Over the past 100 years, the popularity of population control in the United States has had its ups and downs. Once seen as a responsible way to protect the planet and ensure its future viability, population control was later revealed to be a coercive tool used to limit the reproductive freedom of low-income and minority groups.
Jade S. Sasser, assistant professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of California, Riverside, has spent nearly a decade studying the history of population politics and how it is interpreted today. According to her, population control is far from a thing of the past; instead, some of its core messages have been repackaged to appeal to a younger generation of American activists.
The resulting narrative links demographic trends to environmentalism and sexual agency, positioning “empowered” women as key crusaders in the fight against climate change. If women are encouraged and provided with the necessary materials to control and limit their reproduction, or so it is believed, they and the planet will reap the benefits.
But there is a problem, Sasser said. Some women remain disproportionately targeted by such a narrative, most of them poor women living in the Global South or in developing countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Sasser’s first-hand experiences with young women in the Global South – and their American activist counterparts – form the backbone of her new book, “In barren ground: population control and women’s rights in the age of climate change” (NYU Press). Described by its author as a “cautionary tale”, the book takes a critical look at the positioning of population growth as the source of the climate crisis.
“I hope the book helps people understand these issues as part of a more complex system,” Sasser said. “Connecting population control and the environment may seem like common sense, but what we think of as ‘common sense’ is never actually common sense; in this case it is shaped by people like scientists who produce the information we learn in school, and what we see and hear in the media. For decades, policymakers, scientists, and environmentalists in particular have worked hard to make population control a matter of common sense.
A former Peace Corps volunteer in Madagascar, Sasser spent nearly two years observing a series of population advocacy trainings and workshops, including those run by a now-defunct Sierra Club program known as the name of the Global Population and Environment Program, or GPEP. The program primarily targeted young American women for membership “through optimistic approaches connecting youth energy, the language of women’s empowerment and justice, and policy-relevant science,” Sasser wrote.
Although based in the United States, the program has focused its efforts on women in the Global South. He emphasized the importance of what Sasser calls “sexual stewardship” – achieved through the use of contraceptives and other family planning techniques – both for the overall empowerment of women and for the relief of suffering. ‘environment. But when hard data is considered, Sasser said, the flawed simplicity of GPEP’s approach to tackling climate change becomes stark.
“The countries that emit the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year are not those with the highest fertility rates,” she said. “In 2011, China, the United States, Russia, India and Japan emitted the highest greenhouse gas emissions each year; each of these countries has low fertility rates” compared to those countries that population advocacy groups like GPEP tend to focus on.
Moreover, in those same countries with high fertility rates – places like Nigeria, Tanzania and Ethiopia – national greenhouse gas emissions do not even rank in the top 75 globally. At best, the disparity points to a deeply misguided attempt to tackle climate change by placing the onus to do so on women in the South.
According to Sasser, the goals of advocacy groups like the GPEP ignore the complex realities and long-term goals of the young women they claim to serve.
“Women in the Global South are portrayed as homogenous poor people, simultaneously burdened by environmental problems, poverty and their own excessive fertility,” she said of discourses of sexual stewardship like the one promoted by the GPEP. Such portrayals do not paint an accurate picture of the young women Sasser met during her stay in Madagascar, where she worked in a village as a community health counselor, teaching sex education to an audience of mostly adolescent girls.
“I was in my mid-twenties during my time in the Peace Corps, and suddenly I was surrounded by young girls and women who had already been pregnant and breastfed – many had already had abortions at some point – and I realized that my knowledge was completely inadequate compared to their real experiences,” she said. “I needed to learn from them.”
Her experiences with these same Malagasy women later inspired Sasser to delve deeper into the history of modern population control, which she says began to resurface as a concept increasingly tied to climate change in the mid-2000s. His research revealed the roots of population control in 16th and 17th century Europe, as well as its subsequent synthesis into a coherent theory, often used to discredit the importance of welfare policies, by Thomas Malthus.
She also delved into America’s history of population control, tracing its mid-century national origins to a series of efforts to distribute contraceptives to other countries as part of international aid programs. Meanwhile, as birth control became a scarce commodity in the United States, Sasser said, “where middle-class white women fought for the right to limit their fertility, poor women and women of color fought forced sterilization and other imposed means of coercive fertility”. regulation.” According to contemporary narratives of population control, what remains at stake for women in the Global South is not much different.
Sasser said she remains a strong supporter of all women’s access to contraceptives and family planning services, as long as they are situated “in the context of comprehensive and broader sexual and reproductive health services.” It is the reframing of population control as a social justice movement that she finds fault with. Yet she’s not entirely surprised by the movement’s appeal among young activists, many of whom favor individual action as solutions to large-scale environmental problems.
“When it comes to climate change, it’s much easier to point to someone on the other side of the world and say that’s their problem,” Sasser added. But such a strategy ignores the larger drivers of environmental destruction: namely, state and corporate resource extraction and pollution, the effects of military action and occupation, and the fossil fuel consumption practices of the wealthy, to name a few.
If young Americans really wanted to feel like they had an impact, Sasser added, they would focus on adjusting their own drinking behaviors and habits while also advocating for large-scale change. Simple changes like eating less meat and dairy, taking public transportation, shopping locally, and ending our addiction to fast fashion are all accessible ways to contribute to the greater good of the planet.
“It’s lazy to say that population control will solve climate change,” Sasser said. “It’s really simplistic thinking that ignores the complexity of resource consumption, not to mention the complexity of population dynamics; it also allows powerful and problematic players like the military and oil companies to get off the hook. Let’s not be lazy in our thoughts or in our actions: the only reduction in human resources has never been the solution.
Sasser’s research for “On Infertile Ground” has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation.