Population Conclave Faces Sharp Clashes

The stage is set for a confrontation between two world views--one secular, another sacred--when 180 nations gather in Cairo next week to debate global strategies for stabilizing world population.

Incensed by the inclusion of abortion and contraception on the agenda, Pope John Paul II has mounted one of the Vatican’s most intensive diplomatic offensives in recent memory to bend an international program into conformity with Catholic teaching.

“We cannot accept the systematic death of the unborn,” John Paul said earlier this year. “Every family must know how to resist the false sirens of the culture of death.” He condemned contraception as “an assault on the sacredness of life” and “contrary to moral law.”

Equally adamant, United Nations officials and the Clinton Administration, as well as Catholic dissidents and leaders of other faiths, are no less certain of their own moral grounding.

“The Vatican is not the only one” to approach the issue of birth control with a moral vision, Fred Sai, chairman of the Cairo conference’s preparatory committee, declared recently to loud applause at the United Nations.

How does the Vatican maintain the moral high ground of defending the sanctity of human life and the “dignity of the family” when the consequences of its opposition to contraception and legal abortion seem to many scientists, demographers and policy-makers to be self-defeating?

The world’s population, now numbering 5.6 billion, has doubled since mid-century. It is growing at a rate of about 90 million a year--roughly equal to the population of Mexico.

At issue is a U.N.-sponsored 20-year program to stabilize world population at 7.27 billion by the year 2050. Unless the brakes are applied, world population could reach 8.9 billion by 2030, leveling off at 11.5 billion about 2150, according to a United Nations population projection.

Although it is not binding, the Cairo plan would serve as an internationally recognized model as nations fashion their own population policies.

It contains a number of proposals backed by the Vatican, including education for girls and primary health care for women and infants. A lower birth rate, for example, has been linked to improved literacy and a reduction in infant mortality.

But references to making legal abortions and contraceptives accessible to those who want them have infuriated the Vatican. The Pope has used nearly every public appearance to denounce the meeting and spoke out again Sunday from his country retreat southeast of Rome, saying conference documents do “not sufficiently value the social implications that are of the foundation of marriage and family.”

Papal representatives are describing the stakes in apocalyptic terms.

“The lack of a coherent ethical vision underpinning a document which deals with fundamental questions concerning the future of humanity is extremely worrying,” Msgr. Diarmuid Martin told a preparatory committee meeting April 4 in New York.

The Vatican’s position is bound to have an impact on many of its 1 billion adherents worldwide, but it varies from country to country. A majority of Catholics in industrialized nations long ago rejected the teaching against contraception. It is in developing countries where the church’s influence on sexual practices is greatest. Papal envoys are attempting to enlist both Roman Catholic and Islamic countries in their crusade.

But with one week remaining before the Sept. 5 opening of the International Conference on Population and Development, the Vatican is having difficulty laying exclusive claim to the moral high ground.

“Calling those with whom they disagree spiritually false, politically imperialist, morally and ethically deficient is as intolerant as it is self-righteously arrogant,” Rabbi Balfour Brickner, a co-founder of the World Conference on Religion and Peace, told reporters earlier this week.

More than 3,200 U.S. Catholics and 55 organizations have signed a full-page newspaper advertisement to be published in the New York Times challenging the Vatican’s stance against contraception.

In Brussels, 24 religious thinkers from a dozen variants of major world religions convened at the behest of the Ford Foundation and the Pew Global Stewardship Initiative to fashion a religious response to the Vatican.

“We don’t dare let the Pope . . . pull off the notion that one side of this is moral because it opposes contraception and the other side is immoral and less religious,” said Martin E. Marty, a noted religion scholar from the University of Chicago who chaired the Brussels meeting in May.

Some, like the Rev. Gordon L. Sommers, president of the National Council of Churches, questioned the morality of denying contraceptives to poor women when there are 25 million unsafe and illegal abortions each year. Others speak of the biblical imperative of stewardship of God’s creation.

At the heart of the Vatican’s opposition to contraception and abortion is the belief that every person, as a creation of God, has a dignity and worth that is unconditional and inalienable.

The belief is based on the church’s interpretation of Jewish and Christian Scriptures and what the church calls natural law--knowledge of God’s purpose and will through inferences from the visible, natural world.

As the church applies the teaching, abortion, sterilization and contraception are “contrary to the moral law inscribed in the human heart (and) an assault on the sacredness of life.”

Natural birth control methods, including the rhythm and ovulation methods--abstaining from sexual intercourse during the wife’s fertile days--are permitted by the church.

“The church doesn’t say people have to propagate and have as many children as biologically possible,” said the Most Rev. James T. McHugh, a member of the Vatican delegation to the Cairo conference and bishop of Camden, N.J. “We embrace an ethic of responsible parenthood.”

Natural birth control methods vary from 53% to 86% effective, according to a report last year by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. By contrast, the pill has been found to prevent pregnancy from 97% to 99% of the time. Male condoms are about 85% effective.

