POPULATION: The Numbers Game

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Words v. Deeds. So far, birth control campaigns, even when given government support (as in India), have had a hard time of it. Birth control advocates and research scientists look ahead to "the pill" —the still-undiscovered oral contraceptive cheap enough to suit the pocketbooks of impoverished Latinos, Asians and Africans and simple enough to be understood by all. Resistance to the idea of birth control is often a complex of emotional, moral, philosophical and economic attitudes. In Latin America, the Philippines, South Viet Nam and Ceylon, the Roman Catholic prohibition of contraception is felt. India still echoes to the sexual dictum of Gandhi that "union is a crime when desire for progeny is absent." In Pakistan the standard male reaction to birth control is "a man must have children or he is not a man" throughout the Moslem world, there is the belief that children are "a gift of Allah"; and in many places, a barren woman is an object of pity. In lands where death comes early and often, those who wish extra hands in the fields fear to have few children. In rural Ceylon, people look upon large families as the first step to political influence; so, on an international scale, do ambitious leaders of small states—such as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah.

Red China, whose population is variously estimated to be anywhere from 580 million to 680 million, has had a curiously confused attitude toward bigness—alternating between a desire for manpower and a concern for so many mouths to feed. Early in 1956, Peking turned on a birth control campaign that plugged everything from up-to-date devices to the favorite oral contraceptive of Chinese herbalists: live tadpoles. But in 1958, Red China's bosses quietly dropped birth control, now preach the gospel according to Karl Marx: an increase in population is always an increase in capital.

Reproduction seems to be one field where private enterprise always triumphs. Historically, governments and churches have had remarkably little success in influencing breeding habits. In most Western countries, the difference between Roman Catholic and Protestant birth rates is slight or nonexistent. In Fascist Italy, all the martial exhortations of Il Duce failed to persuade Italians to increase the size of their families. And in India, where Nehru boasts "there is more official talk and action on birth control than in any other country," government planners recently conceded that they had been a mere 46 million low in their original estimate of India's population by 1966.

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