The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ (remembered these days as being about collective action, but actually a long argument for coerced population control), found ‘freedom to breed intolerable’, coercion ‘a necessity’ and that ‘the only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon.’ Hardin’s view was nearly universal. ‘Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control,’ wrote John Holdren (now President Obama’s science adviser) and Paul and Anne Ehrlich in 1977, but not to worry: ‘It has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.’ All right-thinking people agreed, as they so often do, that top-down government action was needed: people must be ordered or at least bribed to accept sterilisation and punished for refusing it. Which is exactly what happened. Egged on by Western governments and pressure groups such as the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, coerced sterilisation became a pattern in many parts of Asia in the 1970s. ‘Dalkon Shield’ contraceptive devices, the subject of safety lawsuits in America, were bought in bulk by the American federal government and shipped to Asia. Chinese women were f...