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POPULATION Volume 50, Issue 2 CONNECTIONJune 2018 CELEBRATING HALF A CENTURY OF PROGRESSIVE SOLUTIONS FOR OUR CROWDED PLANET President’s Note or a half-century, Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth) has been focused on education and advocacy to achieve population stabilization. While we’ve made real progress, the hard fact remains that population continues to soar every single day to levels that are ever more unsustainable. A brief balance sheet: F The Bad News The Good News • World population grows by more than 226,000 each day, • When we were founded, only four nations were at or 83 million each year. below replacement rate fertility (2.1 children per woman). • Climate chaos is now a reality, with population growth the Today there are nearly a hundred such nations. number one cause — a fact roundly ignored by too many • Mexico is estimated to have reached replacement rate, experts. having seen its family size plummet from 6.75 children • Nearly half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are still per woman when we were founded to just 2.14 today. unplanned. • The Western Hemisphere as a whole is now below • Access to reproductive health services is under constant replacement rate. assault by Right Wing extremists. • Average family size in the U.S. has dropped by 28 percent, • There are 214 million women in developing nations who from 2.5 children at our founding to 1.8 children today. don’t want to become pregnant, yet aren’t using modern • The U.S. teen birth rate is more than 70 percent lower contraception. than when we were founded. • Apart from condoms, there are still no reliably reversible • FDA-approved long acting reversible contraception methods of male contraception. (LARC) — 200 times more effective than birth control • Africa’s population is projected to more than triple, to 4.5 pills — is covered for insured Americans at no cost. billion people, by 2100. Population Connection is on the right track, yet we’re nowhere near our destination — and we have no time to lose. We are proud to be America’s nationwide provider of K-12 Population Education. We train 12,000 teachers annually. Some 50,000 educators use our materials to teach about 3 million students each year. The demand for our programs continues to exceed the supply. Just as important in these contentious times, we never shy away from outspoken advocacy — with Trump reimposing an expanded Global Gag Rule, defunding UNFPA, and trying to cancel all funds for bilateral international family planning assistance. Here at home, he and his congressional accomplices attack our friends at Planned Parenthood day and night. And from Neil Gorsuch to district and appellate judges, Trump schemes to shove our courts to the far right for decades to come. Our best hope, without question, is the next generation. Population Connection, along with Population Connection Action Fund, proudly hosted hundreds of college student activists in March for our annual Capitol Hill Days advocacy weekend, where they lob- bied 169 members of Congress. And we constantly fan out all across America to raise the alarm and light the path forward. We do this without one red cent of public money. We don’t seek it. We don’t want it. Thanks to our stalwart, farsighted 40,000 dues-paying members, we can be what we’ve been for half a century: America’s strong, sound, unapologetic voice for population stabilization. John Seager [email protected] Population Connection — June 2018 VolumePopulation 50, Issue 2 Connection June 2018 Features Board Chair Estelle Raboni, MPH, MCHES 7 Twenty Years of Teaching Population: PopEd Trainer Board of Directors Perspectives Aaron S. Allen, PhD By Kate Anderson Andreea Creanga, MD Amy Dickson Katie Ferman 12 Fifty Years of Family Planning for Our Future Bryce Hach By Stacie Murphy Padgett Kelly, PhD Anna Lawson, PhD Nejla Liias 22 Celebrating Fifty Years of Grassroots Membership and Sacheen Nathan, MD Support Bob Pettapiece, PhD Dara Purvis, JD (Vice Chair) The Hon. Tom Sawyer (Treasurer) 26 PopEd and Pam Wasserman: Thirty Years Together Carol Vlassoff, PhD By Lee S. Polansky and Pam Wasserman Kevin Whaley, PhD Hania Zlotnik, PhD (Secretary) 28 From Apathy to Action: Population Connection’s President and CEO John Seager Millennial Staff Members Share Their Inspirations and [email protected] Intentions Editor By Lee S. Polansky Marian Starkey [email protected] 32 Key Data Trends Since Our Founding as ZPG Population Connection (ISSN 2331-0529) By Marian Starkey Population Connection is the national grassroots population organization that educates young people and advocates progressive action to Departments stabilize world population at a level that can be sustained by Earth’s resources. 