in the trenches/population

 

4. Voices

"Future food security now depends on changes in every major facet of our lives, including profound changes in reproductive behavior, family size and population policy."

-- Lester R. Brown, WorldWatch Institute, State of the World 1997.

"Men have the final say in reproductive health issues. This effectively means that in our reproductive health work, we can only ignore men at our own peril and that of society as a whole."

-- Joyce Mujuru, Zimbawbe Minister of Information, 1997.

"During the past 24 years, over 30 million abortions have taken place. If this is not great evil, what is?"

-- Wanda Franz, National Right to Life Committee, anniversary of Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, 22 January 1994.

"We have looked for, and have not found, any convincing economic argument for continued national population growth. The health of our economy does not depend on it. The vitality of business does not depend on it. The welfare of the average person certainly does not depend on it."

President's Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, 1972.

"To think that the leadership of my church is unable to acknowledge and trust that women will make good decisions about family planning, sterilization, and abortion speaks of the centrality of patriarchy to Roman Catholicism. A patriarchy that not only seeks to control women, but that also seeks to cut off all debate and dialogue on these questions."

-- Frances Kissling, Catholics For a Free Choice, 31 January 1996.

"Defense budgets are coming down, market economies are taking root, and democracy is spreading. That's an enormous boon to economic development and that's the key to lowering fertility rates....Why should we worry? We've gone from one to 5 billion while living standards have gone up exponentially. There's no evidence that population growth diminishes or dilutes development."

-- Ben Wattenberg, American Enterprise Institute, telephone interview with George Moffett, 14 May 1992.

"Our supplies of natural resources are not finite in any economic sense....if the past is any guide, natural resources will progressively become less scarce, and less costly, and will constitute a smaller proportion of our expenses in future years. And population growth is likely to have a long-run beneficial impact on the natural-resource situation,"

-- Julian L. Simon, The Ultimate Resource, 1981.

"We have a couple of billion more people on this planet than we need. What are we doing trying to figure out new ways to let couples have more babies? On a societal level, we have to ask 'what's driving this?'"

-- George Annas, Boston University School of Medicine, August 1994.

"Again, let me be unequivocal: family planning prevents abortions. We know this intuitively -- after all, it is unintended pregnancies, not desired ones, that drive desperate women to take desperate actions. And we know it empirically -- data from countries as socially and religiously diverse as Hungary, Russia, Mexico, and even our own United States show clearly that increases in contraception cause decreases in abortions."

-- J. Brian Atwood, Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development, 6 February 1997.

"Successful population programs fight poverty. They encourage freedom of thought and action; they empower women to claim their rights to equality and autonomy."

-- Nafis Sadik, United Nations Population Fund, February 1996.

"The media must be more responsible in giving the population crisis the time and attention it deserves. When we now have thousands of the world's leading scientists all agreeing on the severity of the crisis, why do so many in the media continue to feel that equal time must be given to the very few conservative economists and revisionist environmentalists who disagree?"

-- Jane Fonda, address at the United Nations, September 1993.

"By stabilizing population growth rates, developing nations can devote more of their scarce resources to meet the basic needs of their citizens."

-- Secretary of State Madeleine Albright testifying before the House International Relations Committee, 12 February 1997.

"The advocates of population control by such means usually deny, contrary to all scientific fact , that a human embryo is human. Or if they admit that the embryo is human, they must claim that the power of state extends even to human life so that the definition of who lives and who dies is not based on the prior existence or sacredness of a human life in any of its forms, but on the political will to control human population according to a questionable theory of world resources and human needs.

Dr. Navarro-Valls, Holy See press office, "The Courage to Speak Bluntly," Wall Street Journal, 1 September 1994.

"It could be simultaneously true that human beings are both part of nature and something special in nature. Our numbers, like those of any other species, must be limited. But we are the only species with the intellect to realize that and to control our numbers voluntarily in a way that respects both he preciousness of each individual and the constraints of the environment."

Donella H. Meadows, The Global Citizen, 1991.

"Be fruitful and multiply...."

Genesis 1:28

"We shouldn't delude ourselves: the population explosion will come to an end before very long. The only remaining question is whether it will be halted through the humane method of birth control, or by nature wiping out the surplus."

Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, The Population Explosion, 1990.

"We question the views of population controllers who perpetuate the notion that rapid population growth is the major cause of poverty and environmental degradation in developing countries and that provision of family planning in those countries is the solution."

-- Ananilea Nkya, Tanzania Media Women's Association, 1993.

"We in the developed world cannot cry disaster about population growth in the developing world while ignoring skyrocketing consumption rates in our own countries."

-- Jacqueline Hamilton, Natural Resources Defense Council, Amicus Journal, Winter 1994

More on Population:
Table of Contents | Twelve Hundred Words or Less... | Web Resources
Activist Groups | Voices | New in the Literature
Hotspots | On the Other Hand... | Funders