c. 1999 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ Same world, different planets.
Religious activists and ethicists sometimes appear that far apart on the issue of global population growth, a topic receiving renewed attention with the United Nations’ projection that the world’s 6 billionth human will be born on Oct. 12.
On one side are religious leaders, ranging from liberal American Protestants to conservative Iranian Muslims, who see family planning as essential to stem a population growth threatening to overrun the Earth’s environment and resources.
On the other side are those, including some Roman Catholics, who dismiss such apocalyptic predictions of population bombs. They fear that massive family planning campaigns are leading to forced abortions, sterilizations and other coercive measures.”For a number of the world’s religions, this is probably the single most difficult issue they face,”said Christine Gudorf, an ethicist and professor of religious studies at Florida International University.
For most of religious history,”fertility was understood as a major indicator of the goodness of creation,”she said. Now, with environmental destruction accompanying human growth,”we’re coming into circumstances where it is a symbol of death.” The United Nations is publicizing the”Day of 6 Billion”to promote its campaign to spread the availability of contraceptives to families who want them. But the organization is taking a more diversified approach to population growth following the consensus of 1994’s International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo.
Parents often have large families to hedge their risks against infant mortality and being abandoned in old age, so the United Nations is also urging more economic development, health care, education and women’s rights in the developing world. A greater sense of security encourages parents to have smaller families, said Nafis Sadik, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA).”The Cairo message is that the choice should be made by the individual,”said Sadik.”Religious and cultural opposition (to artificial contraception) still exists, but it doesn’t seem to have made a great difference in the way individuals have responded to their own needs.” One of the biggest surprises to emerge from Cairo was Iran’s support for family planning. According to Sadik, Muslim leaders there agree a country’s strength is no longer judged by its population but by its technological development.”They feel it is a religious responsibility of every family to practice family planning,”she said.
Gudorf said that, contrary to stereotype, even the Roman Catholic Church no longer champions large families as inherently good. The church teaches that families can limit their size for financial or medical reasons or even environmental concern. But the church still opposes artificial contraception.”The question is whether we can get the level of birth control that we need with natural family planning,”Gudorf said.
Some Christian conservatives continue to see fertility as not just a religious obligation but vital to the faith.”If the population controllers are correct, it can be argued that Christianity is wrong because its teachings cause more babies to be born,”said an article advocating large families on the Internet site for the World Life League.
The United Nations has predicted the population will reach anywhere from 7.3 billion to 10.7 billion by 2050, with 8.9 billion considered most likely. Experts debate how many humans the globe can support, but Gudorf noted that while birth rates are lower in the West, each new American baby will use vastly more environmental resources than its counterpart in a developing nation.”This is not primarily a Third World problem, this is a U.S. problem,”she said.
But Steven Mosher, president of the nonsectarian Population Research Institute in Virginia, said population growth has its benefits.”We should light a birthday candle and celebrate that (6 billionth) baby’s birth,”Mosher said.”People are living longer than ever before, they’re living healthier lives, they’re eating better, they’re dressing better. We are better off today at 6 billion than we were at 3 billion in 1960.” He added:”We now know the population of the world will never double again. All the forces of modernization are working in that direction (of lower birth rates). Why should we be alarmist?” But Gudorf said some of the world’s worst poverty can be attributed to overpopulation.”There have never been so many hungry people in the history of the world,”she said.
The question of forcing families to have fewer children has provoked some of the sharpest debate among religious leaders on population. Pope John Paul II compared such coercive measures to those of the biblical Pharaoh who, jealous of the growing population of Hebrew slaves, required that all its newborn males be killed.
Today, prosperous countries”fear that the most prolific and poorest peoples represent a threat for the well-being and peace of their own countries,”John Paul wrote in his 1995 encyclical”The Gospel of Life.”Rather than working for economic parity, these countries push”a massive program of birth control.” Gudorf said that flatly ruling out coercion is”morally cowardly. We don’t allow people to treat their kids as they like. We don’t allow them to abuse them. In the same way I don’t think we can allow people to reproduce the world to death.” But she said the least coercive measures should be used first, and if more severe ones must be applied, they should be done universally. China’s draconian one-child policy, while leading to”extremely morally problematic”measures such as forced late-term abortions, is at least applied to everyone from communist officials to poor citizens, Gudorf said.
But Mosher contended such programs are inherently immoral. He said medical workers in Peru conducted”a massive sterilization program targeted mainly at Indians”rather than the wealthy elite.”If you look at these programs on the ground, it doesn’t make a good picture,”Mosher said.
A U.N. investigation in the Peru case found claims of widespread abuse were exaggerated but that some women received insufficient counseling before agreeing to sterilization.
DEA END SMITH
