7

The Population
Establishment Today

Today about $5 billion is spent each year on family planning in the Third World. Around $3 billion is spent by Third World governments, with China, India, and Indonesia the biggest spenders; over $1 billion is donated by governments of developed countries, multilateral institutions, and private agencies that constitute the Western population establishment; and the rest is spent by individual contraceptive users. Although population assistance has risen over time, it accounts for only 1 percent of official development assistance. This small percentage appears more significant, however, when one considers that less than 7 percent of official development assistance is allocated to human welfare concerns.1 Moreover, population aid and the policies it helps to generate influence many other aspects of development planning.

The population establishment is by no means a monolith—it is made up of a wide spectrum of organizations and individuals, pursuing different and sometimes conflicting activities and goals, some more attuned to women’s rights than others. Yet th ey are loosely joined together by a common sense of purpose, and often more tightly by a common source of funds. Since the US government is the largest single donor, contributing almost half of international population assistance, it is the key actor in the population control drama. However, it generally prefers to play its role behind the scenes.

Following is a list of the major agencies involved in population activities:

The US Agency for International Development (AID). AID population assistance takes two main forms. The first is bilateral assistance to country-level programs, which accounts for about half of the population budget. A few countries, notably Bangladesh and Kenya, have received a disproportionate share of bilateral assistance relative to their population size.2 In 1993 AID made the policy decision to target assistance on two types of countries: “countries that contribute the most to global population and health problems” and “countries where population and health conditions impede sustainable development,” which include places where growth rates “threaten the environment.”3

The other half of AID’s population budget goes primarily to cooperating agencies, which include nonprofit groups, private firms, and universities such as Johns Hopkins. Under Reagan and Bush, US assistance to multilateral agencies was severely reduced because the IPPF and the UNFPA lost funding over abortion controversies. Aid is resuming under Clinton.

AID’s new “Sustainable Development Strategy” identifies population growth as a key “strategic threat” which “consumes all other economic gains, drives environmental damage, exacerbates poverty, and impedes democratic governance.”4 Population control is one of AID’s four main areas of concentration, and the Clinton administration is requesting $585 million in FY 1995 for population programs, up from $502 million the year before.5

Although population programs will also have health care and female education components, family planning will continue to receive the most resources, since according to AID it is the single most effective means to reduce population growth.6 And it appears that AID will support health and education only to the extent that they serve its population control objectives. In the words of AID administrator J. Brian Atwood:

Family planning will remain the critical element in our population programs. . . . Our concern must be to meet the unmet need for family planning, but to go beyond. Maternal health, prenatal care, safe sex and social education must be part of the total picture. So must the empowerment of women. So must the education of girls. We cannot attack the crisis with a single arrow. We cannot go to war with a single weapon.7

Governments of Other Developed Countries. Japan is now the second largest national donor. Recently, it substantially increased its population assistance, earmarking $3 billion for a global initiative on population and AIDS for the seven-year period FY 1994-FY 2000. Women’s health activists in Asia are worried about the implications of such a large increase. In the past Japan has had a relatively low profile in population matters, but now it is officially embracing the view that the “population explosion” is causing food shortages, unemployment, urban slums, and environmental degradation.8 Other major donors are Germany, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, and Australia. Most channel at least half their population assistance through multilateral agencies.9

Traditionally, European governments have had a more broad-based approach toward population than the United States and, in some cases, have served as an important counterweight to AID’s and the World Bank’s narrow family planning agendas (see Chapter 12). In the late eighties, however, the UNFPA and US lobby groups such as the Population Crisis Committee put pressure on European governments to increase their support for population control, a strategy which is unfortunately starting to pay off.10 Parliamentarians have been a special target. In 1994 a British all-party parliamentary group on population and development recommended that the government double its foreign population assistance in the next ten years, and, more ominously, reduce funding to overseas aid charities which fail to make family planning a priority, and increase it to those which do. It also urged NGOs to engage in the social marketing of contraceptives.11

The UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA). With a budget of close to $220 million a year, the UNFPA is the largest multilateral member of the population establishment. Although in theory the UNFPA is supposed to support a wide spectrum of population-related activities, in practice its main emphasis is on funding family planning programs. Between 1969 and 1991, for example, the UNFPA devoted only 1.6 percent of its total assistance to the broader area of women, population, and development, as opposed to over 45 percent to family planning programs. Moreover, many of its women’s programs are “small-scale endeavors which simultaneously address women’s reproductive and productive roles.”12

This emphasis on family planning is no accident. According to a UNFPA official interviewed in 1984, before the cut-off of US funds: “AID, which provides about a quarter of our funds, puts pressure on us to focus on family planning.” Officially, the UNFPA is committed to the principle of voluntarism and must abide by the UN Human Rights Charter. It projects a public image of an organization, in the words of one official, “in business to do what people want, not to tell people what to do.”13 But in effect the UNFPA does not do what people want but what governments want, and what governments want, if it involves pushing population control, can easily conflict with voluntarism.

The UNFPA, in fact, has played a very negative role regarding coercion. It has given awards to the population field’s worst human rights violators (see Chapter 9) and has often actively cooperated with them, as in the case of Indonesia. In recent years, it has also produced extensive and expensive propaganda promoting population alarmism, particularly the view that rapid population growth poses the most serious threat to the global environment. It is playing a key role in orchestrating the new population “consensus.”

That said, not all UNFPA-sponsored programs are oriented toward population control, and it funds some positive initiatives in the field of women’s health. However, its institutional ethos continues to be strongly neo-Malthusian.

The World Bank. In the late 1960s, then World Bank president Robert McNamara became a powerful voice for population control within the international community. It is only in the last few years, however, that the Bank has become a leading financier of family planning, making new loan commitments of around $200 million annually. India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh account for almost half of Bank population assistance, though Africa has more projects.14

Bank influence in the population arena extends far beyond financial commitments. By virtue of its leverage over other forms of development finance, the Bank is able to pressure Third World governments to develop population policies. This is done by discussing the adverse impact of rapid population growth in its influential economic reports and through “dialogues” with senior government officials, and by arranging the cofinancing of large population projects with other donors, which gives the Bank greater power in its role as coordinator. In the 1980s the Bank increased its leverage by making the release of structural adjustment loans contingent upon adoption of population control policies in a number of countries, especially in Africa.15 While the Bank sought to free market forces through its privatization strategies, it tried ever more tightly to control population growth, by robbing health budgets and using incentives and disincentives if necessary.

This action reflected a shift in World Bank ideology on poverty and population away from the more liberal view that poverty alleviation through social and economic development was the main key to fertility decline. According to analyst Peter Gibbon, in the 1980s the Bank believed that population problems could no longer wait for socioeconomic development to solve them; their urgency was “increased by the threat of ecological imbalance and by the necessity to succeed with the structural adjustment effort.”16 Despite differences of opinion within the institution, the Bank began to attach greater importance to population than to poverty. Gibbon maintains that this shift reflects a fundamental change in the North’s strategy of stabilizing and dominating the South. In the 1970s, when the international economy was awash with petro dollars, multilateral, bilateral, and private donors and lenders competed to give assistance to Southern countries and to build alliances with their ruling elites. They had an optimistic faith that investment would spur modernization and that poverty reduction programs would succeed in bringing political stability.

In the 1980s, with the international economic recession and the decline of the Eastern bloc, Northern concern shifted from making loans to recovering them, from buying alliances with Southern elites to forcing them to comply with austerity programs. The North became more interested in “direct political stabilization” of the New World Order through selected US military interventions, cooptation of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and reduction of population growth. According to Gibbon, this created the paradox of a weakened emphasis on poverty while poverty was rising and a renewed emphasis on population control while population growth was actually slowing.17

Now in the 1990s the liberal approach seems to be creeping back, though it is too early to tell whether the transformation is rhetorical or real. Though the Bank’s current philosophy holds that slowing population growth is still a “high priority” in the poorest countries, it maintains that

