People Aren’t the Problem

A quiet knock sounded at the door of a small apartment in China--the home of young Christian woman I'll call Ling Tao. It was her brother. With bad news: His wife was pregnant. Normally, that would be good news. But in China, the government restricts the number of children a couple may have. If the wife gets pregnant again, she's hauled off to a clinic and forced to submit to an abortion. Currently, the legal limit in China is one child. Ling Tao's brother already had their one child. Now his wife was pregnant again, and he was afraid for the baby's life. "What shall we do?" he whispered. As a Christian, Ling Tao knew exactly what to do. She persuaded her brother and his wife to continue the pregnancy. And she promised that if the government ever found out about the second child, she would take it and raise it herself. And so quietly, bravely, 3 people took a stand for human life against a government that throws people out on the garbage heap like so many empty cans. Thank God it doesn't happen in America. At least, not today. But maybe tomorrow. America has an active and well-funded population control lobby. The prestigious magazine Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has published articles recommending coercive measures to control the population. Heavy taxation of couples with more than the legal number of children. Birth licenses so only selected adults can reproduce. Compulsory sterilization for those deemed unfit. Fertility-control drugs added to the water supplies. All this puts a new light on the so-called pro-choice movements. Here in America, groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation use choice as a slogan, only because it's come to mean a legal right to abortion. But in places like China, they show their true colors, where they support forced sterilization and forced abortion. The real goal is not choice, it's population control-- no matter how coercive. Why? Because the population lobby sees people as the problem. They think the more people there are, the less there is to go around. Each person gets a smaller slice of the pie. But a person is not just another mouth to feed. A person is also 2 hands and a mind, which he uses to bake a new pie to share with others. Over an average lifetime, an individual actually produces more than he consumes. In modern technology, the creative input of human hands and minds has become even more important than what nature provides as raw resources. Take the silicon chip, for example. It's made out of sand. Common sand. What turns it into computer chips is an incredible amount of creative human energy. No, humans aren't the problem. When God created Adam and Eve, His pronouncement on the human race was that it was "very good." And God's first recorded words to them was a command to "be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth." When God promised Abraham descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky that was meant as a blessing. The solution to poverty and pollution is not restricting the number of children born; it's calling all people to become children of God--to respect and care for the world God created. A change not in population size but in the human heart. And if that happens, Americans will never have to fear the a quiet knock on the door.

07/20/92