Population problem is a ruse
to decrease minorities

Dear A.M. Costa Rica:

"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

I would like to address the misguided concerns of Mr. Herndon, where he calls for a significant decrease of world population in order to combat hunger and environmental damage. 

I encourage all readers to research the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, a movement of elitists mainly from the United States and Britain, who called for population control through contraception and sterilization (forced or voluntary). 

Whereas the beginning of the eugenics movement had "purity of the race" as its objective, after the horrors of the holocaust (the logical conclusion of eugenics), the movement was rebranded as a way to save the environment.

The overall philosophy of the eugenics movement has always been the same — there are too many brown and black people in this world (Latin America and Africa, specifically), not to mention the poor of every race. 

Human life is being reduced to economics whereas their right to life is weighed against our desire to maintain our way of life, for most people who call for population control have not applied those same restrictions on their own lives. For instance, Ted Turner is an advocate for a worldwide one-child policy although he has five children.

There are poor and hungry people in this world because of warfare, famine, and selfishness. Stopping people from reproducing is much easier than asking ourselves to change our ways or to go without a particular comfort or "toy" in exchange for sending that money to help the poor.  The truth is that study after study has shown that nearly every nation is experiencing a demographic winter, with their replacement rates much lower than the needed 2.33 children per household. 

The overpopulation alarm was first rung in the mid-1800s and repeated again in the late 20th century, and yet a significant portion of the Western world has not experienced these "inevitable" food shortages; we (especially in the U.S.) are the fattest we've ever been.  Time after time, the overpopulation alarmists have been proven wrong because we've never produced as much food, we've never been so obese, and we've never been so rich as the West is right now.  Therefore, eugenicists have latched onto the environmentalist movement because the claims are mostly unverifiable. For every research paper that "proves" climate change is man-made, there are papers that claim it's a natural occurrence.  In the meantime, they all tend to agree that the cause is from poor minorities having too many babies.

Simply put, we can help the poor by reducing how materialistic we are in the West, offering alms to lift them out of their poverty.  Instead of spending billions of dollars in sending them contraception, those billions can be used to provide them medicine and clean water, to build them schools and hospitals, to teach them modern farming techniques, and to help them construct a viable and modern infrastructure. 

We can indeed learn how to live in an environmentally-responsible manner, being good stewards of the environment instead of exploiting it for wealth and selfish control of resources.  But blaming human life as the source of the world's ills is misguided and faulty.  God asked us to be fruitful and multiply and to fill the earth, but He also asked us to love our neighbor as ourselves. Preventing our neighbor from being born is not love, it's the very definition of selfishness and must be rejected.  The problems we are facing are due to human life, it's from our narcissistic behavior.