About last week's challenge by the Optimum Population Trust that Britons limit themselves (or perhaps be limited by others) to having no more than two children, Melanie McDonaghon (no common conservative, by the way) writes a feisty response in The Times (U.K.). I print a few choice bits below but the whole essay is certainly worth reading.Of all the bogeys you might have thought well and truly nailed in the past decade or so, the population control movement seemed most obviously to have a stake through its heart. At a time when we – I mean, anyone over 35 – are all horribly conscious that there won’t be enough taxpayers to support us in gin and cigarettes in our old age, the very last thing we need to worry about is excess population growth. On the contrary: as seen from the dinner party circuit, the real crisis is the difficulty for female graduates in getting anyone to breed with. Forty per cent of women graduates don’t have a single baby at the age of 35.
But, against all the odds, the population control lobby is back and trying to make the breeders feel guilty. The Optimum Population Trust – a wonderfully loaded title – made a call this week for families in the UK to limit themselves to no more than two children. It was like stepping into a time warp, back to the Seventies. Britain’s birthrate, growing at its fastest for nearly 30 years – at 1.87 children per couple – is, says the author of its report, Professor John Guillebaud, an environmental liability. “Each new UK birth, through the inevitable resource consumption and pollution that UK affluence generates, is responsible for about 160 times as much climate-related environmental damage as a new birth in Ethiopia.” He wants the Government to appeal to families to “stop at two children”, with particular reference to fecund teenage girls. Funny, I dimly recall Patricia Hewitt, as Health Secretary, opining that couples ought to have three children – one for each parent, and one for the State.
And there is the hint – but just a hint – from the Optimum Population people that if voluntary restraints do not work, governments will bring in coercive measures. The example that springs to mind here is, of course, China and its compulsory one-child policy. I’ve come across some distinguished academics myself who wouldn’t dream of trying to impose coerced abortion here but have made it quite clear, in private conversation, that we should all be grateful on environmental grounds that it happens in China...
