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SAN ANTONIO • Students at Central Catholic High School had the unique opportunity of hearing Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, speak to their religion classes on Sept. 16. Mosher is widely recognized as a leading authority on the population question and is author of the best-selling book, A Mother’s Ordeal: One Woman’s Fight Against China’s One-Child Policy.
China had been closed to the world for 30 years when Mosher became the first American social scientist allowed in as part of a scholar exchange program in 1979. In his particular case, strings had to be pulled, as the Chinese were wary of allowing in someone who could read, write and speak Chinese. This proved to be a blessing, however, as his special permission from Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping himself opened doors that would otherwise have been closed to him.
China’s infamous “One-Child” policy went into effect shortly after Mosher’s arrival. He remembers the evening of March 8, 1980 very well, as the local communist party leader dropped by to announce he had received a new document from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, one that concerned population control. It was the “One-Child” policy. “The policy is actually stricter than one child per family,” said Mosher, “because the Chinese government says, basically, to the Chinese people, ‘You cannot have children unless and until we, the government, give you permission to have children.’” |
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China’s infamous “One-Child” policy went into effect shortly after Mosher’s arrival. He remembers the evening of March 8, 1980 very well, as the local communist party leader dropped by to announce he had received a new document from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, one that concerned population control. It was the “One-Child” policy. “The policy is actually stricter than one child per family,” said Mosher, “because the Chinese government says, basically, to the Chinese people, ‘You cannot have children unless and until we, the government, give you permission to have children.’”
Under the policy, each province and village was given an assigned birth target for the year. When Mosher queried the village leader as to how the number of births in his province of Canton could be kept to just the 180 assigned, the leader replied, “It’s very simple. We will do a house to house survey of the village and we will ask every woman if she’s pregnant. If she’s pregnant with her first child, we’ll say, ‘Go ahead and continue your pregnancy.’ If she’s pregnant with her second, we’ll say, ‘How old is your first child?’ And if she answers, ‘four or older,’ we’ll allow her to continue her pregnancy. But if she answers, ‘My first child is three or two or one,’ she’ll have to go in for an abortion. And if she’s pregnant with her third or fourth child, we’ll simply order her to go in for an abortion.”
Mosher followed the women who were arrested and taken away to be locked in a barred, dimly lit dormitory with only narrow wooden benches to sleep on and meager daily rations. While incarcerated, they were continually pressured into “voluntarily” agreeing to an abortion. Some, who were in the early stages of pregnancy, submitted fairly readily. “There were a lot of holdouts in my village,” related Mosher. “These were mostly women who had felt their babies move and had passed the point of what we call quickening.” Some were as far as nine months along.
“I’ve seen communist arrest warrants and where there’s a place for ‘crime,’ they wrote in ‘pregnant’,” he said. “I’m an eyewitness to forced abortion.” The women were told that if they refused the procedure and gave birth, their baby would be killed anyway. This was done by injecting formaldehyde into the soft spot in the baby’s skull. The director of one large hospital told Mosher that around 400 such procedures were performed yearly at the hospital.
“There’s no moral justification for what China is doing,” said Mosher, “but there are people who say China’s population problem justifies what the Chinese government is doing.” He related that these people may not sanction the methods used, but feel the end justifies the means. Such people believe the world is overpopulated and advocate reducing the population. Mosher does not agree with this either.
He notes that the population has doubled over the past 40 years, but says that this will never happen again and states why. “The reason the population doubled is not because human beings are breeding like rabbits,” he says. “It’s because we stopped dying like flies.” He sees the rapid fall of the death rate in the ’60s and ’70s as causing this one-time doubling phenomenon. Today, however, people are marrying at a later age and having fewer children.
Mosher does not see a large population as depleting natural resources and leading to deprivation for all. “The only really limited resource is human intelligence,” he says. “If we have an abundance of something, the price goes down. If we have a shortage of something the price goes up. Wages keep going up. And what that means is that human beings are in short supply.”
He pointed out the effect of fewer births on the economy. “Europe is dying, literally dying,” he said. “They have fewer babies born than they had people die. ... The cemeteries are filling up and the maternity wards, the hospitals are emptying out.” He noted that factories whose products are used by the young shut down in such an economy and, with fewer young people getting married and buying homes, home prices fall. Then, with fewer young people purchasing stock and taking risks, the stock market falls, as the retired and elderly withdraw their money from it.
Conceding that when the population goes up, shortages occur, Mosher used the example of a food shortage, to describe what happens. “You develop new strains of wheat that produce more yield per acre, for example,” he says. “You have people … using their creative intelligence to solve the shortages.” He believes that the more brain power available, the more easily the problem is solved in a free economy. “We’re constantly inventing new ways of producing the same thing more cheaply, using less energy, less time. … But all those things depend on one thing — human ingenuity.” He adds, “With prosperity you can afford to set aside a certain amount of money to deal with environmental problems.”
He went on to point out that we currently use only about 3 percent of the land in the United States. “You could put the entire population of the world in the state of Texas,” he said, “and give them a single family home with a front and back yard.”
He stated further, “The enemy of the environment is poverty, not prosperity. And you don’t solve poverty by reducing the number of people. You solve poverty by putting in place democratic systems.”
He noted that the “planned economies” of China and the Soviet Union have created the worst environmental problems in the world.
Rather than sending underdeveloped countries contraception and sterilization devices to reduce their numbers, he believes we would be better served by providing them with new and effective means to provide for themselves. |