Population policy should be integrated with social policies that address a range of poverty reduction and human development objectives. Particular emphasis should be placed on better infant and child health, education of girls, and overall improvements in the status of women. These measures bring important benefits in their own right, and experience now shows that they are more effective in reducing high birth rates than policies which focus narrowly on fertility reduction alone.18

Belatedly the Bank is beginning to criticize family planning programs that use demographic targets and incentives: “The point is to provide fertility regulation as a reproductive-health and not a population-control measure.”19

While such statements are welcome, they are too little too late, given that the Bank has already set many governments off in the opposite direction. Many problems also remain with the Bank’s approach to reproductive health and health care in general, not to mention its broader economic strategies. Yet this softening of the population hard line could open more political space for policy changes. In recent negotiations with the Indian government, for example, the Bank urged the government to abandon targets in its population program—without success.20

The International Planned Parenthood Federation. With a budget of roughly $100 million a year, the IPPF, headquartered in London, is the largest international private agency funding family planning services. Major contributors include the governments of Japan, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the United Kingdom.21 In 1985 the IPPF lost US government funding because of its principled refusal to insist that its 117-member family planning associations stop all abortion activities. That funding is now resuming.

At the same time that the IPPF promotes family planning as a basic human right, it uses overpopulation rhetoric to build support for its programs and takes an incautious attitude toward contraceptive safety. As a result, its member associations have often played a double role: On the positive side, they have bravely introduced family planning programs into hostile environments; on the negative side, they have helped pave the way for population control interventions and programs that neglect women’s overall health (see Part Three). Reformers within the organization are now pushing for greater attention to quality of care issues and more work on AIDS.

The Population Council. Located in New York, the Population Council operates on an annual budget of approximately $40 million. Its main funding source is the US government.22 Since its inception in 1952 the Council has played a key role in the design and introduction of family planning programs, the training of Third World personnel, and the transformation of population studies into a respectable discipline.

Today the Council is a proverbial mixed bag, with staff ranging from population control advocates to academic demographers to feminist reformers of family planning. Its Center for Population Studies does interesting research on the role of women, migration, development, and the determinants of fertility; its International Programs department is more directly involved in setting up family planning programs within a technocratic population framework; its Center for Biomedical Research develops new contraceptives, such as Norplant, often designed to play a major role in reducing population growth. Despite its professed commitment to quality of care and freedom of choice, the Council has actively promoted the mass introduction of easily abusable contraceptive technologies into already abusive population control programs.

The Population Council is the preeminent liberal population organization today, especially since the Ford Foundation has shifted its focus more onto reproductive health. Over the years its good credentials among the upper echelons of the US establishment have given population control a legitimacy it might otherwise lack.

Foundations. From 1952 to 1983 the Ford Foundation committed $260 million to population activities, with major program areas being reproductive and contraceptive research, demographic training, core support for the Population Council, and technical assistance to family planning programs. Ford played a major role in the early design of family planning, greatly influencing—and by many accounts distorting—the structure and goals of India’s population program.23 Some of its early population specialists considered coercion a viable option and suggested nightmarish technical fixes such as “a substance that could be given to an entire population in food or drink which would confer sterility until an antidote is given.”24

Ford, however, changed faster than the rest of the field and transformed its population program into a reproductive health program in the mid-1980s. It is now an important source of support for many women’s health initiatives. The MacArthur Foundation, increasingly active in the population field, has a similar philosophy and is also a key funder of more progressive research and advocacy organizations, with a focus on Brazil, India, Mexico, and Nigeria. Within the international women’s health movement there is dissension over the extent to which foundations should be involved in setting the political agenda.

The Hewlitt, Mellon, and Rockefeller Foundations are also key players in the population field, but tend to be more traditional, with less of a link with the women’s movement. Along with the Population Council, these five US foundations accounted for over 60 percent of private funding of international NGOs engaged in population-related work from 1989 to 1991.25

Private Agencies, Consulting Firms, and Academic Centers. While AID, UNFPA, World Bank, IPPF, Population Council, and large private foundations are at the hub of the population establishment, a multitude of smaller groups help make the wheels go ’round. The Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception, the Pathfinder Fund, Family Health International, Family Planning International Assistance—these are a few of the private agencies that develop and deliver family planning services to the Third World. Most profess to be working for the double goals of making family planning services available and limiting population growth. Individuals within these agencies often tend to lean toward one goal or the other—there is not always one unified point of view.

