Arguments for and against pursuing demographic goals have now been considered, as have ethical objections to population control. A provisional conclusion has suggested that, provided basic human rights are protected, it is not in principle illegitimate for states to intervene in reproductive conduct. Action is only, however, justified if a convincing, evidence-based case is made for its current and future benefits, and following public discussion. The first proviso defers to liberal principles; the second satisfies democratic criteria and is necessary, too, for mobilizing public opinion and compliance. Informed debate is especially crucial when considering population matters, given their susceptibility to populism and social injustice. But supporters of inaction or pro-natalism are equally obliged to make a robust case for these options, rather than treating them as a default. There is a further, practical, proviso: there must exist effective but ethically permissible (i.e. basic rights-compliant) means for influencing fertility rates. These means are the topic of the current chapter, which focuses on the practical, political aspects of what might more appropriately be called population governance than control. It asks what ‘control’ and ‘coercion’ mean in the context of contemporary liberal-democratic governance and examines the mechanisms actually used by, or available to, twenty-first century states with demographic ambitions.
Because it is anti-natalist policies that are typically charged with using unethical means, these are again the main focus. In practice, many of the measures mentioned for modifying fertility behaviour can be and are used in both directions. Implementation of national population policies tends to mirror a state’s overall style of governing and many of the countries currently facing the most challenging demographic conditions are not liberal democracies. Some are failed states; others are authoritarian, patriarchal or deeply divided. In response to enduring hostility to ‘coercive population control’, however, it is incumbent on advocates of stabilization strategies to establish that measures exist which meet standards of liberal-democratic government. This standard is derived in the following discussion not just from abstract liberal ideals but also from the way governing occurs in liberal states. It may thus serve as a political model for any state with demographic aims and provide an ethical framework for transnational organizations. This does not mean that hard choices do not persist, but this chapter identifies a practical framework for negotiating them.
For modern liberal states grounded in the social contract tradition, complete non-coercion is a political non sequitur tantamount to anarchy. Preserving civil society, including defence of individual rights and liberties, requires a degree of coercion. This is considered legitimate, provided it rests on consent and operates within constitutional limits. Although the state’s authority is underpinned by its monopoly of violence, contemporary governments use the state’s repressive apparatus sparingly since voluntary compliance is more efficient. This is achieved primarily through modifying people’s behaviour. The law punishes transgressors, but it also sends messages about (un)acceptable behavioural norms that are reinforced by public education and information. Public policy adds a fine-grained system of incentives and disincentives (mainly through benefits and taxes) that is modelled on, and supplemented by, market mechanisms (prices). Such measures are considered by liberals to be unremarkable means of governance. Together they comprise a matrix of messages, rewards and sanctions whose aim is to synchronize private choices and public interests with minimum friction.
The relationship between freedom and coercion, or private and public, which this entails is at odds with the dichotomy constructed by opponents of population stabilization. Rather than the top-down, centralized and bureaucratic model of government practised in the mid-twentieth century and associated with (population) control, current styles of governance deploy a range of sectors, agencies and mechanisms for purposes of behaviour modification. They work in ways that are often invisible as forms of power, yet they penetrate deeply into private lives. Vigilance against state repression remains crucial, especially to protect basic rights, but mainly the new governance works on individual preferences and choice architectures before they are acted upon. It by no means follows that these practices are beyond criticism, or that they are devoid of coercive aspects. But two points nonetheless follow. First, that it is hypocritical to single out population stabilization policies for condemnation inasmuch as they abide by liberal standards that are acceptable in other policy fields. Second, that should governments be persuaded that a smaller population serves the public good, then effective measures compatible with their normative sensibilities are available.
In fact, despite widespread condemnation of population policies, the majority of governments do practise them. In 2013, 81 per cent reported direct provision of family planning services, often explicitly linked to demographic aims. Thus, 37 per cent of the world’s governments had policies to reduce their population growth rate, including nearly half of less developed countries and 72 per cent in Africa, while 43 per cent aimed to reduce fertility rates. Inversely, 20 per cent were trying to raise their population growth rates and 27 per cent to increase their TFR.1 Alongside family planning services, measures commonly deployed for achieving downward trends include integrating sexual and maternal health into primary health-care systems, promoting men’s responsibility, raising the legal marriage age and improving women’s education and employment.
