The road to controlling population growth in the 20th century was paved with good intentions and unpleasant policies that did not work, a new book argues an historian who grew up as the youngest of eight children might well be expected to approach the question of whether the world is overpopulated from an unusual angle. Matthew Connelly, a professor at Columbia University, dedicates his study of those who thought the planet had too many people and tried to do something about it to his parents, "for having so many children".
Yet, he assures the reader, it Was not his personal experience of large families that drew him to the subject. Mr. Connelly’s mentor, Paul Kennedy of Yale University, believed it was necessary to look beyond great-power rivalries to understand the post-cold-war era. In 1994 the pair wrote an article for Atlantic Mouthly arguing that population growth in poor countries, increasing awareness of global economic inequality and the prospect of mass migration could lead to clashes between the West and "the rest".
When, years later, Mr. Connelly began his own book on population growth, he still thought of the topic as a way to offer a broader understanding of world security. He ended up writing a very different-and angry-book, one about people who looked at the human race reproducing itself and saw what a gardener sees when looking at a prize plant: something to be encouraged to bloom in some places and pruned in others.
As the world population soared, the population controllers came to believe they were fighting a war, and there would be collateral damage. Millions of devices were exported to poor countries although they were known to cause infections and sterility. "Perhaps the individual patient is expendable in the general scheme of things," said a participant at a conference on the devices organized in 1962 by the Population Council, a research institute founded by John [D] Rockefeller, "particularly if the infection she acquires is sterilizing but not lethal. "
Furthermore, statistical estimates suggest that as much as 90% of the reason that women have families of a particular size is simply because that is the number of children they want. Where women gained education and rights, birth rates fell. As with reproduction itself, for people to become less fruitful, desire must precede performance.
What is the main idea of Paragraph 4 （）
A. Some elated problems arise when world population increases quickly
B. Rapid population growth may have the potential to cause a war
C. Many birth control methods are potentially lethal
D. Most birth control devices would not endanger people’s lives
