Population control’s questionable ethics
By Ruth Enero
Australia-based FINRRAGE (Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering) recently issued a “Call for a Stop of ‘Anti-Fertility Vaccines’.” This move is only one of many challenges it is making to various reproductive technologies used for population control.
The November 1995 Finnrage Journal, edited by Renate Klein, also criticizes forced tubal ligation, sex selection abortions, abuses in informed consent for contraceptive users, and China’s one-child policy. Such skepticism is significant, echoing in widely different camps and scrutinizing numerous sacred cows. How amazing to find that with regard to population control, both Finnrage and the Vatican have similar grievances with proponents of “safe, effective, reversible, user-controlled” contraception.
In numerous sources, from Ms. Magazine to the conservative Human Life Institute News and in between, blame is starting to fall on these common villains: women’s health providers, misguided environmentalists, pharmaceutical companies, international aid agencies, and multi-national corporations. Numerous institutions which promote, dispense, or fund population control programs incur wrath as “racist, eugenicist, and profoundly women-hating” in Ms. Klein’s words.
But what exactly is all the fuss about? To begin with the so-called anti-pregnancy vaccine. Australia introduced this type of drug in 1986. The intent was to trigger a given woman’s body into producing anti-bodies to HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin), a hormone essential to pregnancy. Because the drug affects the immune system, it poses health risks, including damage to pituitary and thyroid glands, inappropriate immune responses, possible infertility, and more. Women can’t remove this vaccine or stop its effects once they’ve been given it. Violations of medical ethics regarding the use of this drug on Indian women were documented in 1993, including blatant disregard for informed Consent.
Dr. Margaret Ogala, an Africa pediatrician, sets another scenario in Empowering Women. As a medical student in the 1970’s she was initiated into the concept of safe motherhood.” Working with large families who—especially by Western standards—were poor, a promise of “health care for all by the year 2000” seemed attractive. Two and a half decades later. Ogala is outraged that the major drugs supplied in “free” aid packages are “contraceptives of every description,” while her patients die from a shortage of penicillin and anti-malaria drugs. And amid abundant condom supplies, Ogala sees AIDS taking one African out of nine “as the population controllers sit back and watch.”
The 1992 Nov/Dec issue of Ms. relates that in 1951 India was the first country in the world to launch an official family planning program. India received a major component of its anticipated social change by testing contraceptives that were financed largely by the U.S. Indian women participated in the testing of (among other drugs) implants of (two rod) Norplant 2 and (five rod) Norplant. Most were not aware they were participating in an experiment. For these women, there were no cautions about Norplant’s carcinogenicity and other side effects. Partly because drug studies seek long—term data, women who developed medical problems (hemorrhagic bleeding, dizziness, weight gain, heart problems) from their implants found that early removal was not part of their “free” care.
Testifying regarding “Crimes Against Women,” at the 1994 U.N. ICPD in Cairo, Egypt, an Indian woman complained about the injustice that “Family planning is available at the doorsteps of poor people, but water, health facilities are not.” Ms . calls India’s family planning a failure, even noting that abortion has targeted female babies. Of 8,000 abortions done in Bombay following amniocentesis, it reported, only one was of a male fetus.
Women’s stories from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Turkey and other countries are tragically the same. Ironically, the networking that uncovers many abuses takes place at gatherings such as the 1995 United Nations Fourth World on Conference on Women, held in Beijing, China. While clashing on the issue of abortion, women of many political bents named the UNFPA (United Nations Fund For Population Assistance), the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, the Population Council, USAID, and the US-based Women’s Health Coalition as among key players in promoting coercive reproductive policies.
China itself — while touted widely as a success story for family planning — in actuality is one of the worst human rights violators. At the same time, Chinese provinces located near the China-controlled country of Tibet are exempted from family size quotas: the Chinese government apparently hopes to out-reproduce Tibet as a form of ethnic cleansing.
Even as abuses of reproductive technology are exposed, there appears to be no immediate end to their practice. Injectable Depo-Provera, uterine Quinacrine implants (QS), Norplant and numerous other powerful drugs help maintain what some call “technological patriarchy.” The Northern hemispheres “privileged 20 percent” of the world’s inhabitants are accustomed to enjoying 80 percent of the world’s resources. We of the developed world use population control as an “environmental” quick fix while we waste and pollute what rightfully belongs to all the earth’s peoples. A more courageous path beckons us: to challenge the premise that women’s fertility is the mother of all evils.
