How Many People Is Too Many?

By mid-October of this year, the world's third most populous nation will hit 300 million inhabitants. And thanks to America's burgeoning fertility rate, we will keep moving briskly onward, hitting 400 million in less than 40 years, by Census Bureau projections.

Is 300 million people too many -- or not enough? Wade into a discussion of population size, and you're soon up to your neck in a host of knotty issues: sex, contraception, immigration, economic justice and ecological crises. To find out who'll be celebrating the big milepost, who'll be deploring it, and why, I got in touch with seven individuals who have especially strong views on the various forces that will decide the eventual size and composition of our nation's population.

One out of three pregnancies unintended

I started with an organization that's been at the center of the population struggle for decades. Population Connection, based in Washington, D.C., was founded in 1968 as Zero Population Growth by, among others, biologist Paul Erlich. Erlich wrote "The Population Bomb," a 1960s bestseller that put human numbers on the public agenda.

Brian Dixon, Population Connection's director of government relations, told me the group will try to take advantage of the publicity surrounding the 300 million mark to advance its congressional agenda. Today, that consists mostly of rearguard actions to protect existing reproductive rights and resist what Dixon calls "the war on sex information."

He said that when people don't have the means and information to control their fertility, the results are obvious: "Just here in the D.C. area where we work, you can't go a week without seeing evidence of overpopulation in the press: choked highways, crowded classrooms. It's our job to make it clear that we have to maintain not only living space but also lots of forests, farms, wetlands, etc."

Dixon cited research showing that one-third of all pregnancies in this country are unintended. "And our teen pregnancy rate is almost twice that of the next-highest industrialized nation. Yet we're wasting hundreds of millions on abstinence programs that have been shown never to work, and in fact can be quite harmful."

He doesn't believe abstinence proponents are really interested in preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases: "They want to punish people who act, in their view, immorally. You got pregnant? It's because you behaved badly. You got an STD? You should've thought about that before you had sex. They want bad outcomes."

I asked Dixon about a May 6 article by Russell Shorto in The New York Times Magazine that created a national stir by exposing the religious right's efforts to restrict access to contraception. He said the threat is very real, and it's nothing new: "That's been pretty obvious around Washington for a while."

Fruit of the womb

Among the motives behind what Shorto called the "contra-contraception" campaign, a "pro-procreation" philosophy is not necessarily foremost; current attacks on birth control are as much about making political hay as making babies. But some Christian writers are giving top priority to what they see as the duty of believers to reproduce, early and often.

Nancy Campbell of Franklin, Tennessee, is author of the 2003 book "Be Fruitful and Multiply." Her title quotes Genesis 1:28, in which God gives Adam and Eve a bit of advice that many evangelical Christians interpret as a command to procreate energetically. In an article on her website aboverubies.org, Campbell lists "101 Reasons for Having Children." (No. 27 -- "It's just as easy to cook for ten as it is for one!")

Regarding religious groups' efforts to restrict contraception, she told me, "I would like to see contraception be made less available to young unmarried people. Contraception has actually caused more babies born out of wedlock than when young people had to say no to sex before marriage."