Word: birthed
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...main [factors] is whether the baby is delivered too small or too soon, which increases its chances of death. About two-thirds of all of our infant deaths occur among the 8.2% of babies that are born at low birth weight. Most developed countries have lower rates of preterm and low birth weight deliveries [than the U.S.] and that makes a difference in infant mortality rates...
Back in the 1970s, Hayden's argument wouldn't have been surprising. That era, which saw the birth of the modern environmental movement (the first Earth Day was observed in 1970), was obsessed with the idea of global limits, that without drastic intervention, we were doomed to overpopulation. Books like Paul Erhlich's The Population Bomb warned that the Earth was reaching the end of its carrying capacity, and that within decades, hundreds of millions of people would starve to death. The only way to avoid this Malthusian fate was rigid population control, which many environmentalists were in favor...
...growing planet feed itself, while the forces of globalization helped lift hundreds of millions in the developing world out of poverty, even as population continued to rise. As the years passed, overpopulation has dropped from the vocabulary of most environmentalists, partially due to the controversies that surrounded state-mandated birth control in countries like China, with its one-child policy. Though simple arithmetic will tell you that the bigger the global population becomes, the harder it will be to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, you rarely see the population connection made explicit in major environmental reports. "Environmentalists came to realize...
...question remains though: what can we do about population? State-mandated birth control is essentially unfair - and a policy no American government would ever support. But in his new book, Engleman makes the argument that the government doesn't need to get involved. The key to limiting population growth, he says, is to give control over procreation to women. In society after society, even in countries where large families have always been the norm, when women take control over family size, birth rates shrink. "They don't have to be coerced," says Engleman. "This will happen as long as women...
...seen this transition happen myself. In Japan, where I spent a year as a foreign correspondent, large families were once the norm, and women rarely worked. That's changed - and Japan's birth rate has plummeted - as women seek professional and personal fulfillment beyond having children. But that change has yet to occur in those parts of the developing world that are growing fastest, such as Uganda, where population is rising at 3.6%, the highest rate in the world. That's what Gen. Hayden is worried about - that bursting population will turn struggling nations like Uganda into basket cases, with...