The government of Vietnam will decide on December 22 whether to penalize parents who have more than two children, reinitiating a coercive population policy it abandoned in 2003.

“We are considering an adjustment to our policy appropriate to the circumstances of the country,” Truong Thi Mai, chair of Vietnam’s Parliamentary Committee of Social Affairs, confirmed on Saturday. “The Parliament Standing Committee will decide the week after next.”

Ms. Mai, a leading figure in the government debate who sits on the influential Standing Committee, was attending a weekend conference of the Asian Forum of Parliamentarians on Population and Development in Hanoi. She declined to provide details of the proposed policy adjustment, but said it was brought about by continuing poverty in rural areas associated with families with more than two children.

Asked whether the policy would violate the principles of family planning voluntarism, an approach that Vietnam government representatives agreed to at the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, Ms. Mai responded that the government “has consulted all international laws to which Vietnam is a party” and had discussed the proposed policy change with the United Nations Population Fund. The 1994 agreement lacks the status of international law.

UN sources confirmed that discussion and characterized the initiative as a return of population policy influence by government forces who believe Vietnam’s decline in fertility – it fell from 3.8 children per woman in 1989 to less than 2.1 today – is among its greatest social successes. The fertility rate has not risen significantly in recent years, but some Vietnamese officials nonetheless fear that a population “boomlet” may be occurring.

If approved, the new policy would impose fines on parents for any third and higher-order children, the UN sources said. Government officials and parliamentarians are already required to have no more than two children, risking advancement or continued service if they have more.

Initiation of the proposed new policy may also reflect the recent breakup of what had been a ministry devoted to population, maternal health, and child welfare, according to the UN sources. These three functions have since been split into three departments and divided among ministries, weakening the influence of former ministry officials committed to family planning voluntarism.

The Vietnamese two-child population policy had been in effect in the 1990s and until 2003, when – in part due to international pressure against coercive family planning policies – it was replaced with a policy encouraging a “small-family norm” throughout the country.

Reinstatement of the two-child policy would be reminiscent of the longstanding one-child population policy of China, Vietnam’s northern neighbor, which requires that most parents have no more than one child or face fines or other penalties. Despite this policy, China’s fertility averages around 1.8 children per woman, indicating widespread exceptions to or evasions of the policy.

Vietnam’s fertility rate rose slightly around the time its two-child policy was relaxed in 2003, but demographers judge the increase insignificant and doubt it stemmed from relaxation of the policy. The fertility rate has since fallen back to 2.1 or slightly lower, according to UN sources.

Fertility rates that stay consistently at two children per woman allow a population eventually to stop growing in the absence of significant net immigration. Most eastern Asian countries have experienced rapid fertility decline in recent decades, to roughly two children or fewer, due to the increasing popularity of small families and improved access to family planning services in the region.

———-

Robert Engelman is Vice President for Programs at the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research organization based in Washington, D.C. He is the author of More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want.

Keeping a book short is no easy task, especially on a set of topics as complex and controversial as population and the reproductive intentions of women. Now that I’m discussing my latest book, More, widely, and the publication is gaining some reviews (such as this one in The Washington Post), I’m developing a list of topics I hope to develop further if I ever write the sequel. The title could be More More, or maybe even More, Longer More.

Many points that some readers feel I’ve missed are actually in the book, though perhaps not highlighted or explored in depth as much as people would like. That’s the case with the topic of individual consumption of natural resources, which I discussed in an earlier blog (“All Consuming Question,” June 6). And I do make the point clearly (as have some reviewers and questioners) that many women aren’t able to use contraception at all because of social pressure from their partners and others in their lives.

By contrast, some topics could use more attention in a future treatment of this linkage. Among those I’m making notes on are:

• The desire of many women to have large families, and the need some have felt throughout history to enhance their fertility, not suppress it. I acknowledge in More the diversity of childbearing intentions among women, and point out that what matters to overall population outcomes is average fertility, not that of any particular woman or group. But the persistence of reported high desired fertility among many women is worth exploring in more detail. I’d like to try to tease out what is personal and what is social (and possibly socially pressured) in women’s frequently expressed hopes for having many children in some societies.

