Taking On The Overpopulation Myth

Transaction, $29.95, 300 pages

REVIEWED BY JOSEPH A. D’AGOSTINO

“‘Our health care sector is collapsed,’ Kenya obstetrician Stephen Karanja says simply, opening his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. ‘Thousands of Kenyan people will die of malaria, the treatment for which costs a few cents, in health facilities whose shelves are stocked to the ceiling with millions of dollars worth of [contraceptive] pills, IUDs, Norplant, Depo-Provera, and so on, most of which are supplied with American money.’”

This one quote from Steven W. Mosher’s “Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits,” from the former secretary of the Kenyan Medical Association, summarizes the state of Western-funded population control programs in the Third World. Just as Planned Parenthood, founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger (who said she wanted “to create a race of thoroughbreds”), still has 70 percent of its clinics located in minority neighborhoods, foreign aid for health programs still target the black, brown, and yellow populations of the world for reduction. Now called reproductive health or maternal health programs, these efforts - which continue to receive billions of dollars a year from the United States and Europe even as birthrates decline to below replacement level in most regions of the world - began as population control and still have that effect.

Unlike almost all other American scholars of the subject, Steven Mosher, president of Population Research Institute and a China expert, does not consider population control to be a worthy goal. [...]