It is helpful in this context to distinguish between supply-led and demand-led initiatives. The former, which figure most prominently in the 2013 list, are in principle less controversial. Building state capacities to supply comprehensive reproductive health services is a key development goal but one that is also recognized indirectly to suppress birth rates through disincentivizing large families. Providing choice among a ‘basket’ of contraceptive methods; information about wider issues connected to family planning and reproductive health; comprehensive medical support for female reproductive functions from puberty to menopause; well-resourced health-care centres: these, in addition to legal, safe abortion, are supplies that would ideally be provided universally in order to satisfy reproductive rights. Cripps summarizes them as ‘choice-providing policies’, the most unambiguously ethical way to attenuate population growth.2
It is the demand side, however, that tends to present more intractable political and ethical dilemmas, inasmuch as a population resists supply-led inducements. Recall that rapid population growth persists during demographic transition for as long as mortality decline is not matched by fertility decline. Where this situation endures, it is usually because the prevailing culture rewards large families and espouses pro-natalist values. Some women may wish to limit their childbearing but are deterred by husbands, wider extended-family networks and social disapproval. Social stigma may attach to barrenness or voluntary sterility; artificial birth control methods may be condemned as sinful, unnatural or dangerous; small families may challenge men’s perceptions of virility or the state’s understanding of its interests. When it comes to managing fertility, supply, but especially demand, issues reflect deeper structures of gender inequality. Large families may appear economically rational for individual agrarian households, but they also express traditional patriarchal customs that tend to persist in developing/ transitioning countries. This is why many demographers regard cultural diffusion (of modern attitudes to birth control), as well as economic development, as a condition of fertility decline.
The challenge in engendering demand for small families is not simply to persuade would-be parents to recalculate an ideal number of offspring. Beforehand, individuals who may believe their fertility lies in the hands of fate or others must be persuaded to think of themselves as responsible reproductive agents. They must exercise this agency by making decisions and acting upon them since every act of procreative sex not intended for conception must be protected. This may extend only to spacing births, which improves maternal and infant health outcomes, but if the aim is also to reduce family size, then behaviour must be re-normalized, so that fewer babies become the rational and/or virtuous option. In short, family planning is not just a euphemism for contraception; it requires a reconstruction of subjectivities and a construction of agency. This is implicit in calls to empower women. While this is emancipatory, once women are incorporated into the public sphere they become susceptible to policy and market mechanisms that affect their reproductive calculations. At this point, their decisions can be recalibrated through dis/ incentivizing inducements and pressures. It is here, where subjective choices and individual decisions are apparently most free from state control or traditional authorities, that contemporary forms of governance are most effective in managing reproductive conduct. But is this coercive?
This section analyses the political meaning and legitimacy of coercion within liberal-democratic regimes. While measures like compulsory sterilization and abortion have been ruled out as unequivocally and impermissibly coercive, the discussion now moves on to incentives and disincentives as modes of demographic management where the line between freedom and coercion is less clear-cut. Moral judgements are less definitive here because political judgements are more context-dependent, as illustrated below. A salient issue is whether coercion is a question of agency (specifically, of state power overstepping certain boundaries) or of means (the methods whereby compliance is achieved). Isaiah Berlin’s and Robert Nozick’s theoretical accounts of coercion are helpful for explaining the distinction and illuminating its political implications when used for demographic purposes.
In ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958), Berlin engages closely with Mill’s 1859 essay but defends negative liberty more specifically against political coercion. He argues, ‘I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others.’ If ‘this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum’, then ‘I can be described as being coerced.’ Coercion is accordingly the term Berlin gives to political constraints that arise from deliberate and over-extended interference with individual freedom. The essential question for him is not what form interference takes, even if it is legitimized by democratic consent, but ‘How much does the government interfere with me?’3 Absent the gendered language, does this not encapsulate the opposition with which liberal critics frame their animosity to population control, as a coercive invasion of private reproductive space by the state? Yet Berlin was aware that his conceptual analysis was too parsimonious to accommodate the way power actually operates. He admits that, in actual situations, civil society requires constraints on negative liberties. He became aware, too, that ‘deliberate’ political acts ignore modes of interference that transgress frontiers of negative liberty yet remain invisible according to his definition of coercion: such as measures that operate through subtle forms of manipulation at the level of preference formation and desire.