What then of predictions by demographers, scientists and policy-makers of a future population-food crisis? “I’m not a Malthusian. I’m a mathematician. You simply cannot have all the births that people will bring forth if they use no method or natural birth control methods,” Marty said.

The Vatican’s response was framed in 1965 when Pope Paul VI addressed the United Nations.

“You must strive to multiply bread so that it suffices for the tables of mankind,” Pope Paul VI told the U.N. General Assembly in 1965, “and not rather favor an artificial control of birth . . . in order to diminish the number of guests at the banquet of life.”

Yet some experts believe that, if anything, the banquet could become a fast as the world’s population increases. The expansion of cropland has slowed and much agricultural land is losing fertility, according to the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington-based research group.

The world’s fish catch peaked in 1989. Grain production, the institute said, continues to increase at about 1% a year, but population is growing at closer to 2% a year.

“Each year the per-capita grain supply is diminishing. That’s what’s new. I think we’ve moved into a new era,” said Worldwatch project director Lester R. Brown. “I don’t think most people realize it yet.”

Scarcity will fall most heavily on those already poor, 800 million of whom are malnourished today, according to the United Nations. So long as couples in the poverty-ridden Third World fear hunger and infant mortality, family planning makes little sense. They need surviving children, especially sons, to assure their old-age security.

The disparity between the haves and have-nots, some believe, will spur further emigration and competition for resources--and threaten social and political upheaval--in hard-pressed regions.

Undersecretary of State Timothy Wirth, a member of the U.S. delegation to Cairo, told The Times, “Population stabilization is so terribly important for global economic development and for the issues of political stability and environmental protection that we have got to address the situation very aggressively.”

Warnings of a “population bomb” are dismissed by the Vatican as simplistic slogans that fail to recognize that many countries with relatively high birth rates have an abundance of uninhabited land and undeveloped resources.

Where there is poverty and hunger, the Vatican said, it is usually due to poor administration, political ineptness and corruption, or the result of war--not a scarcity of resources. Further pressure is placed on world food prices--and the environment--by high consumption in the West.

“We do not agree that the world is in a state of great crisis because of population growth,” said Vatican delegation member McHugh.

That position astounds Brickner, the senior rabbi emeritus at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York. “To say that there’s no overpopulation is a denial of reality that is a kind of blindness to justify their theological posture,” he said.

Ironically, one of the strongest statements calling for a worldwide program to stem population has come from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

In a report made public in June by an Italian Catholic news agency, the academy warned of “unresolvable problems” for future generations. It said that to indefinitely sustain a birth rate much higher than two children per couple would be “unthinkable.”

However, the academy stopped short of recommending contraception. In keeping with the Vatican’s stand, it emphasized the need for moderation in consumption and sharing of Western technology with developing countries.

The Cairo plan makes the linkage between poverty and hunger and population growth unmistakably clear, Undersecretary Wirth said.

But few believe that there will be a radical restructuring of the world economy. Even McHugh noted that a recent U.N. report on progress made since the 1991 Earth Summit on environment and development in Rio de Janeiro said industrialized nations have done little to change consumption patterns or to step up technological assistance to developing countries.

In 1960, the richest 20% of the world’s people held 70% of global income, according to “State of the World: 1994,” published by Worldwatch. By 1989, the wealthy’s share climbed to almost 83%. At the same time, the poorest 20% of the world’s people saw their share drop to 1.4% from 2.3%.

“I was first 20 years ago to say if all the grain in the world was equitably distributed, there would be no hunger or malnutrition anywhere. But having said that I’m not sure in retrospect I said very much,” said Brown of Worldwatch.

Consumption increases with affluence. People switch from eating cereal grains to chicken, beef and pork. That places added pressure on grain reserves. Producing two pounds of meat takes six pounds of grain. No nation, Brown said, has ever voluntarily “moved down the food chain” as affluence increases.

It is also unlikely, he said, that there will be a repeat of the so-called “Green Revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s that saw dramatic increases in crop yields through the intensive use of petroleum-based fertilizers and hybrid seeds. Nor is there much hope at the moment that genetic engineering mentioned by Vatican officials will usher in a new age of agricultural bounty.

But even if there were a series of breakthroughs, environmentalists and demographic experts say that there would remain a pressing need for contraception.

“You can increase efficiency, but you’re going to be just racing time if population growth rates don’t slow down. Technology cannot win that race,” said Sandra Postel, an adjunct professor of international environmental policy at Tufts University in Medford, Mass.

Yet, the inverse is equally true. Contraception and abortion alone cannot do the job, or perhaps even work, without narrowing the yawning chasm that separates the haves from the have-nots.

“There has to be a change of attitude across the board,” said Bishop McHugh. “We’re trying to raise people’s sights and attitudes to a higher level of moral and ethical decision making rather than just succumb to a technological fix.”