In the 1960s and 1970s, neo-Malthusian panic about overpopulation overtook eugenics as the primary motivation behind coercive policies aimed at limiting childbearing. Neo-Malthusian ideas spread among senior technocrats and government leaders in some developing countries, resulting in human rights abuses that Western development professionals encouraged and that Western aid often funded. Those abuses peaked in the form of China’s one-child policy (1979–2015) and India’s forced sterilizations during its “Emergency” (1975–77), a period in India when civil liberties were suspended and the prime minister ruled by decree.
The one-child policy saw over 300 million Chinese women fitted with intrauterine devices modified to be irremovable without surgery, over 100 million sterilizations, and over 300 million abortions. Many of these procedures were coerced. In a similar vein, India’s Emergency saw 11 million sterilizations, many of them forced.
China and, to a far lesser extent, India still have troubling policies. After softening its one-child policy to a two-child policy, China continues to brutally enforce family size limits and to require birth permits from prospective parents and parents seeking to expand their families. Coercion continues to define an unknown share of the country’s 9 million annual abortions. In India, political representation is apportioned in a way that punishes states with high birth rates. Half the people in India live in states with policies that penalize, to varying degrees, families with more than two children to discourage large families. Fortunately, recent policy changes are reversing heavy financial penalties imposed earlier on high-fertility states.
Neo-Malthusian policies aimed at limiting family size have increased female infanticide and sex-selective abortion in China and India, skewing the world’s sex ratio at birth to 107 boys per 100 girls. (The natural ratio is 105 boys per 100 girls.)
Neo-Malthusianism remains the chief cause of family size restrictions. Countering overpopulation hysteria continues to be important.
Introduction
In 1983, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)—then the United Nations Fund for Population Activities—the world’s largest multilateral source of funding for government population programs, began issuing a prize called the Population Award, to be presented annually to “an individual, to individuals, or to an institution for the most outstanding contribution to the awareness of population questions or to their solutions.”1 The first prizewinners were Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister who declared a national “Emergency” that suspended civil liberties and mandated sterilizations on a massive scale between 1975 and 1977, and Qian Xinzhong, head of China’s State Family Planning Commission and the man in charge of the country’s one-child policy, which lasted from 1979 to 2015.
The coercive nature of India’s Emergency and the atrocities of China’s one-child policy were already well known.2 The Nobel Prize–winning economist Theodore Schultz, chairman of the University of Chicago’s Department of Economics, resigned from the UNFPA Advisory Commission in protest of the award recipients.3
Why did the United Nations (UN) applaud Gandhi and Xinzhong, who had overseen coercive policies that victimized millions of people? Part of the answer can be found in UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar’s statement as he presented the Population Award: “If rapid population growth in the developing nations is left unchecked, it will evidently undermine all efforts for economic and social development and could easily lead to widespread depletion of each nation’s resources.” He praised the “vision and foresight” of Gandhi and Xinzhong for their efforts toward “controlling population growth.”4
Neo-Malthusianism, defined as fear that a large population size could lead to a humanitarian and ecological disaster and that combating so-called overpopulation is thus an urgent problem—has real-world consequences. The belief has often resulted in support for coercive policies. Countering neo-Malthusianism is especially critical now given the recent prominence of such thinking.
At the 2020 World Economic Forum in Switzerland, famed primatologist Jane Goodall opined, “All these [environmental] things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago.”5 The world population 500 years ago is estimated at 420–540 million people, or around 6.7 billion fewer people than today.