Robert Nozick discusses such measures in his essay ‘Coercion’, which focuses on means rather than agency.4 Coercion occurs when one agent prevents another from choosing to perform an act. Nozick identifies the key mechanism as conditional threats and offers (‘throffers’). At issue is not enforcing obedience by preventing bodies from acting but eliciting compliance by altering wills. In policy terms, ‘throffers’ are essentially incentives and disincentives: they outline what the consequence will be (reward or sanction) of making certain choices, with the aim of guiding ‘voluntary’ decisions along particular pathways. Although Nozick defines them as coercive, they typically operate through ‘free’ markets and, even when governments deploy them, they are rarely judged illegitimate in the sense that they violate basic rights. Indeed, ‘throffers’ have become staple policy levers for liberal states and, if they are noticed at all, they are generally regarded as compatible with personal liberty and consent. In their more benign form, they coincide with what Cripps calls ‘soft incentive-changing policies’, for example positive financial incentives to stop at one or two children. But context is important.5 In some forms and circumstances, incentives, especially disincentives, may cross the line of ethical permissibility. India’s population control programme provides a good illustration.
During the latter part of the twentieth century, India’s persistent population growth not only provoked notorious examples of rights abuse but also illustrated the hazards of tackling demand-side deficits when official anti-natalist aims are thwarted by a pro-natalist popular culture with low literacy rates. It became apparent that building clinics to supply contraceptives does not automatically create demand for their services. Strategies for generating demand were therefore devised, which relied on mass mobilization behind the family planning programme and on increasing incentives and disincentives to a degree that became tantamount to basic rights abuse.
To understand this charge, it is useful to look at India’s National Population Policy, published in 1976 during the Emergency. This enthuses about the capacity of monetary compensation to incentivize sterilization among the poor (mass vasectomy camps offering cash and other material rewards had been successfully pioneered in Kerala). The intention was to increase such incentives, not just for sterilization ‘acceptors’, but also for the ‘recruiters’ whose task was to deliver sterilization volunteers. The latter included medical professionals, labour in the organized sector and members of cooperative societies, local councils and the voluntary sector. This army of minor officials was to be motivated by tax incentives. Teachers, railway workers and village health workers were among local people given targets for recruiting candidates and incentives to pursue them aggressively. The 1976 Policy notes that, in some states, incentives had already penetrated deeply into work and welfare structures, with preferential housing and loans being given to men who were sterilized after fathering a small family and corresponding sanctions being imposed on those who refused. Central government workers were warned to expect their terms of service would be amended similarly.
It is difficult to identify precisely where the line between permissible and impermissible strategies was crossed, but opponents were clear that it had been. Most obviously problematic was the shift to disincentives: penalties imposed on unsterilized fecund men and unsuccessful recruiters, who were threatened with loss of livelihoods or subsidies needed to meet basic needs. In a situation where the Emergency meant a suspension of civil rights, and powers were devolved to local actors operating against a background of caste, class and religious divisions, mass fear and insecurity prevailed. Incentives were also criticized on the grounds that mass poverty means poor, hungry people are made offers they may feel unable to refuse. In such circumstances, it is impossible to distinguish between voluntary and coerced consent, so that dis/incentives become coercive in a qualitatively different sense from the kind of ‘throffers’ made in liberal, market-based societies.
It is for such reasons that using targets, incentives and disincentives to pursue demographic goals has been condemned (as it was at the 1994 Cairo ICPD) as an unacceptable means of population control. Yet it is appreciated too (as it also was at Cairo) that in less precarious circumstances, and where the costs of non-compliance are sufficiently mild for non-consent to remain practical, such measures are widely deployed as effective and legitimate modes of governance. Congruent with the argument in chapter 2, it would thus seem that within certain parameters, judgements about acceptable population stabilization measures remain contextual since their impact varies according to (regional) political and socio-economic conditions.
