The Latest Alibi: Racism Underlies Population Controller’s ‘Women’s Rights’ Agenda

The arrival of the six billionth human being on the planet (projected by the UN Population Division to have occurred on or around 12 October 1999) sparked another round of appeals for family planning. Waving banners of “women’s rights” and “reproductive health,” the population control lobby argues that family planning enhances women’s health and meets large “unmet needs” in the developing world. A closer look at their arguments reveals that reproductive rights and women’s health are only the latest in a series of changing justifications for population control. Indeed. over the last three decades, the population lobby’s explanations have jumped from famine and resource depletion to economic stagnation and environmental collapse, and have settled (no doubt temporarily) on reproductive health and women’s rights. As history and science refute each argument in turn, population control groups simply shift to their next explanation in their war against people. The arguments change with time and circumstance, but the “solution” remains remarkably familiar: ever more population control directed at the poorer, darker peoples of the developing world. For underlying the shifting sands of the population controllers’ justifications is the unspoken belief that too many of the “wrong” kinds of people are procreating too quickly.

Eugenic Roots

At its roots, the movement’s racist motives are anything but subtle. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, openly voiced her contempt tor those she deemed as belonging to “inferior races.” In her 1922 book Pivot of Civilization, she called for the extermination of “weeds overrunning the human garden” and the sterilization of “genetically inferior races.”1 In explicitly racist and eugenicist terms, she promised that investments in birth control would mean “more from the fit and less from the unfit.”2 In 1939, the American Birth Control Federation (the precursor to today’s Planned Parenthood) designed a Negro project in which black ministers with Engaging personalities” would travel through the South preaching the virtues of population control. The project proposal justified its expenditures by arguing that the “mass of Negroes particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously” and that the increase among the black community “is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.”3

Following the Second World War, public outrage at the Holocaust caused the eugenics movement to be more guarded in its public pronouncements. But the movement’s racist and eugenicist motives never disappeared; they just went underground. By the 1960s, the movement had regained some of its lost respectability by adopting another justification for its activities. Likening the earth to an overloaded spaceship or sinking lifeboat, and issuing apocalyptic warnings about the impending collapse of the world, population activists captured the popular imagination. The “population explosion” became the doomsday metaphor of choice. Images of mushroom clouds of people, boiling up from the surface of the planet, in an unconstrained frenzy of procreation, were conjured. The twin spectres of mass famine and resource depletion came to be widely accepted as reasons to curb fertility rates at home and abroad. In the introduction to his 1968 book The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich claimed that “the battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any…program embarked on now.” Of course no such famines ever occurred. It is now well-attested that world food production has more than kept pace with population growth and that rates of food production show few signs of slowing.4

Other population controllers argued that natural resources would be exhausted by a combination of more people and higher living standards. In 1972, for example, the Club of Rome fixed the dates at which known reserves of certain resources would run out. The dates for the exhaustion of the following resources were laid out in the Club’s report, entitled The Limits to Growth: Copper: 1993; Gold: 1981; Lead: 1993; Mercury: 1985; Natural Gas; 1994; Petroleum: 1992; Silver: 1985, and Tin: 1987. The head of the Club of Rome later admitted that in order to generate sufficient hysteria to impel governments to action, the Club had deliberately lied in its report.5 Some of the data which predicted massive population growth and exhaustion of resources — was wrong by a factor of 900%; the correct calculations would have presented a very different picture.6

History’s Answer

History, of course, has answered such false assertions: availability of raw materials has more than kept pace with increased consumption, and commodity prices have not risen, but dropped.7 In 1986, the US National Academy of Sciences produced a report entitled Population Growth and Economic Development which reversed many of the Academy’s former alarmist claims. The report states that “There is little reason to be concerned about the rate at which population growth is depleting the stock of exhaustible resources.”8 Instead, population growth and rising living standards have stimulated resource development.

Unable to support their objectives with cries of impending famine or resource depletion, the population movement turned to an economic argument: population growth, they claimed. leads to poverty. Underlying this claim is the false assumption that wealth is finite and that more people means less wealth to go around. This mentality may best be exemplified by China’s calculation of its gross domestic product (GDP), which “goes up each time a pig is born, but down each time a child is born.”

Environmental Crisis?

In the 1980s, a new justification for population control gained widespread currency. Piggy-backing on the popularity of the environmental movement, population controllers began proclaiming that the growth in human numbers placed unsustainable pressure on the earth’s fragile ecological balance and was the root cause of every form of environmental crisis from ozone depletion to “desertification” and soil erosion. As one environmentalist author put it, “more people means more pollution, more environmental damage, and more extinctions of other species.”9

Although widely accepted, the population-environment link lacks credibility also. In many parts of the developing world, the environment would benefit from more people. A study in Kenya, for example, found that population growth spurs environmental recovery: the previously desolate Machakos District improved dramatically following the introduction of a highly efficient, labour intensive, terracing which conserved soil and water, increased agricultural production, and generated an increase in tree coverage.”10 Conversely, there are numerous examples where population decline resulted in environmental damage. In Nepal, depopulation from mountainside to the valley regions, caused by migration, meant that too few people were left to re-plant trees, maintain agricultural terraces and continue practices that sustained mountain agricultural.11

