Birth defects

Five years before Charles Darwin’s death, the issue of human population growth, which had triggered Darwin’s thoughts on natural selection throughout other species, hit the news with some force. Thomas Malthus, almost a century earlier had raised the fear that uncontrolled human population growth was unsustainable and would be challenged. And in 1877, news was spreading around the world of appalling famines in India and China, great migrations across the Atlantic and Asia and the beginning of large-scale organised violence against Chinese immigrants in the US. It was also the year “when the world first heard of a remarkable family that had grown to some 1,200 people in seven generations. Through criminality, pauperism and disease, the pseudonymous Jukes were alleged to have cost the American people over $20 million in today’s dollars,” writes Matthew Connelly in a new book Fatal Misconceptions, which charts the global efforts to control human population growth. The issue had an uneasy base in the field of eugenics during the first part of the 20th century, which was concerned not only with limiting population growth, but also with ensuring that various categories of humans were prevented from reproducing. The best efforts were tainted by this underlying perception so that governments turned away from it in later years. This issue came to a head at the 1974 World Population Conference, followed by India’s rejection of Indira Gandhi’s sterilisation policies three years later, which exposed the population control movement as having no mandate. It was rejected by a majority of governments and by India, the most populous democracy, writes Connelly. All of the most important international and non-governmental organisations in the field entered a period of agonising reappraisal. Facing staff and budget cuts, population controllers could only take satisfaction in receiving confirmation that fertility rates had begun to fall in almost every region of the world. Together with unfulfilled predictions of imminent global famine, it only made their work seem less urgent, and their excesses all the more unforgivable. Continuing debates about whether government programs were reducing fertility rates — in most places, it started without them — were becoming matters of merely academic interest. The defeat of Indira Gandhi and the Congress party with its sterilisation programmes was a notable point for democracy. “Something even more powerful, even more implacable, had finally defeated the ideology of population control: people voting one by one,” writes Connelly. But in China, without a popular vote, policymakers were able to pursue one of the world’s largest population control programs without the worry of popular rejection. To begin with, proponents of population control ignored the possibility that people might choose to have fewer children even with less coercive measures. In fact, the fertility rate was already falling rapidly: in the 1970s it fell from 6.4 to 2.7 over the preceding decade. But by using future projections as Human population growth worldwide has led to policies in many countries to limit the reproduction of their populations, often with mixed and unexpected results, writes Nigel Williams. Birth defects