Open letter to Nafis Sadik,M.D.
Special Envoy of the U N Secretary-General
for HIV/AIDS In Asia
300 E 56th Street Apt 9J New York, NY 10022
T: (212) 826-5025 (H); (718) 735-5843 (Office) F: (212) 7581529 (H); (718) 778-3649 (Office)
E-mail: sadikk@unfpa.org
Dear Dr. Sadik:
I have just read Fatal Misconception by Matthew Connelly. He has glowing things to report about your good sense, good will and effectiveness and your interest in the past in putting women in charge of their own fertility. I understand that your interest is now in HIV/AIDS, but I am looking for guidance and make bold to appeal to you.
In the past 10 years there has been a truly remarkable discovery about fertility. I have at hand four peer reviewed articles from top ranking scientific journals that independently demonstrate that the “demographic transition,” the tendency for fertility to decline in a community as its social development progresses, is not due to contraception or choice at all. It is due about 90% to changed mating patterns. If that is true, and the scientific case seems air tight, then it should be possible to achieve almost any growth rate or degree of stability of a population by means that are cheap, safe and sure.
This has to be the most important scientific discovery since the dawn of science and the best news since the dawn of news. There has never been a rational mating strategy in the past because the relationship between mating pattern and fertility was never known. Unsuccessful strategies in urban environments are easy to document. I can show you dozens of urban societies that have vanished with a predictability that can only mean demographic collapse from dysfunctional mating patterns. I can show you a few exceptions. Unsuccessful strategies in rural environments are less easy to document, but I can show you hundreds of success stories and one failure in which the population can be traced from too large down to zero. The circumstantial evidence indicates that there have been an enormous number or similar failures.
But while the science is already mostly on the shelf (there is some more work that urgently wants to be done, but it should be neither expensive nor time consuming) nobody seems to know about it. Connelly makes no mention of this recent research in his book. I have consulted geneticists, fertility experts, population geneticists, clergy, and politicians and read everything I can find on the subject. The only people who know are the authors of the articles, and they don’t want to talk. Most will not answer a phone call, a letter or an email.
Every woman should have the right to choose how many children she wants to have. There is a perception that in advanced societies she now has that choice because of available effective birth control. But when you look at the numbers, she does not have the choice. She is at the mercy of a force that has been documented, but about which she has never been told.
At present, I am not in a position to give anyone advice. I have not published a paper and those who have published relevant papers refuse to discuss them. (There is one exception, not enough to call a consensus.)
It the past and into the present, there have been any number of mating strategies. None being rational, they have either been misguided or traditional. Some of the traditional ones happened to work, which is the only reason we are still around. However, globalization is happening. Nobody is isolated. We are well on the way to having a single world strategy, and it isn’t a traditional one.
We can probably survive with a world population anywhere between ten and ten billion. I think the lower part of that range would be prudent, but we should never venture outside it. Wide though the range is, it is finite and if we continue to fly blind, if women continue to make choices as ignorant as they are and as ignorant as a lot of authorities seem to want to remain and to want to leave them, venturing off the edge seems assured.
So I need help. I need someone with whom to discuss the evidence and try to figure out a way forward. Perhaps you are completely away from the field and are indifferent, having your own burdens. But maybe you could at least steer me toward someone who would care. Do let me know what you think.
I shall post this as an open letter on nobabies.net which is my web site. The site also contains most of my evidence. (More is always piling up.) If you are interested, I should be happy to put together a more condensed version for you, since the site is so big as to be rather forbidding.
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