Stopping Population Growth is Easy

Julie Smith, 4/6/26

This is a summary of Chapter 6, Reining It In, in the book, “2050: What’s it Gonna Be?”.  You can download the full chapter, as well as other chapters.  References are here.

Historically, we humans have employed plenty of effective tactics to rein in our population when necessary.  Some methods are kind and gentle, and others not so much.  In the kind and gentle category, I would include options such as educating women, providing appropriate health care for women and babies, and providing options for birth control, so that women can control their family sizes.  Some of the rougher methods that might be best avoided would include war, genocide, infanticide or suicide. 

Of course, the planet also has ways of controlling overpopulation of species in general to maintain a natural balance between various species, such as food and water shortages, leading to death by starvation or dehydration of weaker individuals and ultimately survival of the fittest, as well as, of course, diseases and plagues. 

We humans have plenty of options to choose from if we want to control our population.  We can do it kindly and gently, or we can continue to look the other way and ignore the issue and do nothing about it, and let some harsher natural force take care of it for us.  Luckily, stopping population growth is easy! If we choose to be proactive about reining in our population, we’ll first have to muster the will to do it.  That appears to be the hard part. 

In 2016, we had the lowest population growth rate in the U.S. since 1937, a rate of 0.7%.  However, 0.7% is still an additional 2.2 million people to the U.S. every year, and nearly half of all U.S. pregnancies are still unplanned,³  which means that 1.1 million unplanned births might have been avoided entirely if the women had access to modern contraceptives.  In developing nations, there are 214 million women who don’t want to become pregnant, yet aren’t using modern contraception.  That’s 214 million women who are likely to have one or more babies that they don’t want, for lack of access to birth control.  214 million people added to our planet. 

Simply providing these women with the means to avoid unwanted pregnancies with modern contraception would likely take care of runaway population growth without doing too much more about it.  This is what I mean by kind and gentle population reduction. 

And, it’s even cheap.  In undeveloped countries it costs about $10.60 per year to prevent a birth, according to the Guttmacher Institute.  Think about that.  $10.60 to prevent a birth that is pretty likely to end badly.  To avoid yet another stressed and unhappy mother.  $10.60 to avoid an unwanted child who will likely be wanting for food, love, health care, direction and education.  To avoid yet another disgruntled human who will be easy prey for terrorist militant cults and other ugly antisocial behavior.  $10.60 to avoid yet another 4.5 tonnes/year of carbon emissions on our planet.  Does that sound like a good deal?  A win-win?  Um, like, duh.

Targeting unplanned teen birth rates with sensible education makes a huge difference.  It turns out that education goes a long way towards voluntary birth control.  It’s a proven fact that when women are educated, they delay families until they finish school and start their careers, and when they delay families, they have fewer children.  In turn, life is better for mommies because they prevent undue stress on their bodies and give themselves a leg up in setting an empowered course for their lives. 

A key part of the propaganda spewed at the general public by greedy big corps is the myth that a reduction in population would be bad for the economy.  Please don’t buy this nonsense.  They are trying to create doubt about the urgency of population control.  And, while it’s true that some reworking is necessary, in reality we simply can’t continue forward with unrestrained population growth any more than perpetual capital growth and expect to have a reasonably comfortable planet to live on.  We can foster a healthy economy while protecting our natural resources from unsustainable population growth.  Does that sound like common sense?  It does to me.

As mentioned above, it looks to me like we don’t have to really do all that much to get our population under control, we just need to do our part to make birth control available to all women worldwide who don’t want to have children.  How hard can that be?  Actually, the “worldwide” part might seem a bit daunting, when you think about it, and it’s definitely true that you and me acting alone can’t really do much on that, unless we want to quit our jobs and head over to India to volunteer for a women’s clinic. 

Luckily there are some things we individuals can do that are pretty easy.  It turns out that there are lots of non-profits that are dedicated to protecting women’s health, and the health of children with basic medical services.  So, the first thing to understand is that these clinics provide a lot of services that help women control their family sizes, in addition to contraceptives, so contraceptives make up just one part of the services.  And as for abortion, many clinics provide that also, but typically that’s a last resort to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, with pre-emptive services that prevent unwanted pregnancies a much bigger priority.  For example, only 3% of Planned Parenthood services are related to abortion, and none of these services are Federally funded.

When it comes to contraceptives, or birth control, there are many kind and gentle ways to do it, in practice, from condoms to IUDs to shots to birth control pills.  Once we’ve had enough children, we can do something more permanent, like tubal ligation or vasectomy.  The problem is, many women don’t have options.  Here in the middle class in the U.S., my husband and I had options readily available that we used to easily control our family size.  In an undeveloped country with a huge gap between rich and poor, and corrupt leadership that couldn’t care less, access to birth control is often a bit more challenging, if not impossible.

