South Vietnam: Only One of Many Sad Examples Of Population Growth Threats!

By Donald A. Collins | 2 December 2024
Church and State

(Photo by Edward Moss on Unsplash)

Let’s start with the projected good news put forth by many experts as bad news or “difficult to adjust to” good news about the prospect of population reduction.

It is true that the fertility rate for women worldwide is declining and has been for decades even since the rate was going down just before the rapid increase in population numbers in the 1960s.

One American Enterprise Institute scholar is Nicholas Eberstadt who along with John Bonython offered a lecture you can listen to here.

Another similar view is from “The Fertility Apocalypse w/ Samo Burja” who discusses the “Demographic challenges and fertility crisis” which you can read about here.

Let’s agree that fertility RATES are substantially down. In many developed nations, life is good for many, and this 2nd author offers more nuanced views than Eberstadt. He admits a population size decline is uncertain but says there are more reasons involved than the current rate of decline in his population projections. Even so, he seems more uncertain about the reduction of human numbers.

The real question for me is how fast we can lower the unsustainable human impact on Earth. Burja suggests the history of growth occurs in leaps and declines has not stopped the march to higher numbers on a higher total base of human numbers. Also, how about our projected longer lives driven by increased better health worldwide?? Burja wonders how a world with only 80 million could manage!!!

The growth of the number of the aged he sees as a problem as many of us now live to be 100. I should admit my wife is now thankfully in her 100th year! Demand for care facilities arises.

As I listened to each of the above commentators, I did not think either of them were addressing the effect now of our huge numbers. I argue a decline in human numbers would it be good if it occurred in time before the climate driven flora and fauna declines failed to meet the needs of the large present population.

Mr. Burja suggests the government should be paying Americans to have babies. Since worldwide we will be “competing” with other nations. Doubt India, China or Russia are not going to want to lose a demographic numbers battle to the USA. Our founders proclaimed that “all men are created equal” but that ideal has not yet occurred here, certainly not worldwide. 

Predicting the future illustrates my arrogance, but here is my opinion. Let’s look at one of many current examples of the population situation in many countries but most acute in Africa.

In talking and writing as I have frequently done about the dangerous growth of population worldwide and in the United States, I was struck particularly by the data on Vietnam, which a family planning group that I organized visited in 1994. Our group of course only visited South Vietnam since North Vietnam remains separated by an armistice agreement fashioned at the end of hostilities in 1954.

Underneath all the world’s contemporary problems, environmental, medical, political, cultural, and immigration, lies the overwhelming impact of too many homo sapiens for our limited planet to sustain without disastrous consequences.

Speaking of immigration, as we are a nation of immigrants, making us the most ethnically diverse nation on the planet, it becomes ironic that the plan to deport millions of immigrants in the next 4 years would make business operations in, for example Texas, the most deportment eager state, to suffer from key labor shortages most specifically in agriculture and construction.

I favor making reasonable criteria on numbers for allowing immigrants to arrive in the USA but doing that legislatively was ignored for decades by both parties.

Having traveled widely throughout the world, I have observed firsthand the effects of such impossible to handle current numbers. Before, however, as human numbers expanded our Earth had the room to provide for the homo sapiens then living.

Now humanity and the flora and fauna which support us can look at the shriking of space and resources so that the next expansion will require more planets which despise the wishes of Elon Musk and other fantasists who aren’t content to see the reach of the unattainable universes that the James Webb telescope has revealed. Could greed or egos be involved?

In 1974 the population of South Vietnam was about 20 million people at roughly the time when the US withdrew our forces after its defeat from Vietnam.

I organized a study group to visit Vietnam in 1994 when the population in South Vietnam was 94 million.

The purpose of our study tour was to observe a method of family planning known as quinacrine sterilization or QS which had been widely used in the country by a national government program but had suffered from adverse publicity when we met with the top officials who were in charge of what had been an extremely successful program with no deaths, and no problems with the women who had received the treatment whom we visited in villages not far from Hanoi.

