8: Control without Coercion?

Although “coerced sterilization” in its grossly offensive conventional form may have seen its day, a much more insidious pattern of social engineering has come to replace it.

—Mondana Nikoukari¹

 

 

Many contemporary populationists argue that population growth can be slowed or stopped in ways that respect the human rights of women and the poor. The horrors of the Cold War population control panic of the twentieth century need not be repeated. Laurie Mazur says: “We can fight for population policies that are firmly grounded in human rights and social justice.”²

These activists argue that the debates about population and environment are unnecessarily polarized, that we don’t have to choose between population control and social justice—to build an ecological society, we must do both.

Contradictory strategies

But that’s easier to say than do. The idea that population control can be merged with a social justice agenda assumes that populationist policies don’t contradict the goal of fundamental social change. In reality, far from making sustainable social change easier, populationist policies add divisive tensions and problems to environmental campaigns. In practice, it is just about impossible to “do both.”

There are just two broad policy options open to populationists: they can urge individuals to have fewer children, or they can support government-backed coercion. As Andrew Feenberg writes:

The dilemma of population politics is the absence of any significant realm of action other than appeals to individual conscience and coercion by the state. There is not much else to be done at the political level except attacking public opponents of birth control and lobbying for repressive legislation. One cannot very well demonstrate against babies or even against parents. Unless the state intervenes (as it has in China), the issue is private, each couple choosing how many children it wants as a function of its own values. This explains why Ehrlich’s political program wavered between moralistic voluntarism and more or less harsh state action.³

As we saw in chapter 7, coercive state action to cut population cannot be reconciled with human rights. It directly contradicts efforts by social activists to increase people’s control over governments and institutions, by giving the state more power over individuals’ lives and sexuality.

But if calling upon the state to cut population is ruled out, the option of appealing to individuals has its own problems. Past campaigns to convince individuals to have fewer children have had little success. Women’s decisions to have children are influenced by a wide range of cultural, social, economic and personal factors, none of which are addressed by calls for smaller families on environmental grounds.

The population establishment isn’t a neutral force: it has a specific political agenda, and when it provides funds, it wants to see results. If voluntary programs don’t produce the desired demographic outcome, there’s likely to be pressure to introduce sterner measures. As Amara Pérez writes in the evocatively titled book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded:

The reality is foundations are ultimately interested in the packaging and production of success stories, measurable outcomes, and the use of infrastructure and capacity-building systems. As non-profit organizations that rely on foundation money, we must embrace and engage in the organizing market. This resembles a business model in that the consumers are foundations to which organizations offer to sell their political work for a grant .... Over time, funding trends actually come to influence our work, priorities, and direction as we struggle to remain competitive and funded in the movement market.⁴

This is not an abstract issue. Family planning programs that raise government and foundation money by promising to reduce the birth rate will face demands for measurable results—and those that want to keep their grants will find themselves pressured to shift from offering reproductive choices to pressuring women to make the “right” choices.

Experience with family planning in third world countries shows that programs motivated by a desire to cut population tend to use coercive measures, regardless of the desires of their supporters in the North.

Gradations of coercion

An approach that’s often counterposed to coercion involves offering incentives and rewards for “accepting” birth control. In practice, many poor women lack the power to make choices about many aspects of their lives, and incentives to use contraception can make it difficult for them to say no. When a woman’s family is hungry, the offer of money if she agrees to be sterilized or accepts some form of long-lasting contraceptive is really no choice at all.

Supporters of incentives to lower population point out that incentives and disincentives are routine in everyday life—from traffic regulations to tax systems. These measures help society function. So what could be wrong with giving poor women incentives if it means they get access to family planning services they lacked before? Betsy Hartmann replies:

Such an argument avoids the central question of why people need to be persuaded or forced to have fewer children in the first place. Isn’t it because of the very absence of the most powerful incentive of them all: the economic and social security of having fair access to the fruits of development? This is not something that can be handed out in local currency when a person is sterilized; instead it involves major social restructuring. When incentive schemes are substituted for social change, the result invariably discriminates against poor people, especially women, if it does not outright coerce them.⁵

Coercion doesn’t just mean forced sterilization: it can take many forms. In some Indian states, people with more than two children are not eligible for government jobs. In Indonesia, entire communities have been denied benefits if an insufficient number of couples used birth control. In Singapore, large families lost child tax credits and priority access to subsidized housing.

