Mr. BUSH. Mr. Speaker, even before I took office in January of 1967 I heard people say that it was all a Congressman could do to keep up with his mail and his committee work, much less try to think of solutions to the major ills of the world. With the help of hard-working and dedicated staff I have been able to answer all the letters which flow daily into my office and to keep abreast of action pending before the Ways and Means Committee on which I serve. But while I not claim to have discovered a panacea for the earth's problems, I have become increasingly aware of a very sensible approach toward meeting quite a few of our most troublesome concerns.
That approach is family planning and population control.
For years we have heard cries of alarm about the population explosion which nations such as India and China are experiencing. It is a very real crisis, prompting President Johnson to say that:
Next to the pursuit ot peace, the really great challenge to the human family Is the race between food supply and population increase. That race is (today) being lost.
And former President Dwight D. Eisenhower has said:
I have come to believe that the population explosion is the world's most critical problem.
The problem of population growth is skyrocketing, and in this report I intend to address myself to some of its aspects.
The United States is itself not free of the threat of overpopulation. Today we have something like 200 million citizens, but within 32 years--by the year 2000--we shall have 300 million Americans, a 50-percent increase. As the distinguished former Chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Atomic Energy Commission, David E. Lilienthal, has written:
An additional 100 million people will undermine our most cherished traditions, erode our public services and impose a rate of taxation that will make current taxes seem tame. . . . (Eventually) there comes a point at which a change In quantity becomes a change in quality-when we can no longer speak of "more of the same." And another 100 million people will, I fear, make just that change in the joy of life in America.
Sitting as I have on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, which has responsibility for social security legislation, I have heard almost endless testimony to the effect that our national welfare costs are rising phenomenally, prompting me to wonder how we can take basic steps to arrest it. But the problem is by no means wholly financial; it is emphatically human, a tragedy on unwanted children and of parents whose productivity is impaired by children they never desired. In the words of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:
There is scarcely anything more tragic in human life than a child who is not wanted.
Adding all this to the problems of poverty in cities and rural areas and to the increase in crime which many sociologists see related to overcrowding, I have decided to give my vigorous support to measures for population control in both the United States and the world. Certainly responsible religions have the right to determine their doctrines, but for those of us who feel so strongly on this issue, the recent encyclical was most discouraging.
Every day the world gains 180,000 people; that is, 180,000 more people will be born today than will die. In a year's time the total is a staggering 70 million, equal to the population of France, Belgium, and Holland combined. At the present rate, the population of the world is expected to double within 35 years to a total of 7 billion people.
These figures do not tell the horrifying tale that overpopulation spins: of increasing poverty, of disease, of human misery, and, worse, of starvation. Famine already stalks India and China with their mammoth populations. Before you go to bed tonight, 10,000 people around the world--most of them children--will have died of starvation and malnutrition. Some say that U.S. foreign aid can easily wipe out this tragedy if only it is applied in large enough quantities. But the respected former President of the World Bank, Eugene B. Black, offers a chilling contradiction:
I must be blunt. Population growth threatens to nullify all our efforts to raise living standards in many of the poorer countries.
Birth control must come swiftly to stave off the number of future mouths which will feed on an ever-decreasing proportion of food. But it is by no means the only answer. The immediate response to the problem of overpopulation is more food. The years 1980-85 are the critical time. If we cannot approach feeding the world's people by then, no program of improved agricultural production or population control will prevent the widescale starvation which will then follow.
At the same time we are rushing to increase the world's food supply, we must also seek to promote information about family planning and to provide those nations which request them with birth control devices. Such methods as the interuterine device--IUD--and the contraceptive pill, as well as other more traditional practices, have met with a less than totally successful response in the past few years. But until medical research provides better means for stemming overpopulation, we must make sure that these are available on a massive scale to the people who need them and want them. The United States and a few Western European nations have the technological ability for mass production of this equipment as well as the capability for birth control research. If we cannot provide the underdeveloped world with such aid, no one will.
But let me impress upon you that the answer is neither birth control alone nor increased food production alone; it is both. To quote the able former director of the Food and Agricultural Organization, Mr. Binay Sen:
Population stabilization and accelerating the rate of increase of food production in the developing countries are like the blades of a pair of scissors. Neither can be effective without the other.
AT HOME: THE HUMAN TRAGEDY
Over a year ago, the New York Times noted:
In the period of greatest affluence the world's richest city (New York) has ever known, the welfare rolls keep growing at a faster rate each year. . . . The most disheartening point of these statistics is that nearly two-thirds are children under 18, growing up in an atmosphere of despondency and defeat.
