Nicholas Eberstadt is a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
For advocates of Third World population control or as they now prefer to say, “stabilizing world population” — the resort to scare tactics in debates and policy battles is nothing new. Quite the contrary: The specter of disastrous consequences (famine, plague, vast and needless human suffering) is routinely invoked by the neo-Malthusian lobby in its attempts to silence opponents and to proselytize the unconvinced.
The latest dire claims from this alarmist approach to public policy discourses have just been unveiled in Washington. Today Congress is being warned that millions of unwanted Third World pregnancies (thus, unwanted Third World births and abortions) will be on its hands if it does not immediately reverse itself, and add hundreds of trillions of dollars to the prospective foreign aid program population budget. The gambit, and its supporting “evidence,” are entirely of a piece with the anti-natalist movement that authored them: amazing, but not surprising.
The background to this unfolding drama was a January 1996 vote, in the House of Representatives and the Senate, to cut Americas international “population assistance” funds by about 35 percent from the level of the previous year. The slated total — about $380 million -would mean a reduction of over $200 million. It looked to be a dramatic cutback (although due to the enthusiastic, high-level support that population programs have enjoyed in the Clinton administration, the “cutback” would still have left these programs with more money than they had under President Bush).
The claxons immediately sounded. Nafis Sadik, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), raised the threat, among several others, of a renewed global population explosion. “The way U.S. funding is going,” she told the New York Times, “17 to 18 million unwanted pregnancies are going to take place, a couple of million abortions will take place, and I’m sure that 60,000 to 80,000 women are going to die because of those abortions — all because the money has been reduced overnight.”
Treated as a serious prognosis (rather than, say, a rhetorical outburst disguised by numbers), Dr. Sadik’s prophecy would have had some remarkable implications. For its arithmetic to work, for example, population growth in such places as Latin America and Indonesia (where, currently, modern contraceptives are widely used) would basically have to double from one year to the next. To all but the most committed anti-natal advocates, the implausibility of the official UNFPA assertion was patent. Implausible (or easily falsifiable) claims do not make good debaters’ points. The Sadik prophecy was thus quietly retired before the battle to cancel the Congressional cutbacks began in earnest.
The ammunition that is now being used in the effort to overturn the funding reductions for the U.S. international population programs comes from Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. On its face, the Guttmacher analysis sounds inherently more reasonable than Dr. Sadik’s. Instead of 17 to 18 million unwanted Third World pregnancies, the Guttmacher analysis indicates that the U.S. population aid cutbacks will result in about 4 million. (To be more ex- act: 3,956.544 “unwanted pregnancies from budget cuts” -this is a very precise study.) Unlike the Sadik pronouncement, moreover, the Guttmacher paper offers a meticulous explanation of its methodology, a detailed breakdown of its calculations, and a long list of citations and references utilized in the exercise.
Yet for all its seeming rigor and statistical precision, this Guttmacher study is nothing but an elegant fantasy. For despite its sober and careful tone, there is absolutely no reason to expect the correspondence between “budget cuts” and extra Third World pregnancies anticipated in its pages to occur in a real world populated by human beings.
The reason the Guttmacher study is so flawed as to be useless is both simple and fundamental: It ignores the fact that human beings — in poor countries as well as rich ones — respond to changes in their circumstances, and strive to improve their lot in the face of constraint.
Forget for the moment that the impending congressional cuts might well be made up by other governments (Western aid-giving countries, or even Third World aid-taking countries themselves). For the Guttmacher study to make sense, there would have to be a fixed, mechanical and determinative relationship in our world between a population’s usage level of publicly provided modern contraceptives and its levels of pregnancy or fertility. By the logic animating this exercise, less public money for contraception would mean that a corresponding proportion of adults would automatically cease practicing birth control.
These Guttmacher assumptions would be perfectly reasonable if Third World parents were blind automatons or heedless beasts. Beasts, after all, do not deliberately regulate their procreation, and automatons are built to follow an immutable routine. Everything we know about Third World parents, though, suggests that a more human vision of them would be rather more successful in describing, and predicting, their behavior — including their “population dynamics.”
After all: Survey results from country after country in Asia, Africa and Latin America consistently demonstrate that parents throughout the Third World (like parents in rich countries) have pronounced views about their own “desired family size” — and that their own “desired family size” is in fact the best predictor of their country’s fertility level. Though they may be deemed ignorant by the planners who propose to improve their lives, Third World parents do not believe that babies are simply found under cabbages. They know how to make babies and how to avoid births, and put the sort of effort into achieving those objectives that would be expected of major life decisions.
If international funding for government-sponsored family planning programs falls, Third World parents will not fatalistically abandon their views about their own desired family size and fall into a breeding frenzy, as the Guttmacher study implicitly presumes. Instead they will at- tempt to achieve their goals by other means. They may use “traditional” family planning methods (which brought low fertility to Europe before modern contraceptives were invented). They may practice abstinence — no modern method is more effective than this. They may even spend some of their own money to purchase modern contraceptives. (Though population planners talk endlessly about the ‘“unmet need” for modern contraceptives in the Third World, the simple fact is that poor people have an “unmet need” for practically wary- thing — and their spending decisions reveal their preferences and priorities).
Since it is completely tone-deaf to the very human qualities at the center of the family formation process, the Guttmacher calculations cannot provide a realistic estimate of the demographic consequences of Congress’ impeding population fund cutbacks. In truth, that impact is probably incalculable. Depending upon how couples behave, it is possible that those cutbacks would have a small demographic impact – or virtually none at all. Conversely, if the Guttmacher methodology were actually valid, the population funding increase during the Clinton years should be credited with bringing birth rates in Third World countries down significantly — but not even the neo-Malthusian lobby has been bold enough to make this extravagant claim.
The current population funding contretemps, of course, is not the first occasion upon which junk science has been brought to Capitol Hill in the hope of influencing legislation. It is not the first time that representatives and senators have heard claimants depict catastrophes in their effort to fend off cuts to their own particular spending programs. By and large, however, such conduct is still the exception in Washington. For the population—control lobby, by contrast, such con- duct now seems to define the norm. As long as that population lobby exists, demographic demagoguery — like death and taxes — promises to be a fact of life.
This article ran first in The Washington Times . Monday, 11 March 1996 and is reprinted here with permission.
