Social aspects of population and its control

Abstract

Whoever meditates upon social conditions affecting demographic behaviour and the prospects of its control or the social consequences of population trends and happens to have been present at the closing session of the last, London, meeting of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, cannot help remembering Bourgeois-Pichat’s remark about what he called ‘the present demographic revolution’: ‘After fertility has passed from the control of society to that of the individual’, he said approximately, ‘mortality is now about to cease to be the fate of the individual, and society has started to assume the responsibility of deciding who shall survive.’ I cannot tell how far Bourgeois-Pichat expected his audience to take this statement in its verbal sense and how far he tried to express vague trends in a paradoxical way. Be that as it may, the thought expressed is worth being explored, if we want to appreciate the societal factor in population trends and control.