Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Family planning charities suggest helping poor women “control their fertility” will save as much CO2 as a trillion dollars of investment in low carbon technologies. But provision of family planning wrapped around a higher purpose has a long and ugly history.
Worried About Climate Change? Investing in Reproductive Health Must Be Part of the Solution
Monday, 21st May 2018
at 5:15 pm
Chris Turner
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Since the invention of the contraceptive pill in the 1950’s, access to modern contraception has driven some of the key demographic and social changes in history. It has delivered improved health outcomes for mothers and babies as women are able to wait longer between births or delay having their first child. It created demographic shifts, as populations have fewer dependents and a more productive labour force. It has empowered girls and women to stay in school longer, seek higher education and participate in the formal economy. And now recent research has determined that contraception also has a key role to play in addressing climate change.
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Poverty reduction and strengthening economies
When women can exercise reproductive choice, they are more likely to participate in education and the workforce. In most developing countries, female participation in the formal economy has increased as fertility has fallen. Women’s participation in the economy promotes economic growth and economies that are strong are better able to absorb the disturbances of climate change and recover from climate-related events.
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Women’s participation and leadership
Women’s participation and leadership is important to climate change preparedness, resilience and action. Enabling women to control their bodies and reproductive health can help create opportunities for women to participate, lead and contribute to the conversation.
As a climate change mitigation strategy, family planning programs are also more cost-effective than other conventional, energy-focused solutions. One study found that $220 billion spent on providing family planning to those with an unmet need would reduce 34 gigatons of global carbon emissions, compared to $1 trillion for a similar outcome if spent on low carbon technologies.
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Regardless of your position on birth control and abortion, I think we can all feel a sense of unease when efforts to provide “family planning” are offered as part of a larger mission to reduce population, rather than placing the interests of the recipients of the medical aid first.
Provision of birth control to poor people has a long, ugly history. For example, consider this Guardian story about the Bangladesh government’s recent efforts to offer sterilisation services to inconvenient Rohingya refugees displaced by ongoing political turmoil in Burma.
Bangladesh to offer sterilisation to Rohingya in refugee camps
Family planning authorities have asked the government to launch vasectomies and tubectomies for women in Cox’s Bazar, where 1m refugees fight for space.
Bangladesh is planning to introduce voluntary sterilisation in its overcrowded Rohingya camps, where nearly a million refugees are fighting for space, after efforts to encourage birth control failed.
More than 600,000 Rohingya have arrived in Bangladesh since a military crackdown in neighbouring Myanmar in August triggered an exodus, straining resources in the impoverished country.
The latest arrivals have joined hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees who fled in earlier waves from Myanmar’s Rakhine state, where the stateless Muslim minority has endured decades of persecution.
Most live in desperate conditions with limited access to food, sanitation or health facilities and local officials fear a lack of family planning could stretch resources even further.
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Many of the refugees told AFP they believed a large family would help them survive in the camps, where access to food and water remains a daily battle and children are often sent out to fetch and carry supplies.
Others had been told contraception was against the tenets of Islam.
Farhana Sultana, a family planning volunteer who works with Rohingya refugees in the camps, said many of the women she spoke to believed birth control was a sin.
“In Rakhine they did not go to family planning clinics, fearing the Myanmar authorities would give medicine that harms them or their children,” Sultana said.
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You could reasonably argue that refugee women having 19 children each is unsustainable. But I doubt the first concern of the Bangladeshi authorities is the well-being of the Rohingya. I suspect the Bangladeshi authorities would be overjoyed if the Rohingya refugee problem just quietly disappeared.
Over zealous family planning doesn’t just occur in poor countries. The USA has experienced domestic scandals in the past related to forced sterilisation, and scandals with the practices of organisations like Planned Parenthood, including accusations of medical racism.
My point is I personally have no problem with women having access to the medical services they need to create a better life for themselves and their families. I understand some people likely have different opinions about reproductive issues, what is an is not acceptable, to myself.
But surely we can all agree that mixing family planning with another mission like reducing humanity’s global carbon footprint creates a horrifying risk that the welfare of patients will not be the top priority. There are many ugly historical examples to support this concern.