The rest of this chapter examines the policy mechanisms actually available to contemporary (neo) liberal states for modifying fertility conduct. The political question here is not whether the liberal state is ethically justified in interfering with ‘private’ matters but, rather, by what strategic mechanisms it routinely manipulates reproductive choices. The mechanisms described exemplify neoliberal governmentality in which, as Foucault explains, interventions are ‘no less dense, frequent, active, and continuous’ than in other political systems.6 This model of governance is not recognized as ‘control’ in the sense equated with population control, because it generates ‘voluntary’ consent to policy objectives through behavioural change. Dis/incentives play a central role. Two principal strategies are distinguished in the account that follows: social engineering and biopolitics. Both fall under the broad heading of biopower as Foucault defines it, where population becomes ‘the object of government manipulation’ but is ‘unaware of what is being done to it’.7 In the current analysis, however, social engineering is identified as a distinctive economic mode of governance, for which ‘homo economicus is someone who is eminently governable’. My narrower category of biopolitical measures refers to strategic uses of education and public health campaigns, although in practice social engineering and biopower are usually combined. This is nicely illustrated by a recent report that focuses on their use in reconfiguring consumer and reproductive habits.
Probably the most important levers to change behaviour are education, the creation of economic (and fiscal) incentives, together with legislation involving sanctions for non-compliance. . . . Financial incentives may provide additional reasons for changing behaviour. If society as a whole deems a behaviour unacceptable or antisocial, peer pressure can be an effective tool for change. Suggestion via the media is important in changing attitudes . . ..8
Incentives and disincentives are most overtly used in social engineering approaches. Their provenance in the population field is instructive. When neo-Malthusian aims resurfaced in the mid-twentieth century, experts acknowledged that both the means to influence fertility rates and their ethical justification remained rudimentary. They called for a more contemporary policy framework. This effectively meant drawing on games and rational choice theories, which were in turn indebted to an older utilitarian psychology. Jeremy Bentham had written that ‘pleasures, then, and the avoidance of pains, are the ends which the legislator has in view . . .. Pleasures and pains are the instruments he has to work with’.9 Market forces (which use price signals to discipline decisions by making them more or less costly) suggested an efficient yet apparently apolitical means for managing fertility choices (demand). If co-opted or simulated by government, they could also be harnessed to replace more overt and controversial methods of population control.
This new behavioural approach can already be discerned in Hardin’s list of viable options for rationing the commons. Rather than trying to suppress the self-interest responsible for its tragic degradation, Hardin proposed exploiting it to engineer choices. Instead of direct prohibitions, ‘carefully biased options’ could incentivize constraint. Markets play an important role in rationing use of the commons, by privatizing and commodifying scarce resources (although Hardin considered their distributive effects unjust). Taxes can play a similar role and are more amenable to policy aims and democratic consent. Although Hardin calls taxation coercive, he stressed that this was only because the candour of the word draws attention to the costs (in terms of painful counter-measures) of overpopulation and overconsumption, not because he equates it with state oppression. Indeed, he contends that if citizens appreciate why the commons is ruined, it is rational for them to consent to rationing through (progressive) taxation, as a fairer option than unadulterated marketization. He accordingly presents taxation as a good coercive device for instilling (consumer and reproductive) temperance, provided the means and their purpose are explained and agreed upon. Hardin was especially keen on applying this approach to the reproductive commons, where he dismissed assumptions that appealing to social conscience would suffice to instil responsible childbearing. Limiting tax relief to two children, or using it to reward women for delaying their first pregnancy, was deemed more effective.
Using the tax/benefits system to influence procreative decisions in this way was seized upon by environmentalists worried about ecological harm caused by the West’s population explosion. The first issue of The Ecologist included an article that recommended a programme of positive incentives for sterilization, plus annual tax-free bonuses for women of childbearing age who declined to reproduce in a given year. In a later issue of the journal, the authors of the influential Blueprint for Survival (1972) suggested using tax incentives, education and advertising to encourage small families. They also called for research on ‘subtle cultural controls’ and for greater understanding of the ways socio-economic circumstances may be exploited to encourage below-replacement fertility. Similar arguments were incorporated into the Plan of Action produced at the UN’s first World Population Conference (Bucharest, 1974), which identified welfare provisions like maternity benefits or family allowances as flexible strategies for influencing family size. If early formulations of these policy directions were somewhat crude, the behavioural logic they exploited would become more sophisticated during the 1980s, as market mechanisms were used more extensively as instruments of and models for public policy making. This is exemplified by the New Public Management, an approach that both exposes more areas of public life to market forces and brings market discipline to bear on public services. This method may resemble the ‘throffers’ that Nozick identifies as coercive, but incentives and disincentives mobilized to modify reproductive conduct do not cross Berlin’s threshold of negative liberty; indeed, they are justified as ways to increase individual choice. Foucault’s commentary on neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics is informative here. He presents it both as a generalization of market principles across all areas of life (thus distinguishing it from its liberal predecessor) and as an intellectual grid. As such, even non-monetary aspects of the social system are subjected to market logic, which becomes the principle of intelligibility for all social relationships and individual behaviour even when they are not directly economic.
Behaviour within this regime is effectively understood as simultaneously self-regarding (individual self-interested decision making is privileged) and other-regarding vis-à-vis economic outcomes (an increasing range of apparently exogenous social and environmental factors is brought within the orbit of economic governance, on the grounds that they indirectly contribute to economic growth). Fertility conduct, child-rearing practices, ageing, family policies, are among the ‘private’ phenomena caught in the neoliberal grid as important areas for management. Population and the environment are presented, here, as so much human and natural capital: human resources and ecological services that require continuous investment and refinement. As Wendy Brown writes, ‘market principles frame every sphere and activity, from mothering to mating . . . from planning one’s family to planning one’s death.’10 A UN report acknowledges this trend towards greater interest in demographic trends, with ‘far more concern about fertility levels’ becoming a feature of recent years. In particular, it finds ‘more low-fertility countries expressing concern about and adopting policies to raise fertility and high-fertility countries doing the same to lower fertility’.11 That concern is being met through engineering reproductive choices. The crucial debate needed here is not, I suggest, an ethical one about legitimacy or instrumentalism but a broader consequentialist one about the direction of these policies and their environmental impact.
In developed states, measures pioneered by antinatalists during the 1960s and 1970s are now used for pro-natalist purposes. Baby bonuses, generous family allowances, parental leave schemes, tax incentives, housing benefits and flexible work schemes are the currency used to incentivize more births in the low-fertility, ageing societies of the developed world. Subsidized childcare, crèches, early schooling, and tolerance of births outside marriage and of unconventional relationships are explicitly commended by European policy makers as ways to remove disincentives to parenting, such as expensive housing, inflexible labour markets or rigid sex roles and gender identities. Fertility recovery in Northern Europe is accredited to measures designed to alleviate the opportunity costs of child rearing, especially those that enable women (and preferably men, too) to combine production with reproduction.12 While the new pro-natalism is driven mainly by economic concerns, its policy instruments are justified by surveys showing that ‘Europeans would like to have more children’ (usually two, sometimes more) but ‘are discouraged from doing so by the kinds of problems that limit their freedom of choice’.13 The concept of ‘unmet need’ (desire/demand) is reoriented here towards pro-natalist purposes. Esping-Andersen and Billari identify ‘a demographic reversal. This suggests that the “less family” trend was transitory rather than the harbinger of a new era.’14 They expect it to become more widespread as family-friendly policies expand, especially among the middle class (they do not consider the environmental implications). Paradoxically, raising fertility levels requires expensive government incentives (like subsidized childcare) to counteract market disincentives that suppress them. For couples experiencing neoliberal austerity, relying on their persistence may be a risky choice.