A prevalent trend in the development business is the growth and proliferation of consulting firms, which feed off the US government budget. The population field is no exception. Among the main consulting firms involved in population work are Development Associates, the Futures Group, and Westinghouse Health Systems. AID, for instance, funds a project of the Futures Group called RAPID (Resources for the Awareness of Population Impact on Development) which, with sophisticated computer technology, dramatizes the perils of overpopulation with simple graphs, highly selective statistics, and the kind of elementary Malthusian reasoning that attributes almost every social ill to high fertility.

To the tune of over $23 million since 1986, AID also finances the Futures Group’s OPTIONS project. The project provides Third World governments with advisors who conceptualize and draft population policies and related legislation, often based on RAPID data. It concurrently indoctrinates key Third World leaders through population training, seminars, “observational travel,” and fellowships. Its main targets, mostly in Africa, are “heads of state, ministers, parliamentarians, private sector leaders and others who control the allocation of significant amounts of resources.”26 The OPTIONS project raises serious ethical questions about the nature of US intervention. The fact that national population policies incorporate RAPID data and analysis is also troubling, given how far removed RAPID is from an accurate depiction of reality.

Research and training centers at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, University of Michigan, Georgetown University, University of North Carolina, Northwestern University, and Tulane University provide the academic backup to the US population program, each receiving substantial funding from AID.27

Although strictly speaking most of these organizations are private, in reality almost all depend heavily on US government funds. This can limit their independence, as in the case of the Pathfinder Fund, which in 1983 was forced to stop all abortion funding, even through private sources, in order to receive its annual appropriation from Congress. It also means that many are reluctant to challenge AID emphasis on population control, for population money is their lifeblood.

Pressure Groups and Publicists. Public support for population control is vital in order to lubricate the wheel with regular applications of funds. Thus pressure groups and publicists perform an important role in building a US population control constituency, lobbying Congress and influencing the media. They are also spreading their tentacles into Europe. They tend to take an extreme line—the group Zero Population Growth, for example, believes that overpopulation is the second greatest hazard in the world next to nuclear war—but their zeal is tolerated as long as it yields results. In the 1990s their strategy has been to appropriate the language of women’s rights in order to make the population message more palatable.

Of all the pressure groups, the Population Crisis Committee, now renamed Population Action International, founded in 1963 by General Draper and Hugh Moore, is the most influential. It exercises leverage far beyond its modest annual budget of several million dollars by using prominent retired military, government, and business leaders to press its case not only on the US public and Congress, but on senior Third World officials. The Population Institute, also based in Washington, DC, is engaged in a similar mission, but tends to be less sophisticated. In recent years more environmental groups have joined the population control bandwagon. Population agencies have vigorously courted mainstream environmental groups because they see interest in the environment as a way to attract a broader constituency and expand US funding for family planning programs. For a variety of reasons, many environmental groups have proven to be all too open to this marriage of convenience. Of these, the National Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Sierra Club have the most active lobbying operations (see Chapter 8).

The international parliamentary movement on population and development, supported by the IPPF, the UNFPA, the Pathfinder Fund, and Population Action International, among others, is also an important pressure point for the promotion of population control. It brings together parliamentarians from different countries at periodic conferences with the rationale that “Meetings of elected parliamentarians, from donor and recipient countries alike . . . help form a political safety net for heads of state who want to move aggressively on the population front.”28

In 1985 the New York Times ran a full-page advertisement sponsored by the Global Committee of Parliamentarians on Population and Development, which called for “population stabilization” and blamed “degradation of the world’s environment, income inequality and the potential for conflict” on overpopulation. The ad carried the signatures and photographs of thirty-five heads of state, all but one of them men.29