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‘Family Planning’ has routinely been a cover for eugenics.
Selective-child (i.e. a-bortion rite). There has been progress to Plan (i.e. a-bort) Down Syndrome men and women. They have been deemed unworthy (i.e. inconvenient, unwanted, or profitable) and a burden for the moral principle of sustained stability.
I don’t know what you are talking about. Do you?
Malthusian dogma.
Margret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a eugenicist admired by some rather unsavory historical figures.
And a notorious racist. As to that her desires to cull the blacks was not secret:
https://youtu.be/QOmRk26jrNo
James, as always, does excellent leg work.
Interestingly, when in college I really ate up the whole malthusian, satanic doctrine. My how studious research had forced me to challenge my worldview.
Although not religious, I’ve come back around to recognizing man is not God, nor is man bad. Man is programmable, just like those GIGO models.
35 years on this Earth: young, still filled with piss n vinegar, wondering how so many remain ignorant of this disgusting, anti-human agenda. That’s all this is. Hatred for humanity. If you wage endless destruction for profit and power, destroy the family, muddy the minds and natural creativity of youth, what can one expect?
Simple reality: access to cheap energy, elevated quality of living, personal transportation, strong familial community with strong males = lower birth rate. It’s a natural progression of humanity to reproduce less when education and wages are elevated.
Instead, these psychopaths (mostly atheistic) want to play God since they don’t believe, and destroy humanity due to their resentment of their own lack of self worth. I can’t wait to watch them writhe in agony in the coming decades.
They deserve every ounce of suffering coming to them, ten fold, for what they have inflicted upon the nescient masses.
Extremely good point about Sanger – and I must say, this article about “family planning” is written by a leftist who actually understands their true environmental goals. They *have* to get rid of part of the population, because that takes away the pressure for growth and makes the remaining people easier to control. (which is why every totalitarian leftist government ever does exactly this)
I have a relative who has always fervently believed in overpopulation, and the need to reduce children. I have gotten to where I point out to him that in most of the developed countries around the world, population replacement rates are below 2.0 (many around 1.5), which means their populations are actually shrinking. (I think Japan is the lowest) So, what that means to a faithful devotee of Sanger (and of Paul Erlich) is that the real problem they face is how to go about getting rid of all of the surplus (in their view) black and brown babies around the world. That’s what this article is all about.
After I started making that point, my bro-in-law makes a point to never bring up the topic any more if I’m around.
Exactly, it’s the same “Population Bomb” 60’s central planning culture all through the Greenshirt left. “Climate” just another wrapping for more of the same.
Sterilisation is permanent. It is not about giving women control.
Birth control is easily turn-on-and-offable. A woman who has access to it can plan her family. She can choose when to work on her career. She can choose when to provide for her newborn children.
She can choose how many children to provide for (with her husband). She has control.
Birth control is a good thing.
This is not about sterilisation or abortion.
“Family planning charities suggest helping poor women “….no, it’s the men
The elective a-bortion of wholly innocent human life throughout our evolution from conception is a wicked solution. Delaying reproduction increases risk to both the mother and child.
A poor mother should not be forced to have more kids than she could afford.
Nobody is forcing her to have children, she and her husband made that decision for themselves.
Delaying reproduction increases risk
You cant be serious,,, seriously? With today’s longer term, temporary, compliance free options for birth control, not only do you decrease risk, you increase probable success. The literature is literally littered with positive examples.
The number one contributing factor to poverty is unwanted pregnancy in an impoverished environment. It is the driver of infant mortality, and the biggest influence on overall life expectancy. Contraception, in particular, compliance free contraception, is and always will be the top policy for reduced poverty and improved outcomes. We aren’t talking about old fashioned “sterilization”, …. no permanent method is necessary.
Washington University did a study on outcomes of birth control and found that the IUD, implants or injections were 97+ effective at preventing unwanted pregnancies and improving outcomes. The Buffett Foundation found the data so compelling they forwarded a 27 Million grant to CO to provide longer term, compliance free, contraception to poor at risk populations and found it delayed first birth by 3 years. …. 3 years is the difference in many cases of getting an education, or being stuck voting for Democrats who enslave the poor as voting blocks. Of course the, pro life conservative ranks refused to further the program with state funds ….. which is just plain stupid for a bunch of people who claim to oppose a-bort-ion. ….. i.e, what is not to like about an INSTANT 97% reduction in a-bort-ion???