Socially engineering choices through carefully calibrated incentives and disincentives is not of course limited to demographic matters. Advertising and other marketing strategies are widely used to reorient consumer choice and increase consumption. But government interventions in price structures, with the aim of raising the costs of polluting or incentivizing parsimonious use of scarce resources, are also common (justified partly by insisting that harmful externalities must be included in prices). Subsidizing renewable technologies like solar power is another example, although economists generally dislike subsidies, especially when used to satisfy demand among the poor for water, fuel and so on, which they charge with encouraging profligacy. Green taxes use similar calculations in order to reconfigure consumers’ cost-benefit analyses. Thus the Royal Society’s People and the Planet recommends measures like charging for rubbish collections, a tax on aggregates and installing smart electricity meters ‘to enable consumer behaviour change’. ‘By raising prices on less sustainable products,’ it explains, ‘taxes and charges can be effective in influencing consumer behaviour towards sustainability.’ Inversely, incentives ‘can come in the form of monetary grants and tax reductions and make sustainable choices less expensive’, thereby letting ‘the market play a role in changing purchasing patterns’.15
Because they are more visible as government interventions, and despite their greater accountability, green taxes are more likely to provoke resistance, both from vested interests (hence the fate of Australia’s mining tax) and on grounds of social justice (since higher prices affect the poor disproportionately, although this is the case for all goods in capitalist economies). Governments may respond with compensation schemes. While welcome in social justice terms, however, they confuse the message (of sustainable use) and blunt the efficacy of disincentivizing strategies. As with other environmental measures, there is therefore need for carefully targeted, case-by-case assessments of policy interventions since disincentives need to be fair but just painful enough to deter extravagance. In general, commandeering market forces (for example, by allowing prices to rise in response to real or engineered resource shortages, as in carbon tax or trading schemes) is less politically risky unless policy makers can persuade the public of the benefits of a collective response to environmental degradation and of the higher longer-term costs of inaction.
Engineering reproductive choices is little different in terms of its mechanics from engineering consumer habits. This symmetry strikes some normative thinkers as morally repugnant. Yet inasmuch as policy makers deem it desirable to modify fertility rates, and they understand a principal mechanism of contemporary governance to be a process of behaviour modification achieved through reconfiguring costs and benefits, it is not inherently more coercive or unethical than other liberal-democratic measures used to manage the commons. Antipathy to population control often provokes hypocrisy here. When, for example, the United Kingdom’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) reported on the environmental impact of population growth in the United Kingdom, it summarily dismissed population-stabilizing policies as unethical. Yet the Commission had no qualms about recommending extensive intervention in ‘choices about behaviour and consumption’ through ‘sustained efforts using all available techniques, including regulation, incentives, education and persuasion’.16
While critics dislike the idea of couples basing procreative decisions on cost–benefit analysis, economists have realized that individuals cannot anyway be relied upon always to make rational decisions about their interests. Seeking more subtle methods of influencing choices, policy makers have turned to behavioural economics. A chapter of the United Kingdom’s last comprehensive sustainable development strategy, Securing the Future (2005), was for example entitled ‘Helping People Make Better Choices’. Here, the New Labour government proposed ‘a new approach to influencing behaviours based on recent research on what determines current patterns’. The goal was ‘measures to enable and encourage behaviour change’ which address ‘entrenched habits’.17 This is the approach alluded to by the Royal Society when it recommends changing consumption patterns through ‘intelligent ways to encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves’. It was able to cite the Behavioural Insights Team, instituted by the Coalition government in 2010 and popularly known as the Nudge Unit.18 Although it has itself been a victim of austerity cuts, the agency’s work has been incorporated into governing practices based on the guiding premise of behavioural economics: that through an understanding of subconscious psychological cues and emotional associations that affect decision making, individuals can be nudged into compliance. This is congruent with neoliberal governmentality inasmuch as it works on ‘interests, utilities, cognition, decisions, choices, actions, consumption, preferences, behaviors’.19 Redolent of Foucauldian biopower, the Royal Society attributes its political appeal to the way ‘behaviour is changed without individuals even noticing that this has happened.’20 When applied to reproduction, such strategies may be unrecognizable as coercive population controls, but they are a method that is available for persuading individuals to make responsible choices while maintaining a sense of voluntary, if not necessarily welcome, consent.
