The Tooting Salon

I’m just back from Hong Kong, which was everything they say it is – hectic, hotter than a sauna, a seething mass of humanity packed into high-rise buildings, growing so fast they’re having to create new land to build on.
Yes, it was love at first sight.
The multinational, multicultural vibrancy, the sheer beauty of the place, audaciously tall buildings proliferating between mountains and sea. If anyone reading this can offer me a job in Hong Kong, I’m there.

Then I read an article in New Scientist about cheap IVF in Africa – using new technology to make fertility treatment available to women who could never afford the thousands of pounds it normally costs. In general I’m in favour of people in developing countries getting the best, not the cheapest, but the new programme will enable a lot of childless African women to have families. I’d first read about this a couple of years ago in Nature, and thought at the time it had enormous potential to change lives.
Cause for optimism – but then I scrolled down to read some of the comments on the New Scientist piece. Were the readers filled with joy for African women, some of whom faced not only personal sorrow but social and economic fallout from being unable to conceive naturally?
No. Comments include “I find the prospect of millions of African Octomoms to be horrifying”… Women in those overpopulated nations are judged by how many children they can spew”… “If all women in the world underwent mandatory long-term contraception from the time they are 10 until they are 25 the world would be a better place … Do the [African] fertility clinics enforce any age limits or minimal educational accomplishments for the mother?” … “…a program (sic) to offer cash benefits for people to be sterilised would actually help. At the moment as soon as the west provides more food, they just breed to a new level of poverty and starvation….” And so on.
There are a couple of dissenting voices, some brilliant satire from “Darwin”, and a pithy note from Mike Harris, who comments, “Why Shouldn’t Africans have access to IVF? Do they not have babies for the same reason as anyone else? Do they not love their babies as much? Or is it that rich, pink babies are adorable while poor, brown babies are a “population problem”?”
It's probably true that lots of people are thinking exactly that, but it’s not the whole truth. People like the Optimum Population Trust in the UK actually think nobody should have too many children. They don’t go around arguing for mandatory contraception, or for Nature to be allowed to weed out those who can’t have babies with her help (in Africa, this is often not for genetic reasons, but as a result of poor-quality medical care and infection). But they do think that too many humans are a bad thing, and the planet would be better off with fewer of us.
Yes, it’s the same argument that’s been used since the time of Malthus, when the imminent “peak” of supportable human population was a few billion fewer than are now alive. The argument that assumes future generations will be able to eat/burn fossil fuel/throw away plastic bags, but will be incapable of producing more food, finding solutions to environmental problems, or having any kind of positive impact on the world.
Before I could get too depressed, I learned about a debate at this year’s Battle of Ideas that will be raising exactly these issues. Three’s a crowd? The battle over population and reproduction. So I will be able to go along on October 31st and have the arguments out with those who want all of us to have fewer babies.
Which brings me back to Hong Kong, that crowded, busy, built-up city making its own land to expand onto. Yes, it’s far from perfect. Yes, it has poverty, exploitation, over-work and underpay. But it’s also richly alive, developing and growing, setting a standard of ambition and achievement that the UK could learn from. And what’s driving that achievement is the people who live there.
The more the better, I say, whether it’s Hong Kong, Africa or Tooting.