Population: Planning for 2000

The poor may not be getting poorer, but they are constantly growing more numerous. Poor families in the U.S. have an average of 4.5 children compared with three for those above the poverty line. Last week President Nixon sent a message to Congress calling for a major increase in federal family planning services in the next five years. The goal: to make birth control information and devices available to all American women of childbearing age.

The greatest impact would be among the estimated 5,000,000 low-income women in this category. Nixon’s proposal would raise federal spending on birth control—now $64 million annually —by $150 million after five years. The President also urged a federal study of U.S. population growth, its expected effects and the nation’s capacity to handle it, and urged the United Nations to take the lead in controlling world population growth. Presidential Assistant Daniel P. Moynihan said the problem was the world’s most serious save for disarmament.

Though Nixon pledged that the program would not be forced on individuals against their beliefs, an official of the New York Catholic archdiocese charged that it would add “an implicit pressure” on welfare mothers to accept. A Florida N.A.A.C.P. leader also criticized the program on the grounds that blacks “need to produce more babies, not less,” for added political power. The plan, however, drew praise from many family planning and demographic experts and from the Episcopal bishop of California, C. Kilmer Myers. Indeed, unless the birth rate is cut, U.S. population (now more than 200 million) will exceed 300 million by the year 2000.