The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (8 page)

The vicissitudes of the United States’ policies on birth control and abortion have always had at least as much impact abroad as they do domestically. Americans don’t pay much attention to what goes on beyond their borders, giving those working on issues of sexual health abroad a freer hand than at home, whether that means blanketing neighborhoods in other countries with packets of pills or channeling money to abstinence-promoting, condom-excoriating missionaries. American officials have introduced safe abortion into foreign countries, and they’ve interfered to make abortion more perilous. The United States pushed to create the United Nations Population Fund, the world’s premier agency promoting reproductive health, in 1969. Decades later, the United States government tried to destroy it.

By then it was in some ways too late: The family planning infrastructure that America did so much to build had taken on a life and a legitimacy of its own. At the same time, the forces of cultural globalization—undermining sexual taboos and celebrating individual rights above community attachments—continue to be associated with Americanization. Thus a country like Nicaragua can pass abortion legislation that mirrors the position of the party then in power in the United States and still spin it as a blow against Northern imperialism.

T
he global spread of family planning has vastly changed the world. Even as the planet’s population increased nearly fourfold in the twentieth century, from 1.6 billion to 6.1 billion people, fertility rates have declined sharply in most countries, and smaller families have become the norm. “In the 1950s, women in less developed regions had an average of six children,” wrote UN demographer Joseph Chamie. “[T]oday’s average is closer to three. By midcentury, the global fertility average is anticipated to be close to replacement levels of around two children per couple.”
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There are many reasons women are having fewer children, but many studies show that a substantial part of the decrease is due to increased access to contraception, now used by more than half the couples in the world.
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In some countries effective family planning programs have been a great boon to development. Falling birthrates, which for a time increase the percentage of working adults to dependent children in a society, create a window where a greater share of the population is productive. Demographers call this the “demographic dividend,” and it can be a major spur to development. Harvard economists David Bloom, David Canning, and Jaypee Sevilla have argued that the demographic dividend created by East Asia’s postwar embrace of family planning “was essential to East Asia’s extraordinary economic achievements, accounting for as much as one-third of its ‘economic miracle.’ ”
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(The Philippines, conversely, is the only big East Asian country to eschew family planning, and the only one whose economy never took off.)

Perhaps most important, the global family planning movement has—often inadvertently, and in the face of great internal resistance—given rise to a new vision of universal women’s rights that has changed both international law and individual lives. At the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, more than 180 countries adopted a program of action proclaiming, “Advancing gender equality and equity and the empowerment of women, and the elimination of all kinds of violence against women, and ensuring women’s ability to control their own fertility, are cornerstones of population and development-related programs.... The full and equal participation of women in civil, cultural, economic, political and social life, at the national, regional and international levels, and the eradication of all forms of discrimination on grounds of sex, are priority objectives of the international community.”
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This was a remarkable statement (and to some social conservatives an appalling one). Like most UN declarations it remains more a goal than a reality. Given the persistence of sexual oppression and even terror in much of the world, the half a million women who die due to pregnancy complications each year, the millions more who have their genitals cut in the name of purity, and the plague of illegal abortion that fills hospital wards from Nicaragua to Nigeria, the Cairo program of action can today seem like empty verbiage. But just as peacekeeping remains a crucial endeavor despite the endurance of war, and human rights law matters despite constant violations, the global commitment to reproductive rights represents an important attempt to unite humankind against an ageless scourge: the wholesale devaluation of women.

There have been setbacks and backlashes, some caused by right-wing forces in the United States, others by related movements in countries such as Nicaragua. In all likelihood there will be more, since fundamentalism and feminism are both spurred by the upheavals of globalization. Still, slowly, in frustrating fits and starts, a relatively new international ideal of women’s rights as human rights is altering laws and societies in subtle but systematic ways, forcing changes to discriminatory inheritance laws and patterns of education, draconian abortion bans, child marriages, and other sources of female misery. The attempt to liberate half the world’s people from the intertwined tyrannies of culture and biology is one of the least heralded but most ambitious global initiatives in history.

M
argaret Sanger was well aware of the emancipatory potential of reproductive rights. “Women can attain freedom only by concrete, definite knowledge of themselves, a knowledge based on biology, physiology and psychology,” she wrote in her aptly titled 1922 book
The Pivot of Civilization
. Birth control, she argued, “is no negative philosophy concerned solely with the number of children brought into this world. It is not merely a question of population. Primarily it is the instrument of liberation and human development.”
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When international family planning entered the mainstream of American politics in the 1960s, though, liberation and human development were hardly foremost on the minds of its proponents. Some of the men—and they were mostly men—who created America’s international population policy would develop decidedly feminist sympathies. But they were driven above all by a deep concern, sometimes shading into panic, about overpopulation. The international reproductive rights movement would extend and enrich the lives of millions of women around the world, but it began in a spirit of grim Malthusian fear.

P
eril is imminent,” warned Hugh Moore, the founder of the Dixie Cup Company and an early family planning activist, in his 1954 self-published booklet
The Population Bomb
. The cover of one version of
The Population Bomb
shows a globe so teeming with people that it resembles an orange with a fuzzy rot spreading over its rind. A fuse comes out of the top, but a giant scissors labeled “Population Control” is poised to snip it. On the inside cover were endorsements from Arthur Krock, the award-winning journalist known as “the dean of Washington newsmen,” and famed judge Learned Hand. Moore distributed his pamphlet to ten thousand influential people whose names he took from
Who’s Who
.

