On Infertile Ground

Population Control and Women's Rights in the Era of Climate Change

Jade S. Sasser

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479821730
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A critique of population control narratives reproduced by international development actors in the 21st century Since the turn of the millennium, American media, scientists, and environmental activists have insisted that the global population crisis is “back”—and that the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change is to ensure women’s universal access to contraception. Did the population problem ever disappear? What is bringing it back—and why now? In On Infertile Ground, Jade S. Sasser explores how a small network of international development actors, including private donors, NGO program managers, scientists, and youth advocates, is bringing population back to the center of public environmental debate. While these narratives never disappeared, Sasser argues, histories of human rights abuses, racism, and a conservative backlash against abortion in the 1980s drove them underground—until now. Using interviews and case studies from a wide range of sites—from Silicon Valley foundation headquarters to youth advocacy trainings, the halls of Congress and an international climate change conference—Sasser demonstrates how population growth has been reframed as an urgent source of climate crisis and a unique opportunity to support women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. ­Although well-intentioned—promoting positive action, women’s empowerment, and moral accountability to a global community—these groups also perpetuate the same myths about the sexuality and lack of virtue and control of women and the people of global south that have been debunked for decades. Unless the development community recognizes the pervasive repackaging of failed narratives, Sasser argues, true change and development progress will not be possible. On Infertile Ground presents a unique critique of international development that blends the study of feminism, environmentalism, and activism in a groundbreaking way. It will make any development professional take a second look at the ideals driving their work.

1

The Population “Crisis” Returns

In 2010, Mother Jones magazine ran a special issue with a cover asking, “Who’s to Blame for the Population Crisis?” Inside, the issue’s lead article, “The Last Taboo: What Unites the Vatican, Lefties, Conservatives, Environmentalists, and Scientists in a Conspiracy of Silence?” centered on a crowd thronging the streets of Calcutta late one night:1

It’s midnight on the streets of Calcutta. Old women cook over open fires on the sidewalks. Men wait in line at municipal hand pumps to lather skin, hair, and lungis (skirts), bathing without undressing. Girls sit in the open beds of bicycle-powered trucks, braiding their hair . . . grandfathers under umbrellas squat on their heels, arguing over card games, while mothers hold bare bottomed toddlers over open latrines . . . Many people sleep through the lively darkness, draped over sacks of rice or on work carts full of paper or rags or hay. Groups of men and women, far from their home villages, sprawl haphazardly across the sidewalks, snoring.2

Rather than a conspiracy of silence, a review of media and popular writings at the turn of the millennium reveals just the opposite. In fact, the Mother Jones issue appeared in the midst of a veritable explosion of articles, blog posts, journal publications, and think pieces linking women’s fertility, global population growth, and the environment. From 2005 to 2008, writing that cited the terms “population growth” and “environment” or “climate change” increased fourfold.3 Like Mother Jones, magazines began to publish special issues and entire series dedicated to the issue. Scientific American’s population issue in summer 2009 claimed that “Malthusian limits are back—and squeezing us painfully,”4 while the next year, National Geographic initiated a yearlong series focused on population growth’s environmental consequences, titled “State of the Earth 2010.” With striking, glossy images of people around the world farming, fishing, driving cars, extracting minerals, and thronging the streets, juxtaposed with pictures of the denuded, heavily plowed or constructed earth, the images told a gripping story of a planet sagging under the weight of human activity. And in 2011, after the United Nations published new global population projections, the New York Times responded by publishing articles and blogs detailing the ways ongoing population growth would intensify demands on the global food supply, colliding with limiting factors like climate change, water scarcity, and land shortages.5

Increasingly, these writings focused on climate change.6 A 2015 editorial in the Los Angeles Times argued that “sensitive subject or not, the reality is that unsustainable human population growth is a potential disaster for efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions,”7 while the Huffington Post reported that “access to voluntary birth control . . . will cut our collective human carbon footprint.”8 Specialized scientific reports have also taken up this theme, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a transnational body of climate scientists and policy actors, stating in its 2014 assessment report that “globally, economic and population growth continued to be the most important drivers of increases in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion.”9

If population growth is a secret, it is an open one—yet, the language of secrecy and taboo continues to predominate. Collectively, the majority of recent population-environment writing is focused on two central themes: population interventions as secret, controversial, or overlooked, but necessary solutions to environmental problems; and the mutual social and environmental benefits of supporting women’s universal, voluntary access to Western contraceptives. These writings insist that, while taboo, population must be addressed if we are collectively going to make progress on climate change, and—equally importantly—that increasing women’s access to contraception as a climate mitigation strategy is empowering to women. Moreover, this argument has also been taken up by prominent Western feminists, including Hillary Clinton, Gloria Steinem, and Mary Robinson, all of whom have advocated family planning and population stabilization as a necessary, women-centered climate change strategy.10

Behind the scenes, a different story emerges. In international development, the arena that has turned the rhetoric of population problems into intervention programs and policies, population and family planning have lost the prominence they once enjoyed. Development actors speak often of the disappearance of population, in comparison to the days when its role in international development and foreign policy seemed unshakable. Where was population before, and where did it go? Why is it “coming back” now?

