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133  Quality of Life and Freedom Will Perish
     If Unlimited 'Right to Breed' Persists
     The Washington Post, January 18, 1969

     "Population!" my shrillest critics cry.  "Why don't you say more
about the world's most critical problem, the population explosion?"

     The cold logic of Malthusian arithmetic is of course inescapable.
The sheer mass of humanity cannot long increase at its present rate of
a doubling every 40 years.  There will be an inexorable halt to human
increase within, at most, a few generations.  We can hardly doubt
that the quality of life and the odds of peaceful survival are
deteriorating under the impact of that increase long before we reach
the biological limit.

     As everyone knows, Western science and medicine have contributed
to the problem: directly, by perfecting our techniques of preserving
life and of remedying infertility, and indirectly, by underpinning
the humanitarian outlook that cherishes the value of each individual
life.

     The technology of contraception has of course lagged behind the
evident humanitarian need for it.  The perfectly safe, reliable,
cheap and unobtrusive method has still to be developed.  Nevertheless,
the obstacles to population control can hardly be labeled as
technological gaps.  Nor could the ecclesiastical dogmas persist as
long as they have without reinforcement from some even more primitive,
irrational myths.  (In any case, the crisis in Roman Catholic theology
must now reach its own resolution regardless of outside comment).

     As Prof. Garrett Hardin, in an article in Science magazine, and
many before him have pointed out, man's heritage reinforces a will to
multiply against a now obsolete set of odds of infant death.  He goes
on to compare the planet to a common pasture, and reviews the
economics of a system where a common good is left to the greediest
harvesters.

     He suggests that voluntary restraint will be self-eliminating.
A system based on social conscience will merely raise the general
level of guilty anxiety among the well-intentioned ("Was it morally
right for us to have had those twins?") without achieving practically
useful results.  He would invoke lawful coercion to achieve the ends
of the social consensus.  In fact, the main aim of his discourse
is to attack the unlimited "right to breed" which now stands as a
basic personal freedom.

     One has to question the merits of such a freedom in a crowded
world.  Nevertheless, I believe that Prof. Hardin has grossly
underestimated the difficulty of actually policing explicit social
controls on reproduction without trampling on every other personal
freedom.

     I would not willingly abandon our cumbersome system of due
process that protects the security of my person against arbitrary
assaults by the fallible agents of the state.  We can more readily
tolerate the inevitable minor inequities in the allotment of positive
incentives and rewards that can achieve the same ends.

     This may seem a feeble answer to the population problem in poor
countries, but their basic problem is poverty.  Overbreeding is no
less a cause of it, and no amount of gloomy exhortation or diplomatic
pressure will get very far unless accompanied by answers to their
desperate problems of economic development.

     Knowing Prof. Hardin's background as a biologist, I expected him
to insist that action be preceded by more detailed knowledge of the
motivational causes of overbreeding.  In middle class America, they
may be intertwined with our dismal failure to solve the problem
epitomized by the title of Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex".
What other creative role in life do women play after they have
dutifully produced exactly two children?"
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