Time Essay: POPULATION EXPLOSION: IS MAN REALLY DOOMED?

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But even if technology succeeds in providing both the food and raw materials to support a large population, some Americans worry about the probability of a basic deterioration in the affluent society that they have come to take for granted. "How will we house the next hundred million Americans?" asks President Nixon. "How will we educate and employ such a large number of people? How will we provide adequate health care when our population reaches 300 million?" Some birth-control enthusiasts want to answer with a barrage of coercive measures ranging from special taxes on any family with more than two children to sterility drugs in the public water supply. Indeed, about the only tactic they have not yet proposed is euthanasia. Mr. Nixon answered his questions with a more modest approach: a $382 million program to encourage birth control.

Although America can theoretically support many millions more than it does now, there must be a point-400 million, 500 million perhaps-at which the increase has to stop. And partly because the alarmists' warnings have been heard, this stabilization point seems to be approaching. In actual fact, the American birth rate has been dropping for most of the past decade (it is medicine's victories over death that have caused the population increase), and it now stands at an average of 2.5 children per family. This is not much more than the 2.1 figure that represents, when combined with current death rates, the concept of zero population growth. "To say you believe in zero growth is like saying you believe in the law of gravity," says Chicago's Hauser. "It's going to come whether you believe in it or not. The only question now is how we will achieve zero growth and over what time period."

The first step, already partly taken, is to prevent the birth of unwanted children. According to one major survey, at least one American child in five is unwanted. The obvious solution -making both contraceptives and abortion cheaper and more available-would reduce the birth rate to below the magic 2.1. The principal question-raised anew last month by Milton Eisenhower and ex-Senator Joseph Tydings, founders of the Coalition for a National Population Policy-is whether Americans can be persuaded to want fewer children. A recent Gallup poll showed that the trend is in that direction: the percentage favoring large families (four or more children) has dropped from 40% in 1967 to only 23% today. As liberated women seek careers outside the home, and as contraception becomes accepted as an obligation, it is probable that both the ideal family size and the actual birth rate will continue to decline. The Census Bureau has already lowered its estimates for the year 2000 by a minimum of 17,000,000.

That fact alone might suggest that the predictions of a population doomsday, at least as far as the U.S. is concerned, have been exaggerated. It should be added, though, that the children of the post-World War II baby boom are now getting married, and even if the birth rate dropped to 2.1 immediately, it would take two generations for the American population to level off at about 275,000,000.