family planning

Contrary to the hopes of those who care about an environmentally sustainable future for humanity and the biosphere, world population growth is actually speeding up, not slowing down.

According to the demographers at the respected Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C, approximately 90 million people have been added to the planet’s population since last year, at the average rate of 246,000 more humans (net, or births minus deaths) every single day.

Nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended or unwanted.

In Yvon Chouinard’s “Let my people go surfing / the education of a reluctant businessman,” the founder and owner of Patagonia, writes, “From the very beginning of our catalog, we have always tried to portray women as equal to men. When we showed women climbing, they were leading, not following.”

I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Honduras for three years. Family planning and birth control were rudimentary at best in that small, struggling Central American republic. Not coincidentally, there were many unplanned births and extremely rapid population growth. When I was in Honduras, its population was increasing by more than 3 percent annually, at a rate that would double its size every 20 to 25 years.
 

A CAPS Advisory Board member, chemist and professor widely credited as the father of the birth control pill, or “the Pill,” Carl Djerassi, died January 30 at age 91.

Evidence mounts that world population will not stabilize, as some forecasters thought it would, by 2050.