While Republicans in Kansas are making certain no woman without a fat wallet and an out-of-state doctor can get any birth control other than condoms, the world’s human population is going about its business of quietly exploding. Yet the reaction to the United Nations announcement last week that in less than a century there will be 10.1 billion people on this little planet we call Earth barely reached above the level of a whisper.
This isn’t merely about Africa, with its current population of one billion, already wildly stressed and frantically scraping around for water, food, and energy, ready to jump to 3.6 billion by 2100. Here at home, in the United States, we’ll have 478 million people in 2100 (much of it from immigration and from the high fertility rate among Hispanics)—up from our current 311 million. We’re bulking up faster than almost all other wealthy countries.
When I was young, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), with its apocalyptic, neo-Malthusian prediction of mass starvation and food rationing starting even in advanced nations as early as the 1970s and 1980s, was hot stuff. Of course, it was wildly wrong. After Erlich’s predictive abilities proved a fiasco, focus on world population growth and its concomitant problems slowly subsided, to the point where it now has reached a screeching halt. Today it’s so far down the list of problems that people fret over that when we list what we’re most worried about, we say things like, “the economy,” “jobs,” “terrorism,” or “gas prices,” or maybe, among the more far-sighted, “the environment,” or “global warming.” Not many of us even remember “the population explosion.”
There is no doubt that there’s a limit to what the planet can support. The only thing up for discussion is what that limit is. John Bongaarts, a demographer at the Population Council, a research group in New York, is quoted in The New York Times as responding to the United Nations report by saying, “Is it the end of the world? No. Can we feed 10 billion people? Probably. But we obviously would be better off with a smaller population.”
Whether, or to what extent, or at what level of existence, the planet can support 10 billion human beings, I leave to experts in food, water, and energy futures. Yet a different, fundamentally more disturbing question than questions about food, water, decent standards of living and all that, must also be asked. It’s the inherently distasteful question of whether individual ethical stances regarding reproduction, and especially abortion, can hold up in a world where babies no longer represent joy, but only stress and terrible burdens. Will reproductive rights and abortion still be a matter of ethics when the world reaches 10.1 billion people? What about 20 billion? Or will the ethics of reproduction and abortion disappear under the weight of the need to survive?
For those for whom even a 24-hour zygote is a human being worthy of rights and protections, I suppose the answer remains locked into place whether we have 10, 30 or 50 billion people on this planet. To these sorts, it doesn’t matter whether all the elephants and gorillas in the world are gone, or all wilderness has disappeared, or the oceans fully polluted, without any fish, or fresh water reduced to a quart per person per day, or most people live in splendid squalor. Zygotes, embryos, fetuses—they’re all unborn babies and, as such, are precious gifts from God no matter the circumstance.
For those of us who think differently, for whom every zygote is not a human being worthy of rights and protections, abortion is one small part of the much bigger picture of protecting the right of women to control their own reproduction and, beyond that, the very possibility of continued human existence on this planet. While the way China tackled its population explosion (by forcing a “one child” policy on its people) was repulsive in the extreme, there’s no question that China’s brutality effectively wrestled its population growth to a level that’s now manageable. Yet what country, or individual, would want to end up doing what China did?
In the early 21st century, it’s actually rather easy, especially in the United States, and especially in a place like Kansas, to hate what China did and take stands about the rights of fetuses. It wasn’t so easy for China. Nor is it so easy in the slums of Lagos, Nigeria, or even in the middle of a New York City kitchen, where a poor woman who has five kids under the age of five is trying to figure out how to feed them.
We’ll all be gone when the day comes that the shimmering fields of wheat in Kansas have been replaced by sprawling settlements of crowded shacks, and when the earth’s clean water and fossil fuels are scarce or even gone, but it would be interesting to check in to find out if anti-abortionists are still around, still holding fiercely to their principles.
The terrible truth is that when things are going well, and times are “normal,” ethical stands of any sort are easy to take. Only when the test comes do they collapse. If we’re crossing the Donner Pass, so to speak, and things are going terribly wrong, we human beings are fairly quick to abandon all sorts of ethical principles we otherwise hold onto while sitting in the comfort of our living rooms.
All of us in the debate about reproduction rights have an obligation to be perfectly clear about one thing: When the world’s population hits 10.1 billion, the ethical ones in that brave new world will curse the whole lot of us. We will be seen as having failed in our duty to have done something about the growth in the number of human beings when it still might have made a difference.