It would be mistaken, however, to view this process as simply the Western population establishment putting pressure on recalcitrant Third World leaders, for many are more than willing to cooperate. This is because there is often a common interest between the population agencies and Third World elites. After all, there is generally more in common between an AID official in Washington, for example, and a government family planning minister in India, than there is between the minister and an Indian peasant. Perhaps the AID official and the minister attended the same training course at a university in the United States; they undoubtedly read the same journals, attend the same conferences, and socialize at the same parties when visiting each other’s area of the world. Today some liberal Western members of the population establishment complain that Third World colleagues are often much more concerned with rapid population growth and dismissive of human rights concerns than themselves. Ironically, the indoctrination process has proved a little too successful.

Money helps to lubricate the relationship between the population establishment and Third World elites—it is probably no exaggeration to say that foreign support for population control has largely been bought at Western taxpayers’ expense. Donald Warwick notes that in the Philippines, for example, AID forged a local population control lobby through the simple strategy: “Buy in, buy out, and buy around.”30 Third World members of the Old Boy population network (for they continue to be mainly upper-class men, though more women are now joining the ranks) are constantly rewarded with scholarships and travel grants, funding for pet projects, prizes, and renown in the international press.

Although these material rewards help to cement the alliance, the identity of interest between foreign agencies and Third World elites goes far beyond the perks. Both are part of the new class of world managers, which has begun to transcend differences in culture. They define most issues as “management problems” rather than as moral dilemmas, failing to question their own values and assumptions and to confront the frequent incompatibility between population control and respect for human rights. And for them, bringing the birth rate down is an enterprise that befits their managerial talents, whereas attacking poverty and inequality head-on would jeopardize their privileged position in the hierarchy of politics and power.

Today the population establishment is truly international—among a small circle of friends.

From Pressure to Policy

The stage is set. The actors are in place. The next step is to finalize the script. This is the job of the technocrats.

Robert S. McNamara is the global manager par excellence. In the 1950s he managed the Ford Motor Company; as Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he managed the US war in Vietnam; and his years as president of the World Bank saw its transformation into the preeminent international institution managing development in the Third World. Now, upon his retirement, he has determined how to manage population growth.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, McNamara blames rapid population growth for a whole catalog of miseries: unemployment, pressure on food supplies, degradation of the environment, an increase in poverty, and even the rise of authoritarian governments.

He warns that if the world fails to bring down population growth rates through “humane and voluntary measures,” either the old Malthusian checks of starvation and disease will take their toll, or governments will be forced to take coercive measures and desperate parents to resort to frequent abortion and female infanticide.31

What is the way out of such a situation? For McNamara, the answer is simple: Develop and implement a population policy. He outlines some of the essentials of such a policy—political will, administrative capacity, the strength of community institutions. “But the most important single step that any nation can take to reduce its rate of population growth,” McNamara states, “is to establish a frame or a plan within which all of these measures can be formulated and against which progress can be periodically evaluated. . . . As a foundation for such action, country fertility targets must be set for specific time periods.”32

His is a neat vision of a world in which the policymakers draw up a plan, which the functionaries then implement, and the poor masses respond by limiting their fertility. The chain of command is as clear as a military hierarchy. The technocratic mind, in fact, seeks to manage civil society as it would an army at war.

McNamara’s vision is elaborated in the World Bank’s World Development Report 1984, which lays out a blueprint for developing population policy: First, collect data to document the deleterious effects of rapid population growth. Second, ensure the political commitment of important national leaders. Third, create the right institutions. Fourth, intensify support for family planning services. Fifth, adopt other more stringent measures if necessary.33

The Bank draws a clear distinction between population control policy and family planning as an individual right:

Family planning programs provide information and services to help people achieve their own fertility objectives. By contrast, population policy involves explicit demographic goals. It employs a wide range of policies, direct and indirect, to change the signals that otherwise induce high fertility. . . . It requires clear direction and support from the most senior levels of government.34

To change those “signals” more quickly, the Bank has endorsed incentive and disincentive schemes, such as payments to sterilization acceptors. Carefully designed and administered, these schemes, the Bank claims, “meet the criteria of improving welfare and allowing free choice.”35 Instead, they usually restrict free choice and give the green light to coercion.

