A Looming Threat We Won’t Face

On Jan. 10, President Bush signed into law a foreign operations bill that included approval of $446.5 million for U.S. family planning aid through the U.S. Agency for International Development. While that amount represented more than he’d originally requested, the combined total remains less than half of what Americans annually spend on microwave popcorn.

Congress also kept in place a Reagan-era “gag rule” that withholds U.S. grants from foreign nongovernmental organizations using any of their budgets to perform abortions or even provide abortion counseling. The rule’s full impact has yet to be measured, but it’s already known to have cut significantly into the services provided by such effective reproductive-health groups as the International Planned Parenthood Federation and Marie Stopes International. Worse yet, in response to antiabortion groups’ complaints that the U.N. tacitly condones forced abortions and sterilization by aiding family programs in China, the White House now has held up the funds for the U.N. population agency.

At a time when we’ve shown how quickly a nation can unite against the threat of terrorism, our lack of resolution in the face of increasingly threatening population pressures seems all the more strange.

While some early projections, including a few published in “The Population Bomb,” overstated how dire our food situation would be today, the concern they raised, all too briefly, was inarguably valid. The rapid adoption by farmers in the 1970s of the “green revolution,” with its higher yields from better seeds and fertilizers, forestalled widespread famines. But even so, today some 10 million people a year die of problems related to inadequate diet. Meanwhile, other issues raised in “The Population Bomb,” such as the threat of novel epidemics and climate change, were, in retrospect, understated.

The world’s relentless population growth, including our own weighty share in it as Americans, is inexorably leading us to an environmental breakdown. Yet, our attention to this problem now seems to be waning just when urgent action is needed.

As President Bush decides what to do about those funds for China, and as he finalizes next year’s budget requests for international family-planning programs, we urge him to think past the next real-time crisis and invest in long-term risk management. Although birth rates have slowed in much of the world, the population continues to rise. At more than 6.1 billion, we’re already seeing the first breakdowns in our life-support systems, including severe pressures on our freshwater supplies and climate changes that signal potentially catastrophic instability. The United Nations Population Fund recently warned we risk climbing to a population of 10.9 billion by 2050 if we fail to ensure women’s rights to reproductive health.

Judge for yourself if we’re meeting that challenge.

Politicians continue to argue over abortion, and advocacy groups raise alarms at each new population forecast. Yet, there’s little debate about how many world citizens--or, in particular, Americans--is desirable and how we can get to that number. The world’s richest, most powerful, most can-do nation, which adds about 1.7 million people to the world’s population each year, far more than any other industrialized country, still has virtually no domestic policy and only a weak foreign policy on population.

Though so fundamental in determining our future, population is “a marginal issue, at best, in American public dialogue,” says Robert Engelman, vice president for research at Population Action International. “The press runs screaming from it, and we lose an opportunity to engage our own public and the world as a whole on how population change affects our lives.” While we can quickly summon the will to crack down on terrorists, we balk at discussing birth rates, made timid because the subject is so often polluted by racial or religious bigotry. This is so despite the appalling fact that at the dawn of the 21st century, nearly half of U.S. pregnancies are unintended, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute.

In strict financial terms, the United States remains the largest single donor for international family planning. Yet, when viewed in proportion to our giant economy, our donation is stingier than those of other industrialized countries and grossly inadequate to the need. At the U.N.’s 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the 20-year price tag for global family planning was estimated at $17 billion annually by the year 2000. Developed nations vowed to provide one-third of that amount, making the needed U.S. share nearly $1.9 billion for fiscal year 2001. Instead, the U.S. has reduced its support from $667 million annually in 1996 to its current level of about $480 million--with the “gag rule” in effect. That means that while we annually export tens of millions of dollars worth of made-in-America condoms, IUDs and birth-control pills, we share in the blame for the continuing lack of access to birth control endured by some 350 million couples in developing countries worldwide.

Even as we stint on foreign aid, our population growth at home and over-consumption of the world’s resources contributes disproportionately to the escalating exhaustion of our life-support systems, including a stable climate. Freshwater scarcity--already a reality in parts of Africa and the Middle East, where population has been growing by roughly 2.5% a year--is predicted in some parts of the United States within our children’s lifetimes.

Population growth also increases the worldwide threat of disease by pushing ever-larger groups of humans into closer contact with animal reservoirs of previously unknown pathogens. This increases the probability that more AIDS/HIV-like epidemics will occur. Furthermore, our security and that of our children is also at risk from climate change, a threat that grows in parallel with our growing population and profligate consumption of fossil fuels. The danger could come in increases in coastal flooding, intense storms and epidemics, as predicted by most mainstream scientists.

Lack of access to family-planning tools makes the world a particularly dangerous place for women. More than half a million women die each year from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, with an estimated 70,000 of these deaths stemming from unsafe abortions. When First Lady Laura Bush offered sympathy for the “brutal oppression” of Afghan women, she didn’t go on to note that governments that intentionally deprive women of access to birth-control measures also tend to keep them uneducated, unhealthy and out of the professional world and civic leadership. But she should have, not least because societies with more women in leadership roles may well be less brutal, both at home and abroad.

The Earth’s population continues to grow by more than 77 million people each year. Nearly one in three human beings are less than 15 years old. The decisions these young people make as they enter their childbearing years--and their ability to follow through with them--will affect us and our children through the rest of this century. They, and we, need leadership so that we all can start using the planet’s resources more intelligently. President Bush can start leading by asking Congress for more than he did last year for international family planning. In the meantime, we’ll wonder: What new, real-time crisis must we face before we’ll hear Laura Bush talking about population policy on CNN?

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Paul R. Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb,” oversees Stanford University’s Connections project. Katherine Ellison is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose next book, written with Gretchen Daily, is the forthcoming “The New Economy of Nature.”