Goodall is far from alone in her belief that population growth is an urgent problem. In August 2019, the United Kingdom’s Prince Harry subtly suggested that children are a burden to the planet and that responsible couples should have “two, maximum.”6 Bill Nye, “the Science Guy,” supports the introduction of special taxes or other state-imposed penalties for having “too many” children.7 And popular television host Bill Maher in April 2019 declared: “I can’t think of a better gift to our planet than pumping out fewer humans to destroy it… . The great under-discussed factor in the climate crisis is there are just too many of us… . We don’t need smaller carbon footprints, we need less [sic] feet.”8
Recent examples of neo-Malthusian writings include op-eds appearing in prominent outlets such as NBC News (“Science Proves Kids Are Bad for Earth. Morality Suggests We Stop Having Them”) and the New York Times (“Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?,” which muses that “it may well be, then, that the extinction of humanity would make the world better off”).9 In April 2019, the progressive magazine FastCompany released a video titled “Why Having Kids Is the Worst Thing You Can Do for the Planet.”10
Neo-Malthusianism enjoys support among some prominent elected officials. While historically overpopulation alarmism was a bipartisan concern in the United States championed by both Republicans and Democrats, in recent years it has been most common on the political left. When asked in September 2019 if he would enact a “campaign” to “curb population growth” to fight climate change if elected president, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D‑VT) answered in the affirmative, noting he would focus on poor countries.11 Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑NY) famously questioned the morality of childbearing in the face of climate change earlier that year, asking, “Is it OK to still have children?”12 Presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden has even voiced acceptance of China’s family size limits, telling a Chinese audience, “Your policy has been one which I fully understand—I’m not second-guessing—of one child per family.”13
In November 2019, more than 11,000 scientists signed a report calling for the reduction of the world’s population to combat climate change.14 That report went viral and was shared on social media by many U.S. political figures, including Sanders and Sens. Ed Markey (D‑MA) and Chris Van Hollen (D‑MD) as well as Reps. Jimmy Gomez (D‑CA) and Susie Lee (D‑NV).15 Overpopulation alarmism, prominent in decades and centuries past, is undergoing a renaissance.
Others have offered in-depth critiques of neo-Malthusian theory.16 It turns out that birth rates tend to fall without coercion as countries grow richer and that population growth may make resources more plentiful thanks to humanity’s capacity for innovation. Economist Julian Simon, for example, argued that the human mind is the “ultimate resource,” allowing humanity to increase the supply of other resources, discover alternatives to overused resources, and improve efficiency of resource use.17 Recent research has found evidence supporting Simon’s view, showing that every 1 percent increase in population is associated with commodity prices falling by around 1 percent.18 In other words, each additional person helps to decrease resource scarcity on average, suggesting that humans, when free to innovate and engage in market exchange, tend to be net creators rather than net destroyers.
Also, evidence shows that as countries grow richer and children’s odds of survival improve, couples tend to choose to have smaller families without being forced to do so. (Contrastingly, parents faced with high rates of infant mortality in their communities tend to have large families in part as a strategy to improve their odds of having at least some surviving children.) This phenomenon is called the “fertility transition.” Today even in sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s poorest region, birth rates are falling voluntarily.19 The global population is projected to decline in the long run.20
Yet many people remain convinced that overpopulation is an urgent problem necessitating government intervention, so it is worthwhile to detail some of the consequences of neo-Malthusian ideas. This paper focuses on the world’s two most populous countries, China and India, which together hold roughly 40 percent of the world’s population and are where neo-Malthusianism has arguably caused the most suffering.
While neo-Malthusian human rights abuses peaked with China’s one-child policy and India’s Emergency, problematic policies continue today. In both countries, neo-Malthusian policies have contributed to higher rates of sex-selective abortion and infanticide. China has the world’s most imbalanced sex ratio at birth, resulting in 30 million more men than women, and India has the world’s fourth most imbalanced ratio despite government and private efforts to combat sex-selective abortion.21 China and India have contributed to a worldwide lopsided sex ratio at birth of 107 boys per 100 girls and to over 160 million “missing” women globally.22 (The natural sex ratio at birth, when unaltered by sex-selective abortion or infanticide, is on average 105 boys born for every for every 100 girls.23)
Cases of coercion, such as during the one-child policy and Emergency, alone are sufficient reason to oppose neo-Malthusianism. By documenting the extent of penalties and coercion, this paper seeks to demonstrate the grave importance of combating the resurgence of the neo-Malthusian mentality.
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