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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Quirks and Quarks with Bob McDonald
In this 17-minute segment, executive director Nandita Bajaj, along with Dr. Céline Delacroix and PB Advisor Dr. William Rees, was asked to comment on what the 8 billion milestone actually means in terms of social, reproductive, and ecological justice.
Promoting condom use in Thailand with spectacle and humor
Many thanks for your piece about Mechai Viravaidya, Thailand’s “Captain Condom.” Mr. Mechai saw that there was an urgent population growth problem in Thailand, causing suffering for people and harm to the environment, and set about to solve it with humor, creativity and persistence.
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.
Abortion bans are a natural outgrowth of coercive pronatalism
Coercive pronatalism may take the form of restrictions on contraception, or propagandist myths around contraceptive use, or loan forgiveness and other financial incentives in exchange for having large families. If these inducements don’t convince women to have children, then abortion bans are instituted to force them into it against their will.
Pope Francis’s criticism of childless couples hurts parents and nonparents alike
“The fact that after fighting for personal and reproductive liberation for centuries, women in some countries are finally able to break free from their prescribed biological and gender roles and authentically exercise their right to have no or fewer children is something to be celebrated,” Bajaj said. “It’s a hallmark of a liberated society. It’s neither a loss of humanity nor selfish.”
Women on their choice to be childfree
“In university, I took a course in gender studies and psychology where I first learned that this idea of a biological instinct, or maternal instinct, was a social construct and not a universal biological drive. That really resonated with me. I didn’t have any deep desires to be a parent.”