I have suggested that behaviour modification achieved through dis/incentive schemes is the signature of current models of governing and is compatible with standards of liberal governance. It permits effective, legitimate interventions that facilitate demographic management. It does not follow, however, that this resolves difficult choices. If consent is voluntary, in the sense that governments do not compel family size, this does not mean choices are painless. For example, couples may refrain from additional children because they equate it with responsible green citizenship, or because they cannot afford more, but this does not necessarily mean they do not regret falling short of their ideal family size.
There are social justice considerations, too. In the previous chapter, human rights approaches were judged of limited value inasmuch as they are unable to address entrenched systems of gender inequality. Dis/incentive-driven models of governance similarly run up against entrenched systems of class inequality, in which costs of non-compliance tend to fall disproportionately on the poor and therefore look inequitable. Market forces are often praised as an alternative to coercive population control programmes in reducing birth rates. But as Demeny notes, while there is a ‘tendency to idealize the process of development that historically led to fertility reduction as involving little or no cost of adjustment at the individual level’, in practice it is economic hardship and deprivation that disincentivize large families and these are not costless for the families themselves.21 Is the dis/incentivizing power of market discipline ultimately less painful, then, than if limits are imposed by democratically generated decisions supported by public services? An advantage of schemes that take political form is that policies can be deliberately designed to achieve desired (and accountable) outcomes. Where necessary, governments can redistribute income in ways that help compensate for unintended unfair effects. Perhaps the most obvious challenge here is to design a dis/incentive scheme that encourages fewer births but without increasing household (and especially child) poverty.
Incentives generally seem more acceptable than disincentives. This is partly, perhaps, why pro-natalist policies appear more benign, inasmuch as they favour positive incentives and subsidies and are presumed to be congruent with a ‘natural’ desire to procreate. Anti-natalist policies that go against the grain are more often associated with negative, punitive measures based on threats of deprivation (such as China imposing a substantial charge for excessive children, which may be interpreted as a punitive deterrent or, alternatively, as a contribution to additional costs for public finances). The aim is not, after all, to make the poor poorer but to convince them to act differently (large families are already a major cause of household poverty). This is one reason why education and campaigning are vital supplements in gaining voluntary compliance. I have suggested that in developed, low-fertility countries, it may suffice simply to remove incentives to procreation and to publicize the benefits of allowing their populations to decline naturally. Yet, even here, a political decision against intervention is effectively a choice to allow markets to dictate demographic outcomes, inasmuch as low fertility is a response to the costs of child rearing. Education is important for wealthier couples, too, who may believe their ability to support more children justifies choosing a large family whereas, on the contrary, they make irresponsibly inequitable and unsustainable demands on shared resources.
Biopolitical strategies complement social engineering by re-normalizing reproductive habits. In the (narrower) sense used in this chapter, they work chiefly through education or publicity campaigns to reconfigure demand. Their aim is to modify subjectivities by disseminating desired norms (such as a certain family size) as standards of responsible citizenship. Specifically, their target is the public as defined by Foucault, as ‘the population seen under the aspect of its opinions, ways of doing things, forms of behavior, customs, prejudices, and requirements’, such that it can be captured through ‘education, campaigns, and convictions’.22 Although biopolitical mechanisms of discipline and normalization are diffused throughout the social fabric (for example, via the [social] media but also through laws and markets when they send messages about desirable conduct), the biopolitical measures specified here may be used more overtly by governments to achieve demographic (or other) outcomes. Thus, they support the kind of cultural diffusion demographers identify as key to fertility change. They are deployed in the public sphere as an explicit means of altering civic attitudes, rather than working indirectly through the calculus of individual preference sets.