• The related issue of infecundity—the inability to bear or father a child that is (commonly called infertility, though technically this term means simply having no children.) Should couples or individual women who would like to conceive and bear a child, but who have had difficulty in doing so get help from societies and governments (a measure that I support for women who want to postpone and prevent pregnancy?).

• The ways that men often support rather than undermine women’s reproductive intentions and strategies. An earlier draft of More had a longer section on contemporary male involvement in reproduction and its importance, and I’d like to dig further into that topic.

• The importance of sexuality education. This is a critical component of healthy and intentional reproduction that deserves much more attention. The recent news story about a spate of teen pregnancies in Gloucester, Mass., serves as a sad reminder of the high cost of blindness to young people’s need for sound information about sex and reproduction as well as access to safe and effective contraceptive options.

I may deal with some of these points in future blog posts. It’s hard to say, after all, whether or when More More will ever see the light of day.

Some people think policies aimed at slowing population growth are foisted on the developing world by heavy-handed industrialized countries. Actually, most population policies are home grown, and sometimes none the better for this. I have a hunch there’s not much gender diversity in the circles that develop them. And those who write about them often fall into the same trap.

Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak recently endorsed a new $80 million campaign that reportedly focuses on the slogan “Two children per family—a chance for a better life.” Mubarak took office in 1981 in a country with about 45 million people. Egypt today grapples with food scarcity and riotous bread lines in one with 78 million.

Almost all the country’s arable land lies along thin strips on either bank of the Nile River, whose waters traverse nine other countries, all with growing populations, before reaching Egypt. So it’s not hard to understand Mubarak’s concerns about the future of human numbers in the ancient nation. And, as he pointed out, Egypt built the pyramids and evolved one of the world’s first civilizations with a slowly growing population that never exceeded a few million people.

But there’s no evidence that slogans about two-child families slow population growth. You get the impression that a small group of men sat around a table and came up with the slogan idea because it was easier than asking women what might make for smaller families. Many would respond that it takes decent family planning and reproductive services offering a range of healthy contraceptive choices.

Actually, I couldn’t tell in reading the Washington Post story what Mubarak’s campaign involved, because the reporter didn’t relay anything beyond the slogan. Instead, she went on to interview men—and only men, so far I can tell—about why they don’t have smaller families. The journalistic enterprise left a lot to be desired.

One source was a 71-year-old merchant of baby products. He said he had five children and wished for a dozen. “God will feed us,” he added. Other men blamed the government for “not providing,” and suggested children were economically valuable because they often work and earn money—when they can find a job, at least.

Absent from the story were the voices of women (aside from the reporter herself), who bear all Egyptian children. Why not seek out women and ask them: Are you satisfied with the choices you have about childbearing? Do you have good access to contraceptive advice and services that allow you to safely prevent a pregnancy when you want to do so? Are you hoping to become pregnant soon or, if not, are you taking steps you’re comfortable with to avoid doing so?

It’s not every day that heads of state speak up about their population worries, but the topic is on more and more presidential minds these days as food and energy prices soar with no end in sight. When population does emerge as a public issue, journalists can ask the people bearing children what it is they want. The answers might lead to populations that grow more slowly for the best of reasons, because more women became pregnant when they wanted to do so, and only then.

Talking to reporters and others about More: Population, Nature, and What Women, I’m sometimes asked where consumption fits into the population picture. A book review in the intriguingly named magazine Bitch, for example, criticized the book for “failing to adequately distinguish between the individuals who are overpopulating the world and the individuals who are responsible for the type of overconsumption that causes environmental deterioration.”