Like other advocates of population control, Moore was motivated by the anticommunist anxiety of his day. Under the heading “War, Communism and World Population,” he wrote, “Hundreds of millions of people in the world are hungry. In their desperation they are increasingly susceptible to Communist propaganda and may be enticed into violent action.” America’s aid program, conceived as “a means of helping poor and hungry people, of combating Communism and of preserving peace, is doomed to failure as long as it disregards the present unprecedented world population explosion.”
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This was a new spin on an old analysis, one that dates back to the British clergyman Thomas Robert Malthus. Writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, he warned that population growth would inevitably outstrip food production, resulting in widespread suffering and starvation. Should mankind’s own vices, along with “sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague,” fail to kill enough, “gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.”
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The pious, conservative Malthus was no birth control supporter; instead, he argued for abstinence, late marriage, and the repeal of England’s poor laws, which, by allowing the indigent to start families, “increase population without increasing the food for its support.”
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Malthusian arguments would enjoy several vogues in the next hundred and fifty years, inspiring the earliest proponents of contraception. In the 1860s a group of birth control advocates founded the Neo-Malthusian League in London; they won the support of John Stuart Mill and, decades later, the psychologist Havelock Ellis, who would become Sanger’s longtime lover. Neo-Malthusian ideas influenced the anarchist feminist Emma Goldman and Sanger herself, though both were always more concerned with women’s individual rights.

Sanger was a complicated figure, a groundbreaking feminist who transcended some of the prejudices of her time while remaining mired in others. She operated in an era when eugenics, often a cousin of Matlhusian doctrine, was considered a respectable pursuit on both the left and the right, and rarely hesitated to invoke eugenic arguments for birth control, even going so far as to advocate coercive contraception for those with “gross” mental deficiencies.
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Describing a conference she had convened in Zurich, she wrote that attendees were unanimous in the “cool scientific conviction” that contraception was on the way to being perfected “as an instrument in racial progress.”
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At another point, she spoke of birth control leading to the creation of “a race of thoroughbreds.”
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It does not excuse such language to say that it sounded very different in Sanger’s context than it does today. As Ellen Chesler, Sanger’s sympathetic but not uncritical biographer, wrote, “As had happened briefly before World War I, eugenics became a popular craze in this country—promoted in newspapers and magazines as a kind of secular religion.... The great majority of American colleges and universities introduced formal courses in the subject, and sociologists who embraced it took on what one historian has called a ‘priestly role.’ ”
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Liberal adherents included W. E. B. DuBois, John Maynard Keynes, and the American socialist and pacifist Norman Thomas.
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Many eugenicists opposed birth control, fearing that it would lead genetically desirable women to have too few children. Indeed, right-wing pronatalists were as apt to adopt eugenic rhetoric as left-wing proponents of contraception. In his book
Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population,
the historian Matthew Connelly wrote of how one Catholic bishop, debating Sanger, warned that “the races from northern Europe,” whom he called “the finest type of people,” were “doomed to extinction, unless each family produces at least four children.”
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Nevertheless, as Chesler wrote, Sanger “deliberately courted the power of eugenically inclined academics and scientists to blunt the attacks of religious conservatives against her.”
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She was not, in fact, a racist, believing that inherent ability and intelligence varied among individuals rather than among ethnic groups, but at times she used dubious language that reeks of racism to modern ears.
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Her words would provide rich fodder for the contemporary antiabortion movement, eager to tar family planning as a tool of genocide.

T
he stench of Nazism would eventually leave eugenics discredited among decent people. Ironically, though, in the aftermath of World War II, Malthus himself came to seem more prescient than ever. Thanks to immunizations, antibiotics, pesticides, and Western shipments of food and fertilizer to the developing world, “sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague” were curtailed like never before. Death rates fell sharply, without a corresponding drop in births. World population grew at a rate no one had ever seen before—between 1930 and 1960 the number of people on earth increased by 50 percent, from two billion to three billion. Birthrates in Europe had been falling for centuries, but before World War II most population growth was nonetheless in the developed world. The postwar population boom was different; most of it took place in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
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As the scope of the demographic change came into focus in the 1950s, overpopulation captured the attention of a number of highly influential figures. They were motivated by national security fears (too often tinged with racism) of rebellion in unruly, underfed nations, but some were also driven by compassion. They believed that the world’s burgeoning numbers were making poor countries poorer and undermining the effectiveness of foreign aid.

John D. Rockefeller III, grandson of the legendary industrialist, was one of the altruistic ones. Rockefeller had a passion for Asia: As a naval officer, he worked on postwar policy concerning Japan and was later a cultural consultant to future secretary of state John Foster Dulles during the Japanese peace treaty negotiations. At the time a postwar baby boom had made overpopulation a major concern in that densely settled island nation. Unemployment was high, and illegal abortion was epidemic. (In an effort to stem the damage caused by these procedures, in 1948 Japan became the first nation to legalize abortion and sterilization.)
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Rockefeller’s experiences there and elsewhere in Asia convinced him that population growth was retarding development and exacerbating human suffering. In 1952 he founded the Population Council, a nonprofit organization that would eventually help build birth control programs throughout the world.