What that newspaper had to say about New York City applies to the entire nation. The fastest-growing part of the relief rolls everywhere is Aid for Dependent Children--AFDC: At the end of the 1968 fiscal year, a little over $2 billion will be spent for AFDC, but by fiscal 1972 this will increase by over 75 percent to almost $3.7 billion. But these figures do not tell the intensely human side: that the affected children are often unwanted, that two-thirds of them come from families where the father is absent, and that, if past trends continue, they will pass on the curse of poverty to their children. It has been shown that of all the families living in poverty, 33 percent have five children and 43 percent have six children. Seventy-one percent of the non-white poor families have five or more children. Poverty is a vicious trap into which innocent youngsters should not be placed.
We speak of these children as "unwanted"; are they really so? Evidence from various studies indicates that this is indeed the case. One study--reported in "Family Planning, Sterility, and Population Growth," by Freedman, Whelpton, and Campbell, 1959--revealed that while only 6 percent of first pregnancies are unwanted, the figure rises to 62 percent by the ninth pregnancy. A Florida survey reported that 70 percent of the women going to public health maternity clinics did not want additional children. This desire for smaller families is outweighed, however, by the appalling lack of information many women have about family planning: frequently, mothers who finally learn of birth control clinics and aids tell physicians that they were previously unaware of such facilities and would have used them if they had known. The Denver Planned Parenthood Clinic reported that of the women accepting contraceptive help, fully 89 percent had never before used its services. Indeed, it is now estimated that about 5 million women want family planning help-- but that only 700,000 actually receive such assistance through public and private sources.
Some statistics from closer to home especially dramatize the need for these services. Mr. Norman Fleishman, executive director of Planned Parenthood of Houston, reports that there are approximately 377,000 women in Texas--54,000 of them in Harris County alone-- who are in their reproductive years and are in need of family planning help. But less than 41,000 are presently receiving aid from the 15 Planned Parenthood centers in the State, or only a miserable 10.8 percent of the total need. The big stumbling block are local health departments and public hospitals, which give every kind of postnatal care but do not supply women with birth control information and devices. Only 25 health departments--out of 65 in the State--give family planning information, and only 15 give birth control care. The regional Planned Parenthood office estimates that no more than 15 percent of the poor and near-poor families in Texas have access to effective, medically supervised care that will give protection against unwanted pregnancies in Harris County. In short, the willingness for birth control information exists; it is just the facilities which are lagging.
There are two persistent myths which prevail with regard to family planning in the United States. One holds that the poor want children because it means additional welfare funds for them. This is patently untrue, for studies have shown the poor to be aware of the fact that the increased cost of having another mouth to feed and another body to clothe and shelter far exceeds the pittance they receive from public assistance. Rather, as was mentioned above, the poor have more children than they can afford because they do not have access to proper birth control information and devices.
The second myth is that Negroes do not want birth control, believing it to be a form of "genocide." On the contrary, family planning has been growing in popularity among Negroes wherever it is available because our black citizens recognize that they cannot hope to acquire a larger share of American prosperity without cutting down on births, just as the rest of the Nation must do. But they have met with discrimination in these services as in other health services because they are dependent on public facilities-and those facilities have simply not been active in the area of birth control. To provide medically sound and sympathetic birth control services would end this unwarranted discrimination gap. And as to the issue of whether or not black Americans favor planning their families, we need only repeat the word of the late Dr. King:
The Negro constitutes half the poor of the nation. Like all poor, Negro and white, they have many unwanted children. This is a cruel evil they urgently need to control. . . . For the Negro, therefore, intelligent guides of family planning are a profoundly important ingredient in his quest for security and a decent life. . . . They do not welcome any solution which involves population breeding as a weapon. They have instinctive sympathy to all who offer them fair opportunity to develop and advance as all other people in our society.
The Federal Government, along with many State governments, has taken steps to accelerate family planning activities in the United States, but we need to do more. We have a clear precedent: when the Salk vaccine was discovered, large-scale programs were undertaken to distribute it. I see no reason why similar programs of education and family planning assistance--all on a voluntary basis--should not be instituted in the United States on a massive scope. It is imperative that we do so: not only to fight poverty at its roots, not only to cut down on our welfare costs, but also to eliminate the needless suffering of unwanted children and overburdened parents.
SOME PROPOSALS ABROAD
I propose that we totally revamp our foreign aid program to give primary emphasis to population control and agricultural improvement. In my opinion we have made a mistake in our foreign aid to date by concentrating on building huge steel mills and concrete plants in underdeveloped nations while the real effort should have been toward helping to bring those countries up to a level where they can feed their own population.
