Improved health services have managed to keep the increased billions alive, though often in a deprived state. Growth will continue for at least another generation as the new millennium's record 1 billion teenagers enter their reproductive years. These terms stress not sheer population numbers but the broader vision of global well-being. It's not just political correctness to watch your population language. Many of yesterday's terms were rooted in detached calculations that dehumanized people and the process of family-building.
People universally resist bean-counter reckoning in deciding the size of their families.
Most governments in developing countries have adopted family planning policies in an effort to balance their national populations with available resources. They have shouldered two-thirds of the costs involved, asking industrialized nations to help with the rest. It is this commitment that is at stake today.