Dear Steven,

You wrote;

“All my life I've been hearing these stories from both Muslims and people who fear Muslims that the womb is Islam's "secret weapon."”

I totally accept that as an immigrant with a Jewish heritage that those concerns would have been and still are very influential in your world view. The fear you speak of is evidently the reason for the very high fertility rates we are seeing from women within the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, it is now purportedly over 4.

While those concerns certainly have a growing currency within Europe I would claim that outside consumers of right-wing media, fundamentalist Christians, and the misinformed or wilfully ignorant groups here in Australia they are not as much an issue.

Traditionally our fears here have been couched in terms of 'The Yellow Peril', 'The Hordes from the North', and 'The Asian Invasion'. What is interesting about Hans' video is that the great Asian population centres of India and China have not only seen dramatic falls in fertility rates but also that those drops have a far greater impact on the total number of human beings in the world than the Muslim countries you listed.

I'm not discounting that our nearest neighbour Indonesia is a Muslim country but what would be comforting I think to those who hold 'traditional fears' in this country is the fact that the masses of humanity in all three populations to our north are not on exponential trajectories. I find it startling to learn that a third of the states in India have fertility rates equal to or under our own.

I understand the space constraints but perhaps including a form of your explanation to me in your article may have helped the average reader to understand where you were coming from.

stevenmeyer,

"In western countries declines in TFR predate the pill by many decades."

Particularly in France where the TFR started to decline a century before the pill. As usual, there are various explanations, I'll leave it to the demographers--it's interesting to consider why the phenomenon occurred earlier in France than the UK.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12159012

Dear csteele,
The latest available stats from FAO on Syria's food balance says:
2009 - millions of tonnes of cereals - Production 4.7, Import 5.2, Stock variation -2.0, Export 0.05 gives domestic supply at 7.8.
In 2005 they still imported over a third of total cereal supply, although they were approximately self-sufficient for wheat (only 10% of which was exported, and some also imported). Regardless of weather, those days are unlikely to return, as their water resources are overallocated and they've added over 3 million to their population since 2005.

Would I put Israel in the same category? Certainly - and more so. They bang on about having greened the desert, but they overshot that capacity some time ago, they already use every drop of water in the Jordan at least once and are sucking out groundwater to the extent of causing coastal salt intrusion, yet still trying to outbreed the Palestinians, especially on the West Bank.

Dear Steven,
You are right that the pill is not the whole story. But the speed at which fertility decline started happening in receptive poor countries from the late 1960s was largely due to the availability of the pill, and to the level of concern about population growth that ensured aid was provided for getting family planning messages and contraceptives to poor communities. There is a strong correlation between contraception prevalence and TFR, with the exceptions being countries with ready access to abortion, who have achieved low TFR without high contraception prevalence - the Eastern Block countries in particular. You are right, that abortion is available everywhere, and it has always been a significant factor in avoiding unwanted births. Nothing reduces the demand for abortion as much as contraception prevalence.

Education and economic opportunity for women certainly helps, but more as a synergistic element with family planning than as a force itself. Electrification also can have a demonstrated effect. But all these things are more often mentioned in order to imply that family planning programs are unnecessary, than to demonstrate synergies.

My point is that there is no mystery. Fertility reduction, in nationsl of any religious variety, has primarily been driven by voluntary family planning programs (including China, where the TFR drop was mostly in the decade before the one-child policy), and these programs have been primarily supported due to concern about population growth - not, as the UN's more recent agenda advocates, for the sake of women's health and reproductive rights. These programs have greatly improved women's health, reproductive rights, autonomy and economic participation, and for the practitioners delivering the programs, these are key motivations. But for the governments funding them, concern about overpopulation was the essential motivator, and not without reason since population growth rate is an enormous drag on development.

So, everyong who downplays concern about overpopulation is hampering development in high-fertility countries.