Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda

P. A. Ritzer

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Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda

Part Two of "The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It"

P. A. Ritzer

Feb 04, 2025

Transcript

group of children standing on grass field during daytime — Photo by Siddhant Soni on Unsplash

P. A. Ritzer, Volume 25

Please see Part One: “One Big Family” of “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It,” and “The War on Women and Population Control.”

The uncle mentioned above was husband to my mother’s sister, her only sibling. By the hand of Providence, my mother and her sister each had seven children, four girls and three boys. And that aunt once told me about how the women she worked with, at a public school where she was a librarian, were disparaging Catholics, and talking about how they bred like rabbits. Then they said to her, “But we don’t mean you.” She replied, “Yes, you do mean me. I am Catholic, and I have seven children. So, you do mean me.” They also complained about Catholics using public schools, finally conceding, “Well, I guess they do pay taxes.” Left unmentioned was the fact that Catholic schools saved taxpayers millions of dollars every year by educating children, whether Catholic or not, at no expense to the taxpayers, even though the parents of those children paid the taxes that supported the public schools to which they did not send their children.

In one of those public schools, a high school, my mother was filling in as a substitute teacher one day when a girl approached her desk. She asked my mother if each of the charms on the bracelet she was wearing represented a child of hers. My mother answered that each did. The girl then told my mother that she thought it was wrong for any one to have that many children. And my mother tactfully responded to the misguided girl that she did not agree with her.

More recently, though still some years ago, in a short conversation with a pleasant-enough young woman with whom I had been working at a book signing, it came out that I had grown up in a family of seven children. The young woman in a spontaneous and perfectly natural reply said about my parents, “They never quite figured that one out, huh?” I was left speechless, completely taken aback as the meaning of her comment broke through the barrier of my orientation. Here this friendly woman was reflexively and blithely suggesting that my parents were too stupid to understand that sexual relations led to pregnancy, a truly ironic conclusion given that she apparently embraced the popular culture in which the argument was often made that a woman who conceived a child after engaging in consensual sexual relations should have the option to abort the child because her pregnancy was unintended.

Still, along the way I did experience a bit of light breaking through the pall of overpopulation propaganda, and it came from a fellow named Tom from, of all places, California.

She was furthermore suggesting that my mother (a librarian and teacher, who at seventeen years old had earned a full academic scholarship to a leading women’s college and, through it, her degree) and my father (a landscape architect, who had earned his college degree while helping run a family landscaping business and raising a young family) were too stupid to know that they were only supposed to have one or two children and too stupid to know how to prevent the others from happening along. Of course, the woman’s assumption about my parents’ stupidity included that they should not have wanted to have so many children and should have used contraception to make sure they did not.

Even had I been able to respond to the woman, how could I have ever conveyed to one so shallow the depth of my parents’ understanding of the nature of love and the Sacrament of Matrimony; the wisdom of the Christian understanding of love and marriage so faithfully presented in St. Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae; the theology of the body that St. John Paul II would later so ably annunciate; the openness to life called for in the words of God, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it;”1 the richness of faith in believing that He meant it and would make sure that it would all work out if we would only do our work and trust and obey Him; and the beauty of life and the depth of love that could thereby result. Where would one even start?

Still, along the way I did experience a bit of light breaking through the pall of overpopulation propaganda, and it came from a fellow named Tom from, of all places, California. We were both studying in the same program in Italy in the early eighties, though we did not know each other very well. One day we were visiting, and it came out that he was one of ten children, if I remember right. That broke us into the natural affinity that exists to varying degrees among those from large families. And in that conversation, Tom, who was a bright and engaging fellow, said something about which I may have heard inklings before. He said that he did not believe the propaganda about overpopulation. He said without equivocation that there was plenty of room on the earth for plenty more people. And I asked him what he knew about it. I do not remember all that he said, but I remember that it made an impression, and I wanted to know more.

Well, I had the chance to learn more at a parish I belonged to in Texas in the 1990s, when I was asked to be a presenter for the Millennium Evangelization Project (MEP) from the University of Dallas, based on a program out of the Philippines. As soon as I saw the topics to present, I immediately chose “The Myths of Overpopulation,” and was immersed in research and facts that validated the case that Tom from California had made all those years before. In fact from what I learned, the title “The Lies of Overpopulation” may have been more accurate. Among those who famously got it very wrong was Paul Ehrlich who wrote, with his wife Anne, The Population Bomb, published in 1968. Among those who got it very right was Julian Simon as described in the article “Julian Simon Was Right: A Half-Century of Population Growth, Increasing Prosperity, and Falling Commodity Prices” by Marian L. Tupy in Economic Development Bulletin.2

So those who would still value love and openness to life in their marriages were made personae non grata in villages in which their families had lived for generations, because they were seen to be keeping the rest of the village from receiving improvements to their standard of living.

And I learned about Steven W. Mosher, a brilliant, erudite, and dignified man who, as a doctoral student in anthropology at Stanford University and a pro-abortion atheist, was invited to China by the Chinese government to observe their one-child policy. What he witnessed there, including forced abortions and sterilizations, drove him out of atheism and support for abortion and eventually into Christianity and the Catholic Church and the fatherhood of nine children. He is now the president of Population Research Institute (PRI) where one can find all the information one wants to expose the lies of overpopulation propaganda, like this article of the pro-death stances of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.3 Or one might start with this recent article: “East Asia’s Coming Population Collapse: And How It Will Reshape World Politics” by Nicholas Eberstadt in Foreign Affairs.4 Or one might watch Depopulation Bomb: Why Are Birth Rates Falling Across the Globe? on Epoch TV.5 Rest assured, we are not going to overpopulate the planet.

Among all the diabolical things I learned about the population-control movement was how developed nations, like the United States during the tenure of Democrat presidents, through the United Nations and other organizations, would coerce people from countries with a lower material standard of living to use contraception to have fewer children. Thus would representatives of Western population-control advocates and agencies and organizations gather villagers together like lab rats and have them all report on what form of contraception they were using. How evil is that! Talk about letting the government into the bedroom! And using our tax dollars to invade the profoundly private realm of the marital relations of poor people! Can you get much more creepy than that? So under Democratic administrations, unbeknownst to most Americans, our tax dollars are used to fund such evil practices of elitist leftists who assume that they have a right to probe and regulate the marital relations of fellow human beings due to the leftists’ selfish fears—based on hysterical, erroneous projections—that those people from distant lands and cultures who still value life and children will prove a threat to their exorbitant consumption of material goods. God help us.

But it was much worse than that. Not only would these elitists pry into and try to regulate our fellow human beings’ marital relations and how many children they would bring into the world, but then they would try to coerce and extort them into contraception use by conditioning upon it the availability of things like electricity and clean water for the village. Thus would they call out villagers in front of all their neighbors to expose what type of contraception they were using or if they were using none at all. Then the elitists would make it clear that electricity or a clean-water project or some other good would not be brought to the village until a certain percentage of the villagers was using contraception. So those who would still value love and openness to life in their marriages were made personae non grata in villages in which their families had lived for generations, because they were seen to be keeping the rest of the village from receiving improvements to their standard of living. Ponder the evil of that. Well did Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Present rebuke Scrooge and all who reckon themselves so superior as to judge their fellow human beings to be surplus population:

“Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”6

And with that ghostly admonition, we will close Part Two.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

Part Three of this series will follow shortly.

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