The consequence has been an amazing drop in the Japanese birth rate. The 1955 figure was 19.4 per 1,000 and the birth rate now is substantially below that of the United States. The rate of population growth has already been cut in half.
Among less industrial countries, India has the boldest population policy. Nehru and a majority of his party have long held that avoidance of excessive population growth is essential to social and economic welfare for the Indian masses. The first Five-Year Plan, initiated in 1951, allotted 6,500,000 rupees for a program of research and education in family planning under the Ministry of Health. Under the second Five-Year Plan, 2,000 rural health centers and 300 urban centers are scheduled to be opened, with family planning an essential service of each center.
Several Indian states and cities have independently taken an interest in the subject; influential citizens are leading a strong birth control movement. Surveys have shown that Indian peasants as well as urbanites, pressed by poverty and by big families, yet aspiring to a better life, are not averse to the idea of birth control. One cannot expect the program to affect India's birth rate immediately, but Indian leaders are looking to the future.
The most recent and surprising convert to family planning is Cornmunist China. Until 1953 the Chinese followed the standard Communist line that overpopulation is a vicious figment of the bourgeois mind. However, the census completed in 1954 gave mainland China a population of 583,000,000, some 15,000,000 more than the Chinese themselves had estimated and over 100,000,000 more than others had been estimating. Believing this huge population to be growing faster than the world average, the Chinese officials speedily did an ideological somersault, maintaining that "overpopulation" is still a myth but that the Communist program would fare better if population growth slowed down. Family planning was justified as conducive to maternal and child welfare.
The Government, which had begun to spread the idea of birth control as early as 1953, stepped up its work in 1954 and 1955. Contraceptive
supplies went on sale at Government-managed stores; a propaganda campaign was started. On March 5, 1957, the Communist party newspaper, People's Daily, carried an editorial saying that contraceptives should be widely and cheaply disseminated. Of late, a family-planning propaganda campaign has been intensively pursued throughout the country.
When the Population Commission of the United Nations had its eighth meeting in New York in 1955, the Soviet delegation firmly opposed the very idea of a national birth control policy. At the 1957 meeting, this position was changed. The Soviet delegate (the same man who was there in 1955) maintained that for his country no such policy should be adopted, but he said that other countries should be free to adopt whatever population policy they wished. This was an important shift in the Soviet line. What else could the Soviet delegate do with the example of Communist China and neutral India before him? Officially, the United States and most other Western countries are more afraid of family limitation than the so-called backward nations. Such official silence, prompted by strong religious opposition to birth control, would be impossible if it were not for the fact that these nations are relatively prosperous and that their citizens limit the size of their families anyway. In some underdeveloped countries, such as Colombia and Peru and the Congo, the full effects of unrestricted propagation have not yet had time to manifest themselves. But in countries with extreme population pressure, responsible leaders cannot afford to adopt an ostrich attitude toward the population problem.
The American policy of improving the lot of the world's poorer peoples is seriously impeded by our official inability to aid them in their population control. A runaway inflation of people in the underdeveloped nations is not in our national interest.