Even here in the U.S.A., not every woman has equal access, which is why we have more than our share of unplanned pregnancies, particularly among teens.  Part of it is lack of education in backwards religious communities, where the only education is abstinence, which plain flat out doesn’t work, never has and never will.  Basically, the hormones that pretty much control our in-born mission to procreate as a species kicks in, and it’s just unrealistic to overcome by just saying no. 

Contraceptives are so much better than abortion, which is heartbreaking and a last resort to avoid an unwanted birth.

Yet another barrier is availability.  Sadly, we still have ignorant states and regions who seem to think that birth control is not moral, and that it’s much more moral to allow unwanted children to be born into this world.  As if we don’t have enough social problems already.  Then there’s my personal favorite, where hard right hypocritical religiosity MAGA morons find it necessary to tie together kind and gentle pre-emptive modern contraception and women’s health care with nasty murderous ugly abortion, sometimes with pictures of baby body parts in dumpsters.  Think about this.  How can these two kinds of options have anything to do with each other?  One is kind, gentle and preventive, and the other is a last resort, either to save a woman’s life, for horrible cases of rape or incest, or to mitigate the fact that she didn’t have access to proper modern family planning options in the first place. 

Please don’t allow yourself to be duped by this nonsense.  It’s simply propaganda that is specifically designed to shame and horrify an ignorant audience, to discourage birth control and funding of women’s health clinics.  Now why on earth, you may ask, would anybody work so hard to convince us that birth control is bad?  Well, the only theory I can come up with is to keep the population growing, to keep the customer base for greedy big corps growing.  This way, they can keep getting wealthier.  It has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with greed.  Doesn’t that sound nasty and manipulative?  Yeah, I think so too.

In undeveloped countries, where population growth is highest, barriers to contraception include cost, availability, lack of knowledge, cultural taboos and social pressures that encourage young women to get pregnant.  Refugee camps are one of the least safe places in the world for girls and young women.  Contraceptives and access to safe abortions should be treated in these places with the same urgency as water, food and shelter. 

If we can get over all the propaganda and false rhetoric, the simplest thing to reduce our population is to simply provide birth control options to women who don’t want to have children.  The point is to give individuals the means to decide, rather than constantly putting up barriers to access, and if we can do that, the overall problem of overpopulation will likely sort itself out just fine.

Here are a few ways that individual global citizens can help to get our population under control:

1.           Support organizations that provide education, women’s health services and family planning services.  There are plenty to choose from, and if you can, donating is easy.  Any amount is greatly appreciated.  If everyone in the U.S. gave $1 per year, they’d have $300 million a year, and we’d have this thing whipped in no time.

2.           Choose to have two or fewer biological children, especially if you are a U.S. citizen, since we have one of the highest per capita carbon emissions on the planet.

3.           When you have the opportunity to vote for legislation to break down barriers to birth control access, please vote in favor.  Think about that.  What business is it of the government’s what a woman chooses to do with her body or how many children she wants?

4.           If family planning education in your region is limited to abstinence only, raise hell about it.  Hassle your legislators by writing them letters.  Pull a group of women together to fight for it.  This is called activism, and is the only thing that creates change.

5.           Don’t get medical insurance from sleezy companies that don’t cover contraceptives.

6.           Never vote for scummy politicians who actively defund women’s health clinics in undeveloped countries.  These countries are where these services are needed most, and it’s our responsibility as a developed country that has modern contraceptives to help those who don’t.  This is huge, for the good of the entire planet.  How do you know where your candidates stand on this issue?  Good question.  About the best advice I can give is to look at the recent past.  Look at their voting records.  In the past four decades, every democratic President has funded women’s clinics, and every single republican President from Reagan to Trump has defunded them immediately upon taking office.  I shit you not.

7.           Don’t vote for sleezy politicians who discourage appropriate family planning education and access to birth control at the state and local levels.  They may say they’re doing this on religious grounds, but they’re not. 

In the face of the emergency planetary crisis we find ourselves in, you’d think that population would be the most bipartisan issue of all, the one thing we can all agree on.

I find it hard to understand why Republicans generally oppose efforts to control population, when anti-choice policies seem to fly in the face of basic Republican values, like leaving government out of personal lives, and basic economic sense.  For example, it costs $500 million annually to fund Planned Parenthood, which contributes greatly to stopping unintended pregnancies, while the unintended pregnancies that go to term cost taxpayers $10 billion annually.  That’s a hell of an ROI when you think about it.  I mean, nearly 1900% is kind of hard to argue with.  Ya think?  Do you know of a climate-saving project with a better ROI?

By any standards, preventing unintended pregnancies obviously makes great economic sense for citizens, and that’s without even considering the huge impact of avoidance of the immense pressure of the resulting unintended births on our already-stressed environment.