This chapter explores the historical and contemporary reasons for the supposed silence and re-emergence of population in public. It begins with an exploration of the history of global population control and the resulting feminist activism that resulted in a dramatic transformation of international population policy. It then explores the often-invisible role of funding by documenting the role of private and public sector donors in mobilizing resources and securing new strategies to restore it. Finally, I close with a discussion of why climate change is such an expedient way to bring population back to public debate—and why this approach is particularly dangerous.

The American Roots of Population Control

In 1954, Hugh Moore, founder of Dixie Cup and a population activist, wrote a pamphlet called “The Population Bomb” and began distributing it through mass mailings, eventually reaching over 1.5 million people. One of those people was General William Draper, who led a commissioned study on U.S. military aid for then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Draper invited population experts to brief his staff, and at the end of the commission’s work, they wrote a report calling for the U.S. government to fund interventions in maternal and child welfare overseas (which, although not explicitly stated, included contraception). This marked a turn in the U.S. foreign policy establishment—one in which rapid population growth was now officially marked as a security issue, and birth control was seen as a part of national defense. Draper and Moore formed the Population Crisis Committee (later renamed Population Action International), using it as a platform to advocate the necessity of population control in international aid.

Draper, Moore, and the committee were not motivated by humanitarian or public health concerns, but rather Cold War concerns about the spread of communism. Moore’s pamphlet was based on Washington’s anxieties over the spread of communism in rapidly growing nations of the Global South, fears that were closely aligned with concerns about continued access to raw materials, labor, and markets in nations gaining independence from colonialism. The “bomb” he referred to symbolized the potential for rapid population growth in the Third World to have the same kind of explosive and devastating effects on earth as a nuclear bomb.11 Demographers were critical of this approach; they argued that it was dangerous to go with the “offensive and potentially controversial” proposition that population control in the Global South should be used as a tool to counter the spread of communism. However, Moore was unmoved; he wanted to influence business and government elites as well as the general public.

Population control efforts were under way across the newly independent nations in the Global South, led both by state governments and international donors, with the U.S. government playing a prominent role. International agencies began to tie food aid and government loan packages to contraceptive distribution schemes. In the mid-1960s, the U.S. government under Lyndon B. Johnson began to produce and circulate experimental contraceptives intended for mass distribution across India, including over one million intra-uterine devices. Promotional incentives such as cash payments and radios were used as part of carrot and stick incentives for community-based contraceptive providers, with support from the Indian government. After Indira Gandhi took the reins of power in India’s government in 1966, she immediately intensified population control efforts across the country. Doctors were given bonus payments in exchange for reaching targets for IUD insertions and surgical sterilizations. Non-clinical practitioners were paid per service, with vasectomies paying out double the price for that of IUD insertions. Between 1966 and 1967, 1.8 million Indians were implanted with IUDs or sterilized, a number that would increase dramatically a decade later under India’s national Emergency period. During the Emergency, family planning became integrated into all government offices’ activities, cash payments to IUD and sterilization “acceptors” increased more than ten-fold, and compulsory sterilization was introduced as a component of state policy, often enacted in “sterilization camps.” Within one year, more than eight million sterilizations, including 6.2 million vasectomies and 2.05 million tubal ligations were conducted, primarily among the poor.12

As historian Matthew Connelly’s comprehensive study of global population control demonstrates, while India is a particularly egregious case, it is not entirely unique in the history of global population control. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) aid distribution in Haiti became tied to contraceptive incentive programs, and the governments of India, Singapore, and Indonesia denied housing, tax, and other benefits to parents who had more than two children. By the early 1980s, Bangladesh was the largest recipient of international population assistance, and as a result, the state imposed harsh punitive measures on those who refused family planning efforts. In one particularly horrifying example, members of the Bangladesh army rounded up hundreds of people for forcible sterilization, and food aid from the World Food Program was denied to Bangladeshi flood victims who refused to be sterilized.13

