For Zero Growth

BIRTH CONTROL

This is the week when the 200 millionth U.S. citizen will be born; demographers fix the time and day at 11 a.m., Nov. 20. For the past several weeks, population planners have been leading up to the statistical moment with major birth-control news. In London, the International Planned Parenthood Federation announced last week that its 1968 budget would be $6,500,000, double that of 1967 and six times the amount it spent in 1965. Almost simultaneously, the Manhattan-based Population Council reported that family-planning efforts in Taiwan and South Korea had met with marked success, mainly through increased use of intrauterine devices like the Lippes loop.

Are such advances sufficient to win the overall battle? No, says Professor Kingsley Davis, director of international-population and urban research at the University of California. Davis, in the Nov. 10th issue of Science, writes that the family-planning programs as presently conceived and executed cannot prevent the world from rapidly populating itself to doomsday.

Government Regulation. Statistical projections tend to bear Davis out. Even in the U.S., representative of literate industrial nations where birth control has become a byword, the predicted average annual population-growth rate is averaging 1.3%. Present projections put the U.S. population at 308 million by the year 2000, 374 million by 2015. World population now stands at 3.4 billion. At its present annual growth rate--about 1.8%--it will nearly double by A.D. 2000. By 2050 it will be 15 billion. Even if world population growth were brought into line with the present U.S. rate, it would still double by the year 2030.

The answer, suggests Davis, is a natural population growth rate of zero (births equal to deaths), "for any growth rate, if continued, will eventually use up the earth." Such a drastic reduction in births might require absolute government regulation of the size of families--a concept that most nations have found impossible to accept. In a more Orwellian guise, writes Davis, such control might include pressure through limits on availability of housing, manipulation of inflation to force mothers to work, increased city congestion by the deliberate neglect of transit systems, and increased personal insecurity through rigged unemployment.

Overrun World. Davis does not think such appalling correctives need ever become necessary. Instead, he feels, futurists should accept the fact that persuasion, not family planning, is the answer to population growth. He suggests economic persuaders to encourage the postponement of marriage and the limitation of births within marriage. How? Among other methods, by charging substantial fees for marriage licenses; levying a "child tax"; taxing single persons less than married ones; eliminating tax exemptions for children; legalizing abortion and sterilization.

As extreme as Davis's suggestions are, he sees them as the best alternative to a world overrun by people.

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