As pointed out in this site, affluence = better stewards of the environment. Delaying child birth and getting an education, thus bringing children into better economic condition = greater affluence = better environment.
I don’t see any reason to oppose such …. and frankly, I’d rather my tax dollars go to decreasing unwanted pregnancies, and thus the need for planned parenthood, the need for the bottomless pit of generational poverty and enslaving welfare …… as opposed to spending billions or trillions on decreasing the earths temp by 0.01C
+Reminds me of Aleister Crowley (“I kill millions of potential babies every day down the toilet”)
I always find it odd that its the Church who support this: after all if one Believes, this is a prelude to a Life Spiritual Hereafter, so what is the point of worrying about the material world?
The fact remains that actually peak oil, resource shortages and Malthus are not inventions. They are descriptions of a natural set of processes. Populations expand until something kills them off. Around 10 times as many small bird chicks are born as will survive the next winter. The world does not have an infinite capacity for life.
It’s no different for humanity. Starvation disease infant mortality,war, or contraception. Make your choice.
Dr, Deanster – yes, biological risk to the child, risk to the pregnancy *does* increase the more it is delayed in life. You are talking about economic and social risk, this is not about that. (and to be fair, your concerns are valid – but you don’t seem to understand the “risk” that is being talked about her.
One of those facts of biology left over from when our ancestors were small packs of hunter-gatherers roaming the plains is that women are biologically primed to do the most effective job of childbearing between the ages of 16 – 20 (roughly) Pregnancy is obviously successful after that, but every year added to the age of the mother adds to the risk that something will go wrong, that genetic mutations will occur. (which is why having children after the age of 40 is a very dangerous idea)
Our bodies, both male and female, are set up to lead hard, physically challenging lives that don’t last much more than 30 years. Now we’ve built a civilization that allows us to far surpass that – but we still live with the built in priorities and tendencies from those days long ago.
What it’s about is trying to tell people how to live. I never hear about the movers and shakers avoiding having kids, reducing their lifestyle, it’s about telling other people to. Ted Turner has five kids, but tells others they should only have one. Just like the Leo DiCaprio’s of the world telling people to minimize their carbon footprint, while flying all over the world in the least efficient jets available. And, yes, right now it’s not about sterilisation or abortion, but it will be, soon enough. Ask the Chinese how that’s working out.
Not my personal experience, but I read somewhere that in the old Mormon church a man could only have as many wives as he could provide for. If Ted Turner can provide for five kids, good for him. If I can not provide for two kids, I should stop at one (or zero).
“China considers scrapping birth limits by 2019: Bloomberg”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-population/china-considers-scrapping-birth-limits-by-2019-bloomberg-idUSKCN1IM1CQ
I’m not concerned about what is being said, Courtney. I’ll agree with you on that. However, I am concerned about what they are not saying.
We’ve seen the abuses of the one-child policy of China, with forced sterilization and unregistered children living in hiding, and you heard the outcry from certain sectors when they pulled back on it even a little. There are some who want that to become planetary policy, at least for everyone except themselves.
I am also very concerned about “you can have food aid so long as you take birth this control injection” and other such insidious plans, tying birth control to other policies. Worse, it is very likely that they won’t be temporary birth control but actual sterilization procedures that will be permanent.
It’s not a slippery-slope argument if it’s already happened in the past.
Very similar to the “we’ll give you and your family housing, except your husband can’t come along…”
The whole thing sounds like a cultural problem. If you attempt to empower women in this way, they could end up murdered.
“Birth control is a good thing.”….
ever notice how everyone that’s for birth control…is alive
I have always found it interesting that the birth rate in the U.S. actually started declining in the 1800s, long before the pill was available. Long before any birth control was readily available. Apparently, the decline is associated with an increase in wealth.
Make of that what you will. 🙂
Straight into the spam filter. Sigh.
Being left-wing makes it hard for me to write here.
We are becoming more and more cocooned in our own echo chambers. Ideas die in the reverberation.
Without ideas there can be nothing new – no new vistas to explore.
No new freedoms.
No democracy.
[Your comment simply went into moderation, and was not put in the Spam folder. I suspect there were some key words that triggered the mod flag, certainly not anything to do with being leftwing. -mod]
But at least your post did clear and was posted into the conversation.
Acknowledged.
The virtual world imitates the real world. The word “a-bortion” triggers censorship. The solution in both worlds is a layer of privacy and obfuscation.
M Courtney
As a right winger, I find it even harder than you to post what may be considered a left wing solution.
The problem here isn’t about birth control, it’s about old age provision.
Developing countries (and I cringe at calling them that because they are restricted from developing because of developed countries left wing attitudes) have population growth challenges, not because of too many babies per se, but because of the motivations behind the birth rate.
One of course is the higher mortality rate amongst children, so if 10 are born, it doesn’t mean 10 will survive to a ‘productive’ age.
The productive age might be defined as one which continues to support the parents of the child into old age, therefore, the more children born in the early years of a woman mean the greater chance she, and her husband, will be supported in their old age.
To cut a long story short, and here comes the (almost) left wing bit, wouldn’t it be more sensible to make provision for old age, thereby eradicating the need for large families in the first place?
If foreign aid is to be provided for developing countries, targeting it at the youth with condoms means a lot of guys wearing them on their heads at parties rather than putting them to their designed use.
The right wing bit, and we can’t avoid it, is that, were these countries helped to develop by encouraging cheap, fossil fuel derived electricity, to generate wealth, and enough income to provide for even a basic pension scheme, wouldn’t that be a natural buttress to uncontrolled population growth?
The motivation for large families in developing countries is old age provision. Remove that motivation and population growth isn’t a problem. The self same thing has happened in the west, and we pay for condoms.
Sorry if this is a daft idea, I have never seen or heard it proposed before, so I guess it’s a non starter, scientifically.
+1000- Spot on, HotScot! I have seen your reasons before
but lost the source for the research on it. So it’s probably
more economic than biological.
You omit the fun part of it. Making children is the oldest entertainment. Remember a brief explosion of child births 9 months after the big blackout in New York?
“To cut a long story short, and here comes the (almost) left wing bit, wouldn’t it be more sensible to make provision for old age, thereby eradicating the need for large families in the first place?”
We’ve tried that in the West. The end result is that people stop having kids at all, and population collapses.
Any time government gets involved in these things, it’s a disaster. Look at China, where Mao told women to have lots of kids so they’d have lots of men to fight America… and the population grew so fast that he then had to tell people they could only have one kid, as a result of which there are now tens of millions more men than women in China because so many parents killed their daughters so they could have sons.
MarkG
Birth rates are like the climate, they rise and fall mysteriously. The west is wealthy, birth rates are falling, but the effect of that is economic. We only worry about it because there are fewer young to look after the elderly. Developing countries are the opposite way around.
But there is a natural order which will be achieved at some point in the future even if things stay the same.
In my opinion, using immigration to paper over the western birth rate cracks is wrong because it merely exacerbates the situation in developing countries.
Nor is allowing developing countries access to cheap electricity a means of birth control, it’s a violation of human rights to deny them it. Although I have sympathy with the argument that they have had as much time as the west to get their house in order and haven’t.
A interesting postulation. We might ascertain its validity by looking at dates when “developed” countries adopted a “pensioner program” and birth rates for any potential correlation.
Odder correlations have been discovered, such as the decline in crime rates around 15 years after Roe v. Wade.
Curious George:
There was a similar phenomenon in the D.C. area a few years ago. Whole lot of “furlough babies” born about 9 months after the government shutdown.
‘We are becoming more and more cocooned in our own echo chambers. Ideas die in the reverberation.’
That’s only for people who stay within those echo chambers.
Joel Snider
We are living in the echo chamber of ideas, CAGW is everywhere we look, on TV, in the papers, on the internet, everywhere.
WUWT and notalotofpeopleknowthat, Tim Ball, Jo Nova et al are the reverberation antidotes.
Isn’t this really the objective of the earth has a fever promoters . … Population control and money .
