetuses, female infant mortality (through infanticide or abandonment), and selective neglect of girls ages 1 to 4”, according to a 1996 U.S. Census Bureau report. A 1991 Shanghai journal warned that if sex ratios continued to rise, China would have an army of bachelors numbering some 70 million strong by 2010.

A more convincing argument against the effects of population control may lie in the pocket of the American tax payer. The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), the State Department, and the World Bank pumps some 350 million tax dollars a year into population control campaigns, according to the National Review. Are we content, then , that Republican congressmen Chris Smith and Todd Tiahrt have managed to cut off funding for the population control activities with the most coercion involved?

Dr. Hector Cuchon of Peru is not. In his February 23, 1998 Congressional briefing, Dr. Chuchon asked that the “people of the United States understand what their government is doing in Peru.” In a very large country of no more than 25 million inhavitants, the U.S. government supports “a brutal birth control campaign…” Chuchon stated, and went on to urge, “Therefore, I would especially like to say that if you want to help my country, do so by investing in education and job creation, and not using these millions of dollars for population control programs.

While, on the surface, defenders of population control campaigns appear to make a good point with heated arguments about a “booming” population and “dwindling” resources, these opinions pale in comparison to the deadly, chilling facts. As far as such programs ever being implemented in the U.S., I feel that we should imagine ourselves in the place of the Chinese woman, our baby alive and suckling only seconds before being tossed in a trash can. After all, we would all be affected by a population control campaign in the United States. If I have made no argumentative point in this essay, let it come down to this statement, written by Stephen Moore in the National Review October of 1999:

“If some choose to subscribe to a one-child policy, so be it. But the rest of us – Americans, Chinese, and everybody else – don’t need or want Ted Turner or the United Nations to tell us how many kids to have.”

Bibliography

Body Count: population & its enemies

Stephen Moore

National Review v. 51 no. 20 (Oct. 25, 1999) pg. 45-6

And baby makes… too many?

Stephen Sawicki

E: the Environmental Magazine v.9 no. 6 (Nov.-Dec. 1998)

The big crunch.

Jeffrey Kluger

TIME v. 155 no. 17 (Spring 2000)

Speaking her mind.

Meenakshi Ganguly