The QS method is fully described in an article entitled Creating Peace Of Mind For Women on the website of a nonprofit corporation International Services Assistance Services (ISAF).

You can access more information here.

At that time QS was used in over 50 countries by over 250,000 women with no deaths or serious complications. Quinacrine in WWll was used large doses by 2 million US soldiers for malaria, but in evaluating QS the FDA using a flawed study claimed its small, short term presence in a woman’s body caused cancer.

Unfortunately, the method was also attacked by several ideological enemies of family planning who sought to stop the method from being approved for widespread use.

Did such attacks prevail over other methods of birth regulation? How about abortion?

QS has since been studied extensively and proven by careful research to not cause cancer, is of modest cost and can be readily deliverable without any surgery by non-MD personnel who can be readily trained.

Extensive further information can be found here.

Endorsements of QS have been numerous over the years. For example, Jack Lippes, MD, whose IUD was used and still used by millions of women worldwide wrote extensively in favor of QS. Another recently came from the President of The Population Institute of Canada, Madeline Weld, and can be read here.

Sadly, this method which had such a promising start in Vietnam and in 50 other countries was not allowed to continue and as a result, the population in Vietnam in South Vietnam is now projected to reach 125 million in 2025. If approved by FDA its use could have had a profound effect worldwide.

Of course all methods fertility regulation need wider availability! In the USA nearly half the yearly births are unintended!

Worldwide population growth went from 3 billion in 1960 to over 8 billion today and is still growing as the capacity for sustainability declines. 3 billion people was about the number many environmental experts such as my friend Garret Harden, author of t essay “The tragedy of the commons” published in 1968 and many books on the dangers of population growth, thought our earth could sustain over time. That was about the number of us on earth when I was born in 1931!

Control of the US government will shortly be assumed by the Trump Administration, whose leader has described the growing environmental crisis as a hoax. Weather disruptions are growing fast!

The leadership of the world’s most powerful governments have rejected the funding necessary to curtail what the UN COP officials have predicted as out of control global warming based on proven scientific research. Neither has this group of powerful poulter nations acknowledged the impact of growing human numbers, despite the screams of less developed nations about the effects of their fossil fuel emissions.

Claims of coming improvements in our environment because of shifts in eating habits from meat to plant based foods, in a change from gasoline cars to electric, in the rise of solar and wind energy, or even the reauthorization of controlled nuclear power, may not occur in time to stop what is already well started called the 6th Extinction. Famous Greta Thunberg, now 21, hopes youth will be able to go beyond the words of her elders to provide enough money for successful real action.

If the population can decline rapidly now, human living conditions worldwide will benefit. Meantime, Russia’s Putin looms as he spreads fear of nuclear or even expanded use of better non-nuclear rockets.

Read here.

Which of the 4 Horsemen do you prefer, pestilence, war, famine or death?

While I am not an optimist, the reduction of human numbers must happen or as Paul Ehrlich said on a 60 Minutes segment with Scott Pelley earlier this year we will need 5 more planets like earth to sustain a lifestyle like ours in the US.

As for meeting the needs of more workers as human numbers decline, the present automation we now see which often causes our manufacturing jobs to go offshore to the cheapest countries will be solved by the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI).

Again, the time it takes to lessen pressure on our fragile planet’s resources will be critical in lessening the chance for a 6th Extinction!

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”, “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us”, “Economic Growth: A Cancer on all Earthly Life”, “On the Precipice of Political Disaster in 2024”, “Democracy at Red State Risk”, “Does Trump Go to Jail or to The Oval Office?” and “Trump: Pardon or Punish?: The Nixon Precedence Was Not A Trump Coup Denied!”.

Vietnam is facing a ‘grey’ wave: How will it cope with an ageing population?

ISAF Introduces QS 2016

Sir David Attenborough on overpopulation

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Interview with Carl Wahren, 2024

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