EDITOR  -  Ideologically driven movements are rarely equipped or eager to examine their own presuppositions. The population control lobby and its apologists in the BMJ [1] are examples.

                King and  Elliott for instance extol the ideas of Garrett Hardin. Hardin is a eugenicist being  a  former director of the American Eugenics Society. He was an active member at the same  time as the Nazi eugenicist Otmar Von Verschuer who became a foreign  member in 1956.[2] Verschuer who was a teacher of Josef  Mengele and similarly interested in twin research helped finance Mengele's grotesque experiments at Auschwitz. 'My assistant Dr. Mengele has joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsurmfuhrer and camp physician in the concentration camp at Auschwitz ... the blood samples are being sent to my laboratory for analysis. [3]  The activities of Verschuer were well known but far from being treated as an outcast he was given honour and academic favours by the eugenics establishment.

                That Hardin would associate with those who trampled on human rights is not surprising. In 1969 he wrote, 'Coercion is a dirty word to most liberals now but it need not forever be so. As with the four letter words, its dirtiness can be cleansed away by exposure to the light, by saying it over and over, without apology or embarrassment.' [4]

                The links between eugenics and population control are not difficult to discover. IPPF was a member of the Eugenics Society in 1977. It still financially supports China's brutal coercive population policy under which women have undergone forced abortion and sterilization and untold numbers of baby girls have been killed. The Chinese law promotes these atrocities on eugenic grounds.

                King and Elliott claim that the genocide in Rwanda was due to population pressures. The real cause was eugenic racism. 'All manner of humiliating folly was employed in the name of proving this theory of innate Tutsi superiority. Skulls and noses were measured....  The effect of this injustice and of the stereotyping of the Hutu as lesser human beings was to create murderous feelings of inferiority and resentment. [5]

                Eugenics did not die out in 1945. It is flourishing amongst population control and intellectual elites and now it seems on the pages of the BMJ.

Yours sincerely,   Gregory Gardner MRCGP (locum GP).
 
 

1. King M, Elliott C. To the point of farce: a Martian view of the Hardinian taboo - the silence that surrounds population control. BMJ 1997.1315:1441-3.

2. www.africa2000.com/eugenics

3.  Proctor RN. Racial hygiene. Medicine under the Nazis. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press 1988:44.

4.  Hardin G. Population, evolution and birth control. A challenge of controversial ideas. San Francisco, WH Freeman 1969:378.

5.  Keane F. Letter from Rwanda. BBC Radio 4. 25.  Nov. 1996.
 
 
 

EDITOR - Our only presupposition is that there is something to be done - other than casting a taboo over the whole problem, when a community proceeds to starvation and slaughter as the result of exceeding the carrying capacity of its ecosystem, and its opportunities for migration, and the ability of its economy to produce necessary exports, which it can exchange for essential imports, especially food - that is it is demographically trapped. If tribal tensions are already acute, slaughter is inevitable. We argue that the level of slaughter normally endemic in the region would not have escalated in quite the way it did, had not Rwanda been severely trapped.

                Here is the definitive report on the genocide:  "...the decision to kill was made by politicians. But at least part of the reason why it was carried out so thoroughly by the ordinary...   peasants was the feeling that there were too many people on too little land, and with a few less there would be more for the survivors...   "[1] Tempting indeed, if each person only has 34 metres square of some eroding hillside, as in Ruhondo.

                Paul Demeny named this taboo, as he applied it to the discussion of entrapment by his fellow demographers in his own journal, the Population and Development Review. He named it by virtue of the fact that, as an ecologist, Garrett Hardin has over many years brilliantly described the taboos that we humans apply to our population problems, of which demographic entrapment is merely the gravest.

                Whatever else Hardin may, or may not have done, is irrelevant to this issue. As an ecologist he considers us humans as being constrained by the limitations of food, territory, and migration, and not somehow above them (the humanist exemption). Consequently, he has studied the taboos we use to avoid facing them. For this work he has had them named after him.

                Gardner muddles eugenics (...controlled breeding for desirable inherited characteristics... OED) with 'population control', a term inserted in the title of our paper by the editor, and one which we avoid, since it is often used emotively. We argue that the legitimate incentives and disincentives for fertility control may be better than for a community, of whatever ethnic group, to proceed to starvation or slaughter. This issue needs to be debated globally in the context of a UN programme for a 1-child world - it continues at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/demographic_entrapment.

1. International Response to Conflict and Genocide: Lessons from the Rwanda Experience. Steering Committee of the Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda. Editor David Millwood. Copenhagen. Denmark.
 
 Further comment, since space in the BMJ was limited.    We comment only on  Dr Gardner's  more rational arguments.

                (1) The intense emotions that surround the term 'population control' hence or reluctance to use it. Given the reality of entrapment, the choice before a  trapped community is  either a  radical reduction of fertility, most likely to the point of 1-child families, or starvation and slaughter.  We argue (a) that this predicament needs to be debated globally, not tabooed.
(b)  That it has to be made as clear as possible to the community. (c) That the legitimate incentives and disincentives that they may employ, should be debated by the Human Rights Movement - a debate which has yet to take place. Our position is that they should be made to see the alternatives ac clearly as possible, but they should not be 'forced'. Just how 'force'  is to be defined we leave to the Human Rights Movement. (d) The community's  decision   should be  final in the difficult choice between   'population control' and starvation or slaughter. China has made that choice.  The Hardinian taboo has prevented other communities from even knowing that there is a choice to be made.

                (2) The eugenics/population control muddle.  '`Population control' is concerned with the dire consequences of  communities  exceeding the carrying capacities of their ecosystems, their opportunities for migration, and the ability of their economies to produce exports and therefore imports. Eugenics is "the science of improving population (especially human)  by controlled breeding for desirable characteristics (OED)".  We are not concerned with whether deaths are Hutu or Tutsi, both are equally deplorable. We also deplore the process of 'ethnogenesis' whereby previous administrations deepened the divide between the two, instead of minimizing it.  We have no views on eugenics, since it is irrelevant to entrapment.

                 (3) "....Coercion is a dirty word... but it need not be so for ever...".  Just as 'reproductive health'  has partly replaced 'family planning'  another  less loaded term  than 'coercion'  would be useful. 

                We throw out a challenge to Dr Gardner.  If he was outlining a  UN  programme  for the rehabilitation of Rwanda, what would it be?  Ours is on the web.