“If we can get rid of enough people” the terrorist from El Paso wrote in his grotesque manifesto, “then our way of life can be more sustainable.” His sectarian outburst left little doubt as to who he meant by “us” and “our way of life.” Far-right eco-fascism presents its racist intent as concern for the environment, demonizes women of color for being “overpopulated,” and stokes fears of the end of racial “purity” and power. White. It uses the current specter of impending ecological collapse to reawaken a genocidal impulse as old as the United States, wiping out those deemed unfit to survive.
Only a few people champion the most gruesome expression of these beliefs. But today, arguments for population control are resurfacing in mainstream and even liberal discussions of limiting female fertility in the name of environmental sustainability.
This is not the first time that women’s bodies have been treated as a means to achieve a demographic goal. Remember those ugly initiatives, all common in their time, to forcibly sterilize Black, Latina and Indigenous womento treat Puerto Rican women as lab rats in contraceptive trials reduce the population of the island and to finance sterilization camps in India.
Invariably, even the most nefarious population control projects claim to serve an unassailable social good, such as poverty reduction or peace. After Hurricane Katrina, a representative from Louisiana proposed pay people who receive state aid $1,000 in exchange for sterilization. He explained the benefits of reducing the number of poor, citing the likelihood of more frequent hurricanes and the need to conserve resources.
The reproductive justice movement then emerged to redefine these policies as human rights violations. But today, the monster of population control has been reanimated, and those gains are once again under threat.
Most people now know not to use the discredited term “population control.” You also won’t hear mainstream voices talking about “black overpopulation.” Instead, listen to rights-based and social justice language that positions contraception and family planning as key strategies to reduce carbon emissions.
For example, a USAID blog entry for World Population Day links family planning to protecting “people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership,” before going on to go on to say that “by slowing rapid population growth, family planning can help reduce the number of poor.”
Today’s traditional population control advocates offer wholehearted support for reproductive rights. They point to a happy coincidence that women’s freedom to limit childbearing is also a key solution to climate change. Win-win propositions are inherently attractive, but we should be wary of solutions that ask little of those who caused the problem.
Women around the world will tell you that access to health care, family planning, contraception and abortion remain critical unmet needs. True reproductive justice, as designed by women who have long been targeted for population control, includes the ability to choose how many children to have and raise them in a safe and healthy environment. But those who seek to instrumentalize these basic rights as climate solutions too transparently and singularly segue into the benefits of reducing emissions from women with fewer children – not just any women, but the same poor black women. and brunettes who have always been accused of having “too many babies.”
Whatever their political underpinnings, population-based approaches to climate change are steeped in three lies.
The first is that the world’s population is exploding. The growth rate has actually been slowing since the 1960s; from 1990 to 2019, the world fertility rate fell from 3.2 births per woman to 2.5.
Another is that the main threat we face is the scarcity of resources, when in fact the problem is not just numbers, it is the unequal distribution of basic necessities. The planet cannot support 7.5 billion people exploit resources at the pace of the richestbut it could support many more if the wealthiest used a fairer share and if policies enabled poorer communities to end their overreliance on fragile ecosystems.
Finally, there is the myth that larger populations accelerate climate change, when a country’s carbon emissions cannot be extrapolated from its population size alone. The United States is less than 5% of the world’s population corn responsible for 15% of emissions. Meanwhile, countries in sub-Saharan Africa, commonly cited as top candidates for population control policies, are among the lowest carbon polluters.
This is obvious when you remember that climate chaos is a direct consequence of industrial policy, but recognizing the truth takes you to a very different set of strategies than encouraging poor women to have fewer babies. Scapegoating women ultimately diverts attention from the real culprits of our climate catastrophe: fossil fuel and energy companies, and their outrageous success in supplanting government regulation with subsidies and tax loopholes. It diverts attention from the need to change an economic system that demands the unlimited exploitation of resources and the pursuit of profit.
Policy makers must seize the change to push back against the idea that population control is a solution to climate breakdown. Most importantly, they can learn from the women on the front lines of climate change around the world, whose innovative solutions and calls for global economic justice are the real answer to climate breakdown.