A 2006 study by James Oldham found that staff in projects motivated by demographic goals frequently pressured women to accept sterilization or unsafe long-lasting contraceptives. Supposedly non-coercive programs included elements such as denying women access to other services for failing to attend family planning lectures. Oldham concluded:

When NGOs arrive with predetermined agendas, the danger is that these will be imposed on local communities. As long as a Malthusian [population] narrative is part of the program vision, such a narrative is likely to be communicated to, and potentially imposed upon, target communities . . .

Organizations promoting the funding and provision of reproductive health/family planning services in the global south should refrain from using environmental and population arguments to promote their goals. The distortions of Malthusian arguments cannot be justified simply because they are effective in winning partners or funding; they need to be replaced with rights-based arguments in favor of making reproductive health/family planning available to all women.⁶

The overtly coercive population programs in India and China have been widely publicized. Much less attention has been paid to the decades-long sterilization program in the US colony of Puerto Rico, a program that was officially voluntary but in practice allowed little choice to women who needed jobs on an island with very high unemployment, which US authorities attributed to overpopulation.

In the 1940s light manufacturing industries began to move in from the U.S. mainland, attracted by cheap labor and low taxes. Young women were a key and “docile” part of that labor force, but subject to “loss” (from the employer’s point of view) due to pregnancy. The result was a massive sterilization campaign carried out by the local government and the IPPF [International Planned Parenthood Federation], with U.S. government funding. Women were cajoled and coerced into accepting sterilization, often not even being told that the process wasn’t reversible. The result was that by 1968 one-third of the women of childbearing age had been sterilized. The combination of mass sterilization and heavy out-migration due to a declining economy caused the population of Puerto Rico to actually drop—with no resultant improvement in living standards, or the environment.⁷

Feminist lawyer Mondana Nikoukari points out that in the United States, “there is little doubt that women of color, as a group, face disproportionate and coerced sterilization.”

Statistics show that in 1982, fifteen percent of white women were sterilized compared to twenty-four percent of black women, thirty-five percent of Puerto Rican women and forty-two percent of Native American women. By region, the numbers are even more astounding. On Native American reservations nearly 50 sterilizations occurred in one month in the 1970’s with the rate of sterilization doubling by the close of the decade. Sterilization rates as high as sixty-five percent have been reported among Latino women in the Northeast, while in the South black women have undergone the highest rate of hysterectomy and tubal ligation in the nation.⁸

In her view, in many cases informed consent has been replaced by “gradations of coercion” imposed by medical practitioners, courts, welfare agencies, and others. If that’s true in the United States, how can we imagine that in countries where legal protections are much weaker, population-environment programs will truly respect women’s rights?

The “Cairo Consensus”

As these examples show, it can be hard, based on descriptions alone, to distinguish programs that truly empower women from those that only pay lip service to women’s rights, since even hard-line population controllers now routinely include some feminist-sounding language in their statements.

Almost every group that promotes birth control for third world women claims adherence to the policies adopted by the 1994 UN population conference in Cairo. Mazur says the Cairo Consensus was a big step forward because it united feminists and populationists. “[In Cairo] feminists and populationists joined forces because their interests were aligned. If the best way to slow population growth is by ensuring reproductive rights and empowering women, then this is a win-win for both groups”⁹ (emphasis in original).

The Cairo Consensus also has many feminist critics. Hartmann describes it as “a strange brew of feminism, neoliberalism, and population reduction.”¹⁰ In a position paper written immediately after the meeting, Indian feminists Vandana Shiva and Mira Shiva wrote that at Cairo “women’s rights” were reduced to just “reproductive rights.” Those who support the consensus “end up ignoring the fact that women are human beings, not just reproductive beings and have political, economic and environmental rights, not just reproductive rights.” Many women’s groups at Cairo “unwittingly became promoters of the agenda of demographic fundamentalists who believe that all problems—from ecological crisis to ethnic crisis, from poverty to social instability—can be blamed on population growth, and as a corollary, population control is a solution to all problems facing humanity.”¹¹

In the context of the human rights abuses endorsed by the twentieth-century population establishment and the misogynist policies supported by anti-choice religious groups, Cairo’s emphasis on women was a big step in the right direction. Wider provision of sexual and reproductive health services is a goal that deserves universal support, and the Cairo Consensus has provided a framework for women in many countries to fight restrictions on birth control and abortion.