Well, the book actually doesn’t identify any individuals who are “overpopulating the world.” I explain on the book’s second page why I don’t like the word overpopulation. And for many years I chaired the board of the Center for a New American Dream, which works to make North American consumption a sustainable model for the world. I see More as is one sense all about consumption, because it is through what they use, consume and discard that human beings affect the environment.

Unfortunately for open discussions, consumption is often placed in opposition to population, as the Bitch review does—as if one part of the world has no population and only consumes, while another has no consumption and only populates. That’s not how the world works. Population and consumption multiply each other everywhere, in rich countries and poor, even though the dynamics and magnitude of each force vary widely across and within countries.

One obvious connection between the two is that if populations had never grown large, the consumption levels of individuals wouldn’t have much impact on the environment. We worry about consumption precisely because there are so many of us affecting nature and natural resources. A second point, which I explore in More (p. 230), is that population growth itself has historically driven people to innovate in ways that often boost individual consumption. The exhaustion of forests as European populations kept growing drove people in the 16^th century to use coal, long considered a dirty fuel inferior to wood. Improvements in coal mining made possible the Industrial Revolution, which in turn facilitated the hazardous alteration of the earth’s atmosphere today. In modern industrialized nations, sprawl and the great distances many people drive have a lot to do with high population densities.

As More makes clear, we’re not going to solve human-induced climate change or most other serious environmental problems through any one policy change, technological breakthrough or change in individual behavior. It’s going to take action on every level, and even then we’ll be adapting to a rapidly changing environment for generations to come. A world of 6.7 billion people can’t easily change its behavior to leave no imprint on the earth. What’s attractive about addressing population is that it will stop growing, for the best of reasons, if we can satisfy the wants of women everywhere for reproductive choice. A stable or gradually declining world population offers the best demographic platform for a sustainable future, one in which consumption is environmentally safe and meets the needs and reasonable wants of people everywhere.

“Oops, I’m pregnant.”

Even in today’s age of safe and effective modern contraception, women in every society get pregnant when that wasn’t the plan. It’s a simple point I explore in More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want. In the wealthy and health-obsessed United States, for example, 49 percent of conceptions result in “oops” pregnancies. The figure for the world as a whole is estimated at around 38 percent. I suspect that women in many countries under-report unintended pregnancies and that the real proportion is even higher.

Interestingly, the estimated number of annual unintended pregnancies worldwide is almost the same as the annual added population—around 80 million in the first case, 78 million in the second. The two numbers actually aren’t fully comparable, since many unintended pregnancies result in abortions and others simply occurred earlier than a woman intended. Nonetheless, it’s clear that much of the world’s population growth is the outcome of unintentional or at least ill-timed reproduction.

Unintentional pregnancy is common even among rich, well-educated, and influential women. You could hardly find a better example of this than the curious case of Cherie Blair, wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In her new tell-all autobiography, Speaking for Myself, Ms. Blair reveals that her fourth pregnancy came about because she was too embarrassed to bring her “contraceptive equipment” with her on a royal visit to Balmoral Castle, Queen Elizabeth’s Scottish residence.

Apparently the Royal Unpackers at the residence carefully remove and put away all the contents of their guests’ luggage. When the prime minister and his wife first visited the castle, Ms. Blair writes, she had been annoyed that all her possessions had been unpacked, down to “my distinctly ancient toilet bag with its range of unmentionables.” (Interesting noun.) So, on the next visit, she “had been a little more circumspect” and left the said unmentionables at home.

I’ll spare you her description of what happened later in the “bitterly cold” castle, but the result was the Blair’s fourth child, who is considerably younger than the other three. Incredibly, though Cherie Blair was only 45 years old at the time, this accomplished barrister and judge believed she was “too old” to become pregnant.

I wouldn’t spotlight this example of an “oops” pregnancy if Ms. Blair hadn’t published it. I’ve heard similar stories from friends for years. Such stories support important points in my book about women’s lives and population. Many people—including some prominent economists—seem to believe that sexually active partners simply decide how many children to have and then set about having their “desired family size.” But sex happens even when couples don’t want to conceive. Preventing conception takes effort, a willingness to risk embarrassment (whether at shop counters or in royal residences), and some kind of “contraceptive equipment.” This is just as true among the wealthy as it is among the poor.

