control. Two children have become the norm rather than the minimum. This has raised issues of communal survival for us.
DEMOGRAPHICS
Our problems are not the justification of birth control or the issues of sexuality. We must consider a major question which is modern and twentieth century- the problem of the population explosion, first generally and then how it has affected us as Jews .
The world population has grown and then diminished through the millennia. It remained within some reasonable boundaries until the eighteenth century when the Industrial Revolution and changes in medical technology led to a population explosion first in Europe and later in the remainder of the world. The statistics are staggering with approximately one billion people at the beginning of the nineteenth century, three billion at the end, five billion people in 1980, and thirteen billion people by 2020.
Liberals have discussed the need for population control and Jews have been vocal in these circles. We have played a leading role in favoring birth control and applied it generously to ourselves.
The limitation on family size accompanied the rise in the economic status of western Jews . In addition, the struggle for women's rights and the desire to be liberated from child-care, has limited the number of children in Jewish families. This has been true of all but the most Orthodox circles. We have continued this pattern although the population in western lands has stabilized and the rapid growth continues only in Third World lands.
We must address these issues first and see whether we as liberal Jews should accept without further question the efforts at population control. After all, in this century, we have lost six million Jews , so a third of the world Jewish population, never larger than eighteen million, has disappeared. In addition, assimilation has taken its toll. If the American Jewish population has remained at six million since 1940, then we are not replacing ourselves and
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