Introductory Statement: The Need for United Nations Leadership

Abstract

I suspect that social historians of the 21st century will describe the change in public attitudes toward population growth which have taken place during the past decade as the most rapid adjustment to new facts to occur in our century. To those who have been accustomed to seeing, on every hand, confirmation of the inevitability of social lag behind technical progress, it is still hard to realize how different the atmosphere of today is from that of the early 1960s. The most concrete expression of this new approach is in public support for family planning, and for “family planning” one must read “family limitation,” for despite occasional efforts to avoid this implication, the money and effort are available only to cut back present, unprecedented population growth rates.