The wealthy contribute a lot more on a per-capita basis to human-induced climate change and many of the world’s other environmental problems. Yet a significant proportion of their own population growth results from “oops” pregnancies. For anyone who cares about the environment and the influence of population size on it, it’s not enough to support access to family planning in developing countries, important as that is. We also need much better contraceptive access and options in industrialized countries as well. And we need to figure out how to make contraception less of an “unmentionable” for every woman and man, right up to the level of prime ministers and their spouses.

ISTANBUL—The workshop I’ve been attending in this ancient city drew 31 people—ranging from a member of the British parliament to a Dutch women’s rights advocate to a Hungarian environmentalist—to talk about whether it makes sense to bring population into the global debate on climate change.

Tough question, given that most of the responsibility for human-induced global warming stems from the past behavior of wealthier nations, most of whose populations are now growing relatively slowly or not at all. Workshop participants thus worried that taking on population would risk giving a pass to the disproportionately high carbon consumption these nations enjoy.

Many of these participants work to support a concept known by the unwieldy acronym of SRHR—for sexual and reproductive health and rights. Never heard of it? Neither have most people, and that makes the work of these dedicated professionals all the harder. They are promoting, after all, the right of all people to be sexually active when and as they choose, in safety and health, and to conceive a child only if and when they want. Should be pretty basic, but not much of the world prioritizes SRHR or strongly enough supports the health services needed to make it possible for all.

In More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want, I mildly chide some in the SRHR community for eschewing a potential alliance with environmentalists who see the benefits of the concept in reducing unintended childbearing and thus slowing population growth. Disconcertingly, many on the SRHR side also see population as a purely “Southern”—or developing-country—issue. The reality is that unintended pregnancy is to varying degrees common in all countries, and it elevates the populations even of high-consuming nations above what they would be if all reproduction were intentional. The already populous United States, for example, grows faster demographically than some developing countries do—in part because nearly half of all U.S. pregnancies are unintended.

This workshop, at least, undermined the criticism I expressed in More. Though all my SRHR-focused colleagues worried—justifiably—about making too simplistic a link between population growth and climate change, almost all were prepared to accept that the link is real and important. Much of the debate was over whether or how to use it in advocacy aimed at improving access to reproductive health services in developing countries. Though no common statement emerged—this was merely a workshop to start a fresh dialogue—participants proposed exploring alliances with likeminded environmentalists in Europe. That’s a step forward, especially given that concern about population growth has long been less common there than in North America.

The participation of two representatives from sub-Saharan Africa made this meeting even more exciting. Both had much to teach the rest of us about applying the connections between population, health, and the environment in communities. “Why don’t we link these at the local level?” asked one participant, whose national government has endorsed the concept. “If we do, we’re much more likely to solve the problems of poverty and energy.”

I wish I could claim these encouraging outcomes came about because More, which treats the evolution of these linkages from the deep past to the near future, had been assigned reading on the planes to Istanbul. Not quite. But at least I was able to sell a few copies to new friends, whose reactions to the book will mean more to me than I would have predicted when I arrived.

Last Saturday evening my wife and I took our terminally ill cat to an animal hospital, where a veterinarian put him peacefully to sleep as he sat on my lap. I wasn’t really a cat lover when we adopted him seven years ago, but this unusually affectionate and communicative kitty cat converted me. I’m surprised how much I’m grieving for the loss of him.

Years before Toby came into my life I wrote a story for newspapers about domestic felines as deadly hunters of migratory songbirds. Several bird species, such as the Cerulean Warbler, are becoming vulnerable to extinction as their tropical-forest habitat disappears. A comparable threat on the other end of their migration is the predatory nature of pet cats, which by scientists’ estimates kill hundreds of millions of small animals every year.

