Recommendations of the Task Force on Earth Resources and Population (George H. Bush, Chairman)

Congressional Record | July 8, 1970 | George H. Bush's Task Force

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As a result of reduced death rates, there are more people in their non-productive years than ever before. More children and more elderly people unable to participate in the world's work force increase the burden on the productive age group. [...] The National Academy of Sciences has said:

Either the birth rate must go back down or the death rate must go back up.

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Earth Resources and Populations—Problems and Directions

Report and Recommendations of the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population. House Republican Research Committee

House Republican Research Committee
Robert Taft, Jr., Ohio, Chairman

Task Force on Earth Resources and Population
George H. Bush, Texas, Chairman

July 8, 1970 Congressional Record, pp. 23188 and contining.

(Current excerpts taken from Section II on Population)

SECTION II. Population Control

It is almost self-evident that the greater the human population, the greater the demands for natural resources and the greater the danger to ecological balance. The paramount questions deals with an optimum human population.

How many is too many people in relation to available resources?

No one seems to honestly know but many believe that our current environmental problems indicate that the optimum level has been surpassed.

A fair analysis would seem to be that our population and consumption rates have grown more rapidly than our ability to develop and supply the resources being consumed while protecting our environment. […]

Congestion and Density

Many of our nation's social problems can be attributed to population density and the congestion of our urban areas.

Projections of the Urban Land Institute place 60% of our population in the year 2000 in just four huge megalopolis areas— (1) from Boston to Washingon, D.C., another from Utica, New York, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a third from San Francisco to the Mexican border, and the fourth from Jacksonville to Miami, across to Tampa and St. Petersburg. Most of the remaining 40% of the population is expected to live in urban areas as well. Metropolitan areas of over 150,000 grew faster than the national average of 9.8%.

This trend toward density creates immense stress on the public services necessary to accommodate the population. Police, fire, sanitation, transportation—all of these and many others, including education, health and housing, have been unable to keep pace with the demands created by this congestion.

Sociologists believe that this density of population has been a prime cause for increased automobile traffic deaths, drug addiction, broken marriage, alcoholism, crime, homosexuality, suicides, venereal disease and heart attacks as a result of the social stresses that man encounters in his struggle to exist in such a congested environment.

In both his Population Message of July, 1968 and his State of the Union message of January, 1970, President Nixon stressed the need for America to begin developing a national growth policy.

In his State of the Union address, the President said:

The violent and decayed central cities of great metropolitan complexes are the most conspicuous area of failure in American life. I propose that, before these problems become insoluble, the nation develop a national growth policy.

Our purpose will be to find those mean by which federal, state and local government can influence the course of urban settlement and growth so as to affect the quality of American life.

In the future, decisions as to where to build highways, locate airports, acquire land or sell land should be made with the clear objective of aiding a balanced growth.

In particular, the federal government must be in a position to assist in the building of new cities and the rebuilding of old ones.

At the same time, we will carry our concern with the quality of life in America to the farm as well as the suburbs, to the village as well as the city. What rural America most needs is a new kind of assistance. It needs to be dealt with, not as a separate nation, but as part of an overall growth policy for all America. We must create a new rural environment that will not only stem the migration to urban centers but reverse it.

If we seize our growth as a challenge, we can make the 1970's an historic period when, by conscious choices we transformed our land into what we want it to become.

Family Planning and Birth Control

The role of family planning services as part of an overall medical health care system was covered in the Task Force report on Federal Family Planning Programs—Domestic and International which was released on December 22, 1969. In that report, we stressed that an estimated 5.3 million American women do not have access to information or techniques available to the rest of society about how to limit their fertility.

It was further noted that this inaccessibility of knowledge undermines the morals of our society and was not in keeping with the basic principles of a democratic system.

Family planning is more than simply birth control.

It includes many aspect of maternal and child healthcare which must be made available to all our citizens. Birth control must be kept within the total context of Family Planning and should be considered always as an available option for any individual.

The belief that Family Planning constitutes population control must be rejected. Over 97% of American married couples utilize maternal and child healthcare services and an estimated 90% [2] practice birth control in some form and still the United States experience a population growth of 1%, a doubling every 70 years.

Family Planning constitutes the knowledge base for regulating births and reducing infant mortality. Population control is to limit birth, not to regulate births. It is necessary to understand the difference.

