Reproductive Rights and Wrongs

The Global Politics of Population Control

Betsy Hartmann

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781608467341
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

With a new prologue by the author, this feminist classic is an important gateway into the controversial topic of population for students, activists, researchers and policymakers. It challenges the myth of overpopulation, uncovering the deeper roots of poverty, environmental degradation and gender inequalities. With vivid case studies, it explores how population control programs came to be promoted by powerful governments, foundations and international agencies as an instrument of Cold War development and security policy. Mainly targeting poor women, these programs were designed to drive down birth rates as rapidly and cheaply as possible, with coercion often a matter of course. In the war on population growth, birth control was deployed as a weapon, rather than as a tool of reproductive choice.Threaded throughout Reproductive Rights and Wrongs is the story of how international women’s health activists fought to reform population control and promote a new agenda of sexual and reproductive health and rights for all people. While their efforts bore fruit, many obstacles remain. On one side is the anti-choice movement that wants to deny women access not only to abortion, but to most methods of contraception. On the other is a resurgent, well-funded population control lobby that often obscures its motives with the language of women’s empowerment. Despite declining birth rates worldwide – average global family size is now 2.5 children – overpopulation alarm is on the rise, tied now to the threats of climate change and terrorism. Reproductive Rights and Wrongs helps readers understand how these contemporary developments are rooted in the longer history and politics of population control. In the pages of this book a new generation of readers will find knowledge, argumentation and inspiration that will help in ongoing struggles to achieve reproductive rights and social, environmental and gender justice.

Part One

THE REAL
POPULATION
PROBLEM

1

Security and Survival

An art historian turns to me at a party: “You’re writing a book on population control? My field is aesthetics, and I feel that overpopulation is destroying the beauty of great cities like Paris. Ugly immigrants’ housing is springing up all over the place.”

The babysitter turns off the TV. “I’ve been thinking about it,” he says. “If they don’t force people to be sterilized in India, how are they going to cope with the population explosion?”

An accounting professor explains how pharmaceutical companies could develop cures for many of the basic diseases that afflict poor people, but don’t because the people who need them are too poor to pay. “Maybe it’s not such a bad thing,” he adds. “After all, if more poor people survive, it will only exacerbate the population problem.”

An economist, known for his radical views on the United States economy, surprises me by saying that many Third World countries have no choice but to initiate harsh population control measures. “Their economic survival is at stake,” he asserts.

I have grown to expect such responses from people, no matter how well-meaning or well educated they are. They are repeating a message they have read in the newspaper, heard in the classroom, and seen on television so many times that it has become conventional wisdom. It first captured the popular imagination in 1968, when Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich published his famous book The Population Bomb. He warned that mankind was breeding itself into oblivion and endorsed stringent population control measures, including compulsion if necessary. Probably most readers of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs have the same impression: that the population bomb is exploding out of control. It is the starting point of most discussions about population—and, unfortunately, the end point as well.

The myth of overpopulation is one of the most pervasive myths in Western society, so deeply ingrained in the culture that it profoundly shapes the culture’s world view. The myth is compelling because of its simplicity. More people equal fewer resources and more hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, and political instability. This equation helps explain away the troubling human suffering in that “other” world beyond the neat borders of affluence. By procreating, the poor create their own poverty. We are absolved of responsibility and freed from complexity.

The population issue is complex. To put it into proper perspective requires exploring many realms of human experience and addressing difficult philosophical and ethical questions. It entails making connections between fields of thought that have become disconnected as the result of narrow academic specialization. It demands the sharpening of critical facilities and clearing the mind of received orthodoxies. And above all, it involves transcending the alienation embodied in the very terms “population bomb” and “population explosion.” Such metaphors suggest destructive technological processes outside human control. But the population issue is about living people, not abstract statistics.

The myth of overpopulation is destructive because it prevents constructive thinking and action on reproductive issues. Instead of clarifying our understanding of these issues, it obfuscates our vision and limits our ability to see the real problems and find workable solutions. Worst of all, it breeds racism and turns women’s bodies into a political battlefield. It is a philosophy based on fear, not understanding.

Family Matters

On the surface, fears of a population explosion are borne out by basic demographic statistics. In the twentieth century the world has experienced an unprecedented increase in population. In 1900 global population was 1.7 billion, in 1950 it reached 2.5 billion, and today roughly 5.7 billion people inhabit the earth. Three quarters of them live in the so-called Third World. The United Nations predicts that world population will reach 6 billion by the end of the century and will eventually stabilize at about 11.6 billion between 2150 and 2200, though such long-term demographic projections are notoriously imprecise.

