Held to answer

The earth’s seven billionth baby was born recently, and it turned out to be just another story of the week.

Procreation is the most sacred of sacred cows for politicians and the media.

Republicans are joined at the hip to the religious right, and the religious right dances around a male deity (who had a son, not a daughter). Even the most primitive cultures have figured out that the easiest way to control females is to get them knocked up.

Democrats have been weak advocates for all forms of birth control, including abortion. They are so fearful of offending someone’s cultural heritage, they avoid any hint of eugenics. They long ago ceded that empty phrase, “pro-life,” to Republicans.

I know pro-life Republicans who won’t acknowledge that people die in this country for lack of health care or that millions of babies on the planet are born into misery.

I know pro-choice Democrats who secretly want young women to stop choosing birth for babies they cannot and will not support. These good Democrats say nothing for fear of being called judgmental.

So the seven billionth baby came and went.

We’ll soon be back to stories about how women in the Western nations are not having enough babies. These stories pop up regularly, even on NPR.

One of the most ridiculous was published four months ago in The New York Times. In an essay entitled “The Problems of a Graying Population,” Chrystia Freeland of Reuters attempted to tie together the summer protests in Spain and Greece, the budget deadlock in Washington and Anders Breivik’s shooting rampage in Norway as a result of fewer babies being born in the Western world.

“As life expectancy increases and fertility declines, that population pyramid is being inverted — and in some countries, that is causing the entire economy to topple,” Freeland wrote.

In her view, we need more babies to grow up and provide financial support for the elderly. She doesn’t indicate what kind of jobs will await these babies after they grow up.

Technology is taking away jobs in the developed world, and a surplus of workers guarantees lower salaries. There would not be a generational war if there were enough work and prosperity to go around.

Freeland says the answer is feminism, “the one political movement that has long campaigned for societies to find a better way for women to be both workers and mothers. … To fix our economies in the long term, what we should probably be talking about is maternity and paternity leave and workplace day care.”

Encouraging more breeding is hardly the appropriate response to a world-wide population of seven billion.

This story is so huge, nobody thinks it’s local and applies to them. While the media were reporting on the various “symbolic” babies representing Number 7,000,000,000, in Canby, Ore. the school board was fussing over a proposal to allow high school nurses to prescribe birth control to students on campus. (The board voted no.)

We’ve got a never-ending American presidential campaign, and none of the candidates want to talk about population control. The Republican candidates vow to be the most pro-life.

Joel Cohen, a mathematical biologist at Columbia University, noted that providing modern contraception to all people “with unmet needs” would cost about $6.7 billion – less than the $6.9 Americans likely spent for Halloween this year.

But even he muted his warnings on why we should restrain ourselves: “Pronatalism” is unjustified, was how he put it. He was also careful to take a swipe at the English clergyman, Thomas Malthus, calling his late 18th Century predictions that soaring populations would lead to mass starvation as “discredited.”

Those predictions came true in Ethiopia and Somalia – to name two countries that have lost millions to starvation. And that’s not taking into consideration how much of the planet’s environment has been lost to fight hunger. (Nor does it discredit Malthus’s theory that when food production is improved, it increases human population – but not always the quality of life.)

The more there is of something, the less it is valued. It is no different for human life. That is hard to accept if you think humans are special just because they are human.

When several countries produced “symbolic” babies to celebrate the seven billionth one, the media straddled opposite sides of the issue – treating it as good news for the individual families, but not necessarily for the planet.

In 1999, when world population hit the six billion mark, the U.N. designated a boy born in Sarajevo as the symbolic baby. ABC News tracked him down recently.

Adnan Mevic is now 12 years old. He is a sweet-faced boy who lives with his parents in a single-room apartment in the Bosnian city of Visoko. His father is terminally ill with colon cancer, and his mother lost her job as a textile worker.

According to ABC News, Adnan has been diagnosed with a small hole in his heart. The family survives on $350 a month and cannot afford the healthcare they need.

Perhaps the news story will help them get more resources.

Otherwise, Adnan will be lost in a crowd of seven billion.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons