Feminists For Choice

Whenever you bring up the issue of government-imposed birth restrictions (such as the One Child Policy in China), the immediate reaction from both sides of the political spectrum is condemnation. But there is the very practical matter of population growth to consider. As Andrea so aptly pointed out in her post about the Duggars last week, the global population is estimated to hit the 8 billion mark in the next 15 years. And a new article in Reuters says that we will hit the 9 billion mark in 2050. That’s a lot of people, who all need to eat, breath, shit, and drink. It’s only logical to wonder if the Earth can sustain that many people. According to the Reuters article:

Birth control and new technologies — not lifestyle change alone — may be needed to head off a combined climate, food and energy crunch later this century, said the head of Britain’s science academy Martin Rees.

The world’s population is expected to rise by one third to more than 9 billion people by 2050, and may keep growing, fuelling concern about food and energy shortages and a more difficult task to curb greenhouse gases heating the planet.

But analysts and environment and development groups rarely mention population control, which smacks of totalitarianism, in U.N.-led climate talks meant to agree in December a broader, more ambitious pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

Rees has a good point – population control is definitely going to be a necessity if we are going to slow the impacts of global warming and the depletion of Earth’s natural resources. The question, however, becomes how those population controls should be implemented.

I would hope that any feminist worth her salt would oppose mandatory sterilizations or forced abortions. Both measures, as well as birth quotas, would run counter to the entire foundation of the feminist and pro-choice movements, which is self-determination. However, we are going to need to increase access to birth control and other family planning services all over the world if we want to give women options. Education about birth control options is going to be key. And the corporations that manufacture birth control drugs and the female condom are going to have to make them more affordable, but you know that they won’t do it without a good deal of pressure from the government.

All of this really needs to be considered from the standpoint of our ethical obligation to the planet and each other. If governments do impose restrictions on family size and reproduction, do those restrictions serve a higher purpose by ensuring that there are enough resources to support future generations? The British philosopher Thomas Robert Malthus seemed to think so. In the mid-1800′s, Malthus argued that there was a limit to the Earth’s carrying capacity, and that famines and disease epidemics were a good thing because they caused the population to shrink. His argument can be boiled down to the idea that one dead person now saves ten in crunch. Malthus was a proponent of eugenics, and he thought that humans should view reproduction the same way that we view it for animals – as something to be controlled.

I personally think Malthus’s ideas are racist, and I think that the idea of imposing birthing limits would easily be exploited to curtail population growth in African, Latin, and Asian countries. But I also think that we do need to stop population growth, because plants and nonhuman animals have just as much right to exist as humans do. They’re not the ones responsible for poisoning the water and the air – humans are. So I’m in a moral quandry. How can pro-choice advocates support self-determination and curb population growth at the same time. I’d love to hear your ideas.