082194 The Population Distraction

by Julian L. Simon

CHEVY CHASE, Md. The Roman Catholic Church's reaction to the United Nations Population Fund conference in Cairo is a monumental political blunder.

The Vatican should not have mentioned abortion and contraception. It should have stuck to the subject of the conference - population control. Pope John Paul ll could simply have said that human life is the ultimate value and that interfering with reproductive liberty is a crime. But the church, like its critics, is drawn to the abortion wars like moth to a flame.

Thus it allows the opponents of true reproductive freedom to steal the issue of personal liberty and thereby take the moral high ground. By so doing, it is subverting its own larger - and admirable - goals.

Some militant feminists have decided that while Pope John Paul ll is trying to force them to have children they don't want, Population Fund programs are not what women need. So the conference, which will be held in Cairo from Sept. 5 to 13, has already become a free-for-all.

But the bureaucracy will get its way - population control, the central theme of the conference. This is crystal clear in "objectives" in the "draft final document" (written, of course, long before the conference even begins): "To achieve and maintain a harmonious balance between population and resources." The "harmony" would be achieved by governments' "curbing unsustainable population growth" along with "reducing excessive resource consumption."

This aim, euphemistically called "population stabilization" and cloaked under verbiage about "family planning," has been affirmed by Timothy E. Wirth, the Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs. He bluntly talks about "population control," and President Clinton explicitly backs this goal.

Sugarcoat the matter as U.N. functionaries do, attaining this goal means government policies that will propagandize, bribe and coerce couples to have fewer children than they would otherwise choose to have.

The world's leading example of population control is China. Its "family planning" one-child policy is pure coercion. It includes forcing IUD's into the wombs of 100 million women against their will; mandatory X-rays every three months to insure that the IUD's have not been removed, causing who knows what genetic damage; coercion to abort if women get pregnant anyway, and economic punishment if couples evade the abortionist.

Most of the population establishment, which backs the Cairo show, applauds China's programs. The population-control advocates are forever apologizing that yes, there was coercion in the past, but the abuses were local and unauthorized and no longer occur. This was again revealed as a lie by the recent Chinese law to prevent the "floating population" from having the children they want.

The population activists now use their influence with the State Department to finance population-control programs in Africa with our aid programs and bribe African governments into cooperating.

Now comes the Pope to get into a well-publicized argument with President Clinton about abortion and contraception. Non-Catholics, and even some Catholics like Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice, interpret the Pope's statements as amounting to coercion of Catholics to have more children than they would like to have.

Jane Fonda - our "special goodwill ambassador" to the U.N. Population Fund - has decided that the church is the bogeyman in the matter. And Mother Jones magazine writes: "The Vatican's dark marriage to Islam has kept birth control off the international agenda. Meanwhile, the population bomb is ticking." This has two tragic effects.

First, the attack on the Pope deflects attention from the real enemy - the Chinese, who coerce; the Indo

The Pope is talking sense, if anyone will listen.

nesians, who use heavy-handed communal "persuasion," and the U.N. Population Fund, which orchestrates population control. Second, the Pope's message against governmental coercion, and in favor of life, is lost entirely; instead of being heard as the defender of the most basic human values, he is seen as the villain of the conference.

There is a terrible irony here. The church has been the leading institution that celebrates human life as such and asserts that enabling a new person to enjoy life is a good in itself. It does not urge people to have more children than a couple want and can afford. It recognizes the human limitations of a family's resources and energies. It does, however, hope that people will decide to have additional children, and cheers when they do.

Most important, it recognizes that one family's having more children does not make another family poorer in the world's goods; this conclusion is supported by two decades of research by population economists.

The Vatican's problem is that no matter what it says about other matters, a few words about abortion and contraception get all the attention. Is this the Vatican's problem or the problem of a stupid lying liberal media? In the United States' position paper at the 1984 population conference in Mexico City, there were just a few sentences opposing abortion, but for all practical purposes they were the only sentences that mattered. This is what the Vatican is up against.

The church is also up against a deep-rooted anti-Catholicism that is triggered by the population issue and distorts the thinking of even the clearest-minded people. The church's great message about the value of life gets lost to many (including my fellow Jews) amid these quarrels and recriminations about abortion and contraception.

The church is the only participant in these proceedings that gets it right about the economics of population growth and economic development. A supposed rationale for "population stabilization" is that lower population growth brings about faster economic growth. But the fact is that this proposition - mainstream wisdom until the early 80's - has been proved false.

In the 1980's, there was a U-turn in the consensus of population economists about the effects of population growth. In 1986, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences almost completely reversed the worried view it expressed in 1971. Its report noted that there was no statistical evidence of a negative connection between population increase and economic growth. And it said, "The scarcity of exhaustible resources is at most a minor restraint on economic growth."

This shift has gone unacknowledged by the media, by environmental organizations and by the agencies that foster population control abroad. While the Reagan Administration built this body of scientific fact into its 1984 stand at the world population conference, the Bush Administration did nothing to carry it out in policy and the Clinton Administration turns a blind eye to it. Now the U.N. Population Fund has carefully prevented mainstream population economists from participating in preparations and the conference. So what will we get in Cairo?

We'll get lots of acrimonious feminist rhetoric against the church and white males, providing an enjoyable occasion for the women and fine ' sound bites for the media, plus heartburn for the Vatican and maybe a lesson for the future.

And we'll get quiet success for the population controllers and U.N. bureaucrats who want to force women in poor countries to have fewer children than they want to bear - with no benefit to the economies and environments these establishment members claim to be improving. O

Julian L. Simon, who does research an population economics, is professor of business administration at the University of Maryland.