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The Overpopulation Debate, Part 1: Finding the Facts

Campaign Against (My Own) Ignorance

I volunteer a couple of days each year with an organization called Justice For All.* Their mission is to expose the injustice of abortion on college campuses nationwide. Their method: Tell the truth about abortion through pictures and testimonies, then engage people in rational conversation about why abortion shouldn't be considered a viable reproductive option.

No matter what you think about using graphic visual aids in this kind of discussion, it's hard to argue with the goal of sitting down and talking calmly and compassionately about the facts. A little education rarely hurts anyone. Over the course of many such conversations, one defense I've heard repeatedly from abortion-rights advocates is overpopulation. The argument is that we need to keep abortion legal to stem the tide of overpopulation, which threatens the future wellbeing of the whole planet.

While I can confidently say that abortion is ethically wrong, regardless of the effects of overpopulation, I have to admit that the conversations haven't gone much further than that, because I haven't known enough facts about overpopulation.

Until now.

Figuring that my own ignorance on this (or any) subject is an easy enemy to defeat, I went on a fact-finding mission. I learned a few things …

• Earth's population indeed exploded during the 20th century, increasing from 1.65 billion to 6 billion. Eighty percent of that growth occurred in the last half of the 1900s.¹
• This population growth was mainly due to an increase in life expectancy, combined with birthrates that remained high across the globe. In just 50 years, average life expectancy increased by more than 20 years — from 41 years in 1950-1955 to 64 years in 2000-2005.²

Yup, There's a Lot of Us ... Can't We All Just Get Along?

It's no wonder that we're feeling the crunch³. People as young as our parents were around at a time when the earth's population was noticeably smaller. But concern about overpopulation isn't a simple question of how many people are on earth. An area is overpopulated not because it has reached a certain density of population, but because it doesn't have enough food, water, shelter or natural resources to sustain its population. Sometimes, quality of life or strain on the environment are factored into the equation. Sometimes they're not.

Major arguments in the overpopulation debate fall into three categories:

1. Overpopulation is a problem because it means that some people don't have basic resources like food, water and shelter.
2. Overpopulation is a problem because humans are destroying plant and animal life and ravaging the environment.
3. Overpopulation is a problem because it keeps some countries from developing economically.

All of these arguments have merit, and there is verifiable data to support them. But another thing I learned through my research is that there's so much opinion flying around about how bad the problem is (or isn't) and what should (or shouldn't) be done that it's hard to get at the facts. Plus, all we can really do is speculate (even if it is educated speculation) about future population trends.

What we have here is a multi-faceted debate that can easily degrade into an excuse for personal-agenda pushing with wholesale disregard for facts. So how are we to think of overpopulation in light of a Christian worldview? I think we can sort it out at least somewhat. But first, a few more facts …

A House, a Dog, a White Picket Fence and 2.1 Children

• In the past 30 years, the world's fertility rate has sharply declined. In the period from 1965-1970, the average woman had 4.9 babies in her lifetime. In 2000-2005, the rate declined to 2.7 births per woman.⁴
• The population "replacement fertility rate" is 2.1 births per woman, which means that each woman has to have 2.1 children in her lifetime just to maintain the earth's current population. Since we are still slightly above that rate, that means the earth's population is still growing, but not nearly as fast as it was, say, in the late 1980s, when earth added 86 million inhabitants per year — the biggest incremental increase in recorded history.⁵
• The most recent U.N. study on the matter predicts that the human population will reach 9.2 billion around 2050.⁶
• By then, fertility rates in "less developed" countries will have fallen to 2.05 children per woman, while the fertility rate in "more developed" countries will be significantly below replacement, at 1.79 children per woman. And that means a downward turn in the population curve around the globe.⁷

These statistics shed an entirely different light on the population issue, because, while we must consider the consequences of last century's explosive growth, we have to do so in light of current trends. And those trends portend some problems that most of us aren't even thinking about right now. In fact, one of those is already starting to make the news ...

Old People Who Aren't Grandparents

Once the fertility rate drops below replacement level, an obvious consequence is an aging population. Babies aren't born fast enough to balance the number of elderly people dying, so the average age of the population rises quickly. Then there aren't enough workers to support (either thorough government systems or family systems) the elderly population. China, for example, has experienced a rapid decline in fertility rates over the past quarter-century due to its one-child policy and the accompanying forced sterilization and abortion. Analysts are now predicting that in 10 years, China will have a major work force shortage, but it will be 10 years too late to do anything about it.⁸

That's not the only consequence of declining (especially rapidly declining) fertility rates. It's just one example that shows we're dealing with a complicated problem, and that we probably shouldn't go spouting off about what needs to be done until we have a better understanding of the situation. In my experience, people on both sides of this debate have a tendency to do just that. Spout off.

C O F F E E  S H O P

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In addition, Christians who are trying to biblically address the problems related to overpopulation need to consider that the solutions that appear obvious to the secular world are not necessarily compatible with a Christian worldview. It's going to take some creative thinking to come up with a better answer. More about that in part two.