What is the myth of overpopulation?
The myth of overpopulation is an unfounded belief that:
the number of people on Earth will exceed the carrying capacity of the planet in the foreseeable future, leading to economic or social collapse, and that actions ought to be taken to curb population growth.
Where did the overpopulation myth come from?
In 1798, an Anglican minister by the name of Thomas Malthus published the first edition of his An Essay on the Principle of Population where he speculated that, under perfect economic conditions, humans reproduce exponentially while their ability to increase agricultural output increases only linearly at best.
Malthus theorized that there were two kinds of “checks” that kept the population growth rate in check with the food supply.
What was the affect of Malthus' theory?
How does the myth of overpopulation affect us globally?
Malthus’ ideas quickly became the foundation for a movement that began to preach population control and contraception as the keys to socioeconomic development and the betterment of Western society.
Governments today are pushing population control policies in order to control the number of children being born as a protective measure to their national resources. All of these policies have received global recognition of their brutality:
- China’s one-child policy, where women were severely fined, arrested, or forcibly sterilized for exceeding the birth limit.
- India’s sex-selective abortion where approximately 15.8 million girls have been eliminated since 1990 due to a cultural preference for boys. Now the government wants to impose their own two-child policy.
- Latin America’s forced sterilization programs where women where arrested for being pregnant and their babies where aborted in unsanitary conditions.
- The United Nation’s ‘education programs’ that refuse aid to developing countries unless they accept contraception, abortion, and sterilization to prevent the false idea of population over-growth.