Pope Melinda I is in town, with no one from the idiot BBC daring to question her assertion that Catholic doctrine is, or at the very least ought to be, determined by opinion polls taken among Americans who happen to identify themselves as Catholics. It is likewise taken as read that the problem with the world is that it has proles and darkies in it. Heaven forfend that anyone might mention the global redistribution of wealth, or the improvement of African women’s healthcare by providing them with, oh, you know, doctors, nurses and midwives.

The invariable increase in abortions wherever there are contraceptives; the horrific side effects of the Pill, of women poisoning themselves so as to be permanently available for the sexual gratification of men; the obvious dangers of sticking a coil or a diaphragm up oneself; the total ineffectiveness of condoms in preventing sexually transmitted infections from Botswana to Birmingham, from Malawi to Manchester, from Ghana to Glasgow, from Cameroon to Cardiff: none of this must ever be mentioned. Did someone say something about “informed choice”?

Years ago, I remember mentioning the Conservatives to one of this country’s best-known pro-life and pro-family activists. She all but spat with contempt: “I spent 18 years campaigning against them.” As, indeed, she had done, and most especially against Margaret Thatcher, the abomination of whose name in such circles is matched only by the abomination of the name of Tony Blair. A traditional Catholic, my interlocutor’s only objection to Labour was that “it used to be based on Methodism, but it isn’t anymore.”

And now, the party against whom she fought so valiantly for 18 years is back with a vengeance. Labour should make clear that, in emulation of Saint Melinda, it will cease the direct funding of abortion as part of the overseas aid budget, something that would in fact reduce that budget dramatically, so very much of it is spent on that procedure.

We could then get to work with facts such as the invariable increase in abortions wherever there are contraceptives. Our reasonable expectation could be to reframe the debate entirely, in terms such as the global redistribution of wealth, and the improvement of African women’s healthcare by providing them with, oh, you know, doctors, nurses and midwives.

The position of the Catholic Church is fully borne out by the facts, and is unique in being so. Femaleness has been classified as in itself a medicable condition by means of the contraceptive pill, which is simply not a medicine at all. It is, in point of fact, a poison, designed precisely to stop healthy body parts from performing their natural functions, and accordingly attended by all manner of horrific side effects, for no reason except to make women permanently available for the sexual gratification of men.

And despite the unrivalled effectiveness of Natural Family Planning if it is taught and practised properly, a practice only possible by a faithful married couple. Even the WHO, hardly a Vatican puppet to put things at their very mildest, has to admit that one. The Pill, in turn, has wrought havoc by filling our water supply with synthetic oestrogens. Following logically, maleness itself has also been so classified, leading to the heavy medication of boys purely for being boys, by means of Ritalin and other powerful “treatments” for largely or entirely invented conditions.

Public money is lavished on those who bear the name of Marie Stopes, author of extravagant, versified love letters to Hitler. Marie Stopes, who disowned her own son because he married a woman who wore glasses. Marie Stopes, who campaigned for the compulsory sterilisation of “the C3 population”, of “half-castes” and of “revolutionaries”, among numerous others. Marie Stopes, who opened dozens of clinics in working-class areas to reduce the number of “undesirables” by persuasion if force were politically impossible. Yet those clinics now retain the right to “counsel” women considering the abortions that they have a gigantic financial and an immeasurable ideological interest in ensuring go ahead.

They still carry the name of Marie Stopes. Our televisions now carry their adverts. Our 50p stamps have recently carried her image. And we all carry the shame. As they do across the Atlantic, where tax dollars fund the heirs of Margaret Sanger, whose stated primary objective was always to prevent black babies from being born, the objective still pursued above all others by her successors, so that “Planned Parenthood” would more accurately be called “Planned Genocide”.

Bringing us, more or less, to Africa. Certain people might consider applying some journalistic or scientific objectivity to the question of where in Africa the condom use relentlessly promoted by Western nongovernmental organisations and compliant governments has ever arrested, never mind reversed, the rate of HIV infection. There is nowhere.