Initially, this rapid increase in population was due in part to some very positive factors: Advances in medicine, public health measures, and better nutrition meant that more people lived longer. However, in other cases, notably in Africa, it may have been a response to colonialism, as indigenous communities sought to reconstitute themselves after suffering high death rates from slavery, diseases introduced from Europe, and oppressive labor conditions. In many countries colonialism also disrupted traditional methods of birth spacing.1

In most industrialized countries, the decline in mortality rates was eventually offset by declines in birth rates, so that population growth began to stabilize in what is called the “demographic transition.” Most industrialized countries have now reached the “replacement level”* of fertility, and in some the population is actually declining.

Today birth rates are also falling in virtually every area of the Third World. In fact, the rate of world population growth has been slowing since the mid-1960s. Population growth rates are highest in sub-Saharan Africa—about 2.9 percent in 1994—but are considerably less than that in Asia (1.9 percent) and Latin America (2.0 percent). It is also important to remember that despite higher rates of growth, Africa contains a relatively small share of the world’s population—India will have more births in 1994 than all fifty sub-Saharan nations combined.

The United Nations estimates that by 2045 most countries will have reached replacement-level fertility. The reason population growth still seems to be “exploding” is that a large proportion of the present population is composed of men and women of childbearing age. Half of the world’s people are under the age of twenty-five. Barring major catastrophes, an inevitable demographic momentum is built into our present numbers, but this should be a subject of rational planning, not public paranoia. The truth is that the population “explosion” is gradually fizzling out.

Nevertheless, there is still considerable discrepancy between birth rates in the industrialized world and birth rates in many Third World countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Conventional wisdom has it that Third World people continue to have so many children because they are ignorant and irrational—they exercise no control over their sexuality, “breeding like rabbits.” This “superiority complex” of many Westerners as well as some Third World elites is one of the main obstacles in the way of meaningful discussion of the population problem. It assumes that everyone lives in the same basic social environment and faces the same set of reproductive choices. Nothing is further from the truth.

In many Third World societies, having a large family is an eminently rational strategy of survival. Children’s labor is a vital part of the family economy in many peasant communities of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Children help in the fields, tend animals, fetch water and wood, and care for their younger brothers and sisters, freeing their parents for other tasks. Quite early in life, children’s labor makes them an asset rather than a drain on family income. In Bangladesh, for example, boys produce more than they consume by the age of ten to thirteen, and by the age of fifteen their total production has exceeded their cumulative lifetime consumption. Girls likewise perform a number of valuable economic tasks, which include helping their mothers with cooking and the post-harvest processing of crops.2

In urban settings children often earn income as servants, messenger boys, etc., or else stay home to care for younger children while their parents work. Among the Yoruba community in Nigeria, demographer John Caldwell found that even urban professional families benefit from many children through “sibling assistance chains.” As one child completes education and takes a job, he or she helps younger brothers and sisters move up the educational and employment ladder, and the connections and the influence of the family spread.3

In recent years, however, urbanization has been associated with fertility decline in a number of countries for both positive and negative reasons. For those with ample resources, living in an urban area can mean greater access to education, health and family planning services, and the kind of information and media that promote a smaller family norm. Since the debt crisis and economic recession of the 1980s, however, the quality of life of the urban poor has deteriorated in many countries. High unemployment or work in insecure, low-wage occupations mean that poor people simply do not have enough financial resources to support a large family. Brazil has experienced such a distress-related fertility decline. The government’s failure to institute agrarian reforms in rural areas forced people to flee the poverty of the countryside, only to face the harsh realities of urban slums.4

Security is another crucial reason to have many children. In many Third World societies, the vast majority of the population has no access to insurance schemes, pension plans, or government social security. It is children who care for their parents in their old age; without them one’s future is endangered. The help of grown children can also be crucial in surviving the periodic crises—illness, drought, floods, food shortages, land disputes, political upheavals—which, unfortunately, punctuate village life in most parts of the world.5

By contrast, parents in industrialized countries and their affluent counterparts among Third World urban elites have much less need to rely on children either for labor or old-age security. The economics of family size changes as income goes up, until children become a financial burden instead of an asset. When children are in school, for example, they no longer serve as a source of labor. Instead parents must pay for their education, as well as for their other needs, which cost far more in a high-consumption society than in a peasant village. And there is often no guarantee that parents’ investment will buy the future loyalty of a grown child. As economist Nancy Folbre notes, “The ‘gift’ of education, unlike a bequest, cannot be made contingent upon conformity to certain expectations. Once given, it can hardly be revoked.”6

In industrialized societies personal savings, pension plans, and government programs replace children as the basic forms of social security. These social changes fundamentally alter the value of children, making it far more rational from an economic standpoint to limi...