Some top population policymakers have openly counselled the use of coercion. In an article published in 1979, Bernard Berelson, the late president emeritus of the Population Council, and Jonathon Lieberson argue for the “stepladder” approach to population policy: Start off with soft measures, such as voluntary family planning services, and proceed if necessary to harsher measures, such as disincentives, sanctions, and even violence. “The degree of coercive policy brought into play should be proportional to the degree of seriousness of the present problem and should be introduced only after less coercive means have been exhausted,” they write. “Thus, overt violence or other potentially injurious coercion is not to be used before noninjurious coercion has been exhausted.”36

They are able to condone coercion so easily because they believe there is no such thing as a “correct” ethical system or universally “approved” ranking of human rights. In their ethically neutral, morally relative universe one thing is clear, however: They rank themselves above others. And it is their responsibility, they say, to make their “best information and policies” known to the “dominant powers” of other societies.37 If this is their best policy, what could be worse? On Berelson and Lieberson’s stepladder the sky’s the limit.

From pressure to policy and ultimately to practice—the population control drama plays on. Sometimes all the actors meet in one location, as occurred in Mexico in 1984.

 

Making Population Policy: Some Unsalutary Examples

In the 1980s AID, UNFPA, and the World Bank worked closely together to get African leaders to embrace population control. In some cases, especially in francophone Africa, this helped reverse a long colonial tradition of pro-natalism, which prevented women’s access to contraception. At the same time, however, the agencies promoted the machine model of family planning and the neo-Malthusian ideology which underlies it. The agencies also bypassed mechanisms for democratic decision-making—the agenda was set largely from outside.

In the case of Senegal the three agencies coordinated efforts to pressure the Senegalese government to formulate a population policy. The Bank and the UNFPA carried out a joint sector mission to document the importance of population control in Senegal, while the AID-funded OPTIONS project financed sending three consultants to the Ministry of Planning and Cooperation to help draft the population policy. It also organized a Senegalese “study tour” to Zaire to learn about Zaire’s new population policy. (The corrupt and authoritarian regime in Zaire hardly seems a good model.) Meanwhile, RAPID presentations “demonstrating the impact of rapid population growth on development potential” were given to a cross-section of leaders from ten regions of the country. In a final turn of the screw, Bank staff spoke about population “with high-level officials when discussing terms for a structural adjustment loan (SAL).” As a result, preparation of a population policy statement and action plan became an “agreed condition” of the loan.1

In Nigeria the Bank funded Nigerian consultants who “conducted research necessary to suggest a reasonable population policy to the government.”2 This work also provided material which the Futures Group used to update RAPID presentations. These presentations in turn were used to train Nigerian demographers and build support from government officials and religious leaders. The World Bank president at the time, Barber Conable, also met with the president of Nigeria to discuss population matters.

The result was a population policy adopted in 1989 which endorses patriarchal norms and targets women. “The patriarchal family system in the country shall be recognized for stability of the home,” it proclaims. It calls for women to reduce the number of children they have in their lifetime from over six to four by the year 2000, while men are only “encouraged to have a limited number of wives and optimum number of children they can foster within their resources.”3 Not suprisingly, Nigerian women’s organizations were outraged.

Funding for family planning is already outpacing that for basic health. A 1991 World Bank loan, to be spread over seven years, gives family planning considerably more money per year than the Health Ministry has for all its annual recurrent expenditures. A Nigerian newspaper warns that “the project could divert interest from the core primary health projects which are meant to improve the health standards of rural dwellers who are prime targets in the family planning project.”4 Due to structural adjustment, health services are already in terrible shape, even for the middle class.