However, such a reversal is under way in Uganda, where the government’s message is the same as the Catholic Church’s: “Change Your Behaviour”. Huge numbers of condoms have been distributed in Botswana, and the result has been for President Festus Mogae to declare, “Abstain or die”. Who, exactly, is incapable of fidelity within a monogamous marriage and abstinence outside such a marriage? Women? Black people? Poor people? Developing-world people? Or just poor black women in the developing world?

It is no wonder that early Labour activists peremptorily dismissed a scheme to abort, contracept and sterilise the working class out of existence. Everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, should read my friend Ann Farmer’s Prophets and Priests: The Hidden Face of the Birth Control Movement, London: The Saint Austin Press, 2002, ISBN 1 901157 62 8. In addition to its unyielding racism, the war against fertility is, and has always been, the war against the working class, the war against the poor at home and abroad, the war against the electoral base of the Left, the war against the social provisions for which the Left exists, and, above all, the war against women.

Furthermore (this bit is Lindsay, not Farmer – but I’m sure that she would agree with it), the idea of fertility as a medicable condition, requiring powerful drugs or even surgical interventions to prevent a woman’s body from doing exactly what it does naturally, is basically and ultimately the idea that femaleness itself is such a condition, a sort of XX Syndrome. I can think of nothing that is actually more misogynistic than that, although some things are equally so, notably the view that the preborn child is simultaneously insentient and a part of the woman’s body. Is it the whole of a woman’s body that is insentient, or only the parts most directly connected with reproduction?

In America, and increasingly also in Britain, the black male is the victim of a triple genocide in the womb, on the streets, and on the battlefield.

Two charities have now 'come out' in support of a population policy. Christian Aid has had extensive discussion in the correspondence column of 'CA News', and has responded with a statement in which they declare 'CA recognises that populatinn growth is contributing to climate change and also increasing the number of people who are suffering the effects of climate change...however we believe that the effect should not be seen in isolation...'. They do have some reservation, however, but are basically supportive.
The other is 'Save the Children', which has for some time had on its web site a policy brief on population, and has now made this concern clear in their latest appeal which expresses explicit support for the London conference in which the Gates' featured so prominently.
I therefore have decided to withdraw my support from Oxfam and all other charities that refuse to recognise this issue and transfer it to these bodies.

I might say that if there is a wedge driven between those who advocate population restraint and those who advocate consumption restraint, it is the latter who have been responsible. Generally, population people are, in the nature of things, acutely sensitive to the fact that you cannot have infinite growth in a finite environment, and see the relevence of that insight to consumption and economics as well as numbers of people

I just don't understand the head in the sand attitude of people who claim that only excessive consumption is responsible for the excessive demands on our planet, when it’s so obvious that the more people who are consuming, the more demands there are going to be. It’s particularly depressing to see this attitude from someone in charge of a major charity.

There are a billion people already without enough food or water, let alone living to the standard that we currently enjoy. What on earth is wrong with the idea that people should be encouraged to voluntarily make more use of the wonder that is contraception, or helped to have this option where it isn't currently available to them? Too much consumption is a really difficult problem to tackle; there has been very little progress with it so far. Until that really difficult problem is solved, if ever, why not get behind what should be a really simple, voluntary solution - fewer consumers of the future.

Barbara Stocking does no favours to the environment or humanity in arguing that the terrifying issues our planet faces due to the unsustainable demands of our species result from excessive demand rather than population growth.

Even a rudimentary appraisal of the situation would recognise that the issue is not an "either or" when identifying demand and population as causal factors, but a multiplicand of the two. This is of course precisely the policy position of Population Matters.

To consider only excessive consumption as the issue (as does Oxfam under Ms Stocking) but dismiss the numbers of population is to set limits on the carrying capacity of a lift (elevator) based on the average weight of its passengers rather than their number.

Yes, it is true that the factors driving climate change result from the fossil-fuelled economies of the developed world. However, it is also true that the populations of major parts of the developed world are forecast to grow substantially.

The present USA population of 318m is projected to increase to 404m (27%) by 2050 and the present UK population of 62m to increase to 72m (16% and equivalent to “ten more Birminghams”) in the same time-frame.

Given our disproportionate levels of per capita consumption in the developed world, these population increases will have an accompanying disproportionate impact on our planet’s remaining resources.