For indeed, what do we want out of our foreign aid? It is to help people, we can do it much better by increasing agricultural production and promoting population control than by constructing sports stadiums and highrise housing projects. Nothing could be more humanitarian than to dent the grim list of those 10,000 persons who die each day of malnutrition or starvation. All this we must do now, knowing that if we fail, no amount of aid of any sort will ever be able to touch the problems of a world grown too populous for its own good. By no means should we try to do this alone. We should attempt to shape other nations' foreign aid programs to emphasize the same two items. The United Nations would do well to concentrate on the problem of overpopulation in its own aid efforts. The proclamation of an "International Population Year" by the U.N. will do much to focus world attention and hopefully action on this most vital problem.
We must encourage foreign nations to increase their poulatlon control activities, and especially to provide birth control services to rural areas instead of just the cities. After these first necessary steps have been taken, these countries could turn to more sophisticated approaches, such as providing incentives for their people to limit the size of their families voluntarily. At the same time we should continue research into better means of birth control-such as injections and male contraceptives-which can spur future, more effective population control drives and eventually turn up wholly new methods for combating the problem.
I prefer to see private capital do this research at its own expense, releasing Federal funds now spent for this purpose to pay for the manufacture and distribution of those devices already developed. It is a little-known fact that the State which is presently conducting more research into birth control is Texas. Valiant experimentation and discovery is being done at this very minute in the Southwest Research Institute, at the University of Texas at Austin, and at Baylor Medical School in Houston.
Private foundations are also striving admirably to deal with the population explosion. The key to the food crisis may well have already been found by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. The Rockefeller Foundation, working in Mexico, has developed something known as miracle wheat, which might be able to take up where the fastly diminishing supply of American grain runs out. And both Rockefeller and Ford, operating through the International Rice Institute in the Philippines, have developed a miracle rice-IR-8-which if produced on a huge scale will do much to save millions of Asians from starvation. Both of these discoveries--pioneered totally by nongovernmental organizations--will buy time for the world while population control efforts are instituted.
AT HOME
I propose that we increase and earmark appropriations for our already existing family-planning services in all areas: the dispensing of birth control information, the training of family planning caseworkers, and the distribution of birth control devices if the patient requests them. Money spent toward family planning is a good investment, since in the long run it will save on such costs as aid for dependent children. But again let me emphasize that this is a preponderantly human problem, and compassion more than fiscal conservatism demands such action.
Our States and cities should be encouraged to pass legislation increasing the scope of their own efforts in family planning. A sort of central bank of information in this area, offering the latest news of advances in research and in private and governmental services, should be set up and used by these sub-Federal governments. One of the greatest blocks to more vigorous family planning in the United States today is the timidity which local agencies such as hospitals and welfare departments have in dealing with this subject. We must somehow find ways of convincing these officials that the public supports family planning and desperately needs these agencies' aid in this important area.
Along the same lines, our public hospitals and medical centers should all have some place where interested women can obtain information on birth control. An excellent time to give such information would be at the time of postpartem care of the mother. Our medical schools and nurses schools should vastly increase their courses in the field of family planning so that every person connected with medicine will be aware of the means of forestalling future unwanted pregnancies. It is my hope that Texas, already a leader in birth control research, will again take the lead and expand its current curriculums to include more of this sort of training.
And I propose the establishment of a Joint Congressional Committee on Family Planning in America, in the style of Senator Gruening, of Alaska's Subcommittee on Foreign Aid Expenditures, which has done so much to increase public awareness of the population explosion abroad. Thanks to Senator Gruening's courtesy I have participated in his hearings. This new joint committee, comprised of members from both the House and the Senate, will seek to focus national attention on the domestic need for family planning through hearings and proposals for ways to increase our present efforts in this field. Hopefully, the expanded public awareness of the need for birth control at home will serve to end the municipal and county "timidity" about birth control mentioned earlier.
WHAT CAN WE DO?
For information about what you can do in your own city to advance the cause of family planning, call your local Planned Parenthood center. In Houston they are located at 3512 Travis, telephone No.: JA3-7419. The Houston center is the fastest-growing one in the country, now ranking just behind New York and Chicago in the number of patients served-15,000. It needs your help and your support. For further information about the population explosion abroad, write either the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, 515 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022, or the Population Crisis Committee, 1730 K Street NW., Washington, D.C. 20006.
I do not claim that these proposals will be the absolute answer to the problems of increased population, either in the United States or anwyhere else. But I earnestly hope that they will receive the attention of a nation which is concerned as I am about the spread of poverty, hunger, disease, and human conflict.
For years any public discussion of family planning was most controversial. Things are gradually changing, but they must change faster. In the past there has been some religious opposition to family planning. I still feel, in spite of the recent encyclical, that there will be a liberalization in this opposition.
It is so frustrating to have within our group a real answer to this pressing problem, and yet feel no sense of urgency in our Nation. All of this can change. It must change. It must change soon.
Though, what with it's being even two years older than the first, it likely will mean even less to our listeners (if any).