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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The birth rate and the fertility rate has been falling at a fairly consistent rate and will soon reach the population replacement rate.
The population will only increase for another decade or so and then it will stabilize and then eventually fall.
Birth rate and fertility are only falling in certain sectors. There is no decrease in the target population of the OP. European and USA birth rates are at a point of non replacement, especially in the educated sectors …. its a case where the uneducated are replacing the educated.
That’s not a recipe for future success.
I live within 10 miles of 4 institutions of ‘higher education’. The so called “uneducated” are the ones that build buildings, collect the trash, keep the utilities running, fabricate steel, fix automobiles, and plow the roads. Not having a approved degree is, for some reason, deemed “uneducated” by some. IMNSHO the “educated sectors” appears to have a significant percentage of people who know more and more about less and less to the point they know everything about nothing.
Well Greg ….. when we ASSume, we usually misinterpret meaning. When I say Educated, it includes people with trained skills. Education is not exclusive to college degree. But there is no assumption when it comes down to unmarried women on welfare, who dropped out of high school, with five kids they had no business having. Their education is in HOW to game the system.
Dr.Deanster,
are you sure they’re “gaming” the system and not actually using it as it was truly intended? The whole point is to get as many babies born to unwed mothers so that “someone has to do something” and then they swoop in to fix the problem they created in the first place.
Greg, you have described my education perfectly: a degree in vacuum physics.
Pretty much exactly this, the successful in western society are having less children (mostly due to the cost of doing so) but instead funding the children of the failed. Globally the successful countries (who have low birth rates) are funding the children of the 3rd world. Anyone who thinks this is in ANY way sustainable isnt thinking at all about what that word means. We are breeding a disaster. Literally.
And to those who think a 3rd world woman is exercising some ‘right’ to have a dozen children – I suggest you go and try walking in her shoes. She has no rights – the men who own her are forcing her to have those children to increase the power of their own local ‘tribe’, due to strength in numbers. She is being used as a machine for that, until she is worn out, then is usually replaced, and yet people want that protected. Disgusting.
That’s why it’s so important to act now. If we wait, there will be no reason to panic, and panic is a well-tested method of getting people to give up power over their lives.
The neo-pagan nature of the climate cult is going to degenerate to human culling and sacrifice to appease Gaia. We laugh at the pagan sacrificing virgins of the past, but it is headed our way again unless the brainless sheep that refuse to stand up against the crap finally wake up.
Good luck taking me, before I take a bunch… I will spare no dominator doing the bidding of these satanic creatures. Unfortunately, most on here aren’t focusing on the real preparators. Police and military. All of these rules and laws are meaningless without some amoral scum “following orders” because it’s his job.
Instead, most statists just venerate at the feet of their real enemies, whom I’ve just listed. That painfully obvious reality is apparently so uncomfortable. Let’s go worship the flag! Patriotism! Yay!
Bunch of children, that type of worldview creates. Many on the right are just as guilty as the left, especially for being so pro police and military.
It’s disgusting
climate change is the reincarnation of the population bomb
https://chaamjamal.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/overpopulation-to-cause-mass-extinctions/
Some guys believe that human beings are a problem for the climate. So the question is how to get rid of the surplus. And to find out how big is the surplus. Plus to determine who is the surplus. And who will execute that task.
There have always been some thoughtful persons who started to handle that problem…
/sarc
Here we go.
Population control or should I say “Control” the real reason for the war on Co2. Bill Gates’ father was the head of planed parent hood. I offer wonder what life would be like if Bill was aborted. Or Stephen Hawkins, Jerry Brown, and a list of others.
Without Bill Gates, maybe we would have reliable computers…
Population control is indeed needed quite a lot in those countries where reproduction rate is a lot above 3. Most places in Africa, Islamic countries and India.
But only there, as they can’t really feed themselves. Apart from the issue of who pays for their food there is the issue that the extra agriculture output needed to feed them all requires lots of water and that does have an impact on climate. Doesn’t matter much that the food is grown elsewhere (say in Kansas) obviously.
Just make these people wealthy, and they will reduce their reproduction rate. Children are the only insurance they have when they are old.
Being an old person without children in some developing countries, you are doomed.
More like $130m family planning and hygene > $1T in actualized climate protecting installations.
First of all, learn what ‘romance’ is all about.
