STEUBENVILLE, OH—October 31, 2011, has been declared "the day of seven billion" – the day the population of the human race will reach its highest mark ever. Many experts have deemed this "an ominous day." But Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, says it should be a celebration.
"I, for one, am not frightened," Mosher said. "In fact, we're celebrating the birth of baby seven billion. (This milestone) represents a great victory over death."
Mosher presented his talk, "Baby Seven Billion: A Reason to Celebrate," on October 18 at Franciscan University of Steubenville. He said many secular experts try to frighten people with false ideas about overpopulation—that it leads to famine, increased global warming, a lack of resources, and economic troubles.
Mosher countered these popular ideas with two arguments: first, that population will soon peak, then begin declining again; and second, that economic problems and famine are not caused by large numbers of people, but by incompetent and corrupt governments.
"The worst environmental catastrophes in the world are not caused by people in their numbers—they are caused by governments which are unresponsive to the demands of the people to take care of the environment and to preserve natural resources," Mosher said.
Countless nations are actually declining in population, said Mosher—Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and much of Europe. In fact, Russia's population is declining so rapidly, the government has recently instated a "child bonus," paying approximately $13,000 to parents for each new birth.
"They're closing down the maternity wards in hospitals and opening geriatric wards in their place," Mosher said. "Our long-term problem is not going to be too many children—it's going to be too few children."
Mosher himself was once a pro-choice atheist. It was after he spent time in China in the late 1970s researching that government's "one child policy"—and witnessing the arrests of dozens of pregnant women who were later forced into abortions via lethal injection—that he began to realize the horrors of "population control."
"The (Chinese) government hands down to officials at all levels a quota of babies that are allowed to see the light of day," Mosher said. "For the officials, it's a matter of their career. For the couples who are trying to have their second or third child, it is literally a matter of life and death. They're eliminating the ultimate resource: the human resource, the one resource you can't do without—the creative, God-given intelligence."
Mosher concluded by saying that to view overpopulation as a "problem" is the result of a degraded view of the human being. "There's plenty of room on God's green earth for all of us," he said.
Mosher has appeared numerous times before Congress as an expert on world population, China, and human rights abuses. He holds master's degrees in cultural anthropology and East Asian studies from Stanford University. His talk was sponsored by the Franciscan University Legal Studies Department.