Again, an initial deployment and justification of this approach can be found among post-war neo-Malthusians. Not all those concerned about a population explosion were enthusiastic about socially engineering the reproductive commons. Paul Ehrlich, for example, expressed optimism that a concerned public would voluntarily limit itself to replacement-level fertility, once informed of the reasons and serviced with the means for doing so. Such interventions are more obviously a legacy of Enlightenment approaches that emphasize education, on the assumption that reasonable, responsible decision making results from sound information and an enlightened interest in the common good. An enduring belief among many baby boomers (borne out by their own reproductive conduct) that abstemious procreation is the responsible choice suggests that such measures can be influential. Sex education in schools might, for example, include information about family planning but also educate children about the environmental advantages of small families. Publicity posters and media campaigns already emulate advertising techniques to advance broader health agendas (regarding diet, for example). They are not averse to using ‘throffers’, such as explaining ill health as a disincentive to high-risk behaviour. Saatchi and Saatchi’s ‘pregnant man’ poster, used by the British government during the 1980s to induce men to sexual responsibility, is an iconic example, as are later television advertisements linking HIV/AIDS avoidance to safe sex. In India, publicity campaigns concerning maternal health, family planning and valuing the girl-child are prevalent on public transport and television. The efficacy of such instruments depends not just on their visibility, however, but also on the wider narratives woven around demographic trends and the socioenvironmental commons. These largely depend on political decisions, which is why a new debate about the costs of persistent population growth is a critical aspect of sustainable development.
This chapter has shown that a range of ethically acceptable measures is available for modifying reproductive conduct. Among them, socially engineering choices and biopolitically reconstructing behavioural norms are indicative of contemporary models of government. These policy mechanisms, centring on incentive/disincentive schemes, manifest that particular mix of liberty and coercion that is typical of twenty-first-century (neo)liberal governance. Although their manipulative modus operandi is not immune to criticism, especially when conducted in clandestine ways that preclude democratic oversight and inasmuch as they disproportionately affect the poor, their application to reproductive behaviour conforms to overall standards of governing that liberals regard as legitimate.
In conclusion, it would appear that an assumed reliance on coercive means is not a good reason for refusing future population policies or the best place to focus normative debates about population stabilization in the twenty-first century. Instead – and given that most governments do, after all, turn out to pursue demographic policies – renewed debate about the purposes and merits of pursuing particular demographic ends seems more urgent. Chapter 1 summarized some of the relevant considerations, emphasizing in particular that pro-growth policies tend to be pursued for purposes of national economic growth and power, which are contrary to the interests of global social justice and planetary sustainability. From this perspective, I have suggested looking at such policies more critically, especially where they drive pro-natalism in developed countries but also where they are the default of patriarchal cultures confronting rates of rapid population growth that are contrary to their interests in development.
While it is important to revisit and understand the reasons (anti-natalist) population control has provoked such hostility, I have suggested that both the reasons and the term itself now seem largely anachronistic. This does not mean that critics’ warnings have become irrelevant: they show how important critical vigilance remains in this politically and ethically treacherous field. But the benefits of population stabilization (and ultimately reduction) for the global commons, including for its poorest members and sentient non-human entities, are well documented and attainable by ethical means, if the political will can be generated. Getting the demographic dimension reincorporated into international environmental, including climate change, conferences is a small but vital step. Provoking new debates about the merits of population stabilization and decline, encouraging organizations at every level to embrace and explain this as a demographic goal and advertising the voluntary nature of today’s rights-compliant population governance are even more important.
What has also nonetheless become clear from the foregoing analysis is that population matters and demographic trends are embedded in deeper structures of gender, race and class inequality. This is partly why policies in this area remain so controversial, but it also serves as a reminder that, on their own, population policies have limitations. Nonetheless, given worsening environmental indicators and continued growth in the global economy, it does not seem realistic to me to suggest putting the population issue on hold while these wider and more intractable problems are resolved. Limiting the human population may not be a panacea. But given that numbers are a multiplier of unsustainable behaviour, and that women especially benefit so much from the provision of family planning services that anti-natalist policies prioritize, it is surely time to return the issue to the political agenda. I have argued that political theorists, among others, have an important contribution to make here in developing an ethical framework commensurate with the governance models and biophysical conditions of the twenty-first century.