All this week at Pro-Life Perspective, National Right to Life President and PLP Host Carol Tobias is providing you with sizable tidbits from the excellent opening presentation at NRLC 2012 by Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute. By way of a quick reminder.
Speaking of the convention don’t forget, as we alerted you last week, that you can now not only order CD recording of the General Sessions, individual workshops, the Prayer Breakfast, and the Closing Banquet., but also that you can purchase them online at http://shop.nrlchapters.org.
If your preference is CDs, you can order them here. (You’ll find a complete list by title and presenters. Individual recordings are $8.00 each; the entire set is $400.)
In yesterday’s excerpt Mr. Mosher began by discussing the origins of the myth of overpopulation. The Rev. Thomas Malthus, a British minister in India, theorized that because population growth will “always” exceed food supply, so there was no need to respond to the famines that took millions of lives in Northern and Southern India. From there…
“So the myth of overpopulation – Malthusian origins of it – became a justification or a hands-off policy towards India and other British colonies where when famine occurred people were just left to die. So the Rev. Malthus, instead of responding to his better angels and responding to the needs of those who were hungry by providing the food, said ‘No don’t provide them with food. Let them die because if they don’t they and their children will die inevitably in the future.’ We also see the Malthusian myth of overpopulation at play in the Irish Potato Famine.
“And of course we’ve seen that the fundamental premise of the myth is mistaken. We’ve seen food supply continue to increase faster than population for decades now because of the green revolution. We’ve seen per capita food consumption continue to go up worldwide. Even though we have 7 billion people, we’re eating better than ever before. And yet, people still talk about overpopulation and still talk about the fact that soon we will run out of food.
“So let me tell you about the worst famine in human history. This was a famine not caused by too many babies; it is not caused by overpopulation-it was caused by government mismanagement of the economy. It happened in China from 1960 to 1962. A couple of years before, in 1958, Chairman Mao Tse Tung forced the Chinese people into large communes. Up to 80,000 people were told that they were to farm the land in common. Communist Party officials were put in charge of these so-called ‘People’s communes.’ They didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t plant on time, they didn’t irrigate properly, they didn’t harvest on time. Crops were lost, and by 1960 there was a nationwide famine and millions of people were starting to die Now at that point Chairman Mao could’ve done the right thing. He could’ve announced to the world that his policies had failed and ask for help, and the great grain-producing countries of the world (like the United States and Canada and Australia) would’ve responded generously and ships of grain would have begun arriving in Chinese ports. Instead he tried to hide the famine, hide the evidence of his failure.”
We’ll continue tomorrow with more of Mr. Mosher’s opening address at the annual National Right to Life Convention. In the meantime, we’ve provided links to purchase a CD or MP3 of this, and every other general session and workshop at NRLC 2012 at prolifeperspective.com. We’ve also provided links to the work of the Population Research Institute and several of the videos Mr. Mosher screened at the convention. Again, all of that is available at www.prolifeperspective.com.
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