Who's Really Controlling Women?

Who's Really Controlling Women?
by Stephanie Herman

A Kansas state legislator recently proposed a $5000 tax credit for women who, when faced with an unwanted pregnancy, choose adoption rather than abortion. Rep. Thomas Klein, a pro-choice Democrat, believes a tax incentive would lower the number of abortions performed in his state.

But skeptical Republicans have already criticized the proposed bill's potential for spawning a "baby market." (Never mind that couples paying to adopt children have already delineated such a market; they get a tax credit, too.) And it won't be long before the Malthusian Democrats join in the bill-bashing, but with a different concern: the population explosion that a tax incentive to give birth would create.

The fracas over population numbers was first marked by the 1798 publication of the Essay on the Principle of Population, in which Thomas Malthus assumed that natural resources couldn't keep up with exponential increases in population. His theory turned out to be wrong, but a new brand of Malthusian doom & gloom was forged in the early 1970s with Paul Ehrlich's false alarm, The Population Bomb. (He predicted that "a minimum of ten million people" would starve to death in each year of the "Me" decade.)

But despite dispelling evidence, the overpopulation myth has quietly infected our culture. We hate war, murder and death, but find misplaced solace in the fact that when atrocities occur, at least the Earth is spared a burden. What's more, we all want to keep abortion rare, but choicers are quick to note that without this reproductive "option," we'd be sharing food, oil, and highway space with millions more people than we already do.

Overpopulation hysteria extends out in two directions: 1) the belief that population increases correlate with decreases in economic performance, and 2) the belief that larger populations will simply drain the Earth's supply of natural resources.

Troublesome evidence, however, shows that population increases only benefit economic performance. In "More People, Greater Wealth, More Resources, Healthier Environment," Julian Simon stated some obvious facts: "Every agricultural economist knows that the world's population has been eating ever-better since World War II. Every resource economist knows that all natural resources have been getting more available rather than more scarce, as shown by their falling prices over the decades and centuries. And every demographer knows that the death rate has been falling all over the world - life expectancy almost tripling in the rich countries in the past two centuries, and almost doubling in the poor countries in just the past four decades."

Twenty years ago, Simon also asserted that our natural resources are infinite. But even if he's right, we should still act responsibly in our consumption of those resources. It's habits of wasteful consumption, not population levels, that will betray us.

Nevertheless, overpopulation zealots have little faith in educating on the perils of wasteful consumption; their only focus is slowing the birth rate. What's shocking about the movement, though, is their willingness to compromise reproductive "choice" to accomplish this, especially among "less-than-desirable" populations. "As of 1982, 15 percent of white women had been sterilized [in the U.S.]," writes Michael Sullivan DeFine, a law student at the University of Maine, "compared with 24 percent of African-American women, 35 percent of Puerto Rican women, and 42 percent of Native American women. In the early 1970s, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income individuals were annually subjected to sterilization under federally funded programs."

Sherman Alexie, in his short story The Fun House, alludes to the fact that many Native American sterilizations are either coerced or performed without the patient's knowledge and/or consent: "While my aunt held her baby close to her chest, the doctor tied her tubes, with the permission slip my aunt signed because the hospital administrator lied and said it proved her Indian status for the BIA." And the Women of Color Partnership documents that "a study by the Government Accounting Office during the 1970s found widespread sterilization abuse in four areas served by the IHS [Indian Health Services]. In 1975 alone, some 25,000 Native American women were permanently sterilized - many after being coerced, misinformed, or threatened. One former IHS nurse reported the use of tubal ligation on 'uncooperative' or 'alcoholic' women into the 1990s."

In her 1981 study, "Surgical Fertility Regulation Among Women on the Navajo Indian Reservation" (published in the American Journal of Public Health), Helen Temkin-Greener observed "a 130 per cent increase in the number of induced abortions performed [from 1972 to 1978]. During this time the ratio of abortions per 1,000 deliveries has increased from approximately 34 to 77 (an increase of 126 percent)."

Internationally, U.S. efforts to limit birth are even more aggressive. Africa2000 is an organization that champions reproductive rights, as in the right to reproduce. Their website, a resource on xenophobic population-control programs, states, "It has been extensively documented that population policies - domestic decisions within the host countries that permit or 'invite' outsiders to run family planning operations - have been obtained through the coercive conditioning of foreign economic aid and threats to withhold credit. Where funds for basic public services are dependent upon external financial arrangements, donor countries literally have the ability to sabotage developing economies if population 'assistance' is refused."

This "assistance" denotes an increasingly cut-throat consumer attitude that Brenda Fine, a human rights activist, recently summed up to me this way: "I'd rather there be a population 10% larger than it is now [with 10% of the people caring about the environment] than a smaller one. [It] reminds me of those anti-overpopulation people who drive gas-guzzlers to their charity of choice to ship contraceptives over to Africa. We'd go further in saving the environment if everyone in the U.S. reduced his consumption by 10% than if everyone in Africa were dead."

So what's behind all this international family planning generosity? The position taken by Africa2000 is that while Western population numbers are falling, the "youthful, growing populations in the so-called 'third world' make it certain that this part of the earth will have the benefit of a strong and vital labour force." Not wanting to face either a military or economic threat from these strengthening populations, the West, free from the cold war's distraction, will begin "the escalation of a new strategy of 'containment' -- one in which the primary weapon will be population control."

In fact, Al Gore believes the Third World population crisis warrants a departure from democratic debate. Paul Bedard, in a 1997 Washington Times article, reported that Gore, "[n]oting that Third World nations are producing too many children too fast. said it is time to ignore the controversy over family planning and cut out-of-control population growth." Gore is extremely frustrated that family planning dollars can't fund abortion, and just last month President Clinton proposed a $35 million spending increase on international family planning, while at the same time expressing his recurrent desire to lift the ban on international abortion funding.

The hand of abortion fits comfortably in the political glove of overpopulation. Clergy for Choice cites population problems as a religious justification for killing the unborn, interpreting Isaiah 65:20-23 not as a promise, but as a mandate: "They shall not labor in vain or bear children in calamity." Of course, population control experts must define the "calamity" for us, and last October's Day of Six Billion fit the bill. A Clergy for Choice "sermon," clearly meant to peddle anxiety, assumes population increases must be reversed: "The number six billion alone provokes fear and wonder. What will happen? How can we possibly gain control of this situation?" [emphasis added]

How ironic that it's the pro-choice overpopulation crowd who seek to control women's reproduction. Abortion isn't a reproductive choice, it's a reproductive limit. Unfortunately, by embracing "rights" like abortion, the world's population has often forfeited the very reproductive freedom they sought to protect.

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