2 Editor’s Note Annual membership ($25) includes a one-year 3 Letters to the Editor subscription to Population Connection magazine. All contributions, bequests, and gifts are fully tax- 4 In the News deductible in accordance with current laws. Population Connection 6 Planned Giving Quiz 2120 L Street, NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20037 38 Washington View (202) 332-2200 • (800) 767-1956 [email protected] 40 Field & Outreach PopulationConnection.org PopulationEducation.org 42 PopEd Cover Image: Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, 45 Editorial Excerpts entered lunar orbit on December 24, 1968. That evening, the astronauts held a live broadcast from lunar orbit, in which they showed pictures of the Earth and moon as seen from their spacecraft. Said Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, “The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.” © NASA www.popconnect.org June 2018 — Population Connection 1 Editor’s Note t’s been half a century since NASA astronauts aboard In this issue, we showcase longtime members and volunteer the Apollo 8 shuttle took the iconic photo on the cover teacher trainers. We take a look at how demographic, health, and of this fiftieth anniversary issue ofPopulation Connection environmental trends have panned out over the past fifty years. Imagazine. It was the first time humans had seen our planet in And we aim to inspire hope for the future of our planet and its its entirety, and it was — and remains — a breathtaking sight. people by sharing the stories of young people who understand the challenges of population growth and are willing to have the In addition to being beautiful and awe-inspiring, the Earthrise sometimes difficult conversations required to address it. They photo starkly depicted the finite nature of our planet. We’re on will carry the movement for zero population growth forward a ball that’s spinning through space and there’s only so much into the next fifty years, and I am confident they will nail it. land we can cultivate, develop, chop down, drill, and task with absorbing our waste. In the ten years since I put together our fortieth anniversary issue of the magazine (then called The Reporter), our dues- It’s no coincidence that Zero Population Growth (ZPG) was paying membership has grown from 32,000 to over 40,000. founded the same year that this photo was taken. Americans Our network of volunteer teacher trainers has gone from 420 to were more aware than ever before that what happens to the over 650. And our staff and its outreach to every corner of the environment in one part of the Earth has global repercussions. United States has nearly tripled. The year of our founding was the year the annual global popula- Thank you for supporting that expansion. I am confident that tion growth rate peaked, at 2.1 percent. The global total fertility the population movement will continue to grow over the next rate had just peaked as well, at five children per woman. The ten years, reaching even more Americans. Together we can timing of these demographic events in relation to increasing change the course of history. Thank you for everything you do. environmental chaos was not lost on ZPG’s founders or its ear- liest members. Marian Starkey [email protected] marks our fiftieth anniversary! Fifty years of 2018 advocating for reasonable, voluntary solutions to achieve zero population growth. We owe it all to the 250,000 cumulative donors who have enabled us to educate millions of young Americans and to be strong, effective advocates for population stabilization. Thank you! 2 Population Connection — June 2018 Send correspondence to Letters to the Editor [email protected] . Attn: Marian Starkey Letters are also accepted via Population Connection postal mail. Letters may be 2120 L St, NW, Suite 500 edited for clarity and length. Washington, D.C. 20037 Thank you for your work on the latest issue of Population The more “causes” we adopt, the more access points we expose Connection. You tackled a tough topic (reproductive justice) and to our critics. did it well and successfully! I also have a complaint about terminology here-n-there: Some Having been in this field for a few decades now, and having of our authors talk about “slowing down population growth.” worked with Loretta Ross (and Rickie Solinger) I want to con- We have to talk about ending population growth. If all we want gratulate you for taking on this topic and succeeding in this to accomplish is slowing down population growth, then we’re effort. just debating whether to go over the cliff running or to go over the cliff walking. Keep up the good work and do not be discouraged or deterred; James Hedges your particular voice matters and your particular angle on this topic matters immensely. I was saddened by what Jean Crocco expressed in her March Sarah Burns 2018 letter to the editor.