The Government of Canada has issued a report concluding that the country’s mistreatment of Indigenous women constitutes genocide, citing, among other parodies, non-consensual sterilizations. In North America, various biases motivate coercive population control policies; in Asia, where most forced sterilizations take place today, the unfounded alarmism of overpopulation acts as the main motivation. Whatever its justification, there is never any moral or practical justification for forced sterilization.
In late 2018, sixty Indigenous Canadian women claimed to have been subjected to forced sterilizations and deposit a class action lawsuit against the health care system in the province of Saskatchewan. New allegations continued to be made in 2019, and a recent Account claims that an involuntary sterilization took place as recently as last December.
The United States has its own grim history of forced sterilizations. Nearly seventy thousand individuals were forcibly sterilized in the 20th century under “eugenics” legislation in the United States. Eugenics was the pseudoscience of trying to improve the population by preventing people considered to have inferior genes from having children. Marginalized groups such as Native Americans were particularly vulnerable. In the 1960s and 1970s, one in four Native American women suffered sterilization, this figure reaching 50% between 1970 and 1976.
Recent cases of forced sterilization in the United States have targeted prisoners, echoing earlier eugenics policies aimed at eliminating criminal behavior. Tennessee only banned the forced sterilization of inmates last year. In 2014, California pass legislation to prevent prisons from sterilizing prisoners without consent. More than a quarter of tubal ligation sterilization surgeries in California prisons from 2004 to 2013 were performed without the inmate’s consent.
As disturbing as the reports of coercive population control in the United States and Canada are, such abuses are happening on a much larger scale today in India and China.
In 2016, India’s Supreme Court ruled that “informed consent is often not obtained from patients before carrying out procedures” in mass sterilization camps and directed government to remove them. However, a investigation last year found that the camps continue to thrive the same way they did before the 2016 ruling. And the US State Department National reports on human rights practices for 2018 found that “forced abortions and sterilizations” continue to take place in China, which has relaxed its “one-child policy”, limiting families to one child, to a “two-child policy” from 2016 .
The victims of recent cases of forced sterilization in the United States and Canada are marginalized groups: Indigenous women in Canada and incarcerated, often ethnic minority women in the United States. Fanaticism and paternalism are probably at the root of these abuses.
The primary motivation for coercive population control measures in China and India is different: concerns about so-called overpopulation. In the 1970s, alarmist writings like the Club of Rome report The limits of growth and Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich’s book The population bomb helped spread the fear that overpopulation would deplete resources and lead to disastrous shortages. This fear funneled money into population control. In the 1970s, encouraged by tens of millions of dollars lent by the World Bank, the Swedish International Development Authority and the United Nations Population Fund, India launched large-scale sterilization efforts. These efforts culminated in 1975, when the Prime Minister suspended civil liberties in a national “emergency” and sterilized more than six million people in a single year. In 1979, China instituted its infamous one-child policy, inspired by The limits of growth.
It should be noted that in addition to fears of overcrowding, there are also cases of prejudice against ethnic or religious minorities in China and India. Many victims of forced abortions under China’s two-child policy are minorities, such as Kazakhs and Uyghurs. These groups practice Islam, a minority religion that the government valued insufficiently Chinese. And in India last year, a labor minister from one of India’s two main political parties opined that the government must formulate “a law concerning population control” to save India “from the growth” of the non-Hindu population. Yet many victims of coercive population control in China and India do not belong to any minority group.
While abuses alone are reason enough to oppose coercive policies, the premise that “overpopulation” is a problem is incorrect. It’s quite the opposite, in fact. New research shows that population growth goes hand in hand with more abundant resources.
Consider the time it takes for the average person to earn enough money to buy one unit in a basket of fifty commodities – the “time price” of those items, so to speak. Simon’s abundance index, co-authored with Marian Tupy, found that between 1980 and 2018, the price of time decreased by almost 1% for every 1% increase in population. In other words, each additional human being born seems to make resources proportionally more abundant for the rest of us.
Moreover, economic development is driving down birth rates without the need for drastic population control measures. It is now well documented that as countries get richer and people escape poverty, they tend to opt for smaller families. This phenomenon is called the fertility transition.
In 1979, the year the one-child policy began, China’s birth rate has been just under three children per woman. China’s economy has grown dramatically since it adopted policies of greater economic freedom in 1978, and as the country has grown wealthier, its fertility rate has fallen. The decline was fully in line with trends in neighboring countries that have also experienced rapid economic growth and do not coercively limit family sizes.
In India, where liberalization Economic reforms started only in 1992, much later than in Chinathe birth rate has also fallen, although less dramatically. This change happened as India got richer, but not as much as China. As with China, India’s declining birth rate is in line with trends seen in neighboring countries, most of which have seen even steeper declines as their economies have grown. In fact, among India’s neighbors, only Pakistan and war-torn Afghanistan have higher birth rates, although their birth rates are also falling.
Overpopulation hysteria is just as baseless a reason for forcibly limiting reproduction as ethnic or religious bigotry and the pseudoscience of eugenics. Whether motivated by a desire to prevent marginalized people from having children or to reduce the population, coercive population control remains abhorrent.
Chelsea Follett is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity and editor of HumanProgress.org.
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