On the topic of reproduction, I offer three points. 1) I went to a talk a few years ago where the speaker presented data on Pakistan, I believe. Over the course of just a decade, concerted government efforts led to birth rates being reduced from something like 6 births per woman to 4 - a phenomenal success, apparently unprecedented in a non-compulsory, peacetime development context.
Over the course of that same decade, surveys indicated that the desired number of children per woman fell from about 5 to about 3. So the massive reduction in fecundity was driven (or at least accompanied by) as massive shift in public attitudes about desired family size. The kicker here is that women continued to have, on average, 25% more children than they wanted to have. The desire for smaller families already exists in (at least some) developing countries. Access to family planning, by itself, would dramatically lower global fertility. And what could be more humanitarian than allowing women to have no more children than they are actually willing to take care of? 2) It seems to me that those who argue that depopulation is a more serious threat than overpopulation (in any of the myriad ways that threats have been measured) would do well to support immediate measures for population control (i.e., free and easy access to family planning services) in order to reduce the magnitude of the eventual disruption of depopulation. 3) The anti-immigrant "cultural dilution" argument is specious - it presumes today's cultural moment is the one that is better than all previous instances of our rapidly evolving, cross-pollinating cultures. Compare cultural snapshots through the last few centuries, or even decades. Change is the only constant, and I for one am pleased at the diversity of world foods, music, and art that are now within walking distance of my house. --Doug Fischer Department of Geography UC Santa Barbara
