In 2007, when I worked for a Ghanaian daily newspaper, I broke a story that 30 percent of the country’s maternal childbirth mortalities were actually botched abortions. Like many women throughout the world, denied access to safe surgical abortions, they resorted to backroom quacks with dubious equipment. They are among the 70,000 women who die each year from complications from illegal abortions.
From their graves these women can thank senator Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Junior and Stephen Harper. After Roe v. Wade, Helms figured if he couldn’t control American women he’d take his anti-choice show on the road, pushing through an amendment banning US funding for overseas abortions.
As Julia Whitty points out in her recent Mother Jones feature, Reagan upped the ante by banning funding for any family planning groups that even discuss abortions. Clinton rescinded and Dubya reinstated the rule. Now our own prime minister has pulled funding for overseas abortion and contraception.
Family planning agencies throughout the global south have had to severely restrict programming. The UN estimates that Dubya’s actions drove up fertility rates between 15 and 35 percent in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Arab world and Asia.
This is how foreign aid works. Rich people in rich countries make the decisions, and their ideological biases destroy real lives far away. It is anti-people and anti-environment.
Despite how over-population hurts the planet, environmentalists have shied away from the issue because population control has its own ideological dark side. Social Darwinists, eugenicists and anti-immigrant KKK leftovers have all argued for controlling populations they don’t like. And while human birth rates have gone from nearly five children per woman 60 years ago to fewer than three per woman today, no one can forget China’s brutal methodology.
When environmentalists get population conscious someone inevitably retorts, “One American uses the resources of 23 Indians!” It’s true, and if that one American’s children have children who have children, their collective environmental impact is 55 times more than an Indian family over the generations. That’s because Americans live longer and consume more.
So even the patchouli-sniffingest North Americans are planet wreckers if they reproduce. Despite the complexity that went into that calculation, the thinking behind it is simplistic. In the international development game of consumer catch-up, with populations growing fastest in the south, everyone’s carbon footprint is increasing. We 6.8 billion humans are now consuming as if we had an Earth-and-a-half. The planet can’t sustain this many people consuming this much.
It’s fair to say that rich nations are doing the most damage, and that we’re exporting our environmental problems. We’re over-producing our food, landfilling half of it, dumping it in poor countries and importing high-impact raw materials and cheap manufactured goods from cash-hungry countries. But the solution isn’t to turn every other country into a sparsely populated gluttony-fest either.
To avoid mass starvation, Canadians must reduce our resource consumption and change the international development power game. Canada and the US are generous with their investments in mega-dams, superhighways and mechanized mass agriculture (complete with pesticides and genetic modification). But their mega-food projects don’t feed the hungry. They just grow our population further out of control, while millions still starve and we all pull further away from sustainability.
Globalized big agriculture is eroding topsoil at a rate 10 times higher than it can be replenished. We’re losing six million hectares of agricultural land a year. More than a third of the planet’s land is at risk of desertification, affecting 850 million people.
Meanwhile, small charities in the south and north are making a real impact on reproduction. Instead of controlling women, they are investing in them with entrepreneurial micro-loans and opportunities for education.
When girls go to school the family is necessarily kept smaller to allow for that expense, and girls learn about family planning. They, in turn, have smaller families of their own and experience greater wealth—but still nowhere near the excessive wealth that is making North Americans fat (literally and figuratively).
From Canada’s perspective, the core solution is twofold: 1) Pull international development money out of mega projects and re-focus on families and communities with an ecological lens; and 2) Re-localize our own economies.
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2010.
In all recorded history the human species has not shown itself capable of exercising any restraint, either in breeding, or in ravaging resources. It’s unlikely to happen now. Let’s be realistic – we’ll start seeing the first really huge resource wars this century. We’ll have more wars over dwindling hydrocarbons, we’ll have monster wars over fresh water, we’ll have wars over arable land (what’s left of it), and we’ll have wars over the remaining and rapidly diminishing seafood. Before this century is done North American governments will probably be *encouraging* reproduction so that the maws of permanent conscription will have an assured supply of cannon fodder, because we’ll be fighting too.
I hold out absolutely no hope when I see the majority of people in their 20’s buying into the Stuff culture – good-sized house even for a starter home, two cars, lots of goodies, vacation trips every year. I don’t expect any better from people my age (fiftyish) or older, but I don’t see any signs at all that the next two younger generations are any better. When *will* they get more enlightened? The answer is never, because it’s human nature for people to want what they see that other people have. So quite frankly we are toast. We’re done.
Sorry to be so pessimistic, but let’s not count on humans doing unselfish, cooperative, altruistic things that are historically unheard of.
Population control brings with it the scary thought of eugenics. We can’t really impose our will on people. Some want big families – that’s their right. I myself want at least 4 children in the future. As long as I can afford them, I think it’s a great blessing to bring forth more precious human lives.
precious human lives? sure. that’s why countless lives wasted the world over due to conflicts that place human lives at the bottom of the hierarchy.
and try having one first, before you plan on 4. children are great, but raising them is hard. and expensive. and if your so gung-ho on kids maybe consider caring for the ones that are already here, and in need.
we impose our will on people all the time, in fact, not allowing talk of abortions in order to receive funding is doing just that.
blessing indeed. sounds like bible thumping to me.
Some contemporary scientists have some interesting evidence that shows that population will decrease, thanks primarily to a massive decrease in Baby Boomer population and now that most couples in are limiting themselves to one child, at least in the developed world. The only concerns are industrializing nations like India, and while the average Indian may use less resources than an average North American, India itself is a huge GHG producer, and so is China. Yes, that has something to do with Globalization, but given that the countries that have low environmental standards have a part to play as well. They hold just as much responsibility in that equation as the multinationals that take advantage of those low standards.
Like it or not, Globalization is happening, and if we take it away by entirely localizing our economies, we send countries like India or Kenya that benefit greatly from Globalization back to the stone age. Nobody benefits from that. We don’t, they don’t. People call it parasitic, but I feel it’s more of a symbiotic relationship.
LisaBabe: with all due respect, it always strikes me as odd when someone says that they want X number of children, or at least Y number of children. That’s seriously commodifying kids, actually – what, you already know that one child isn’t going to be able to absorb all your love or something? Or is it that you don’t get enough respect from other mamas if you only have one or two kids?
And on another note, as long as you can “afford” them? Didn’t you really mean, so long as society can afford them? As in, all the other taxpayers? Once you’re past 3 or so kids you’re not defraying all the costs of your progeny, not unless you’re rich and have your own little country somewhere. What you’re really doing is spreading out the costs of your kids over all the people who showed a bit more reproductive discipline.
You’re absolutely correct, though – it is currently your right to have as many kids as you want. And once your eggs give out, no doubt other taxpayers will foot the bill for your expensive IVF treatments so you can have a whole bunch more. Just keep in mind, you’re part of the problem.
realist: shut up.