The Forgotten Child - Debunking the Population Bomb Myth

It was a day only days after my second daughter had been born. I was sitting at a lab table in my physics teaching Lab at Leeward community college in Hawaii preparing for my next class. In walks the chairman of the science department and greets me with, instead of a congratulatory remark on the birth of my 2nd child, a hostile remark about having another child. I told him that it was my 2nd child and he, guessing that that was okay, stormed out of the room. This was September of 1975.

I wondered how he would have reacted had this been my 3rd child; probably an angry tirade of how irresponsible I was in increasing the population that was headed for disaster involving a scarcity of food and other resources insufficient to accommodate a growing population. At this time in the 60s and 70s there were those who were predicting a population explosion, were nothing done to decrease the number of babies being born. I can only be thankful that I was then not in a country such as China with a one baby policy.

According to population statistics a family having no more than 2.1 children would result in a zero population growth. Of course 2.1 babies is an average of all fertile couples. My daughters have had one and four children respectively averaging 2.5 children per family which to those trying to attain zero population growth was anathema.  Fortunately, unlike China, we did not have abortion forced on a woman having an expected second child;  but we certainly had those like my chairman who would dutifully discourage anyone considering a third, or even a second child.

Today we have agencies such as Planned Parenthood who for decades have been discouraging large families worldwide with such success that many countries, except some countries in Africa, are dealing with, not zero population growth, but negative population growth. It is amazing to see the list of countries having such negative growth. In fact, the expected population explosion never really happened.  However, there are today agencies like Zero Population Growth that can be found on the Internet where families are discouraged from having large families and are encouraged to have abortions to control the number of babies born.

However, demographics (the study of population growth) indicates that the world population growth will stop soon, followed by a worldwide a population decline. Once population starts to decline it is very hard to reverse that trend.  A powerful and well documented book bringing enlightenment about this impending worldwide population decline is described below:

AMAZON
What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster [Hardcover]  Jonathan V. Last (Author) List Price:  $23.99
Price:  $16.14

Book Description  Publication Date: February 5, 2013

Look around you and think for a minute: Is America too crowded?
For years, we have been warned about the looming danger of overpopulation: people jostling for space on a planet that’s busting at the seams and running out of oil and food and land and everything else.

It’s all bunk. The “population bomb” never exploded. Instead, statistics from around the world make clear that since the 1970s, we’ve been facing exactly the opposite problem: people are having too few babies. Population growth has been slowing for two generations. The world’s population will peak, and then begin shrinking, within the next fifty years. In some countries, it’s already started. Japan, for instance, will be half its current size by the end of the century. In Italy, there are already more deaths than births every year. China’s One-Child Policy has left that country without enough women to marry its men, not enough young people to support the country’s elderly, and an impending population contraction that has the ruling class terrified.

And all of this is coming to America, too. In fact, it’s already here. Middle-class Americans have their own, informal one-child policy these days. And an alarming number of upscale professionals don’t even go that far—they have dogs, not kids. In fact, if it weren’t for the wave of immigration we experienced over the last thirty years, the United States would be on the verge of shrinking, too.

What happened? Everything about modern life—from Bugaboo strollers to insane college tuition to government regulations—has pushed Americans in a single direction, making it harder to have children. And making the people who do still want to have children feel like second-class citizens.

What to Expect When No One’s Expecting explains why the population implosion happened and how it is remaking culture, the economy, and politics both at home and around the world.

Because if America wants to continue to lead the world, we need to have more babies.