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This week demographers announced that world population had reached 8 billion. I was pleased that most articles covering the milestone did not focus on the “population explosion myth” that led to massive and highly unethical population control measures starting in the 1960s. Average life expectancy has been steadily growing throughout the world, contributing to much of the population growth. Fertility rates, the average number of children born to each woman, have been declining steadily and even alarmingly in high and middle-income countries. The consensus among demographic projections is that the world’s population will peak and start to decline in a few decades.

I remember in the 1990s seeing a foreign-funded “mother and children’s health project” in Guatemala. Midwives were trained and paid to use post-partum depression to emotionally manipulate impoverished mothers to agree to sterilization after delivering a baby. How tragic when a utilitarian “throw away culture,” as Pope Francis calls it, only sees value in human beings who are economically productive. The Catholic view, best expressed by Pope St. John Paul II in my opinion, is that every human being is a gift of God and has incomparable worth and dignity. Therefore, one must cherish the precious gift of human life.

When we fail to respect the right to life and the dignity of human persons, tragedies like abortion-on-demand ravage countries, killing millions of babies and wounding millions of mothers. The population control mentality has led to horrendous coercive government actions like communist China’s One Child Policy that included forced abortions and sterilizations on a massive scale. Many countries, such as India and Peru, had sterilization campaigns where people were operated on and rendered sterile against their will. It was common all over the world to offer monetary or material “incentives” to convince poor people to accept birth control or sterilization. Sadly, the US government and groups based in the US were global leaders in the population control movement and continue to be active.

Coercive population control is clearly unethical, as are strategies to sterilize the poor using “gifts” of money, food, or other items. These completely fail the ethical test of free and informed consent. More importantly, the intrinsically evil nature of direct abortion, direct sterilization, or contraception mean that they can never be done morally, even if a person freely consents or even requests them.

It is important to reaffirm as well that the Catholic view is not that couples should have as many children as biologically possible. Pope St. Paul VI and every holy father since has repeatedly called for both generosity in procreating children and responsible parenthood. If serious circumstances arise, either financial or health-related, it can be the right course of action for couples to space or postpone the conception of children. They must, however, use good means to that good end, such as the different methods of fertility awareness. These have developed tremendously over the last few decades in their scientific accuracy and effectiveness.

Concerning demographic changes in the world, experts see the same problem everywhere in developed countries such as the USA, Europe, Japan, and others: extremely low fertility rates. In a place with good health care and low infant mortality, 2.1 children per woman is the average minimum total fertility rate needed to prevent population decline, absent immigration. Some countries, such as South Korea, have reached unprecedented lows in fertility where the statistical average is barely greater than one child per woman. The USA currently has a fertility rate of 1.78 children — almost the lowest it has ever been in our recorded history.

Below replacement level fertility leads to rapid population ageing when life expectancy is increasing at the same time as the number of children is decreasing. A host of ethical temptations then arise as societies start to view the infirm elderly as a burden to be eliminated. What is sometimes called the “Grey Tsunami,” the increase of elderly persons as a proportion of the general population, is clearly one of the motivating factors for the push to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia in many locations. The fear that medical costs will spiral out of control is the source of proposals to implement different forms of health care rationing.

I think a big part of the problem with demography is that people are studied by crunching numbers. There are definitely good reasons to track fertility rates and other population trends, but one should never lose sight of the moral imperative to view persons as unique and possessing intrinsic dignity rather than as simply part of a range of statistics to be analyzed. I remember hearing this chilling but accurate observation. “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic.” It is easy to strip people of their humanity by relating to them only as part of vast numbers.

We should indeed celebrate the birth of every child, including the eight billionth human being on the planet. I pray that ethics informed by a deep respect for all human persons will become more prevalent when considering demographic and population trends. The lack of good ethics in this area has contributed to the killing and harming of billions of people. It is truly urgent to turn away from utilitarian “the end justifies the means” reasoning that inevitably leads to grave injustices and crimes against persons.