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Population control is the practice of limiting population increase, usually by reducing the birth rate. The practice has sometimes been voluntary, as a response to poverty, or out of religious ideology, but in some times and places it has been government-mandated. This is generally conducted to improve quality of life for a society or to prevent a Malthusian catastrophe. It has also been conducted in the name of eugenics, racism, and the economic self-interest of corporations to exploit citizens of poor countries. (Ehrenreich, 1979)

Contents 1 History 2 Modern ideas and practices 3 Population policies, Causes and Responses 4 References 5 See also 6 External links

Surviving records from Ancient Greece document the first known examples of population control. These include the colonization movement, which saw Greek outposts being built across the Mediterranean and Black Sea basins to accommodate the excess population of individual states. As the number of available sites decreased, the Greeks - beginning with the Cretans - turned to pederasty, the formal practice of pairing young adult males with adolescent boys for educational and bonding purposes. This was done in concourse with delaying the age of marriage for men to thirty. The Greeks also used abortifacients and some cities practiced infanticide, though the latter is considered to have been an early form of eugenics.

The Siwans also used pederasty and boy marriage until the early twentieth century in order to control population size in an environment with finite resources and no natural enemies. Men were generally not allowed to marry before the age of forty. Thus the overwhelming majority of men took adolescent boys as lovers, a social contract often sealed with a formal and public marriage ceremony - a practice documented into the twentieth century in a controversial book called Oasis, Siwa: from the Inside Traditions, Customs and Magic, by Fathi Malim.

Given the nature of human reproductive biology, controlling the birth rate generally implies one of the following practices:

• sexual abstinence
• contraception
• same-sex relations
• sterilization
• abortion
• infanticide

It is generally accepted that overpopulation is caused or aggravated by poverty and gender inequality with consequent unavailability, and lack of knowledge of contraception, institutionalized in a document misnamed the "Cairo Consensus", and third world evidence usually bears this theory out. However, first and second world fertility rates, in the Depression era United States, Modern Russia, Japan, Italy, Sweden, Estonia and France suggest that these populations are responding inversely to poverty and economic pressures especially on women [1]. Thus France is increasing social and women's services like childcare and parental leave, expecting the policy to increase or aggravate overpopulation. Italy is regarded as alleviating overpopulation more rapidly than Sweden as a result of less gender equality and fewer children's services.

• Thomlinson, R. 1975. Demographic Problems: Controversy over Population Control. 2nd ed. Encino, CA: Dickenson.

• Eugenics
• Population genetics
• Population bottlenecks
• Overpopulation

• [2] Population Control. Articles maintained by the Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment (CWPE).
• The Nine Lives of Population Control by Midge Specter Traces the history of the perceived need for population control.
• Ehenreich *Meehanreports
• "To the point of farce: a martian view of the hardinian taboo—the silence that surrounds population control" by Maurice King & Charles Elliott, British Medical Journal 1997