The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (16 page)

Bangladeshi women, of course, needed much more than reproductive rights. “Women were telling us, look, you’re providing us safe abortion services, you’re providing us family planning, what about the basic health of our children? We want our children to be immunized,” Kabir said.
⁴⁷
So the Bangladesh Women’s Health Coalition started an immunization program. Her clients told her how humiliated they were when they had to sign documents with a thumbprint, so she started adult literacy classes. Many of the women wanted to start small businesses, so she referred them to the Grameen Bank and other microfinance groups. They were eager to know what their rights were, so the coalition started legal aid services and legal education classes. “Whatever program the coalition did was because women wanted it,” she said.
⁴⁸
Within a year she opened a second clinic in the capital. More than a dozen more followed throughout the country.

Clients paid on a sliding scale. For many of them, their experience at the clinic was the first time anyone had ever offered them attention as individuals. Indeed, often the women were so used to being referred to simply as someone’s daughter, wife, or mother that they had to think for a moment when asked their own names. “If you look at women in Bangladesh, it’s such an enlightenment for them to have time alone with someone who is focused on them, who cares about their concerns, who is helping them,” said Kabir. “You can actually literally see the self-confidence rise in these women. For them to understand and accept that they are an individual who has value. Because so often they didn’t see that. They thought they were an appendage of their father or their husband.”

Eventually, after a Ford Foundation survey found that botched abortions were responsible for almost 40 percent of maternal deaths in Bangladesh, Germain convinced her superiors to allocate $750,000 to support menstrual regulation in that country. The Swedish government contributed as well. The Bangladesh program, Germain said, “became a lasting example of how countries with very strict abortion laws can nonetheless recognize women’s need for this service and find a way to provide it through a government system, including through mid-level health care workers who are not medical doctors.”
⁴⁹

J
ohn D. Rockefeller III was killed in a car accident in upstate New York in July 1978. For Dunlop it was the greatest heartbreak of her life, and it cast her adrift professionally, since she was widely distrusted as a radical within the population field. Another blow followed—she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She spent a year fighting it; then, looking for a job that was “nontoxic” and free of the controversy and competition of the population world, she went to work for the New York Public Library. Dunlop was happy there, but after two years her mounting rage at the Reagan administration began impelling her to rejoin the fray.

Just then she got a call from Anne Murray, a grant-maker at the Northern California-based William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which was giving away some of the fortune William Hewlett had amassed as a cofounder of the technology giant Hewlett-Packard. The Hewlett foundation had always been concerned with population and women’s issues, and Murray saw the need for an organization to keep the issue of safe abortion alive internationally during Reagan’s tenure. She wanted to channel the effort through Goldberg’s International Women’s Health Coalition, but only if Goldberg herself—an “impossible, energetic, and deeply committed maverick,” in Dunlop’s words, but a terrible manager—surrendered the reins. It was Murray’s idea to bring in Dunlop, who agreed on the condition that Germain be brought back from Bangladesh to work with her. “ ‘I think we should go back to the coven, take over this organization, and see what we can do with it,” Dunlop told her old friend.
⁵⁰
Germain was coming up on four years in Dhaka, which was as long as most country officers stayed. She agreed to return to the United States in 1985.

The organization Dunlop inherited was a mess: There was no staff, no files, no accounting, and no money. She essentially had to create it from scratch, and as she proceeded it became clear that in addition to battling the old-fashioned population controllers, she’d have to learn to fight an entirely different antagonist. “It was then, for the first time in these international conferences, we began to see the right-to-life activity in opposition to our work,” she said.
⁵¹

R
eagan’s election had created a total turnaround in the politics of family planning. He won the presidency with the help of the religious right, which would now have more clout than ever before. As the movement gained in power throughout the 1970s, Carter, a born-again Christian who had been elected with the support of newly politicized evangelicals, had made some foreign policy concessions to antiabortion forces, but family planning itself retained broad bipartisan support. Serious opposition to population programs was mainly centered in the Vatican and the far left. That would all change when Reagan took over.

The new administration’s hostility to international family planning programs came from two distinct ideological directions. Most obviously, Reagan was deeply enmeshed with an ascendant religious movement fiercely opposed to abortion and feminism and profoundly hostile to the United Nations, which had been long associated in evangelical lore with the anti-Christ. At the same time, while social conservatives provided the political impetus to reverse America’s long-standing support of international family planning, a new breed of so-called supply-side demographers cloaked Reagan’s population policy in intellectual legitimacy. These secular economic libertarians, many of whom were not actual demographers, objected to what they saw as the environmental hysteria and taste for social engineering underlying the whole population control project.

By the time Reagan was elected, the success of the “green revolution” had made the problem of rapid population growth seem less urgent. For several decades the Rockefeller and Ford foundations had poured money into developing high-yield crops for farmers in poor countries, an initiative that would revolutionize agriculture in Latin America and Asia. Combining new, more efficient breeds of wheat, rice, and corn with modern irrigation methods and chemical fertilizer, the green revolution vastly increased food output throughout the world. The Iowa-born agronomist Norman Borlaug, called the father of the green revolution, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work on the subcontinent, where his innovations led to dramatically enlarged harvests that staved off the mass starvation so many had feared.
⁵²

Thanks to these developments the alarming scenarios of the cold war neo-Malthusians never came to pass. Borlaug never believed that they made concern about overpopulation—what he called the “Population Monster”—obsolete. “[T]he frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only,” he said in his Nobel lecture.
⁵³
To the supply-side demographers, though, it seemed that human ingenuity would always outpace human need.

