Christmas time, as we all know, is the perfect time of year to lament the fact that there are new humans coming into the world. Who can help it? What with all the joy over the celebration of the Nativity, folks are bound to get swept away suggesting there would be more holly and ivy if only there were fewer humans. After all, one of the great philanthropists of literature once famously opined that Christmas is the perfect time to decrease the extra humans competing for scarce resources.

So, continuing in the tradition of Merry St. Malthus (patron of disgust at the lesser races), McClatchy’s sees millions HIV-free in (sub-Saharan) Africa thanks to the Bush Administration’s hard work, and dares to ask, “Why not millions fewer?” The problem in a nutshell:

The Bush program is widely hailed as a success, having supplied lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs to more than 2 million HIV patients worldwide.

However, researchers, Africa experts and veteran U.S. health officials now think that PEPFAR also contributed to Africa’s epidemic population growth by undermining efforts to help women in some of the world’s poorest countries exercise greater control over their fertility.

You know level heads are at work when the word epidemic is used to describe the births of children.

Anyway, this being a “news” report that mentions George W. Bush, you have to expect some logical errors after the grudging admission that the Dread Cowboy may have done something right. The story opens with the heartbreaking tale of the 45-year old woman with 13 children who found out about contraception after child 13. Now, I’m no expert — more like an amateur with some experience in the field — but if she’s 45 (the story isn’t well-written, but it actually appears that she’s 47, and her 21-month old is her youngest, but let’s work with what we’ve got), and has 13 children, and she likely married between 16 and 20 as is common in that part of Africa, that basically fits with the idea that she’s had one child every 21 months or so (end of breastfeeding at one year plus nine months’ gestation) since she was around 21. 24 years have passed since she first began to upset McClatchy’s writers by having children. Presidents Reagan, Bush, William Jefferson Clinton Martyr, and the Dread Cowboy have held office during that time. Somehow, all of that surplus population is Bush’s fault.

Veteran watchers of NGOs — and the people who staff them — that get their knickers in a twist over the thought of even more (black) children coming into the world can guess where the story is driving:

At a hospital in Busia, a sleepy town in the green hills of eastern Uganda, Agnes Lojjo, a matronly health worker, sat with a handful of pregnant women one recent morning and asked how many were practicing family planning.

Fewer than half the hands went up. One woman in her 30s, wearing a man’s oxford shirt and a colorful wrap around her head, said that a mother who used birth control would bear a deformed child.

Lojjo cocked her head and shot the woman a disapproving look.

“Everyone just has children without thinking,” she said afterward. “It’s adding poverty to poverty.”

…

Much of Uganda is starting to suffocate. Public school classrooms that were built for about 40 students often burst with 100 or more. Large families are dividing their farmland into smaller and smaller parcels for their children, running afoul of neighbors and triggering a growing number of land disputes in local courts.

“Population growth undermines everything we’re trying to do here, all our development efforts as well as political stability,” a senior American official in Uganda said. “The economy isn’t going to have enough jobs for all the people we’re saving through PEPFAR.”

(The traditional shot at the Catholic Church is in there, too.)

Let’s run through the continent of Africa’s major problems: Corruption; climate issues; corruption; numerous polygamous cultures that treat women as chattel; corruption; militant Islam on the rise; piracy; corruption; the legacy of the idiotic, slapdash way in which guilty Europeans hastily patched everything together in ending colonialism; corruption; cultural impediments to local governance; and, of course, corruption.

Now, for giggles – putting the root causes of those problems to the side (for surely, corruption must be caused by extra babies) – let’s examine the state of Africa back during, say, the 1990s, when President Clinton Martyr used to speak a great deal about the threat of AIDS on the continent, but somehow only found money for contraceptives and abortion services abroad. The Congo was the center of a human renaissance, as scholars, artisans, and philosophers gathered in its jungles to engage in heated debates over the future of humanity on the continent. Somalia was blessed with a religious revival and a hearty debate over the future of government, even going so far as to perform impromptu street theater that would later be memorialized in a major American film. And South Africa! South Africa led the world in pioneering, alternative medicine approaches to HIV and AIDS, offering not only provocative theories on its origins, but exciting new approaches to treatment.

The problem sub-Saharan Africa faces is not too many people. Even the stingiest humanist should rejoice in the idea of more people, because more people have more opportunities to solve not only local, but global problems. Anyone watching the state of Germany, or of Japan, or taking a reasonable guess at China fifteen years from now knows that a graying future – one with fewer babies – is a stark, terrible place. I mean, this isn’t even controversial any more.

Unless you’re upset about there being more children with extra melanin in their skin. Then all bets are off.