But the picture isn’t all positive. By treating women’s rights instrumentally, as a means to achieve demographic ends, the Cairo Consensus gave new credibility to an agenda that has long been used to block social change. Populationist groups in the North have adopted Cairo’s vocabulary and have seized on Cairo’s call for governments to “formulate and implement population policies and programs” as justification for their long-standing goal of reducing birth rates in the third world.

Rosalind Petchesky points out that populationist influence can also be seen in the contradiction in the Cairo document “between the rhetoric of reproductive and sexual health/rights and an approach to resources still focused on prioritizing family planning within publicly supported services and relying on the market for everything else.” The Cairo Action Plan proposed a budget in which the funds allocated to birth control exceeded the funds for all other health services combined.¹² In poor countries, implementing the Cairo program has often meant shifting health care budgets heavily toward birth control, while substantially reducing spending on basic health care.

Hartmann writes that population publications often present women as “an undifferentiated mass which needs to be empowered, with little recognition of the many differences between them—poor or rich, rural or urban, black or white.” But acknowledging these differences is crucial because they “impact on their survival and reproductive strategies.“¹³ Lumping the world’s women together in this way also downplays significant social and political differences between women.

Using the Users?

Some feminists argue for using populationist prejudices as a way to win gains for women. Michelle Goldberg, for example, writes that the population question can be used “to force the world to pay attention to reproductive justice.” In her view, “men in power will rarely work to advance women’s rights for their own sake, but they will do so in the service of some other grand objective, be it demographic or economic,” so women’s rights activists should take advantage of that.¹⁵

Similarly, Laurie Mazur argues that progressives must preempt right-wing populationists: “If there is no left/progressive voice on this issue, environmentalists and others who are legitimately concerned about population growth will be driven into the arms of the neo-Malthusians.” ¹⁶

But the real danger is that liberal environmentalists and feminists will strengthen the right by lending credibility to reactionary arguments. Adopting the argument that population growth causes global warming endorses the strongest argument the right has against the social and economic changes that are really needed to stop climate change and environmental destruction.

If environmentalists and others believe that population growth is causing climate change, then our responsibility is to show them why that’s wrong, not to adapt to their errors.

Although one can find common agendas among the world’s women (for example, most women would probably support an end to domestic violence and forced prostitution), there are also major political differences between them, which includes perspectives on population. How many women of color, for example, support the position of many rich, white women environmentalists that high fertility is the main cause of the environmental crisis? There is no consensus here, even by the wildest stretch of the imagination.¹⁴

Combining population control policies and social justice campaigns just doesn’t work. Population policies not only don’t pave the way for progressive social and economic transformation, they raise barriers to it. The Cairo focus on sexual and reproductive rights is welcome, but the price was that the wider issues facing the people of the South were placed on the back burner indefinitely.

Too little, too late

A fundamental objection to the Cairo Consensus is that it “mainly regards women’s empowerment as a means to reduce population growth rather than as a worthy end in and of itself.”¹⁷

But even if that were an acceptable approach, attempts to fight environmental destruction by providing birth control services in the South fail on practical grounds. The plans proposed by populationist groups in the North cannot achieve their stated goals. Just providing contraception is unlikely to have a significant effect on population or emissions—and even if it did everything the populationists claim, the effect would be far less than is required to slow climate change or to turn back the environmental crisis more generally.

Many populationist groups say population growth and greenhouse gas emissions can be slowed substantially just by filling the “unmet need” for birth control and abortion, so coercion isn’t necessary. For example, Optimum Population Trust promises that “successful population policies, which answered the unmet need for family planning, could mean nearly three billion fewer people in 2050, a difference equivalent to 44 per cent of current world population (6.8 billion).”¹⁸

But there are at least three reasons to doubt such claims. These are virtually certain:

1. “Unmet need” programs won’t produce the promised reductions in population.

