Last spring at a Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) talk in Berlin, Melinda Gates used this phrase, “The most transformative thing you can do is to give people access to birth control.” She expressed similar sentiments at the London Summit on Family Planning on July 11, 2012, as did the British Prime Minister David Cameron, and [...]

Although fertility decline often correlates with improvements in socioeconomic conditions, many demographers have found flaws in demographic transition theories that depend on changes in distal factors such as increased wealth or education. Human beings worldwide engage in sexual intercourse much more frequently than is needed to conceive the number of children they want, and for [...]

Last year a member of the World Bank professional staff gave a lecture on development in Africa on the UC Berkeley campus. His audience asked him about rapid population growth in that continent. He immediately dismissed the question, saying that population growth did not need any special attention. It would look after itself. He was [...]

Niger—with the world’s fastest growing population, its highest total fertility rate (TFR), a small and diminishing amount of arable land, low annual rainfall, a high level of malnutrition, extremely low levels of education, gross gen- der inequities and an uncertain future in the face of climate change—is the most extreme example of a catastrophe that [...]

Between February 2002 and January 2004 in the Adigrat Zonal Hospital, covering one-fifth of the large Tigray region of North West Ethiopia, there were 907 admissions with a diagnosis of abortion. Among these, 521 were induced by traditional, unsafe methods.1 Unsafe abor- tion was the leading cause of admission, accounting for 12.6% of all bed [...]

The silence about population growth in recent decades has hindered the ability of those concerned with ecological change, resource scarcity, health and educational systems, national security, and other global challenges to look with maximum objectivity at the problems they confront.

We found ourselves strongly disagreeing with a recent editorial in Contraception by Wells et al. when they asserted, “Thirty years ago, our approach to uncontrolled population growth in developing countries was to flood them with contraceptives…

Letter in response to the Perspective “REPRODUCING IN CITIES” by Mace published in Science February 2008 in Science

Evolutionary psychology posits that certain behaviours are universal because they helped the genes of a particular species to survive across the generations. In the case of human beings, such behavioral predispositions evolved to adapt us to the Stone Age rather the modern world. Patriarchy, we suggest, has deep roots in human evolution.

The tripling of the world’s population growth since 1960 has received little public attention the past decade. Six reasons for the silence around this subject constitute a ‘‘perfect storm’’.