When Matej Gaspar was born in Zagreb he was chosen as the planet’s symbolic five billionth human.
It’s not possible to know who the five billionth person really was, but demographers calculated the birth would be around July 11 1987 and, on that date, the UN secretary-general was in Zagreb.
Metej became the symbolic media-friendly face of an otherwise numerical global population landmark.
Public interest led the UN to decide that, from 1989, World Population Day would be marked on July 11.
Today is therefore the 25th anniversary of the World Population Day.
Since Matej’s birth the global population has swollen from 5 billion to more than 7 billion.
Many people writing about World Population Day highlight these figures then continue to present a statistical onslaught.
They will highlight why the growth is of great concern or the contrary view that there’s nothing to worry about.
Either way, statistics are likely to be at the heart of their arguments. That’s not what I want to write about.
Earlier this week, I read a phrase in a book on the history of cancer, relating to the success rates of clinical trials of chemotherapeutic drugs. The phrase leapt off the page, “statistics are people, without the tears”.
The phrase had such an impact as I had cancerous tumours removed in December last year, followed by adjuvant chemotherapy.
Adjuvant chemotherapy is treatment given after surgery when detectable signs of cancer have been removed and only a statistical risk of relapse remains.
My treatment reduced the chances of cancer returning from 12 to 2 percent, which sounds like good odds, particularly if you’re not the person who has been told they could fall into the 2 percent statistic.
At the time of writing I’d been waiting all day for a call from my oncologist, which never came. I’m waiting for the results of my six-month check-up.
Perhaps I’m just another statistic and he hasn’t realised what it feels like to wait not knowing, cancer patients are his daily work after all.
Gaspar was used to give the 5 billion number a name, a nationality and a place of birth. It was a publicity stunt as, presumably, the UN recognised a number alone wouldn’t engage the public’s interest to the same extent. It’s an approach that needs to be developed.
If it’s not, population will continue to gain widespread coverage only in years when another billion people are added to the human avalanche, as with 2011’s “Year of Seven Billion” or on today’s fairly arbitrary anniversary.
The UN’s chosen theme for this year’s World Population Day is adolescent pregnancy.
It provides some more figures by pointing out that, worldwide, roughly “16 million girls under 18 give birth each year. Another 3.2 million undergo unsafe abortions. Often it is a consequence of discrimination, rights violations (including child marriage), inadequate education or sexual coercion”.
There are many tears behind those statistics.
In the past few months, since I’ve been covering personal stories of population and consumption growth impact, I’ve met many people whose real life stories fall within those UN numbers.
The academically gifted teenager I met in the Transkei who fell pregnant, does not want to have her baby, but is keeping it due to access and cultural reasons is but one of them.
She’s unlikely to finish her education and with no parents a troubling future awaits her. She’s more than a number.
Last week I interviewed women working at an Eastern Cape children’s drop-in centre. They told horrifying stories, the final one about a mentally handicapped woman who’d been raped as a child by her cousin.
Her relatives told her she’d be thrown out if she reported the rape. It seems everyone in the village knows but no one reported it.
She still lives with the same relatives and is now mother to her cousin’s child.
I didn’t meet the victim although the alleged rapist was pointed out to me.
He was tending his garden. This victim is more than a number too.
World Population Day comes but once a year and acts as a brief reminder of population issues but anniversaries and figures are useful only so far and for certain purposes.
As our number increases, whatever that number is, demands on natural resources rise and environmental issues become harder to solve with impact on landscapes and species.
There are women like those I’ve mentioned who don’t have access to sexual and reproductive rights, facilities, care or justice that they need.
Statistics alone do not excite an adequate response to these issues.
As we watch the graphs highlighting population increases and note the UN’s focus on adolescent mothers, unsafe abortions and other sexual and reproductive rights issues, it might help to keep these topics in the news if we focus more on personal stories.
As anyone who is treated as a statistic knows, it’s the personal stories where you’ll find the tears.
* Johnson is writing a series of 100 articles from 100 locations around South Africa. Each focuses on a community, family, landscape or species affected by our increasing population size or increasing, and often unequal, consumption.
** The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Newspapers
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