Open response to: “Overpopulation: Should America have a one-child policy?

By Anne Roback Morse   

Population Research Institute              

Last Tuesday, the Washington Times published an article by Joseph Cotto entitled, “Overpopulation: Should America have a one-child policy?” Despite the provocative title, the article does not present a stimulating thought-experiment, but rather a series of half-truths and inconsistencies with dangerous implications.

 

Because such half-truths have been at the ideological root of every forced abortion this century, we at Population Research Institute drew up a list of the claims made in the article—and countered them with facts to expose their fallacies.

Claim 1: Cotto commences his article by citing Michael Arth, a controversial gubernatorial candidate who advocated the imposition of birth credits. Arth argued that although human innovation often “increases under pressure,” the pressure which inspires it is worse than the innovation itself. The article cites, “One of the most innovative periods of human history was WWII...However, we also had the wholesale destruction of cities, untold suffering and the massacre of at least 60 million people.”

 

Reply: World War II was indeed a period of both ingenuity as well as suffering. However, Mr. Joseph Cotto confuses correlation with causation. Ingenuity and suffering are not inextricably related. There have been periods of misery without ingenuity, and periods of ingenuity without suffering. For instance, the Silicon Valley technology boom of the 1990s did not produce “misery and sorrow for the sake of innovation.”
Read the rest here: http://pop.org/content/open-response-“overpopulation-should-america-have-one-child-policy