What kind of society would we live in today if the U.S. had initiated a population policy a few decades ago? What if the burst of environmental awareness that occurred with the first Earth Day in 1970 had been followed with an actual strategy to deal with an American domestic overpopulation problem? What if someone in a position of great authority — the President, say — had read the demographic writing on the wall and had chosen to do something, like develop a national policy? After all, a country with a population policy of general sustainability would not have the highest growth rate in the industrialized world — due to immigration (as is the case) or for any other reason. “What if” is always a difficult question, but in this case, the subject matter of the book being considered insists upon it.
That book is The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy, by Stephen D. Mumford. You won't be hearing about on your local radio chat shows because its subject is currently quite controversial.
OVERPOPULATION AS A SECURITY PROBLEM
These days, the discussion about world population has been totally distorted by the religious right wing as being the moral equivalent of genocide. Despite all facts to the contrary, the Friends of the Fetus in Congress and elsewhere equate family planning with abortion, and regularly battle any and all U.S. funding of voluntary family planning around the world. (One might wish for more Friends of the Planet.) Even as evidence of global warming mounts, the enemies of stabilized population have so skewed the vocabulary that merely stating the fact that we all share resources from one finite planet seems radical.
But in the early 1970s, President Nixon, in a remarkable attack of progressive thinking, recognized the exponential increase in worldwide population as a security problem for the United States. He understood that the U.S., even as a superpower, was not an island apart. Nixon was alarmed that American population had doubled from 100 million in 1917 to 200 million in 1967, and responded to the surge in 1969 by sending Congress the “Special Message on Problems of Population Growth” and by creating the bipartisan Rockefeller Commission. The result was the report Population and the American Future, published in 1972. It called for reproductive and population education in schools, passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, available contraception for minors, and elimination of all employment of illegal aliens. Tragically, this brave new worldview was not to be.
Despite a barrage of attacks from conservative elements, particularly the Vatican, Nixon eventually forged ahead and requested the National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200. The publication of this 200-page report was met with mounting opposition by the same forces, and then-President Ford disappeared the paper. It has stayed quietly deceased until Mumford's thorough disinterment.
The most controversial part of the book, which is why it is virtually invisible in public discourse, is Mumford's characterization of the Vatican as applying extreme political pressure to maintain its power base. The author is very clear, however, that he is describing the Vatican which is a political entity, not its local churches and members. American citizens must pay for an ambassador to the Vatican, the only religious state to receive such treatment. Remember that the Pope routinely denounces any restrictions upon immigration by governments, despite the fact that his little state accepts exactly zero needy newcomers.
The book offers a powerful and disturbing explanation why U.S. policy about population has been in a state of total denial and devolution, and deserves public discussion.
You can read The Life and Death of NSSM 200 online or order it from the Center for Research on Population and Security, Box 13067, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709
— by Brenda Walker