(Someone mentioned about “being able to, yourself, look after the kids you produce”)
Very simple practical measure.
Completely ban & outlaw formula baby milk and disposable nappies (diapers)
Mothers will then breast-feed their babies – the original and best contraceptive there ever was.
As a triple whammy of goodness,
1. Families will will be better off financially not least from the cost of the Fake Milk and the diapers – breast fed babies hardly even need diapers.
2. The children will grow up to be nutritionally and emotionally well adjusted. They will not turn into low intelligence, irritable, buck-passing teens and adults horribly & fatally addicted to sugar. Hence other drugs.
3. The mothers them selves will be happier & fitter – less prone to indulging in Comfort Food as they will be getting their Dopamine from their children.
Do Not get the idea that giving women the ‘freedom’ to go to work is an economic blessing.
It means they are forced to leave their children in the care of strangers and for a mammalian creature, THAT is THE most stressful torture you could possibly inflict upon it.
And what do the girls get when at work? Told what to do, when to do it, how much to do and verbally & financially reprimanded when they don’t comply.
Leaving your small child in the care of a ‘nursery’ is absolute torture for any/all women.
Does anybody now understand?
Why they’re all getting fat
Why they’ll all on Prozac, white wine and probably cannabis nowadays.
Why they’re having so few children.
To Escape That Stress.
Meanwhile the boys, dumb stupid creatures as they all are, imagine they are giving the girls a ‘freedom’
Oh yeah.
Hint: Why are 50%+ of marriages failing and the breakup is initiated 80%+ of the time by the girl?
And what is their usual complaint?
Unreasonable Behaviour (of the male partner)
And, just roughly, what is the number of girls involved in this Climate Change debate?
Wakey wakey everyone.
The faeries on the pin will be just fine.
Look after the babes in the room first.
and I missed The Most Delicious Irony – because of my ad-blocker.
The Q-Lav.
Recently on UK news, it was revealed that workers (lowly paid young females a lot of them) at Amazon fulfilment depots were actually scared of going to the toilet in case of ‘lost production’ and the ensuing reprimand.
So they were using plastic and whatever bottles/containers to relieve themselves without being seen to visit the rest-room.
Please please please tell me that the Q-Lav is available from somewhere other than Amazon.
Such requires that we teach young men to make the family the top priority.
That means sacrificing the latest and greatest driver, or the new boat, or the night out with boys gambling away their paycheck.
Don’t get me wrong, I totally agree with the premise … the traditional nuclear family is the best situation for all …. but the values for that are demonized these days.
Telling impoverished people to use contraception to defer pregnancy definitely smacks of socialist eugenics or something. My Catholic heritage inclines me to believe it’s immoral, for some reason I can’t quite explain in rational terms (it’s a bit like a gut feeling, but more sacrosanct). Surely starving children to death for their own good, if old fashioned ordnance doesn’t get the job done, would be the more enlightened approach to solving the existential threat posed by impoverished people who want a better quality of life?
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
– Psalm 137:9
It’s always them, they and others who must do the reducing never me, mine and ours. That’s how the games played with others having the hard time not us in our nice part of the world, town, country.
“Go sell what you have give it to the poor and come follow me” are very hard instructions when you are comfortable.
James Bull
Eric Worrall, I’m 100% with you on this one. Regardless of their motivations, whether cultural, scientific or even just superstitious, those in the refugee (and refugee status, in a sane world, should be considered temporary and reversible) camps have overwhelmingly voted, we don’t want what you’re selling. So to have what they already rejected forced (or imposed by subterfuge; i.e., tricked them) upon them permanently is beyond just creepy, I would call it evil. As already noted, provide an impoverished location cheap reliable energy and everything else just sorts itself out, the “host” country for these refugees gets what they want, and besides it’s just the right thing to do. (Picture this, power lines run throughout the refugee camps and who knows how many cottage industries will spring up.)
Just make these people wealthy, and they will reduce their reproduction rate. Children are the only insurance they have when they are old.
Being an old person without children in some developing countries, you are doomed.
There is no better illustration of population growth and linkages to child mortality (read poverty) than this presentation by Hans Rosling:
The saddest part is that it was recorded in 2012 and people still don’t get it!
To damn a proposal because of the people who support it is as wrong headed as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Dismissal by association is about as unscientific as you can get. It’s fundamentally an argument that appeals to emotion rather than reason.