Is it Irresponsible to Have More Than Two Children?

I know families of 12 children: indeed, Mr Noel Dempsey, TD and Ireland’s Transport Minister is one of twelve sons, and they struck me as sane and sensible people when I encountered them.

I know families of 10 children. Of eight children. Of six, of four, of two, of one – and of none.

This is just anecdotal evidence, but if I count up groups of people I know, across several generations, the numbers more or less balance out into an average of about two children per couple.

This is why I think it is ridiculous that a growing number of experts now preach that it is “irresponsible” to have more than two children.

And many voices across Europe are now moving towards a position of advocating compulsory programmes of population restriction. In Britain the two most powerful advocates for positively reducing the human population are Sir Jonathan Porritt, the Green guru, and Sir David Attenborough, the famous naturalist.

In America, Jeffrey Sachs of the United Nations – the world expert on poverty – billionaire George Soros, and, of course, of long duration, the Rockefeller family, champion birth restriction as a “responsible” economic policy. 

The Rockefellers’ prominence in population control movements has led some critics to make cracks about rich men urging restraints on poor people. (When the last political ornament of the Rockefeller family, Vice- President Nelson Rockefeller, died suddenly while having sexual intercourse with a young lady not his wife, there more cracks of another nature. Incidentally, Governor Rockefeller had seven children.)

There have always been those who panicked over population growth, ever since Thomas Malthus, back in 1798, said that the world was overcrowded to bursting. In the 1960s, Paul Ehrlich, a butterfly specialist,  published his influential The Population Bomb in which he likened the growth of human life to a cancer, and urged governments to adopt a policy of population restrictions by adding sterilising agents to the water supply.

Ehrlich’s views remain highly influential, even if he was proved wildly wrong in his prediction that during the 1970s and 80s “hundreds of millions” of people would starve to death because of over-population. They didn’t.

The war against population – or, if you like, people – is being enthusiastically advanced now by climate change scientists, who say that the real reason why the ice-caps are melting is that there are just too many people breathing in and out all over the globe, or as they like to call it in their fanciful way, “Gaia”.

The chief priest of the “Gaia” movement is the British scientist James Lovelock, whose latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning  foresees the world’s population forcibly falling to one billion by the end of this century (it is currently 6.77 billion).

Lovelock, who is 90 and has nine grandchildren writes that it is all nonsense about planting trees and looking for lower-emission ways of life: worse than nonsense – hypocrisy. The nub of the matter is that there are too many of us.

If Jonathan Swift were commenting on these matters today, I suppose he might suggest a few drastic measures, with his lacerating irony. Kill everyone over 70? Enforce cigarette smoking? Ban In Vitro Fertilisation, or any fertility treatment, which encourages breeding? Deny social welfare benefits to anyone with more than two children?

The trouble with such sarcastic ideas is that some environmental and “green” thinkers are already seriously considering them. Why is there such a fashionable discussion around euthanasia, for example? Anything to do with the fact that it would be dead convenient – pun intended – to encourage the frail or the inconvenient to stop using up valuable breathing space?

It’s interesting, all the same, that population reduction policies have never – yet – had much of a following in Ireland. Perhaps that is something to do with the fact that we already experienced a most effective “population reduction” scheme: the Great Famine of 1845-9. Yes, there are some experts today who say that the Famine was indeed a “punishment” by “Gaia” for the crime of over-population: nothing to do with wretched land distribution, the folly of relying on one crop, social injustice and rotten politics!

But it took 150 years for this country to recover from that particular “population reduction”: not just in terms of people, but psychologically,  in collective self-worth, in embittered attitudes. Small wonder there are few votes in “population reduction” in this country!