OZAMIZ CITY, June 7, 2009—Ozamiz Archbishop Jesus A. Dosado, CM has warned the faithful of Misamis Occidental on the “scare tactics” on overpopulation stressing that population-control movement was wrong as a matter of fact.

Dosado said for disaffected Catholics the overpopulation scare was attractive for if overpopulation were the problem, the solution was obvious: Tell the Church to lift the ban on artificial birth control.

“It is less than coincidental that the high-mindedness of saving the planet dovetailed perfectly with a more self-interested outcome, the freer pursuit of sexuality via the pill.” The prelate said.

He added, dissenting Catholics had special reasons to stress the "science of overpopulation," and so they did. In the name of a higher morality, their argument went that birth control could be defended as the lesser of two evils (a position argued by the dissenter Charles Curran, among others).

Dosado underscored less than half a century later, these preoccupations with overwhelming birth rates appear pseudo-scientific. For the overpopulation literature has not only been abandoned by thinkers for more improved science; it has actually been so thoroughly proved false that today’s cutting-edge theory worries about precisely the opposite: a "birth dearth" that is "graying" the advanced world.

The spectacle of overpopulation which was used to browbeat the Church in the name of science was a grotesque error all along.

“Population-control movement was wrong as a matter of fact: ‘The two strongest claims population controllers make for their long-term historical contribution’ are ‘that they raised Asia out of poverty and helped keep our planet habitable.’ Both of these are false,” the local ordinary stressed.

Even more devastating is the demolition of the claim to moral high ground that the overpopulation alarmists made. For population science was not only failing to help people but also actively harming some of them.

The great tragedy of population control, the fatal misconception, was to think that one could know other people’s interests better than they knew it themselves.

The essence of population control, whether it targeted migrants, the "unfit," or families that seemed either too big or too small, was to make rules for other people without having to answer for them. It as another chapter in the unfinished business of imperialism.

The forty years since Humanae Vitae was issued by Pope Paul VI have also vindicated the encyclical’s fear that governments would use the new contraceptive technology coercively.

“The outstanding example, of course, is the Chinese government’s long-running ‘one-child policy,’ replete with forced abortions, public trackings of menstrual cycles, family flight, increased female infanticide, sterilization, condemned even by human rights groups.” Dosado said. (Wendell Talibong)