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The rise and rise of the Champagne Malthusians
In March 1933, the International Birth Control Movement held a Malthusian Ball in London. In the opulent surroundings of the five-star Dorchester Hotel, the great and the good gathered to discuss the problem of poor people’s breeding, the ‘Negro issue’, the best way to promote ‘family planning’, and other burning Malthusian dilemmas. All while decked out in diamonds, gowns and tuxedos, doing the foxtrot and clinking their champagne glasses as they mulled over how best to stop the lower specimens of humanity from getting knocked up with such dumb abandon.

Last week I attended a modern-day equivalent of the Malthusian Ball. It was in the luxurious crypt of St Pancras Church in Euston rather than at the Dorchester and there was no dancing this time. But we were invited to drink ‘luxury Belgian beer from champagne flutes’ and to peruse £1,500 paintings depicting ‘teeming crowds’ as we debated the ‘population problem’. The attendees were more casually dressed than their 1933 forebears - no floor-draping dresses - but once again, in between sips from champagne glasses, men and women with pronunciation far more received than mine gathered to fret over how humankind is spreading like a ‘cancer’ (their word)....

...Obsessed with the idea of limited resources and the insatiable greed of men, Malthusians’ only solution is to save resources by reducing the number of men. A progressive possessed of a social outlook looks at the problems facing mankind and says (in a nutshell) ‘we need more stuff’ – a Malthusian looks at them and says ‘we need fewer people’. Their belief that all the world’s problems are caused by there being Too Many People has not only been proved unfounded again and again (we have continually discovered new and improved ways to make and distribute resources), but it also inevitably makes them misanthropic. Those who think human numbers can continue rising should remember that ‘unremitting growth is the doctrine of the cancer cell’, said Professor John Guillebaud in St Pancras Church, capturing well the Malthusians’ view of humanity as a virus on Gaia’s person....

...Yet when you promote ‘family planning’ on the basis that too many children will ‘destroy biodiversity’, on the basis that women are spawning ‘environment trashers’, on the basis that ‘we are doomed’ if women keep on breeding irresponsibly, on the basis that our offspring, little more than a species of ‘ape’, will do ‘sick and disgusting’ things to the Earth (all direct quotations from last week’s Malthusian get-together), then you’re not giving women a choice – you’re giving them an ultimatum: ‘Stop breeding or the planet gets it.’ You are polluting their decision-making universe with your own prejudices, using the politics of fear to get them to make the ‘right choices’. That is coercion. And whether you’re doing it in order to create a ‘strong and healthy nation’, as in 1933, or to ‘protect biodiversity’, as in 2010, the result is the same: women’s freedom of choice is undermined, and ordinary people are branded with the blame for what are in fact social problems....