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‘Population bomb’? Policy in other countries

Governments have been trying to influence fertility and population growth rates since before Thomas Malthus started publishing his ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’ in 1798. Malthus worried that population growth would outpace the earth’s ability to produce resources for human survival and recommended that governments find ways to repress it. His followers circulated illegal manuals on birth control in the early 19th century.

Population control campaigners got a boost in the early 20th century due to the rise of eugenics movements, which were widely popular before becoming tarnished by their association with Nazi Germany. Birth control activists and eugenicists formed an uncomfortable alliance in their quest to influence fertility rates. American feminist Margaret Sanger, for example, teamed up with eugenics organisations such as the American Eugenics Society in her quest to promote birth control, even though she disagreed with many of their positions.

The 1968 best-selling book, The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich, argued that the world could not feed itself. It revived the population control movement. Population-bomb hysteria took root in much of the world between the 1970s and 1980s. Again, the obsession made strange bedfellows of the political left and the right. The left worried that the world would be doomed because of overpopulation in general. The right in South Africa and prejudiced elites in other countries worried about the overpopulation of black people, or poor people, or other ‘undesirable groups’, in particular.

In many countries, ruling elites imposed coercive population control policies designed to cut birth rates, especially among the poor. India forcibly sterilised millions during the Indian emergency of 1975–77, often under threat of violence or destruction to their homes. In 1978 China established its one-child policy, which continues to inflict draconian punishments on families with more than one child to this day.

Often the policies were (and, in cases such as China, still are) enforced with little regard for differences in individual preferences. An Indian official is reported to have said population control was a necessity for the masses, adding that ‘it is not what they want, but what is good for them’. An official in French Indochina said the problem with the natives was that ‘they are born too much and they don’t die enough’.[1]

The perils of China’s one-child policy

Through its one-child policy, China decided to restrict married, urban couples to having only one child. The policy is officially enforced through fines and other disincentives. The fines – referred to as ‘social-maintenance fees’ – can be several times a city’s annual income. Second children are also often denied a household registration, a hukou, which entitles a person to basic rights such as education. When parents can’t afford to pay the fine, the government often resorts to grave measures, such as destroying people’s homes or forcing women to undergo abortions and sterilisation.

One particularly violent and horrific case made international headlines early in 2012 after a leaked photograph went viral. The graphic image showed a 27-year-old woman, Feng Jianmei, lying exhausted next to her dead seven-month-old foetus after Chinese officials kidnapped, drugged and forced her to have an abortion. The photo sparked widespread outrage and protests. Several Chinese organisations are now lobbying the government to replace the one-child policy with a two-child policy.

Many people have had their houses torn down and their belongings ransacked for breaching the policy. Others have had their children confiscated and sent to orphanages. Government bureaucrats have learned that foreigners will pay thousands to adopt Chinese babies, and they’re happy to cash in on the process.

Despite all the attention China has received for the grave human rights violations associated with the policy, Chinese officials are adamant that China still has too many people, and that the policy continues to be necessary. They credit it with averting some 400 million births. But that is a wild exaggeration. As in most of the rest of the world, fertility was declining before the programme was introduced, and it would have continued to decline in response to economic growth and the increased availability of contraception.

China’s policy has also had many tragic unintended consequences. A typical Chinese family today consists of four grandparents, two parents and one child. As a result, China is now facing a demographic and economic disaster – an aging population, a rising dependency ratio, and a shrinking workforce.

The policy has also resulted in a lopsided sex ratio due to widespread female infanticide. 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.