2. The population reductions they do achieve won’t have an equivalent impact on greenhouse gas emissions.

3. Any impact on greenhouse gas emissions will be too little and too late to slow global warming.

First, the claim that simply making modern contraception available to women who aren’t now using it will have a significant effect on birth rates in third world countries ignores essential social and economic factors. As demographer George Martine writes: “This perspective overlooks well-documented arguments that rapid reductions in fertility depend at least as much on speeding up economic development and social transformations, as well as on empowering women and meeting individuals’ needs in sexual and reproductive health.”¹⁹

Family planning programs alone, without some minimal social transformation that motivates people to perceive that limiting fertility would yield some increment in well-being, and that empowers women to take control over their lives, are unlikely to reduce fertility rapidly. This is especially true in countries that still have a predominantly rural population. Throughout history, rural families have had more children in order to work the land. Practically all the least-developed countries still have a large majority of their population residing in rural areas, where family planning programs are more difficult to implement and have understandably had a lesser impact—unless some form of coercion was applied.²⁰

In Hartmann’s words: “The best population policy is to concentrate on improving human welfare in all its many facets . . . Take care of the population and population growth will go down. In fact, the greatest irony is that in most cases population growth comes down faster the less you focus on it as a policy priority, and the more you focus on women’s rights and basic human needs.”²¹

Second, since the women whose unmet need for birth control is being targeted are the poorest women in the poorest countries, their greenhouse gas emissions are minimal.

The actual magnitude of the impact that future fertility declines will have on the mitigation of climate change is far from being proportional to the number of people who are “not born” under a scenario of rapid fertility decline. Enormous differences in social organization and in consumption patterns between regions and social groups translate into highly differentiated impacts of additional numbers.²²

As demographer Wolfgang Lutz points out:

Within each country the rich have fewer children and emit significantly more than the poor. India, for example, has a per capita carbon emission of only 0.21 tons. Although this is one of the lowest in the world there is every reason to assume that the richest 10 percent in India emit at least 10 times more than the bulk of the population and that the expected future population growth of India comes almost entirely from the poor segments of the population. If this is true, the actual impact of population growth on carbon emissions will be much less than national averages would imply.²³

Equally, the actual impact of population reduction on carbon emission will be much less than national averages would imply.

And the third reason for doubting the value of population programs is timing. As George Martine notes, “Even rapid fertility declines would not quickly produce the stabilization or reduction of population sizes . . . [because] a country’s population continues to grow in absolute numbers for some decades after it has reached below-replacement fertility.”²⁴ This is the issue of demographic momentum discussed in chapter 5: population keeps growing because the number of births, though below the long-term replacement rate, is still greater than the number of deaths.

This is a critical issue, because we don’t have decades to solve the climate crisis.

Analysis by a team led by US climate scientist James Hansen shows that the current level of CO₂ in the atmosphere, now 390 parts per million, “is already in the danger zone” for catastrophic climate change. They argue convincingly that we must phase out coal by 2030, and by 2050 we need to have negative emissions—that is, we must remove more CO₂ from the atmosphere than is added every year. That can’t be achieved without a very rapid reduction in emissions, beginning now.²⁵ Hansen argues that any increase in the average global temperature greater than one degree will have potentially tragic consequences. “The last time Earth was 2 degrees warmer so much ice melted that sea level was about twenty-five meters (eighty feet) higher than it is today.”²⁶

Demographer Martine writes:

The limitations of the “demographic solution” must be made clear. Sheer numbers do not tell the whole story. The world is already on the threshold of a major climactic threat, with or without population growth. Family planning simply does not have retroactive capabilities. Even if humankind failed to produce a single baby during the next generation, its quality of life on Planet Earth would still be endangered by climate change.²⁷

However sincere its advocates may be, the “reduce the birth rate” solution to climate change blames third world women for a problem they didn’t cause and opens the door to more subtle forms of coercion. Under even the most optimistic (read: unrealistic) assumptions, its impact on emissions will be too little, too late: a fraction of what’s needed, decades after dramatic changes must be in place.

In the past, populationists were justly accused of exaggerating the imminence of famine and chaos, so it’s ironic that now their proposals ignore the urgency of the environmental crisis. Demographic change is slow, but the climate emergency demands rapid, transformative action. Setting population targets for 2050 is like setting emission cut targets for 2050: it allows the politicians and polluters to do nothing. The real question is what to do now, not a generation from now.