Population control: the rich controlling the poor?
Today’s record-breaking global population hides a marked long-term trend towards lower birth rates, as urbanisation, better health care, education and access to family planning all affect women’s choices.
With the exception of sub-Saharan Africa and some of the poorest parts of India, we are now having fewer children than we once did - in some cases, failing even to replace ourselves in the next generation. And although total numbers are set to rise still further, the peak is now in sight.
Chinese poster from the 1960s of mother and baby, captioned: Practicing birth control is beneficial for the protection of the health of mother and child China promoted birth control before implementing its one-child policy
Assuming that this trend continues, total numbers will one day level off, and even fall. As a result, some believe the sense of urgency that once surrounded population control has subsided.
The term population control itself has fallen out of fashion, as it was deemed to have authoritarian connotations. Post-Cairo, the talk is of women’s rights and reproductive rights, meaning the right to a free choice over whether or not to have children.
According to Adrienne Germain, that is the main lesson we should learn from the past 50 years.
“I have a profound conviction that if you give women the tools they need - education, employment, contraception, safe abortion - then they will make the choices that benefit society,” she says.
“If you don’t, then you’ll just be in an endless cycle of trying to exert control over fertility - to bring it up, to bring it down, to keep it stable. And it never comes out well. Never.”
Nevertheless, there remain to this day schemes to sterilise the less well-off, often in return for financial incentives. In effect, say critics, this amounts to coercion, since the very poor find it hard to reject cash.
“The people proposing this argue ‘Don’t worry, everything’ s fine now we have voluntary programmes on the Cairo model’,” says Betsy Hartmann.
“But what they don’t understand is the profound difference in power between rich and poor. The people who provide many services in poor areas are already prejudiced against the people they serve.”
Work in progress
For Mohan Rao, it is an example of how even the Cairo consensus fails to take account of the developing world.
“Cairo had some good things,” he says. “However Cairo was driven largely by First World feminist agendas. Reproductive rights are all very well, but [there needs to be] a whole lot of other kinds of enabling rights before women can access reproductive rights. You need rights to food, employment, water, justice and fair wages. Without all these you cannot have reproductive rights.”
Perhaps, then, the humanitarian ideals of Cairo are still a work in progress.
Meanwhile, Paul Ehrlich has also amended his view of the issue.
If he were to write his book today, “I wouldn’t focus on the poverty-stricken masses”, he told the BBC.
“I would focus on there being too many rich people. It’s crystal clear that we can’t support seven billion people in the style of the wealthier Americans.”