This is not to suggest that women in the Global South were not interested in birth control. However, even when they did attempt to secure access to contraceptives voluntarily, the lack of consistent service delivery, comprehensive options, and education about methods and their side effects often formed a formidable barrier. The emphasis on family planning in aid programs also helped deepen poverty in already-struggling nations—particularly across sub-Saharan Africa, where U.S. foreign aid in the 1980s was predicated on countries adopting structural adjustment programs tied to population control. Connelly refers to the twentieth-century escalation of global population control as a “system without a brain,” characterized by policies and other interventions that gained a momentum of their own. Population control seemed to be a machine that ran itself, and it was running amok.14

At the same time, population has long been a site of international struggle in the development policy arena. While population control had been central to the American international development agenda from the late 1950s, leaders in Global South countries at times resisted this approach. In 1974, when the first World Population Conference was convened in Bucharest, many leaders rejected population control imposed by the North, arguing that it was a distraction from the inequalities underlying the international economic order. Instead, they pointed out the long shift in Europe from high population growth rates to very low growth, arguing that economic and social progress were responsible, not population control. Accordingly, they developed the slogan “development is the best contraceptive.”15

Within ten years, however, many leaders’ positions had shifted. At the 1984 World Population Conference in Mexico City, leaders from the Global South argued that their resources could not support unrestricted population growth, whereas the U.S. under Reagan adopted a neutral position on population growth, arguing that slow economic development in the Global South was attributable to too much state intervention, not demographic changes. The best contraceptive, according to Reagan’s administration, was the free market.

Why such a reversal? The answer had less to do with actual questions of population and development, and more to do with the rising influence of religious fundamentalism in the U.S. In the early 1980s, a well-organized group of pro-life advocates who were key to Reagan’s base of support had begun pressing for three things: defunding and dismantling the population office at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); using population funds to support “natural family planning”; and sending a pro-life delegation to the 1984 World Population Conference in Mexico City. In response to this pressure, the U.S. sent a delegation with a neutral position on population growth; at the conference, they argued that free markets provide a solution to social problems like poverty and inequality, and that family planning alone could not address these issues effectively. Abortion could not address them at all. As a result, the Reagan administration withdrew support from any organization providing abortion services, information, or referrals (this became known as the Mexico City Policy, also known as the Global Gag Rule). In this context, the Mexico City Conference “marked the moment when population growth was no longer treated as a global problem requiring a global solution.”16

By the time of the next world population conference at Cairo in 1994, the terms of the global population debate had shifted once again, this time to focus on the role of population in producing environmental problems. And, as the next section will demonstrate, the policy document produced at the Cairo conference reflected a perspective that had never before been formally enshrined in international population policy: a focus on women’s rights to healthy sexuality, reproduction, and autonomous bodily decision-making.

The Roots of Sexual Stewardship: Rio, Cairo, and Women’s Embodied Environmental Responsibility

Feminist organizing for the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (also known as the Cairo Conference) began years before the conference. In preparation for the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio, also known as the Earth Summit, activist gathered to outline their position and organizing strategy. The Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) convened a 1991 meeting of over one thousand women activists from ninety countries who gathered in Miami to discuss the “women’s dimension” of the global environmental crisis. Unlike neo-Malthusians, the feminists at the conference de-centered population from the debate, instead focusing on the global economic crisis, third world debt, and the impacts of nuclear testing and other military operations on land, wildlife, and human health across the globe. A central theme of the conference was that these effects were gendered, in that they disproportionately impacted women’s bodies and livelihoods. They also focused on the political dimensions, specifically the fact that women were drastically underrepresented in decision-making bodies that made global environmental policy.17

The following year, at the UNCED meetings, debates about the role of population growth emerged in an area of the conference’s non-official NGO forum known as the Women’s Tent (Planeta Femea). The Tent was co-organized and hosted by the Brazilian Women’s Coalition and WEDO, and offered a program of daily workshops and presentations structured around drafting a Population Treaty and a separate Women’s Treaty. By the time negotiations had concluded, coalition actors led by Southern anti-Malthusians and Northern feminists firmly rejected inclusion of population control as a component of international environmental development, opting instead for a critical focus on Northern consumption practices and advocating for development approaches favoring women’s comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care.

The document produced from these debates is known as the Treaty on Population, Environment and Development. It asserted that “women’s empowerment to control their own lives is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Women as Sexual Stewards
• 1. The Population “Crisis” Returns
• 2. How Population Became an Environmental Problem
• 3. Scientists, Donors, and the Politics of Anticipating the Future
• 4. The Role of Youth in Population-Environment Advocacy
• 5. Co-Opting Reproductive Justice
• Conclusion: Is There a Feminist Way Forward?
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author