Anti-populationists - the new imperialists

It recognises that population is an important variable in nation building and recommends that governments in the developing world implement policies to address the ecological implications of future population numbers. It has called for universal access to family planning services but not like those of India and South American of the 1950s and 1960s.

While the anti-pops have danced around the notion of mass sterilisation programs, this is the only way to reduce population on a large scale and they know it. This form of “family planning” was tried in the 1950s and 60s.

The first serious attempts at international family planning started in the 1930s in the USA and spread throughout Asia as part of a “civilising mission”. The move to control population for the betterment of mankind also inspired visions of world community.

“Many of the leaders of the world population control movement claimed to represent future generations. All of these leaders tended to treat governments as a means to an end, and they claimed to represent groups that would not fit within national frameworks, whether universal sisterhood, or future generations, or the community of the faithful,” says History Professor Matthew Connelly of Columbia University in New York.

In India in the 1960s the “family planners” used Disney pictures of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse to entice families to come and see that having fewer children was the way to ensure that these children would be happier, healthier and cleaner.

“But more and more, in addition to providing incentives to providers, healthcare workers and sometimes social workers to perform IUD insertions and sterilisations, these programs began to rely on incentive payments. People were simply offered cash, in some cases as much as two or three month’s wages, if they agreed to sterilisation.”

India was at the cutting edge of population control throughout the 60s and 70s. They created temporary operating theatres to encourage as many people as possible to agree to sterilisation. They performed up to 60,000 sterilisations in a month in what they called the family planning Festival of Vernaculum in the state of Kerala.

“Even if some couples make poor choices, governments have done an even worse job in deciding who should be able to have children, and how many they should be able to have. It's the most powerless members of society who are hurt in the process. And this sordid history has done tremendous damage to the cause of reproductive rights,” Professor Connelly said.

The notion of population control is political dynamite, especially for the reproductive rights of women.

“Women’s health activists, here and abroad, have fought long and hard for the right to safe, voluntary birth control and abortion services. Pitted against them are not only religious fundamentalists who would deny them access to contraception, but those who are prepared to sacrifice reproductive rights, and human rights, on the altar of population control,” said Betty Hartmann, Director of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College in the States.

“We know full well what happens when women’s fertility becomes the object of draconian top-down social engineering as it has in China and was in the dark days of eugenics when thousands were involuntarily sterilised. The war on population always has been, and will continue to be, a war on women’s bodies,” Ms Hartmann said.

So while some might applaud the anti-pops pro-abortion stance, they won’t be calling on women in Vaucluse to step up first for sterilisation. They will target women in the developing world and then say they are doing them a favour. This is imperialism of a staggering order.

Apocalyptic visions of the end of the earth are nothing new. They constitute a whole movie genre such as V for Vendetta, ZPG, Soylent Green and Planet of the Apes. Chris Berg, writing for The Age, wrote a very funny article on this genre that tracks, in an unintentional way, the environmental dystopia behind the anti-pops thinking.

It’s intellectual hubris to imagine that at this exact moment in human history that we have crossed the "too many people" line. In the 1970s, zero population growth advocates were sure the end was nigh. Wrong again.