It started as “Five Billion Day.” This was the day—July 11,
1989, to be exact—when the United Nations Development Programme
(UNDP) estimated that the world’s population would reach five
billion. With one voice, the U.N. Population Fund, the
International Planned Parenthood Federation, and related anti-
people groups decried the growing threat of “overpopulation,”
and asked the governments of the world for billions of dollars
to deal with this supposed crisis. But a billion human beings
are not added to the planet’s population very often. Annual
funding requests needed an annual justification. Thus the
following July 11th was billed as “World Population Day (WPD)”,
as has every subsequent July 11th up to the present day. In its
initial iteration, World Population Day consisted of dismal
pronouncements from the United Nations Population Fund—the lead
spear carrier for this unholy day—bringing us the bad tidings
that we are breeding ourselves off the face of the planet. This
early “apocalypse now” style proved ef