Overpopulation Isn’t the Issue

Population management is a solution in search of a problem

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Overpopulation is a looming threat. Or so we’ve been told for the past couple centuries. But the specific reasons for population management keep changing. 

Austin Ruse, writing on the blog of the US Council of Catholic Bishops, explains how overblown fears of overpopulation have led to terrible things. Malthusianism, the belief of 18th century Anglican clergyman and philosopher Thomas Malthus that we’d all starve if the world’s population kept increasing, has not panned out. But the gloom of Malthus keeps returning in different guises. 

Eugenics came next. “To breed a man like a carthorse…to attain that higher civilization” is how Catholic writer GK Chesterton described it over a century ago when opposition to eugenics was still a weird Catholic thing. Around the turn of the 20th century, eugenics was popular in progressive circles as a way to perfect humanity. It was not just a right wing thing. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist who sought to make birth control and abortion legally accessible and socially acceptable. Progressive support for eugenics, however, was memory-holed after Hilter arrived on the scene. 

Rhetoric about “choice,” though, ignores the humanity of unborn babies, obscuring the fact that population management usually results in killing innocent people. Concerns about a “population bomb” led Communist China to force women to have abortions under its one child policy. Though discontinued, China’s population has been falling since 2022. Japan’s population too has been decreasing for over a decade, and Europe isn’t far behind. America’s birth rate is below replacement level, but the trend is more recent. The United Nations is optimistic, though, that decreasing birth rates help the fight against climate change. 

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Serious questions include: How far will the global population fall before the trend reverses and the population stabilizes? Or will we reach a point of no return? Assuming birth rates increase at some point, what social, economic, and cultural changes will this entail?

Postmodern culture doesn’t believe that life belongs to God, but rather that life belongs to us to do with as we please. Nowadays, the dream of improving the human race is shifting to technological augmentation of the human body. Catholic priest and bioethicist Fr. Michael Baggot recently appeared on Matt Fradd’s podcast Pints with Aquinas. Fr. Baggot said that transhumanism will be a bigger issue in the long run than transgenderism is. 

The belief that someday we’ll be able to live forever by controlling our aging, directing human evolution, or adding technology to our bodies—even by uploading our brains to an android body like Data from Star Trek (or simply reside in the cloud)—denies that we have a soul and reduces the essence of who we are to our bodies only or mere data that can be stored on a server.

One of the podcast’s terse comments stands out: “Eugenics 2.0.” Sticking with the Star Trek example, we’re more likely to end up like the soulless Borg Collective. Besides, all Data ever really wanted was to be a real boy. Perhaps he’d wonder why transhumanists want to throw away everything he’s ever wanted. 

Considered together, we have global elites who seem unconcerned with a decreasing population—even promoting policies that have led to low birth rates—and who think they can achieve immortality through transhumanism. Only the wealthy few could afford this, however, if such technology ever came to be (which I don’t think is possible because we are more than just data). 

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This dystopian future is unlikely, but the attempt to pursue it could cause a lot of damage. A feeling of meaninglessness today only fuels the problem. If God does not exist, then life was not purposefully created, so you must create your own meaning. And suffering demands meaning. But what if you can’t find any meaning for your suffering? 

From this viewpoint, we shouldn’t be surprised if someone concluded that it is better not to exist. Philosopher David Benatar makes such an argument in his book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. There is no deprivation in not existing, he argues, because you’re not around to notice it. But existence guarantees suffering—sometimes immense suffering—which is too great a risk. For this reason, he says you should not have children. And if you find yourself pregnant, abortion is not wrong—it’s good. Even human extinction would be okay. 

Benatar may be on the fringe. But like ethics philosopher Peter Singer, who is pro-abortion, pro-infanticide, pro-euthenasia, and who denies that beastiality is wrong, Benatar unabashedly takes atheism to its logical conclusion.

As theologian Christopher West explains, however, in his preface to Pope St. John Paul II’s Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, “Only to the degree that we know what our bodies ‘say’ theologically do we know who we really are and, therefore, how we are to live.”

Knowing that God created us with meaning and purpose is a bulwark against the despair of a world that has forgotten the meaning of life. Jesus tells us to love God with all of our heart, mind, and soul; and to love our neighbors as ourselves. But it’s a constant struggle because society tells us to “do you,” to signal concern about trendy political issues instead of actually helping others, while God isn’t even acknowledged. Yet, in becoming man, God joined in our joys and suffering. To surrender to Him is to embrace life.