In the beginning, Thomas Malthus(1798) theorised that the population grows at a much faster rate than what natural resources can provide. He said that wars, famine and epidemics will act as checks against overpopulation if the gap between people and resources grows wider. He was against abortion and birth control methods instead he suggested prolonged celibacy and late marriage as preventive methods.
Neo-Malthusianism (1877 onwards) stressed on birth control methods and identified the working class with the problem of overpopulation. Issues with overcrowded industrial slums diverted the debate from issues of poverty and unequal access to birth control and the poor having little reasons to abstain from having more children due to availability of resources from industrialization.
At first the religious institutions maintained a stance against contraception on moral grounds of sanctity of marriage and family values but things started to change on basis of existing medical science and birth control being started called “family planning” emphasis was on women’s health etc.
Europe faced depopulation and America faced over population due to 400mn people migrating from Europe to north america and also due to fertility realted issues in respective countries. So nationalist measure were taken in europe to reduce immigration and strict laws against abortion and birth control were passed. Later, by end of WW2 some european countries advocated Malthus’ prophecy for population pressure as the major reason for international tensions and economic rivalry between countries as well as colonialism
Central to the debate were issues of migration, availability of labour, conflict over resources and poverty. The concerns were developmental and political. Soviet Union was the first to make birth control services freely available. But the socialist consistently maintained that the issue is not about overpopulation it is actually about unequal access to resources.
Aspects of the new theory was that the population growth was supposed to reflect the economic development of the new society. It established a low population rate as a key indicator of an economically developed country and that overpopulation was the primary reason for underdevelopment and poverty in the developing countries . Now the advanced countries of the west started pressuring the third word countries for population control, stating overpopulation causing ecological depletion of the world. The developing countries criticised the argument by stating that industrialized nations which had less than 25% of world’s population accounted for 75% of world’s energy use and 2/3rd of world’s greenhouse gas emotions. Thus the ecological crisis was caused by over consumption not overpopulation.
Studies on fertility and poverty revealed the complex relationship between poverty and the tendency to have more children. For one, unlike the neo-Malthusian belief, children are not viewed as liabilities but as assets. The motivation to have more children varies from class to class. Landless labourers, who depend on manual labour, and the poor farmers, who cannot afford mechanised alternatives to manual labour, prefer to have more children. Overpopulation then is not the cause of poverty, but perhaps or at the most a symptom. This is to say that having more children is not the reason for their impoverishment, but is a calculated, rational economic decision on their part.