Perhaps the most well-known of these thinkers was Julian Simon, a polymathic professor of business administration and a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Simon’s quirky oeuvre included books such as
How to Start and Operate a Mail-Order Business
and
Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression,
but it was his contrarian work on population that made him famous. In his 1981 best seller,
The Ultimate Resource,
he made the optimistic argument that population growth
increases
wealth by increasing the supply of human inventiveness. “It is a simple fact that the source of improvements in productivity is the human mind, and a human mind is seldom found apart from a human body,” he wrote. “And because improvements—their invention and their adoption—come from people, it seems reasonable to assume that the amount of improvement depends on the number of people available to use their minds.”
⁵⁴

Taking aim at one of the central premises of environmentalism, Simon argued that the earth’s resources are essentially inexhaustible. One chapter was titled “Can the Supply of Natural Resources Really Be Infinite? Yes!” Another was “When Will We Run Out of Energy? Never!” His bête noir was Paul Ehrlich, with his predictions of imminent environmental doom. In 1980 the two men made a notorious bet. Simon wagered one thousand dollars that the price of five metals would be lower a decade hence, an indication that, contrary to what a Malthusian might predict, they weren’t becoming scarce. To the infinite glee of conservatives, Ehrlich took him up on it, and ten years later had to send his nemesis a check.
^b

Yet while Simon was clearly right about a few things—and the hyperbolic Ehrlich wrong about a great many—much of what he wrote was technolibertarian sophistry. He made astounding arguments against the conservation of energy or ecosystems. “When we use resources, then, we ought to ask whether our present use is at the expense of future generations,” he wrote. “The answer is a straightforward
no
. If the relative prices of natural resources can be expected to be lower for future generations than for us now... this implies that future generations will be faced by no greater economic scarcity than we are, but instead will have just as large or larger supplies of resources to tap, despite our present use of them.”
⁵⁵

Such ideas were risible to the vast majority of experts, but members of the Reagan administration embraced them. Simon became an adviser to James Buckley, undersecretary of state for security assistance, science, and technology (and brother of conservative eminence William F. Buckley Jr.), who soon tried to zero out family planning assistance. Secretary of State Alexander Haig quickly killed that idea. “Do you all know why alligators stomp on their eggs?” Haig reportedly asked during one meeting. “Because otherwise they’d be up to their asses in alligators.”
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Soon Buckley was pushed out, and he went to work at Radio Free Europe in Germany.

Having failed in their frontal attack, right-wingers in the administration worked to undermine international family planning from within—a pattern that would repeat itself with even more intensity during the administration of George W. Bush. First, hard-liners seeded USAID and the State Department with ideological operatives hostile to both abortion and contraception, and they channeled family planning grants to religious groups that shared their views.

In 1983, a group called the Family of the Americas Foundation was brought in to brief foreign aid officials in the main State Department auditorium. The outfit was the American affiliate of WOOMB, or the World Organization of the Ovulation Method Billings, which advocates a method of natural family planning developed by married Australian doctors John and Evelyn Billings in which women measure changes in their cervical mucus to determine their fertile periods. At the State Department, the Family of the Americas Foundation proposed setting up billboards outside of third world capitals reading: “When you’re wet, a baby you will get. When you’re dry, the sperm they will die.”

Attending officials were skeptical. One asked how the Billings method would work for women whose husbands came home drunk and demanded sex. The foundation’s answer: The woman could try sleeping at her mother-in-law’s house or, failing that, she could give her husband money to hire a prostitute.
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In June 1984, over the unanimous objection of the professional staff at USAID, the Family of the Americas Foundation received a grant of $1.1 million. It wasn’t an enormous amount of money by USAID standards, but it represented the beginning of a shift toward faith-based rather than evidence-based population policy, which would reach critical mass during the George W. Bush administration.

Agency staffers tried to make the foundation adhere to their “informed choice” guidelines, which required providers to offer information about other forms of birth control and, if requested, to make referrals. Refusing to submit to the rules other grantees operated under, a number of right-wing Catholic groups launched vehement protests—the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights even threatened to sue. Responding to these complaints, White House public liaison director Faith Whittlesey wrote a letter to foreign aid director Peter McPherson complaining that the guidelines could “affect the president’s credibility with the pro-life movement which has been so supportive.” She urged him not to let any conflict develop between “the administration’s pro-life policies and its population assistance policies.”
⁵⁸

Soon after, McPherson got phone calls from Vice President George Bush and Secretary of State George Shultz. Mercedes Arzú Wilson, the flamboyant head of the Family of the Americas Foundation, had recently visited both of them. Congressman Henry Hyde, one of her patrons in the GOP, had accompanied her on her visit to see Bush.

A consultant to the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family, Wilson came from a powerful family in Guatemala: Her brother, Álvaro Arzú, became the country’s president in 1996. “She would come in wearing about six pounds of gold and start talking about representing developing women of the world,” recalled Duff Gillespie, who was then deputy director of the Office of Population. “She was crazy as hell,” he said, and “would say things that were not only outrageous and untrue, but that were
so
outrageous and
so
untrue that any rational person she was talking to
knew
they were outrageous and untrue.”