Tafelberg Short: The Politics of Pregnancy. Rhoda Kadalie

By some accounts, there are more than 20% more boys than girls under the age of four. One can only shudder to think what might happen when they grow up and struggle to find girlfriends and wives. Male youth demographic bulges are often associated with wars, revolutions and instability.

      Planning other people’s families: International agencies at work

      China’s is a particularly stark example of a national population control policy, but it was not only national governments that sought to slash birth rates. Numerous international foundations and non-governmental organisations – such as those bankrolled by the Ford family foundation, John D Rockefeller and Clarence Gamble – jumped on the bandwagon and experimented with ways to limit population growth, particularly in poor countries. For instance, the Population Council, a research institute founded by Rockefeller, devoted large sums of money to studies of contraception that sought ‘some simple measure which will be available for the wife of the slum-dweller, the peasant, or the coolie, though dull of mind’.[2]

      Injectable contraceptives were exported to poor countries long before they were approved safe for use in rich countries. And millions of intra-uterine contraceptive devices (IUDs) were distributed in poor countries even though they were known to cause infections and sterility.[3] ‘Perhaps the individual patient is expendable in the general scheme of things, particularly if the infection she acquires is sterilising but not lethal,’ a participant at a Rockefeller-funded conference is said to have argued.[4]

      International organisations promoted birth control as a way to lift people out of poverty, save the planet, and prevent wars over scarce resources. Yet family planning often became a means to plan other people’s families, regardless of their desires and choices. Many of the methods used were manipulative, deceptive and ruthless. Tens of millions of poor people were paid to submit to sterilisation, for example. Millions more were administered contraceptives without their full knowledge.

      A 2008 book by Matthew Connelly titled Fatal Misconception provides the definitive account of population control policies and the international movement. As one review puts it: ‘Much of the evil done in the name of slowing population growth had its roots in an uneasy coalition between feminists, humanitarians and environmentalists who wished to help the unwillingly fecund, and the racists, eugenicists and militarists who wished to see particular patterns of reproduction, regardless of the desires of those involved.’[5]

      Many birth controllers, Connelly argues, knew well that improvement of the status of women through economic development, education, and human rights would be effective in reducing birth rates. Indeed, birth rates have fallen across the world as women have become richer and gained education and rights. But all too often, population-bomb hysterics lacked the patience to pursue these far more difficult, slow and expensive goals, choosing instead to promote coercive and indiscriminate policies with a staggering human cost.