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Arguendo: The Legal Challenge of Population Control

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Albert P. Blaustein
Albert P. Blaustein*
Affiliation:
Rutgers—The State University (Camden, New Jersey)
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Extract

It is obvious that overpopulation is the most critical social problem of our time. As such, it is necessarily the greatest legal problem of our time and the greatest challenge which faces the legal profession today. Since the population problem is fast becoming the population crisis, it is essential that our laws and our legal order must now be subject to reexamination. We dare wait no longer in studying, formulating, and augmenting the proper and precise laws and legal machinery both to help restrain the population growth and to alleviate the ills inherent in overpopulation and unwanted population.

But we must, in our quest for the best laws, be wary of the trap of talking solely in terms of population curtailment. We must take as our guiding principle the words of population expert, John D. Rockefeller, III: “Our constant goal is and must be the enrichment of human life, not its restriction.” In other words, our new laws on the population problem must at the same time make for a better society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , August 1968 , pp. 107 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © 1968 by the Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

Editor's Note: The following is extracted from a statement by the author to the Subcommittee on Foreign Aid Expenditures of the U. S. Senate Committee on Government Operations (Hearings on S. 1676, March 2, 1966). Hearings on the population crisis were held during 1966 and 1967 under the chairmanship of Senator Ernest Gruening. Professor Blaustein has added the footnotes for the convenience of readers of the Review.

References

1. J. D. Rockefeller, III, A Citizens Perspective on Population, 6 Intercom. 14 (1964).

2. What Happens to Teen-Age Marriages?, 19 Changing Times, The Kiplinger Magazine 6-7 (Nov. 1965).

3. The Facts of Social Life (Updated), 9 Am. Behav. Sci. 33, 34 (Oct. 1965).

4. R. C. Cook, New Patterns in U. S. Fertility, 20 Population Bull. 113, 130-31 (1964).

5. See, J. Ind. St. Med. Ass'n and J. Marr. and the Family, as quoted in supra, note 2, at 8. Reference also personal correspondence between the author and various sociologists.

6. Ky. Rev. Stat. 2.015, ch. 21, § 1 (1964).

7. Studies quoted in J. M. Kummer, The Problems of Abortion: The Personal Population Explosion, in The Population Crisis and the Use of World Resources, 274,275 (S. Mudd ed. 1964).

8. Id. at 278.

9. Taussig, supra note 7.

10. A. F. Guttmacher, Babies by Choice or by Chance, 59 (1959).

11. Alan F. Guttmacher, The Place of Sterilization, 268, 271, in Mudd, supra note 7

12. H. B. Van Loon, 25 L. & Contemp. Prob. 397, 405 (1960).

13. J. Huxley, Too Many People, in Our Crowded Planet, 223, 229 (F. Osborn ed. 1962).