Overture on global population overlooks issue of global graying
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, May 24, 2004
An overture to the 216th General Assembly has raised a new alarm over global population growth, but demographers are beginning to see a counter phenomenon: global graying, particularly in industrialized countries.
Fertility rates are plunging around the globe, although not enough yet to reduce global population. At the same time, the global AIDS pandemic – particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa – is more than decimating the populations of children whose life and health are critical to their nations’ future productivity.
Overture 13-04 from the Presbytery of Lackawanna in Pennsylvania proposes a number of political steps to stem population growth, including calling upon President George W. Bush and Congress to reverse their policies and decisions that have reduced federal spending to the United Nations and other groups that promote abortion and contraceptives to control world population.
The proposal begins with the assertion that the Biblical mandate in Genesis 1:28 – “to be fruitful and multiply” – has been exceeded.
The overture and its rationale seem to expect a straight-line trajectory of rapidly growing world population, but demographers are sketching a different picture.
The U.S. Census Bureau, for instance, says the global population growth rate peaked more than a decade ago and that the slowdown is expected to continue into the foreseeable future. The hot growth spots in the world – especially Indian and Africa – continue to have high population growth rates, but they are falling. The U.S. Census Bureau predicts China, which has nearly one-sixth of the world’s population, will begin having a population decline by 2050.
One demographer, Phillip Longman, the Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation, even projects a major shrinkage in global population.
“If global fertility rates converge with those seen today in Europe or among native-born Americans, by 2200 world population could shrink to half of what it is today even without any major wars or pandemics, according to U.N. projections,” Longman said in an analysis recently published by several major newspapers. “The only precedent we have for such a decline in population is the period of late antiquity, when falling birth rates helped bring about the collapse of the Roman Empire.”
In another analysis titled “Global Baby Bust” in the June 1 edition of Foreign Affairs, the foundation’s premier publication, Longman says the aging populations are already beginning to produce economic strain in industrialized nations, including the United States, where birth rates have plunged.
“Today, the average woman in the world bears half as many children as did her counterpart in 1972,” Longman said. “No industrialized country still produces enough children to sustain its population over time, or to prevent rapid population aging.”
Longman argues that declining growth rates bring about a short-term dividend – but at a long-term cost. He cited the Pentagon as an example. “Even within the U.S. military budget, the competition between guns and canes is already intense. The Pentagon today spends 84 cents on pensions for every dollar it spends on basic pay. Indeed, except during wartime, pensions are already one of the Pentagon’s largest budget categories. In 2000, the cost of military pensions amounted to 12 times what the military spent on ammunition, nearly 5 times what the Navy spent on new ships, and more than 5 times what the Air Force spent on new planes and missiles.”
The overture from Lackawanna included a number of proposals:
- Urging young women to consider remaining birth-free.
- “… a very substantial reduction of consumption by the comfortable and the affluent.”
- Resisting “the temptations posed by advertising and other enticements to wasteful, injurious consumption.”
It calls on “young people and couples – Presbyterians, those of other denominations and other faiths, and all who acknowledge responsibility to serve the common good – to make their private decisions about procreation in light of the compelling need to reduce the human impact upon the planet …”
The overture also asks both the proponents and opponents of abortion “to work together to support measures that prevent unintended pregnancies, recognizing that abortions, whether legal or illegal, increase when family planning services are not available.”
In many cases, however, abortion rates are directly linked to “family planning services.” The Planned Parenthood Foundation of America is the nation’s largest abortion provider.