So how do I square my concern about animal-killing cats with the affection I feel for one late individual of the species? Shouldn’t I be blaming cats for killing songbirds and threatening the survival of species not only of birds but of small mammals, amphibians, and reptiles?

Of course not. Cats do what evolution has programmed them to do. What has gone awry is not cats’ wants, which are natural, but their numbers, which are not. Nature is usually balanced in ways that make extinction a rare event—unless mortality levels reach levels that tilt the balance dangerously. That’s what has happened with pet cats. The United States alone is home to some 90 million. Most of them spend some time outdoors, and many of them kill. There never could be anywhere near this many domestic cats, obviously, if there weren’t even more human beings to care for them, just as my family did ours.

It’s a pint-sized example of a point I make in More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want. Environmental unsustainability tends to have much more to do with scale than with any essential aspect of our behavior. Cats aren’t bad because they kill birds; they’re just cats. But there are so many of them, and with cats, just as with humans, numbers matter. (In an endnote to Chapter 10, I note geographer Vaclav Smil’s estimate that livestock weigh 20 times as much as all the planet’s wild animals. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a similar comparison between companion and wild animals.)

Since no one would seek a sudden reduction in the population of people—or of their pets—we often focus on modifying individual behavior to reduce environmental risks. In this case, the most important step the world’s hundreds of millions of cat owners can take to protect small animals is to keep their cats indoors. Fortunately for me, Toby had no interest in wandering outside, so he never killed anything bigger than the occasional bug that crawled past him on the floor. Our house was his whole world, which is why it feels so empty and sad as I write this post at home.

In last week’s blog post, I promised to wrestle with the time-honored Malthus Question: Does population growth outrun food supply? The old question is coming back as soaring food prices spark discontent, bread lines, and even riots around the world. I’ll try to answer this question decisively in the next 400 words.

Just kidding. Shelves heave under the weight of books that have grappled with the ideas of Thomas Robert Malthus since he first wrote in 1798. So maybe the answer will take more than one post.

Malthus posited that, “the power of population is…superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man.” Conceiving children is always easy and fun, he argued, while growing food is hard—and gets harder as more people eat. (For more on this, see my book More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want, p. 162.)

First off, anyone who thinks that the Anglican rector and economist was known to his peers as “Thomas” Malthus should check out his Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia makes the point—as does More—that Malthus actually went by his middle name, Robert. His family called him, as mine calls me, Bob. His students at the training college for the British East India Company, where he taught as the world’s first political economist, affectionately dubbed him “Population” Malthus. Then they shortened that to Pop.

The fact that hundreds of population writers continue to call him Thomas makes clear that few have studied his life. That’s one reason I included a short biography of Malthus in More. Regardless of what you think of his ideas, it’s worth knowing a bit about the life and times of an influential thinker. And this one, after all, has been returning to the news—even to the front page of the Wall Street Journal, in a story inspired by the recent surges in energy and food prices. (The Journal’s classicdot-drawing of Bob, by the way, carried the caption “Thomas Malthus.”)

Here’s another name-related footnote on Pop Malthus, this one not in my book: His last name probably refers to a drinking establishment. For years, many people thought the rare and unusual surname couldn’t be English and suggested foreign—perhaps German—ancestry. In her magisterial biography Population Malthus, however, Patricia James makes the case that the name is thoroughly English and derives from—can you guess?—Malt House, a place to drink malt ale.

Okay, so it may take a few more posts to answer the Malthus Question. But at least we’re a bit closer to the man who inspired it. Would it help us deal with the population-food debate if we just think of him as “Bob, the bar guy”?

One of the dozens of countries around the world where hunger is back in the news is the Philippines, where soaring rice prices and long-standing reliance on imported food are raising an old question many people thought was buried for good: Does population growth eventually run into the limits of food production?

