Population control is the practice of limiting population increase, usually by reducing the birth rate. The practice has sometimes been voluntary, as a response to poverty, or out of religious ideology, but in some times and places it has been government-mandated. This is generally conducted to improve quality of life for a society or to prevent a Malthusian catastrophe.

History

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Surviving records from Ancient Greece document the first known examples of population control. These include the colonization movement, which saw Greek outposts being built across the Mediterranean and Black Sea basins to accommodate the excess population of individual states. As the number of available sites decreased, the Greeks - beginning with the Cretans - turned to pederasty, the formal practice of pairing young adult males with adolescent boys for educational and erotic purposes (according to Aristotle and others). This was done in concourse with delaying the age of marriage for men to thirty. The Greeks also used abortifacients and some cities practiced infanticide, though the latter is considered to have been an early form of eugenics.

The Siwans also used pederasty and boy marriage until the early twentieth century in order to control population size in an environment with finite resources and no natural enemies. Men were generally not allowed to marry before the age of forty. Thus the overwhelming majority of men took adolescent boys as lovers, a social contract often sealed with a formal and public marriage ceremony - a practice documented into the twentieth century in a controversial book called Oasis, Siwa: from the Inside Traditions, Customs and Magic, by Fathi Malim.

Given the nature of human reproductive biology, controlling the birth rate generally implies one of the following practices:

• sexual abstinence
• contraception
• same-sex relations
• sterilization
• abortion
• infanticide
• Birth control

See also

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• Eugenics
• Population genetics
• Population bottlenecks

Modern ideas and practices

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An important example of mandated population control is China's one-child policy, in which having more than one child is made extremely unattractive. This has led to allegations that practices like infanticide, forced abortions and forced sterilization are used as a result of the policy. However, the punishment of "Unplanned" pregnancy (fine) is much lesser than the punishment of murder (from 10 years' imprisonment to capital punishment); and both forced abortion and forced sterilization can be charged with intentional assault, which is punished with up to 10 years' imprisonment.

A prominent modern advocate for mandatory population control is Garrett Hardin, who proposed in his landmark 1968 essay The Tragedy of the Commons that society must relinquish the "freedom to breed" through "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon."

Another example was the classified study entitled National Security Study Memorandum 200, prepared by the U.S. National Security Council under the direction of Henry Kissinger in 1974. This report stressed that only 13 countries are projected to account for 47 percent of the world population increase by the year 2050. In many of these countries the government is silent on the issue of contraception.

External links

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• The Nine Lives of Population Control by Midge Specter Traces the history of the perceived need for population control.
• Population Control, from Pro-Life Pages For Students
• "To the point of farce: a martian view of the hardinian taboo—the silence that surrounds population control" by Maurice King & Charles Elliott, British Medical Journal 1997

Population | Moral panics | Birth control