To add insult to injury, the Nigerian population policy is based on seriously inflated population projections. In 1992 the provisional results of the Nigerian census revealed that there were 88.51 million Nigerians, 20 to 30 million fewer than originally projected by the World Bank, the United Nations, and government departments—a rather large error.5

In Latin America the strategy has been less direct. Because of political sensitivities about population control, the Bank’s approach, for example, is “to focus on reproductive health and safe motherhood as the rationale for family planning” and to downplay “explicit demographic justification.” The Bank, however, urges its staff to “continue explaining the economic and social value of slower population growth at every appropriate opportunity.”6

Mexico City: The Pendulum Swings Backward

As part of their extensive preparations for the August 1984 Mexico City International Conference on Population, the UNFPA produced a film, Tomorrow’s World, which depicted the perils of overpopulation and extolled the virtues of modern family planning. Among the more memorable scenes in the film were of a Thai hairdresser giving discounts to customers who buy pills from her and a closing shot of a woman flat on her back, giving birth in stirrups, as an example of what wonders modern medicine can bring.

But the most vivid picture was of a poor, landless Mexican woman who had agreed to sterilization after the birth of her fourth child. “Life without land will never be an easy matter,” the narrator tells us, “but at least this mother’s problems will stop multiplying.”

At the UNFPA headquarters in New York, Dr. Joep van Arendonk, then director of the Program Division, discussed the upcoming conference. “The value of these conferences is that you can reach a number of opinion makers,” he explained. “In Bucharest there was not as much awareness, particularly on the part of Africa and Latin America, that there is a population problem. Now there is an awareness, but what action to take? In Mexico, population targets will be a heated issue again, along with contraceptive approaches, the pros and cons of surgical contraception, and the redistribution of population.” What about redistribution of wealth? I asked him. “That,” he answered, “is not our concern.”38

The Mexican woman has no land. That is not our concern. Our concern is that she stop having children. Was this the message the UNFPA was bringing to its guests in Mexico?

Certainly in Mexico City the discussion was carefully circumscribed, kept within the narrow bounds of an emerging population control “consensus.” The message of Bucharest—that equitable economic and social development is the key to reducing poverty, and hence rapid population growth—had been swallowed, digested, and regurgitated in a much milder form. “The arguments seem to have fused and become two sides of the same coin,” wrote the UNFPA’s Jyoti Shankar Singh. “Rapid population growth is now accepted as both a cause and an effect of poverty.”39 Development can help bring down birth rates, the argument goes, but population control is equally necessary to bring about development.

After their bad showing in Bucharest when they were attacked by Third World governments, the leaders of the population establishment had also done their homework well. A barrage of pre-conference publications and expert consultations heralded the new “consensus,” paving the way for a smooth ride.

The conference scene itself was hardly conducive to challenging the “consensus.” Two US women who attended the conference described it in the Boston Globe:

Mexico City played host to an elaborate production by and for an international elite. . . . That participants were exposed only to the upper echelons of Mexican society and that the conference discussion centered on the ideas of a single world class of administrators raises questions about the international “consensus” which became the watchword of the meeting.40

The only real note of discord at the conference sounded when conservative politician James Buckley delivered the official US policy statement of the Reagan administration. The statement not only challenged traditional Malthusian thinking on the impact of population growth (see Chapter 2), but launched a full-scale attack on abortion rights. Since 1974, Congress has prohibited the use of US government funds for the direct support of abortion services overseas; however, private family planning organizations were still able to receive US government aid if they used a segregated, non-US funded account for their abortion work. The 1984 policy went the critical one step further by denying US funds to any private organization which performed or even just promoted abortion (through counseling, for example) as a family planning method. The statement also stipulated that where abortion was legal, foreign governments could only receive US population aid through segregated accounts.41

Ironically, the policy statement served to legitimize the position of the population establishment by casting it in the role of the defender of reproductive rights. The press collaborated in this portrayal, for the extremism of the Reagan position made the population control lobby seem moderate by comparison.

Only outside the conference hall were reproductive rights interpreted more broadly, as hundreds of women, men, and children, many from Mexico City’s infamous slums, demonstrated on the street. They linked their demands for basic reproductive rights, including the legalization of abortion and an end to forced sterilization, to basic economic rights. Why were Mexico’s poorest citizens being forced to pay for the country’s debt crisis through austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund? they asked the delegates entering the conference.42

No one answered them then, and no one is answering now.