In More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want, I suggest this question will never be put to rest—not, at least, until populations stop growing. And, in fact, the recent surge in food prices is beginning to spur stories in the news media suggesting that population growth is indeed an important factor—perhaps especially in the Philippines. See, for example, this recent story by David Montero in The Christian Science Monitor. But let’s leave that debate aside for a later blog, and focus for a moment on another aspect of human numbers in the Philippines.

The country’s high population growth rate of 2 percent annually stems in large part from governmental hostility to modern contraception. That point is documented in another recent newspaper story, this one by Blaine Harden of The Washington Post. It’s hard to believe that in 2008 a national government would try to quell the use of oral contraceptive pills, IUDS, and condoms. Most women and their partners around the world use these devices, and most sexually active people in wealthy countries take their availability for granted.

But the Philippines’ national government follows closely and respectfully the dictates of the local Catholic hierarchy, which has condemned modern contraceptives as “chemical agents and mechanical gadgets that . . . have caused serious damage in family relationships.” One of Harden’s main sources for his story is a health organization whose staff asked not to be named because “they fear retaliation and harassment from officials in the national and city government, as well as from the Catholic Church.”

The main protagonist of the story is Maria Susana Espinoza, “who lives with her husband and children in a squatter’s hut in a vast, stinking garbage dump by Manila Bay.” Ms. Espinoza always hoped to have just two children but only learned details about contraception after her fourth child. “I don’t want any more children,” she told Harden. “Life is hard. Rice is expensive.”

It saddens me to read stories like this in today’s newspapers after chronicling similar tales spanning centuries in More. Ancient fears of sexuality and of women’s control over their own childbearing—see a chapter titled “Punishing Eve” for this history—still operate in some places in full force. As food and energy prices rise, the world’s fertility rate ought to be falling significantly, since many women quite naturally make reproductive calculations similar to those of Ms. Espinoza. Since women can’t postpone conceptions just by wishing, however, pregnancies happen despite their best intentions to wait for the right time. It’s an old story, but no less painful for that when it plays out today amidst growing hunger worldwide.

NEW ORLEANS—People walking around the Sheraton Hotel here are talking about population as if it were the most natural conversation in the world. The topic interests me, so I join in. As it happens, I’ve written a book on it, just published by Island Press, which I don’t shrink from mentioning. Just being here, though, reminds me that human numbers aren’t often talked about outside this hotel.

If there’s a time and place for talking population this is it: the annual meeting of the Population Association of America. The association’s demographers and public health specialists gathered this year in a city that lost about half its own residents to other places after a hurricane named Katrina. Panel topics ranged from that unprecedented urban population drop (the city’s population has since rebounded to around 70 percent of its pre-Katrina size) to the intriguing idea that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has peaked globally. While PAA members presented findings and partied at the Sheraton, people in the nearby streets of the French Quarter let the good times roll, as they usually do, with nary a thought of the number of us in the city, the country or the world.

But you don’t have to wander around the Big Easy to get a sense of how uneasy we are with population as an issue. Discomfort with the topic is everywhere, not least among environmentalists, who grapple daily with the ways human beings are altering the natural world and its life support systems. Who wants to reduce humanity to a number, or to see themselves as one? And population trends touch on some of the most sensitive issues in our experience: sex, race, childbearing, family size, immigration, abortion. Yet anyone paying attention to human-induced climate change or the ongoing surge in global energy and food prices must sometimes pause to think about just how many we are.

The fact that a few thousand professionals meet once a year to talk about population, at least, is a good sign. And this Tuesday is Earth Day, which on its launch back in 1970 integrated population into discussions about the environment. I’ll celebrate the day by discussing my book—titled More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want along with the author of a different take on population at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

World population has doubled since the first Earth Day. Does that mean worries about population growth were groundless, or that we’re in more peril today than in the past? And what does the future hold? From now through June, I’ll be weighing in from time to time with some thoughts on such questions on the Websites of both Island Press and the Worldwatch Institute. My book explores a few ideas that I hope will stimulate some conversation of its own, and maybe even a bit of hope for the future. I’ll welcome your comments.