In a recent article entitled “Say it loud: I’m childfree and I’m proud,” author Lisa Hymas suggests that the population of the United States must be controlled — through what means, she does not say.
In the article, Hymas refers to the amount of carbon dioxide each American person causes to go into the Earth’s atmosphere, which she alleges contributes to the destruction of the Earth’s environment and atmosphere. To Hymas, the best solution is for people to stop having children: “A person who cares about preserving a livable environment has lots of options for doing her bit, and you’ve heard all about them…. But even in aggregate, all of these moves don’t come close to the impact of not bringing new human beings — particularly new Americans — into the world.”
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Many people would agree with Hymas. In fact, many highly placed individuals in government and society throughout the world advocate controlling the population through laws (i.e. government force). China is one of the most glaring and known examples. Currently in China, the government does not allow (with few exceptions) a set of parents to have more than one child. Every other child conceived must be aborted, and the government will make sure of it.
In addition to “protecting the Earth,” there are other purported or alleged reasons for controlling the world’s population: abate disease, maintain the food supply, reduce resource consumption, stabilize government welfare, etc. Supposedly, if the world’s population is not controlled through government force, then unseemly death will result. Morris Sullivan says that “the world population may eventually stabilize as global warming, AIDS, and food-borne carcinogens cull some of us from the population.” To Sullivan, the obvious solution is to prevent these inevitable deaths and the Earth’s destruction by preventing persons from being born in the first place. Sullivan finds it “hard to imagine anyone opposing restraints on population controls.”
The concern of overpopulation is not a concern new to the federal government. At least since the early 1970s, the federal government has been actively planning for human population control under various umbrellas, one of which is Title X of the Public Health Service Act, whereby the federal government funds “family planning” with hundreds of millions of dollars each year, providing people with free contraceptives, abortions, and more.
However, despite the federal government’s attempts to reduce new births, the population of the United States (and the world for that matter) has continually grown. Since the year 2000, the United States’ population growth has increased approximately 10 percent, with a population of 281,421,906 in 2000 to a population of 309,162,581 in 2010. U.S. Census population growth patterns project that the United States’ population will grow from 310,233,000 in 2010 to 439,010,000 in 2050.
One might correctly expect that the federal government has expressed before that it sees overpopulation as being a problem (although some see “overpopulation” as a political ploy to gain power and control). In 1969, President Richard Nixon expressed the federal government’s concern over overpopulation in the United States. In an address where the President refers to the expectation that U.S. population might exceed 300 million by the year 2000, he says:
This growth will produce serious challenges for our society. I believe that many of our present social problems may be related to the fact that we have had only fifty years in which to accommodate the second hundred million Americans. In fact, since 1945 alone some 90 million babies have been born in this country. We have thus had to accommodate in a very few decades an adjustment to population growth which was once spread over centuries. And now it appears that we will have to provide for a third hundred million Americans in a period of just 30 years.
Since then, the federal government’s concern has only intensified, and more people seem to becoming more acceptant or indifferent to the idea of government population control. However, the concern and the proposed solution have not substantially been addressed as a main issue of American politics, nor has mainstream media highlighted this agenda — likely because any politician in the United States who proposes the necessity of population control would be committing political suicide. He or she would be classified as a Marxist, communist, socialist, and enemy of the Untied States of America. This backlash is admitted by Mark Carter in his article, “Overpopulation: The Unpopular Issue the U.S. Government Won’t Address.” Carter observes: “Why is it that nobody wants to address [overpopulation]? It’s a simple answer. Because of how unpopular it would make any political party or Government that did. Nobody’s going to win an election by addressing it as a main issue.”
Yet, even though politicians don’t make population control a main plank in their election platforms, is it realistic to believe the federal government really is not addressing overpopulation? Or is overpopulation being addressed without public awareness? It is hard to imagine that the federal government would not be making active plans for controlling the population in the United States where it has been admittedly their concern since 1969 and where governments around the world are and have been making it a prime concern of policies and laws.
The reality of the federal government’s population control may become an open and expressed observation and reality for the people of the United States in the not too distant future. Considering the number of entitlement programs that the federal government has created in the United States during the 20th century and now the 21st century, common sense reveals that the federal government has a vested interest in controlling the population of the United States to ensure that it has the ability to sustain the system it has created. In truth, now that the federal government has passed and signed into law the healthcare legislation, the United States government will have more incentive than ever to control the numbers of people in the United States who are potential consumers of resources that the country may not be able to bear.
Given that most of the United States’ population is concentrated in urban areas and on the east side of the Mississippi River, this philosophical, legal, and moral question must be answered directly by those most affected: those in high population areas. In addition, those persons who live in low population states and areas must address a federal government, which, through force, controls the number of children that can be brought into not only the world, but also that particular family.
Inevitably, the laws that result from attempts to control human population will severely and fundamentally clash with the ideas and principles of self-government, limited government, individual freedom and privacy, a constitutional federal republic composed of diverse states, along with many other issues. What that ultimately means for each person and each state in response to those federal laws is yet to be seen. In the end, will the bodies-politic of the states believe that people are dangerous, or just those in government?