Most experts acknowledge that there is no scientific link between population growth and environmental degradation. John Clarke — himself a staunch environmentalist — concedes that the “controversy over the interrelationship between population and environment has not been based upon a great deal of research” and that much of the extensive literature has been “over-simplified and over-generalized.”12 According to Gita Sen, another expert, “the [scarcity] of research has not, unfortunately, slowed down popular or even academic writing on the policy implications of presumed population-environment linkages.”13

Environmentalists and population controllers prefer to overlook the wealth of literature which acknowledges that population expansion stimulates innovation, creativity and efficiency, and improves the environment. Instead, they adopt a double standard that extrapolates environmental problems into the future, while ignoring the solutions. As Frank Furedi noted in his 1997 book Population and Development, “the search for limits always seems to distract Malthusian thinkers from the far more creative search for solutions. The fatalism regarding future innovation reveals that the real limit which preoccupies them is not so much that of land or of resources, but their own limited view of the human potential.”14

‘Reproductive Rights’ Agenda

In recent years, population controllers have advanced yet another explanation for their programs: under the auspices of “reproductive health” and “women’s rights,” population activists now claim that family planning programs meet a large “unmet need” and are critical to enhancing women’s health. Yet the fact that population programs are generally accompanied by “‘carrots” in the form of food and monetary incentives and “sticks” in the shape of denial of health care and grain rations belies the concept of “unmet need.” Women who genuinely want family planning services do not need to be bribed, coerced or manipulated into accepting them.

The unresolvable tension between the population lobby’s rhetoric of rights and their desire to curb fertility in the developing world is illustrated by a recent World Bank study on education and fertility in Africa. The report openly acknowledges that most African women favour families of 6 to 9 children and that there is consequently little “unmet need” for contraception. Yet instead of respecting the rights of African women to decide freely on the number and spacing of their children, the authors of the report advocate a “multi-faceted” strategy to change preferences in order to lower demand for children. Evidently, the concept of ”‘unmet need” refers less to the desires of African women for birth control, than to the psychological “need” of population controllers to reduce the number of Africans.

Fewer Choices

Meanwhile, the distorted focus on reproductive health as opposed to all other forms of health care has diverted resources from primary health initiatives and thereby reduced women’s choices. As Cambridge economist and Nobel-prize winner Amartya Sen has argued, by giving priority to “family planning arrangements in the Third World countries over other commitments such as education and health care,” international policy makers “produce negative effects on people’s well-being and reduce their freedoms.”15

As for women’s rights, the population movement is on even shakier ground. In China, forced abortion — even in the ninth month of pregnancy — is standard fare. In Peru and Brazil, millions of indigenous women have been sterilized, many without their foreknowledge or consent. In Haiti and Bangladesh, thousands of women were used as guinea pigs to test experimental contraceptive drugs and devices. Far from the noble goal and objective of protecting women’s rights, population programs have all-too-often emerged as key forces against which women must be protected.

While population controllers jump from explanation to explanation in a frantic effort to camouflage their motives and justify their programs, the unspoken truth is that they see the very existence of large numbers of Africans, Asians and Latin Americans as intrinsically undesirable. They view with alarm the prospect of larger populations in the developing world and perceive associated changes in balance of power, control over natural resources, and increased migration as a threat to their own security.

The case of Bangladesh is enlightening in this respect. In the 1980s, population controllers targeted Bangladesh with the promise that lower fertility and smaller families went hand-in-hand with economic expansion and increased living standards. After more than a decade of intensive and often coercive population control programs, the contraceptive rate in Bangladesh doubled and fertility rates declined, but living standards remained dismally low. One might expect population controllers to be troubled by the result; instead they boasted that Bangladesh offered convincing, proof that ‘“sheer socio-economic advance is not an invariable prerequisite for further fertility decline.”16 Rather than being concerned with the desperate living conditions of millions of Bangladeshis, Norman Myers and his colleagues were enthralled at the reduction in their fertility. As Frank Furedi notes, “such single-minded pursuit of population control without any consideration for broader health and development issues is revealing of the motives” of population activists and leads us to question “Population control to what end?”17 Not economic development — Bangladesh, Vietnam and a host of other countries testify that plummeting fertility rates can occur without any corresponding improvement in living standards. Not political stability — India and Kenya testify to the dramatic social unrest caused by aggressive population control programs. Not women’s rights — China, Brazil, and Haiti testify to the systematic violation of women’s bodies through forced abortions. forced sterilizations and contraceptive experimentation.

Little in Return

Given the vast sums that are pumped into population control programs each year, one would naturally expect donors to demand a correspondingly high return on their investment. In most cases, the “return” is not dramatic improvements in living standards, substantial increases in economic development or even a marked improvements in the status of women. The “return” that population controllers have invested so much to achieve is higher “contraceptive prevalence rates,” greater numbers of tubal ligations, and ultimately the arrival of fewer African, Asian and Latin American babies. For underneath the latest alibi of reproductive rights and women’s health are the contentious questions of race and power. And here it is enlightening to note that those most likely to be targeted by family planning activists are precisely those who resemble family planners least: the poorer, darker populations of the developing world.

Mary Haynes is a scholar of International Politics who writes from London, England.