!! spellx done
207  Security Is Happiest Cure For Overbreeding of Poor
     The Washington Post  May 2, 1970

     Racism so permeates the historical legacy of contemporary America
that none of our policies and institutions is immune to attack from
some quarter for being "racist."  The epithet may be applied with even
greater venom to policies that are designed to promote racial equality
but differ from the critic's personal ideology of social progress.

     "Institutional racism," furthermore, has nothing to do with the
racial prejudices of any citizen but must be judged entirely by the de
facto impact of a policy on the welfare of a minority group.  The 
battle then rages over the values by which to measure that welfare.  

     Should blacks prefer a sharpening of their racial identity or a
merger with the values and economic comforts of the middle class?
Should we concentrate on the needs of present generation for jobs and
housing, or of the next one for education? Or should all of these be
subservient to building an instrument of political and paramilitary
power to provide the means for a forceful extraction of economic and
social advantages from a reluctant and apathetic majority?

     "Is population control merely another device of institutional 
racism?"  Rational discussion of this hotly debated question is possible
only with great care for the definition of the underlying values by
which any policy in this area will be judged.

     The most valid concern of minority groups is that movement like
Zero Population Growth may divert attention from social reforms like
guaranteed work and income, urban renewal and educational opportunity.
Beyond this, we must also seek how to minimize potential conflicts
between community and personal values, unless our aim is to
rend the nation.

     The community's interest in population control is by now well
documented.  We simply cannot double and redouble the world population
without exhausting our resources and overflowing our sewers.  Many
people believe that the earth already has more people than it can
carry at the level of affluence we currently prize.  If this estimate
is possibly wrong by a factor of two or four, the margin is still not
a comfortable one.

     Rapid growth of our population will multiply the stresses on our
future.  At stake are our environment, our capital investment for
domestic needs and our economic and political relationships with other
countries which furnish us a disproportionate share of dwindling mineral
resources.  On a scale of some decades, these problems may become
crushing to the point that the community may have to press strongly on
atavistic personal preferences for large families.  To the extent that
we can reshape the life style of middle America by persuasive education
today, we may be able to defer the use of sharper compulsion
tomorrow.  For example, Sen. Robert Packwood's (R-Ore.) bill to 
eliminate tax exemptions for more than two children would be a valuable
symbolic step to dramatize a national commitment to restraint in
population growth.

     Such steps are, however, almost irrelevant to the very different
problems to the poor.  Efforts to encourage family planning among poor
blacks might well, in the light of history, be labeled racist if they
were motivated by some national interest that was in conflict with the
interests of the poor themselves.

     The poor do breed more rapidly than the rich--but this disparity
would disappear the most happily with a justified belief in economic
security of the poor.  They are, after all, too few to make a strong
contribution to the overall statistics of national growth.

     The most urgent problem that is generated by the overbreeding of
the poor family is not the depletion of natural resources but the 
perpetuation of the family's own poverty.  The abolition of poverty is
also one of the nation's most urgent, achievable goals.  Where the
interest of the poor  family coincides with that of the nation, only
mischief comes from the extremists on either side who would subvert
individual freedom for the benefit of "larger" issues like racial 
separatism or a premature exercise in social control.

     In reviewing a biography of Margaret Sanger, Sen. Joseph D.
Tydings (D-Md.) pointed to Planned Parenthood statistics showing that
poor women now bear 400,000 unwanted children a year merely for lack
of family planning services (and access to facilities for safe
abortion).  We could do with less ideological rhetoric in favor of
some hard cash for a major step toward solving one of our most 
important problems.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------