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MOSHER POKES HOLES IN OVERPOPULATION MYTHS

Other than their connections with Stanford University, Steven Mosher and Paul Ehrlich don’t have much in common.

In fact, in the ongoing debate on world overpopulation, they are polar opposites.

Ehrlich, a biology professor at Stanford since 1959, created a sensation with his 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb, which predicted that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation.

Despite the monumental failure of this and other gloomy predictions, Dr. Ehrlich continues to teach and write at Stanford and to receive honors and awards for his work.

Mosher’s stay at the prestigious university was much more short-lived.

As a doctoral candidate at Stanford, he was the first American social scientist to go to China, in 1979, after the United States normalized relations with that country.

During his year living in a village in South China, he witnessed the forced abortions and sterilizations performed on women as part of China’s just-begun one-child policy.

When, back in the U.S., Mosher wrote about the horrors of China’s population control program, Stanford, under pressure from the Beijing government, dismissed him from its doctoral program and expelled him from the university.

Mosher has refused to be cowed into silence.  Now president of the Population Research Institute, he speaks out against the dire predictions of the population control doomsayers.

Population has doubled from 3 million in 1960 to today’s 6 ½ billion “not because people started breeding like rabbits, but because they stopped dying like flies,” he told the Delaware Pro-Life Coalition Convention in Claymont, Del., April 1.

“The birthrate was falling, but the mortality rate was falling even faster,” he explained.

The world population will never double again; it will peak at 7 ½ to 8 billion in 2040, and then it will decline, said Mosher.

He bases his estimates on birthrates, which have fallen below replacement level throughout much of the world.

“Europe is in a death spiral,” he observed.

A demographer at the University of Milan said that if Italian women continue to average slightly over one child, in 100 years, Italy will be a Catholic theme park, and the ticket takers will be Albanians.

“I like the Italians; I’m going to miss them, but if they don’t start having children, they’re gone!” said Mosher.

All of Latin America is nearing replacement level.  And although there are some pockets of high fertility in the Muslim world, most Muslim countries, including Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Iran and those in Northern Africa, are at or below replacement level.

Women in sub-Saharan Africa are still having three to five children, said Mosher, but 40 to 50 million Africans have AIDS, spread in part by birth control clinics with often unsterile equipment:  “They will all be dead in a few years.”

China’s one-child policy, which continues to be enforced with the same rigor today, actually originated in the West, he said.

In 1974 a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology systems engineers published a study predicting that the world’s natural resources, such as coal, chromium, zinc and titanium, would soon be depleted, leading to the collapse of civilization in about 70 years.

The study, a computer projection commissioned by a group of Masons calling themselves the Club of Rome, was discovered by China in 1978.

Chinese leaders, accepting it as the latest in Western science and technology, based their stringent population control program on it, with some disastrous results.

China’s one-child policy has led to massive female infanticide by exposure, drowning or smothering, and 25 million young men have not been able to find brides.

“That’s a lot of testosterone running around loose,” said Mosher.

They remain single, angry and frustrated.  Women are being kidnapped, or brought in from Korea and Thailand and sold into prostitution or as wives.

China now has a 3.2 million-man standing army which, along with  the rising number of gangs in the country, act as substitute “families” for the young men.

“My question is, will the Chinese government be able to channel all this anger outside their country?” said Mosher.

Ironically, the much-touted MIT study was a hoax.  Two years after the report was published, the researchers admitted that they had deliberately fudged the numbers to get government funding for population control.

But, despite the fact that the world’s chief natural resources, or substitute materials, are demonstrably more plentiful and cheaper than ever, the overpopulation myth lives on.

“It makes no sense to fund population control programs in countries where population is on the decline,” said Mosher.  “Yet the U.S. is spending hundred of millions of dollars every year to do precisely that.”

The Population Research Institute has managed to stop some of the funding, such as $34 million to the United Nations Population Fund, which was bankrolling China’s forced abortion programs.

The Bible proclaims that children are a blessing, not a liability, and Mosher, as both a Catholic convert from atheism and a social scientist, agrees.

Every child comes into the world not only as a consumer, but as a producer, with a brain and hands, he pointed out; every baby born in the U.S. will contribute over $1 million to the economy over his or her lifetime.

“There is plenty of room on God’s green earth for all of us,” said Mosher.

“Our greatest resource is people, and we need all the babies we can get.”