A maternity nurse performs a health check on a newborn baby in Fuyang, China, Jan. 17.

Photo: Sheldon Cooper/Zuma Press

Doubleday once published a book with a title—“Too Many Asians”—that would never fly today. Author John Robbins argued that “if humanity is to have a future,” the West would have to see to it that fewer Asians were born in the years ahead. That was 1959.

Robbins was but one voice in a chorus of think tanks, government aid organizations, international development specialists, environmentalists, zero-growthers, doom mongers and do-gooders who all saw population control as the cure for poverty. China’s recent announcement that its population fell by 850,000 last year, the first recorded drop since the Mao-induced famines of the early 1960s, provoked much comment on the social and economic challenges decline brings. Yet conspicuously absent was any recognition that the whole idea that Chinese moms having children threatened the country’s prosperity was, much like Marxism itself, a noxious Western import.

That’s no overstatement. In 1977, World Bank President Robert McNamara spoke in Al Gore-ish tones of apocalypse. Population growth, he said, was the gravest issue the world faced “short of thermonuclear war.” It might even be more dangerous, because population growth was “not in the exclusive control of a few governments but rather in the hands of literally hundreds of millions of individual parents.”

Mao himself was conflicted, given Marx’s view of overpopulation as a problem of capitalism and his own tendency to see China’s population as a sign of its strength. The irony is that China today, like so many of its Asian neighbors that once tried to reduce their populations, is offering financial incentives to have more babies. But once the decline starts it’s all but impossible to reverse.

In 1974, the New York Times summed up the received wisdom in a piece reporting on the United Nations World Population Conference in Bucharest. “The consensus of the affluent industrialized Western nations,” the Times said, was based on the understanding that overpopulation “threatens to overstrain world resources, particularly food.”

This orthodoxy was echoed by almost all the experts of the day: the U.N. Fund for Population Activities, International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Club of Rome (publisher of “Limits to Growth”), the Population Institute, Paul Ehrlich, Lester Brown and the Worldwatch Institute, etc. When members of the Reagan administration pushed back—arguing that population growth wasn’t the cause of poverty—they were attacked as yahoos. Herblock published a cartoon of a well-fed Ronald Reagan holding a “world population policy” banner above a sea bursting with impoverished people.

Western groups that pushed population control on the Chinese typically denied that they supported the coercion that often resulted. But they never got too worked up about it, either. If you accept the idea that population growth uncontrolled by government is an existential threat, and if people don’t willingly stop having babies, then coercion is the obvious next step—and it’s far easier in nondemocratic countries such as China.

One example: In 1983, Stanford dismissed student Steven Mosher from its doctoral program after Beijing threatened to close its doors to the university’s scholars. Mr. Mosher, who now heads the Population Research Institute, was doing research in a rural Chinese village when he published photos of pregnant Chinese women, some in their seventh or eighth months, being led off for forced abortions. As a Journal editorial noted about Stanford’s decision, “no one has ever raised significant objections to the veracity of Mr. Mosher’s revelations on this subject.”

Against this there were a handful of lonely voices—including this page—which objected to the outrages against Chinese women and maintained that what was inhibiting China’s development was Chinese communism, not Chinese babies. Among the most eloquent was University of Illinois economist Julian Simon,

who argued that human beings were not just mouths but minds, and that a mind was “the ultimate resource.” He laid out his argument in a seminal book with that title in 1981, at just about the same time Beijing was cranking up its one-child policy.

Simon pointed out that by almost every material measure—life expectancy, daily caloric intake, food production—human life was getting better, not worse. In 1985, he added a prediction: If China embraced the free market, it would likely experience labor shortages. Look where we are today.

Last week the New York Times ran a story headlined “Why China’s Shrinking Population Is Cause for Alarm.” The piece hits on some of the casualties of China’s population decline: fewer workers supporting an aging society, the “hundreds of millions of Chinese women” who were forced to abort their babies, the shortage of girls and large surplus of single men with no prospect of marriage, higher costs for the global economy, etc. And no easy fix.

All sound points. If only that were the message being sent 50 years ago—when it might have made a difference.

Write to mcgurn@wsj.com.