The plan is to make energy so unavailable and costly the poor will simply die off .
In short, the problem of human induced climate change could be resolved within 2 generations.
IF…
All those AGW alarmists who firmly believe that Climate Change is human induced simply resolve to have no children as they would rule the Poorer classes need to.
Okay and send 350.org out to explain it to the Muslim world…..in person.
Global warming is just an excuse to collapse western civilization. Always look for the ulterior motive.
Maurice Strong, as much as anyone else, invented CAGW. link It’s just as unscrupulous as disguising racism as Planned Parenthood.
This is a point I’ve been trying to drive home forever. I discovered the tail of the dragon, researching climate science, but once I did, all the other collateral knowledge I’d been collecting, somewhat arbitrarily my whole life made a lot more obvious sense.
The science is settled, there are too many humans
No it isn’t. No there aren’t. Not by a long shot.
Planned Parenthood a.k.a. the wicked solution, to an albeit hard problem.
So, when and by whose choice does a human life acquire and retain the right to life?
Im guessing most of that 220 billion to be covered by the US tax payer?
Channelling the shade of Margaret Sanger, are they? What was her term… human weeds
A little Sanger. A little Mengele. A progression into the past and future.
Yeah, when the real aim is telling people how to live, what’s the difference? You know, making people prosperous gives them the time and money to do something besides knock boots for entertainment, but when you’d rather be rich, and keep others poor, the obvious solution is the last one to try.
There is no reason that Bangladeshi women or Rohingya women could not be given the same contraceptive chances and accompanying education that British women have. Long acting progesterone only injectable contraceptives have had massive benefits in reducing unwanted teenage pregnancy in the UK.
It is a combination of ignorance and religious indoctrination that has not allowed women in these third world countries some opportunity to control the size of their families.
Dr Giles Bointon
As naive as it may be, my contention is that there’s a natural order to most things. Leave well alone and things usually work out, differently, but they work out. But then I’m a lazy git, if I leave the garden long enough, the wife goes out and does it.
So, somehow, it seems to me that the social stigma attached to “unwanted teenage pregnancy” has driven the need for contraceptives in that narrow corridor. Indeed, it seems to me it’s been so successful it’s contributed to the population bomb the west now has. In other words, the garden needs tending, mercilessly.
In developing countries, the stigma of teenage pregnancies is much less, or at least it was, until the west began telling them ovulation isn’t a sign of fertility, age is.
To counteract the west’s population bomb, the west imports immigrants, which exacerbates the problem of old age provision in developing countries by depriving them of their young and healthy. It caused dissent in the host countries because the perception is immigrants are stealing jobs etc.
Perhaps it might have been better had we not stigmatised teenage pregnancies in the west, legislated against them, and medically intervened to stop them. Our population bomb might not have been as pronounced and the question of economic migration may never have arisen.
Perhaps social cohesion in the west might have been maintained with unwanted mothers relying on their parents for support with their unwanted children. Perhaps it wouldn’t have given them licence to go out and f*ck any guy they met, whenever they felt like it, and perhaps STD’s might not have been quite the problem it is. Perhaps young men might have been forced into some sort of responsibility for their actions instead of whooping up the town at the weekend and vomiting into every receptacle available.
Fertility in animals is mercilessly exploited by commerce, but somehow, we western homo sapiens elevate ourselves above such unsavoury practices.
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have let my daughters be exploited at the onset of their fertility, in fact in their 20’s, their boyfriends are still wary of me. But that’s an unuttered parent/child contract.
However, I can’t help but wonder if our parental good intentions have evolved into social engineering. Moreover, I wonder if those in developing countries might consider it so.
There are several issues being conflated into one here.
Firstly the authors wrongly assume that all births will become consuming adults. In the areas listed the infant mortality rate is still high. I suspect if infant mortality rates were lower they would not be creating such big families. As mortality rates declined in the developing countries so did the birthrate.
rocketscientist,
The obvious question to ask would be, “Would it be reasonable to expect that if the frequency of pregnancy decreased, and the number of births decreased, that the infant mortality rates would similarly decrease?” If so, would that not be a desirable outcome, at least from a moral perspective?
