IN THE MEDIA
Media Coverage
Our team works hard to stay active in our media advocacy efforts to shift the mainstream cultural narrative to inspire behavioral and system change towards substantially downscaling human impact to enable natural ecosystems, nonhuman animals, and humanity to flourish together.
Media inquiries for our executive director Nandita Bajaj can be sent to media@populationbalance.org.
Why Naidu and Stalin are wrong — and how their ideas on reproduction turn the clock back
With their proposed solution, Naidu and Stalin would be rolling back hard-won reproductive rights in the southern states for the self-serving motive of obtaining a “fairer” representation. The admirable alternative to fairer funding allocation would be to champion the rights of North Indian women to reproductive autonomy and the protection of girls from child marriage—policies that would lead to declining fertility there as in the south.
Social Security is a Ponzi scheme high birthrates won't fix
Our media outlets have a strange obsession with declining birth rates. While the world's population clocks in at 8.2 billion and adds another 70 million per year—and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that population growth is a major contributor—we read near-daily headlines about the "crisis" of declining birth rates.
Slow the growth, save the world? Why declining birth rates need not mean an end to prosperity
The world’s population is, at this point, still growing. Nandita Bajaj, the executive director of the US non-profit Population Balance, says there’s a taboo around discussing population among those who oppose eternal growth. She told a forum this week that population and consumption (and therefore emissions) go hand in hand but there are reasons the left and the degrowth movement duck the conversation.
The benefits of fewer people
“Cash for kids” (May 25th) anxiously surveyed possible remedies for declining birth rates, yet never quite explained why this should be a cause for anxiety and not celebration. The use of terms like “crisis” and “catastrophe” belies the fact that people are choosing to have smaller families and that teenage pregnancy is at an all-time low because women have more reproductive choice.
“Worrying” population declines are actually a hopeful sign
Human population is in the news, but not for the reasons we are used to. At one time, our growing population was seen as central to wildlife extinctions, resource depletion, pollution and environmental destruction. But today, we are more likely to hear that there are too few of us, not too many. As women across the world have gained greater reproductive choice, birth rates have declined.
Our goal should be a planet with fewer humans
The Post’s editorial on birthrates is just the latest in an unending — and unnecessary — series of alarms sounded on this subject in recent years. Outside of briefly acknowledging the many upsides of declining fertility rates, the editorial assumes as given the dire consequences should we fail to convince women to reverse them.
How patriarchal pronatalism dominates the conversation about the human future
While scientists warn that human numbers are a key driver of ecological and social crises, the subject of overpopulation gets short shrift by policymakers, think tanks, and even environmental groups. We are told that numbers don’t matter; what matters is solely the level of per capita consumption.
Too much? Too little? Too late?
In a panel discussion spanning the worlds of math, physics and chemistry, investigative journalist Christopher Ketcham chats with Dr. Bill Rees, Prof. Emeritus at the University of British Columbia, Rex Weyler, Co-founder of Greenpeace International, and Nandita Bajaj, Executive Director of Population Balance to discuss where humanity is heading in an overcrowded, over-consuming world.
Pronatalism on the rise to counter growing push for gender equality
There’s an insidious new tactic emerging for selling right-wing ideology to wider audiences, evident in last month’s Budapest Demographic Summit for “family-friendly thinkers and decision-makers,” the upcoming pro-birth Natal conference in Austin, Texas, and the recent film “Birthgap.”
"It's not science" – Organisations with links to Musk accused of "pro-growth" skew
Questions have been raised concerning Our World in Data (OWID) and its pro-economic and population growth bias after it emerged the organisation has taken donations from tech billionaire Musk since at least 2021.
Feminism is the greatest threat to mankind
Women without children, whether by choice or circumstance, face enormous stigma in most cultures, which often includes domestic abuse, divorce, and social ostracisation. There is also a lack of reckoning with the great unraveling of our ecological and social crises, which will likely bring unimaginably dire consequences for humanity and other species over the next several decades.
Reproductive rights are under threat
Coercive pronatalism – pressures to compel women to have more children – inspired by nationalism, xenophobia, militarism or market fundamentalism is at an all-time high, and is a threat to reproductive rights everywhere. On a planet facing numerous ecological and social catastrophes, bemoaning a decline in national fertility rates is a reprehensible distraction.
A Minnesota nonprofit's solutions to human overpopulation
The world’s population is set to grow to 9.8 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100, according to the United Nations. A nonprofit based in Saint Paul shares its solutions to combat human overpopulation and overconsumption.
Population denialism is reminiscent of climate denialism
A new study estimates that global heating will push billions of people outside the comfortable range of temperature and weather in which we have evolved. While coverage of the study notes that rapid emissions cuts could greatly reduce the number of people forced to live amid unprecedented extremes, it fails to mention the obvious: that reducing our population would have the same effect.
Population growth is not good for people or the planet
India’s population has just reached 1.4 billion people, surpassing China as the world’s most populous nation four years earlier than projected. Spurring this growth is a traditional patriarchal culture in which women’s identity is constrained by the social expectation they bear children.
The elite are panic-breeding white babies
Last week I interviewed Nandita Bajaj, executive director of Population Balance, about the dangers of pronatalism, and how coercive policies and cultures which emphasise the importance of having children fulfil our obsession with growth, supplying our economies, religions and political parties with more bodies every year. Towards the end of the episode we discuss Effective Altruism, and its fringe pronatalist movement, a dangerous philosophy supported by the likes of Elon Musk.
Coercive pro-birth policies have devastating impacts on people and the planet
In the end, alarmism about population decline is a distraction from the real crisis demanding attention: the human enterprise in overshoot, overwhelming the natural systems that enable life on Earth. Norms need to shift so that having fewer or no children is understood as a legitimate, positive choice and lower fertility is recognized as a path to a positive future.
The new push for more babies: How tech elites think it will save the planet
“Globally, we’re still adding about 80 million people every year to the planet. That growth stems from pronatalism, which is all of the cultural and institutional pressure that promotes or even coerces childbearing. Climate change, biodiversity loss, growing scarcities of freshwater are all bigger problems than “the bizarre claim that we’re not producing enough babies,” Bajaj said.
Dismissal of “population alarmism” is rooted in pronatalist ideology
Pronatalism is a globally pervasive form of reproductive coercion, that reduces people to reproductive vessels for external agendas. In addition to being a source of reproductive injustice, it fuels population growth and has propelled the global population toward the 8 billion milestone. It’s time to confront the pernicious influence of pronatalism on population growth, human rights, and the planet.
I am not a slave to the biological clock
And why we would do well to recognize that perhaps the “biological imperative” is simply a powerful creative impulse, and we are glossing over this more complex reality when we attribute that impulse, with little examination, to wanting a child.