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A group of scientists has published a new proposal — and it sounds like something out of an apocalyptic movie. They want to cut the world's population in half. Not through war or disaster, but through what they call non-coercive measures — specifically, providing women in low-income countries with family planning services. Their target is four billion people by the year 2200.
This idea is not new. It is a zombie that keeps coming back over and over again, no matter how many times reality kills it.
The intellectual grandfather of this movement was Paul Ehrlich, who passed away earlier this year. Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted global starvation and economic collapse if population growth was not immediately stopped. His ideas became mainstream, shaping government policy worldwide. The consequences were devastating. Ehrlich's thinking encouraged mass sterilization programs in India and directly influenced China's one-child policy — under which an estimated three hundred million babies were killed, many against the will of their mothers. Sixty million Americans have been killed by abortion in the last fifty years, and fear of bringing a child into an overcrowded, dying world has driven a good many of those deaths.
And what happened to the predictions? Since Ehrlich sounded the alarm in 1968, the world population has more than doubled — from 3.8 billion to over 8 billion. And instead of the mass starvations he promised, crop yields increased dramatically. Global hunger has been cut by more than half. The catastrophe never came, because people are not the problem — they are the solution.
The worldview underneath population control theory is fundamentally anti-human. It sees people as consumers, simply mouths to feed, carbon to produce, resources to drain. The biblical view is the opposite. Human beings are image-bearers and co-creators. We are created to cultivate and build and solve. More people means more innovation, more ingenuity, more solutions to problems that previous generations couldn't imagine fixing.
Meanwhile the real demographic crisis facing the developed world is not too many people — it is too few. Russia, China, Japan, and the United States are all struggling with birth rates below replacement level. Population collapse, not explosion, is the actual threat. This Population Bomb zombie idea has already claimed hundreds of millions of victims. It is long past time to put it down for good. Stay informed and engaged with us at PhyllisSchlafly.com, and join us again for the Phyllis Schlafly Report.