Many cultures see a large family as ‘Social Security’ for the parents. If they could be convinced that smaller families resulted in as many children reaching maturity as resulted from frequent pregnancies, they wouldn’t wait for mortality rates to decline to voluntarily reduce the pregnancy rate.
After reading HotScot’s above post, I see value in that argument, and suggested a method to bolster it.
Cheap affordable energy is the single biggest contributor to prosperity – beyond the basic necessities of electricity and all that goes with it – prosperity allows something else to do besides procreate – (Richard Pryor: “We **** just to keep our minds off eatin'”).
These are the sort of wretched conditions you get in high-density populations – which, of course, progressive greenies are constantly trying to promote – while ignoring the fact that in the suburbs (at least where they still exist), it’s clean, safe, with as close to zero population growth that has ever been achieved… and an environment that progressives are openly hostile to, and doing their best to eradicate.
Makes you wonder what they’re really about, doesn’t it?
Wait a week and they’ll probably be arguing that CO2 causes sterility anyway.
The only constant is people leveraging their grant applications by talking about global-warming. The silliness will diminish once people learn that it is no longer a quick and easy way to get money.
So far in the industrialized nations, education of women and monetization of child rearing and retirement planning, seems to result in 2 child families. Whereas frugal living conditions seems to result in large families.
“Family Planning” is motivated by the population bomb, or catastrophic anthropogenic evolutionary fitness, which was a dud. “Planned Parenthood” is literally equivalent to carbon sequestration schemes, with similar motives: the quasi-religious principle of social stability (i.e. “the grass is greener”). Planning is further motivated by immigration reform (e.g. catastrophic anthropogenic immigration reform including refugee crises), taxable commodities (i.e. diverse, productive clumps of cells of the female sex), and democratic leverage. In China, one-child, the equivalent of the West’s selective-child, was motivated by the green blight and industrial progress.
This blog would do well sticking to climate, related science, and such. An article on ‘family planning’ is out of place—no matter my personal views thereon. Which are irrelevant here.
Please, lets keep WUWT as SJW apolitical as possible.
ristvan, in case you didn’t read beyond the headline, the article is about reducing global carbon emissions by spending money on “family planning” which in this case is a euphemism for eugenics. You won’t get many to admit it in polite company, but most climate alarmists see reducing human population as a vital part of reducing global warming.
The title of the article I quoted – “Worried About Climate Change? Investing in Reproductive Health Must Be Part of the Solution”. Notice it mentions “climate change”.
Never mind the fact that women all over the world have been “controlling their fertility” for decades now and the population growth rate has been declining since the early 70’s.
Scratch an alarmist of any flavor and you will find a eugenecist just under the surface. I hear the Nazis were pretty excited by eugenics.
For more on population growth rate, see: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth
Socialists of all kinds had the hots for eugenics until Hitler actually went out and did it. Then they had to find a more acceptable term.
Your concern is not irrational. Whatever your views on family planning bolting it on to save the world schemes always ends badly
As long as the country’s debt is running at the tens of thousands per capita it makes zero sense to borrow even more money to drive up the margin per capita.
More tax payers means lower tax debt per person ( that is supposing you never ever vote another tqax and spend Democrat into office. And at this point let’s face it. Why would you?)
Remember when the Democrats lied straight to your face about keeping government out of your bedroom?
Pop Culture Reference Coming In:
What do you get when you cross Paul Ehrlich and Margaret Sanger?
Thanos.
Considering how little value “Climate Tech” has …
exactly what I was thinking too……every bit of this is dependent on temp measurements that have been so jiggled they are a joke….and climate models that couldn’t predict squat and are a total fail
Family planning for poor women in high birthrate countries is great. Only the religious and the tribal competitive breeders oppose it. It would reduce the migration pressure from the 3rd world to the 1st world as living standards in the 3rd world would rise in direct proportion to the falling birth rate. It also reduces pressure on the environment and habitat of other species which are becoming extinct at a rapidly increasing rate. The world can comfortably accommodate a few billion people on first world living standards and not lose all its wild places – but only if the population stabilises and reduces from the current levels. Why not do this through contraception. The pill, implanon, condoms plus the empowerment of women to be able to use them would help solve A LOT of problems.