Jane Goodall Quotes

If you educate women, family size tends to go down.

China had managed to reduce their fertility to a large extent because of basic expansion of women's education, not because of the one-child family.

You educate a boy, and he'll have fewer children, but it's a small effect. You educate a girl, and, on average, she will have a significantly smaller family.

The good news is world population growth rate decreases systematically and is expected to reach zero by 2050, thanks to urbanisation and women's education.

Anything that increases the voice of young women tends therefore to reduce the fertility rate.

Who is going to be the first to face up to the need for self-restraint in the number of children brought into the world?

You don't have to get rich to have [fewer] children. It has happened across the world.

When the poor know that their children will survive, when they educate their daughters, when they access family planning, they have fewer children.

Beyond 2050 the world population may start to decrease if women across the world will have, on average, less than 2 children. But that decrease will be slow.

By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down.

Family planning is the only exit point of the land problem. No other solution is possible.

Zero population growth ….

Family planning campaigns should be increased so that the sizes of families are manageable and enjoy the best possible standard of living.

This seems counterintuitive, but turns out that as infant mortality is reduced, population sizes also decrease, because parents don't need to anticipate that their babies are going to die.

We should educate more women and girls. Because that is the surest route to controllably, manageably reducing the human population. Educated women have fewer kids. And the kids they do have are better cared for and are more successful. As I like to say, it's not one thing that we need to focus on. It's everything all at once.

Once it was necessary that the people should multiply and be fruitful if the race was to survive. But now to preserve the race it is necessary that people hold back the power of propagation.

I think the best way to control a population is to urbanize and to educate women. We have seen historically in many, many countries that once women are educated and have opportunities, and that happens when they live in cities and once they improve their economies, they no longer want to have eight kids. They want to have one or two or maybe three. And that is much more sustainable for them because they have other opportunities.

The only acceptable way to solve ecological problems is if you can persuade people to have fewer children. In the Victorian times, there were families of 15 children. Someone like Edward Lear, he was the last of 21 children. And so what we have to think about is offering people the alternative choice. And in the West, that's what's happening. The birth rate has been dropping steadily and still is. I'm wanting human beings to be better off so they don't view children as an insurance for the future.

Religion has very little to do with the number of babies per woman. All the religions in the world are fully [able] to maintain their values and adapt to this new world.

I am convinced that the norm in Russia should become a family with three children.

Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent.

Today, American women bear an average of 2.2 children that live to adulthood. Across most of Europe, women bear even fewer young.

World fertility surveys indicate that anywhere from one third to one half of the babies born in the Third World would not be if their mothers had access to cheap, reliable family planning, had enough personal empowerment to stand up to their husbands and relatives, and could choose their own family size.

Social services, not wealth per se, seem to be the key to lower birth rates. The Chinese, although among the poorest peoples of the world, have brought their fertility rate down to 2.4, partly by social coercion, but mostly by broadly available education, health care and family planning.

I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor will rise.