The population wars.

Military analyst Ruth
Sivard cites 148 wars in
the world since World
War II. Among these
were wars in the Sudan,
Somalia, Cambodia,
Georgia, Burundi,
Afghanistan, Rwanda,
and many others. Most
of these were what can
be called "population
wars."

Since the end of the Cold War, the nature of war has changed. No longer are we fighting other countries but, rather, ourselves. According to the United Nations, only three of the world's eighty-two armed conflicts in 1989 through 1992 were between countries; the rest were within countries. They have been the result of our failure to prevent reactionary religious forces from limiting and, at times, destroying the opportunity of millions worldwide to receive family planning, birth control, and legal abortion services.

In its 1997 quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon warns of a pending catastrophe:

Some governments will lose their ability to maintain public

order and provide for the needs of their people, creating

the conditions for civil unrest, famine, [and] massive

flows of migrants across international borders ....

Uncontrolled flows of migrants will sporadically destabilize 

regions of the world and threaten American

interests and citizens.

We are now witnessing these massive flows of economic refugees from poverty-stricken countries and other refugees from the population wars. According to the U.N. high commissioner of refugees, there were 27.4 million migrant refugees in the world in 1995. This is 4.4 million higher than the year before and 17 million more than the preceding ten years. Another 20 million people were refugees within their own countries.

The war in Rwanda, which has resulted in 1.8 million refugees living outside Rwanda's borders in 1995 and close to one million people being slaughtered, is a case in point. The most densely populated country in Africa, Rwanda had the world's highest fertility rate, according to the British medical journal the Lancet. Who's to blame? "The fact that any country should now be in intensely Catholic Rwanda's predicament is an indication of the world's and especially the Holy See's reluctance to face the issues of population control," says the Lancet.

Because of this reluctance, in many countries there isn't enough water or arable land to provide sustenance for all the people. In her 1992 book Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity, Sandia Postel cites twenty-six countries with a combined population of some 230 million people suffering from water scarcity in the early 1990s. The shortage of water in the Middle East is illustrative. Speaking in the May 14, 1992, Washington Post, Elias Salameh, founder and director of the University of Jordan's Water Research and Study Center, made the following prediction:

No matter what progress irrigated agriculture makes, Jordan's

natural water at this pace will be exhausted in 2010.

Jordan then will be totally dependent on rain water and

will revert to desert. Its ruin will destabilize the entire

region.... None of the regional countries--Egypt, Israel,

Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia or the gulf emirates--can be

self-sufficient in food in the foreseeable future, if ever. All

Middle East economies must be restructured away from

agriculture because of a lack of water.

Yet agriculture remains the predominant source of work in most developing countries. Michael Renner of the Worldwatch Institute says that, in Rwanda, "half of all farming took place on hillsides by the mid-eighties, when overcultivation and soil erosion led to falling yields and a steep decline in total grain production." Overcultivation can then lead to a work shortage. Out of a global workforce of more than two billion people, at least 120 million are unemployed and another 700 million are underemployed or without enough income to meet basic human needs.

Linking the problems, Renner notes that "the Hutu leaders that planned and carried out the genocide in 1994 relied strongly on heavily armed militias" who were recruited primarily from the unemployed. "These were the people who had insufficient land to establish and support a family o! their own and little prospect of finding jobs outside agriculture," Renner continues. "Their lack of hope for the future and low self-esteem were channeled by the extremists into an orgy of violence against those who supposedly were to blame for these misfortunes."

The future with regard to overpopulation need not continue to be so dim. Although unbridled capitalism and the greed of corporations and their allies in politics bear responsibility for world poverty, unemployment, and the degradation of the soil, air, and water, the Vatican's success in organizing opposition on a worldwide level to any reduction of population is chiefly to blame.

The May 28, 1992, New York Times reports that "in preparation for next month's Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Vatican diplomats have begun a campaign to try to insure that the gathering's conclusions on the issue of runaway population growth are not in conflict with Roman Catholic teaching on birth control." The pope has gone so far as to issue a decree to Catholics that states: "In the case of an unjust law such as a law permitting abortion. "In is never lawful to obey it or to take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law or vote for it."

In the United States, the Vatican succeeded in getting enough support from right-wing Catholics and Protestants in Congress to block the United States from paying its debt to the United Nations by attaching an amendment to ban the use of federal funds by any private or government organization that supports abortion overseas or counsels women on where to get an abortion. These politicians are part of a coalition that has effectively captured the Republican Party, the House of Representatives, and much of the federal judiciary; it is within about two seats of changing the nature of the Supreme Court. Its influence has grown enormously in state legislatures, as well.

The Vatican, of course, wields tremendous power, but it doesn't speak for all Catholics. In the June 19, 1992, National Catholic Reporter, editor Tom Fox writes: "I feel the church is causing great harm to the planet, making millions suffer unnecessarily, and is compromising its teaching authority to boot, by its absolutist, narrowly defined birth control position."

Jennifer Mitchell, in the January/February 1998 Worm Watch magazine, writes:

In the developing world, at least 120 million married

women and a large but undefined number of unmarried

women want more control over their pregnancies, but

cannot get family planning services. This unmet demand

will cause about one-third of the projected population

growth in developing countries over the next fifty years,

or an increase of about 1.2 billion people.

It is significant that the Lancet has said, "No country has achieved smaller families or low maternal mortality without access to safe abortion ... and none will in the foreseeable future." The World Health Organization estimates that 585,000 women die each year during pregnancy and childbirth. However, according to the 1997 Vital Signs, "The death toll underestimates the magnitude of the problem. For every maternal death as many as 30 women sustain oftentimes crippling and lifelong health problems related to pregnancy." Moreover, many of these deaths and lifelong health problems could have been prevented by access to family planning services and safe, legal abortion.

It is also important to mention that more than 4.7 million people, most of them in southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, contracted HIV in 1995 and 1.7 million people died from AIDS. The Vatican has also strongly opposed any funding of contraceptives such as condoms, which can help prevent sexually transmitted diseases.

What all this means is that the so-called pro-life movement is really a pro-death movement--and we must begin to call it that, not only because of the population wars but because it is denying reproductive freedom to women worldwide and rejecting prevention of disease. But we, too, deserve some of the blame. We are too silent, too inactive, too complacent, too compliant.

Legalized abortion and contraceptive birth control are not only essential for the reproductive freedom of women, they, along with maintaining strong public schools, are where the crucial struggle to maintain separation of church and state must continue to be waged. Now is the time--before it's too late--to make humanism real by organizing and acting, by working with others, to raise the consciousness of a nation and a world, to save a planet.

John M. Swomley is professor emeritus of social ethics at St. Paul School of Theology, president of Americans for Religious Liberty, vice-president of the American Civil Liberties Union, and the author of ten books. This article is adapted from his acceptance of the American Humanist Association's 1998 Distinguished Service Award at its national conference in San Diego this past May.