To disqualify these substantial increases of population in the developed world (and hence their consumption) on the basis that they result in large measure from “inward migration from poor countries”, misses the point. Global over-population is exactly that, global: The growing numbers of the poor of the world will quite understandably seek legal or illegal means to gain access to the developed world and, once within it, their material demands will rapidly scale to those of members of the existing population.

When Oxfam was founded in 1942 world population stood at 2.3 billion. This year world population passed the 7 billion threshold; a three-fold increase in less than seventy years.

Moreover, the United Nations recently revealed that the world's population, instead of levelling off at around 9 billion by 2050, as had been previously forecast, is now projected to continue to grow ad infinitum, passing 10.1 billion by 2100.

No matter what cunning supply-side innovations Oxfam cares to dream up, it cannot defeat a basic law of physics: the finite resources of a single planet cannot sustain the unlimited growth of any species, especially one as voracious as our own
In its 70 year history Oxfam has stubbornly refused to recognise, let alone engage with, the need to restrain the growth of world population.

Now the world is close to “peak oil” and heading into a time of “peak everything”, when a deadly combination of dwindling resources and ever-increasing population will give rise to ever-rising prices.

Resultant starvation will then bring about those reductions in population that past contraception initiatives should have delivered, starting with the poor of the world, of course.

As “one of the dogs that failed to bark in the night” Oxfam continues to conspire with other major environmental charities in their stubborn refusal to confront the greatest challenge ever to face mankind; how to prevent ourselves breeding ourselves out of existence.

Stocking believes that ‘it is consumption in the rich rather than the poor world that is primarily responsible for the pressure on our planet’, giving CO2 emissions as her example – stating that over the 25 years to 2005 North America was responsible for ‘four per cent of population growth but a staggering 13.9 per cent of the rise in emissions.’ However, let’s see some more up-to-date figures: CO2 emissions rose to their highest ever recorded level in 2011, according to the International Energy Agency, despite falls in the United States and Europe; China’s emissions rose by 9.3 percent, driven mainly by higher coal use. China is the world’s biggest emitter of CO2.

It is clear that what we see happening in the world is rapidly increasing consumption in the developing economies of the world, such as China and India, as they race to catch up with the West. We must face the fact that this is the way that the world will move – not in the direction of reducing consumption.

As population increases in the emerging world, as well as in advanced countries such as the USA and the UK, consumption will continue to rise, and pressure on the finite resources of the planet will continue to increase.

It would be useful if we in the UK could have a minister for population, charged with the task of working towards a number which is sustainable within our limits, rather than having to rely on resources from around the world. We could be an example to the world of how to work amicably towards sustainability.

"This is based on a fallacy. It is consumption in the rich rather than the poor world that is primarily responsible for the pressure on our planet...[in terms of CO2 emissions] "

The fallacy is that environmental pressures cannot be reduced to levels of CO2 emissions. Increasing human population increases demand for land, food and water, and frequently in areas where they are already scarce and puts tremendous pressure on an local ecosystems and bio-diversity. Hence, this is why David Attenborough has said there isn't one environmental problem that he's seen that wouldn't be helped by fewer people.

"Lazy and (for us high consumers) convenient thinking" is also being perpetrated by the Left, who want to blame the West for all the planet's problems.

We must consider our population as a prime factor to protecting the world for our descendants. To not even want to consider it as having major impact now and in the future is totally irresponsible. No one is talking about 'control' but how it should be a fully considered and voluntary choice by all responsible adults. 'Hoping' that things settle down in the future goes against all other ways we try to deal with human behaviour. i.e to leave such things to chance is ludicrous. As humans we 'plan and strategise' for just about every other activity that goes on - why not this one??

Indeed. But contraception availability has to be a good thing, even though in and of itself it is not enough. Also, just as those in power so often do the wrong thing for the right reasons, they might in this case be doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Overconsumption and wasteful consumption are the main cause of high CO2 emmisions. The US is a big offender but so is China now. If China had a popoulation of over 2 billion - like it could so easily have had without its draconian one child policy, then this problem would be even worse.

Limiting the rise of population in third world countries is in my view a good thing. Have less births but keep more of these children alive.