Earth’s 8-billionth pilgrim

We enter the world not to own it, but to sanctify it with our prayers and works as pilgrims.

AMID the massive deaths and sufferings from the pandemic, the various wars and conflicts, the natural calamities, and violent incidents around the world, the arrival of the 8-billionth human being on planet Earth is more than a welcome development.

We don’t have the full report yet — the only thing we know is that he or she was born in the Dominican Republic on November15. But it is not too early to celebrate.

“A milestone,” says United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, “a testament to scientific breakthroughs and improvements in nutrition, public health and sanitation, which have produced longer lifespans, reductions in poverty, and declining maternal and childhood mortality.”

It is much more than this. To me, it is the triumph of life over death. And we should learn from it as much as we can. I speak for myself.

In October of 1999, I was a senator speaking to the 102nd Conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) in Berlin. As I rose from my seat, the UN population clock indicated the arrival of the 6-billionth human being on the planet. Adnan Nevic, born of Bosnian refugees.

I welcomed the news with great joy, and some African and Latin American delegates thanked me for it. But within that very hall, there was so much gloom among the delegates from the rich countries, and I could hear them murmuring as I spoke.

I asked a friendly face afterward why this was so, and was told that my brief reference to Adnan Nevic was anathema to those who considered population growth in other, especially poorer countries, the greatest threat to their quality of life and the sustainability of their environment.

True enough, Adnan Nevic was followed by 2 billion more new births. Like Adnan Nevic, the unnamed 8-billionth person on the planet will be followed by many more.

In his “Essay on the Principle of Population,” Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) says that population increases in geometric progression (so as to double every 25 years), while food increases in arithmetical progression, thus causing food shortages and famines. In 1798, he predicted that by 1890 there would be “standing room only” on the planet unless governments reduced births. That was his only solution.

In 1968, the American biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, an international bestseller, to prop up Malthus’ claim. It said, “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” and predicted the loss of continents to famine if people did not stop having children. This won the support of some of the wealthiest Americans and Europeans on both sides of the Atlantic, and even ultra-liberals within the Catholic Church.

I do not know if this ever played a part, however small, in Pope St. Paul 6th’s groundbreaking encyclical Humanae Vitae that year. But if it did, I would not be surprised. The encyclical declares it is never licit to interfere by artificial means in the generation and transmission of new human life, and condemns abortion and contraception as intrinsically evil.

None of Malthus’ or Ehrlich’s “famines” ever came to pass. Not because they lost the academic or theological debate, but because Norman Borlaug, the gifted American agronomist from Iowa, (and even Imelda Marcos from these parts) produced an overabundance of food from their Green Revolution.

In 1974, the US government issued National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200, titled “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests.” Also known as “The Kissinger Report,” it viewed the rapid population growth in the less developed countries (LDCs) as a threat to those US interests.

To preserve its global economic, political, scientific and military dominance, the US launched a global population strategy that called for the reduction of the size of the family in the LDCs to two children per couple by the year 2000. This was below the known replacement level of 2.1 children per couple.

This may have added so much severity to the work on the ground that, according to Nicholas Eberstadt, global fertility has fallen below the replacement level in 83 countries and territories with 2.7 billion people. We see this in the Western Hemisphere and in Asia, specifically in Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, China and Thailand. Here, the population implosion is real.

Since the population of some countries is now in free fall, the countries whose populations are still growing will have to assume the burden. UN experts predict that between now and 2050, more than half of the 1.7 billion global population increase is expected to occur in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Tanzania, Pakistan and the Philippines.

Because of our young median age of 26, we have so much to offer to others. But we must first get rid of population control. Speaking for the Supreme Court in 2014, Justice Jose Catral Mendoza described the Reproductive Health (RH) Law as a population control measure, even while declaring it to be “not unconstitutional.” But population control is never constitutional. So if we want to honor the 8-billionth pilgrim who arrived on our planet this November, we should call for the overturning of the RH Law — just as the US Supreme Court recently overturned its 1973 ruling in Roe v Wade — now!