The practice of birth control is an accepted norm for American married couples. There is, however, concern among many demographers over the widespread desire on the part of Americans to produce three and four children in the belief that such family sizes constitute the practice of birth control. Without failsafe contraceptive devices, available to both men and women, that are medically safe and easily administered, it is not realistic to believe that an honest, free choice decision is available to those who prefer to limit their families to two children.

Population control is not a function for federal, state or local governments. However, Family Planning services, within the context of maternal and child healthcare services, must be made more accessible to the poor in providing these services as a proper function of all governments at a sensible level of costs.

As part of Family Planning Services, birth control information as well as devices and techniques to regulate fertility should be available to all those who want them and cannot afford them through private sources. The major problem in providing these specific birth control services has been the availability of trained personnel. Medical doctors and nurses are hard-pressed for services in more specialized areas of medicine. Also, providing family services to the poor has not been considered an appealing avocation of the medical profession.

Ideally, our entire healthcare system should be overhauled to create less reliance on specialized medicine and overburdened hospitals and more dependence on para-medical professionals in providing healthcare services and more reliance on providing proper nutrition for all Americans.

The legality of abortion and of sterilization does not come under the jurisdiction of the federal government, but they are properly within the purview of state governments where medical laws are widely divergent. The most disturbing aspect of the abortion issue that was brought before the Task Force, is the disparity between the availability of professional abortion services to those women who can afford the $500-$700 to obtain a therapeutic abortion and the estimated one million illegitimate abortions performed by the unlicensed practitioners for those women who cannot afford professional service. It is apparent that many women who desire abortions take extreme measures, and subject themselves to dangerous methods in order to obtain an abortion.

It therefore seems that the main objective of abortion law revision should be to eradicate the increasing number of unlicensed and unqualified practitioners who jeopardize the health and safety of these women and to establish a system that eliminates discrimination resulting from present pricing structures.

Recommendations and Conclusions

The Task Force is committed to the development of a national population policy. We believe education, family planning services, contraceptive research and development as well as transportation, and community planning and development should be important components of such policy.

Before we can begin to remedy a problem, we must first realize that we have one.

Despite the increased interest regarding this problem, there is still a vast number of Americans who are unfamiliar with even the most essential understanding of this potentially dangerous population growth rate.

The Task Force feels that one of the most important functions of the federal government is to supply the public with the latest and most accurate data. This should be done in a non-judgmental fashion that will enable the citizens to be well-informed and to influence their own remedial action.

It is expected that the Council on Environmental Quality and the recently established President's Commission on Population Growth and the American Future will provide the public with this necessary information and ensure continuing data regarding the latest developments.

Death tolls have been reduced in every country to negligible rates from epidemics and diseases such as malaria, measles, smallpox, cholera, polio and tuberculosis; major advances have been made against heart disease and cancer, artificial organs can now prolong life.

Since we accept these intrusions into nature's control of population as morally justified, are we not unwise to consider birth control with equal moral justificiation?

If we continue to support government activities to reduce disease and improve health in order to prolong life under the auspices of what is good for society, then should we not consider birth control as a government activity for similar reasons?

In the Task Force report on "Federal Government Family Planning Program" it was recommended that Congress increase appropriations for contraceptive research in the amount of $380,000,000.00 over the next five years.

In conjunction with this research, the Task Force now feels research in the methodologies of pre-determining sex before insemination must be considered and pursued.

For birth limitation and regulation to be an honest free choice goal of Americans to undertake, pre-determination of the sex of children and failsafe contraception must be available to everyone.

The Task Force believes that much more knowledge is needed by the public in general about fertility control, contraception techniques and sex determination, as well as the social and material consequences resulting from increase population, in order that the broadest number of options are available to everyone in making personal decisions that affect the use of natural resources, family size and ultimately our environment.

There must exist a greater sensitivity to these problems which cannot be provided by the federal government. The government can provide leadership and direction but should never be put into a position of having to enact controls on population as a result of public ignorance and indifference.

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^[2] Charles F. Westoff and Norman B. Ryder, Recent Trends and Attitudes Toward Fertility Control and in the Practice of Contraception in the U.S. University of Michigan, November, 1967, p. 10,2 Ibid

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