In a new article, Frances Kissling, former president of Catholics for a Free Choice (1982-2007), addresses women's health and reproductive rights in the context of growing interest in addressing family planning in the context of population and climate change.
Recent research has demonstrated that among the many strategies that need to be brought to bear to reduce global warming, one of the most humane and cost-effective would be meeting the global need for contraception. Two hundred million women worldwide are without it as they try to prevent becoming pregnant.
But if President Obama tries to include family planning in any attempts to address climate change, he's likely to face another thorny battle with the religious activists who supported his election. Religious leaders, even evangelicals, have jumped on the climate-control bandwagon but remain at best unwilling to admit the important role that family planning could play in achieving a smaller human footprint on the environment. At worst, they are actively opposed to expanding contraceptive possibilities for women in the developing world.
A study by Thomas Wire of the London School of Economics, "Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost," commissioned by the U.K.'s Optimum Population Trust, demonstrates the impact that improved access to birth control could have on the planet:
Each $7.00 spent on basic family planning over the next four decades will reduce CO2 emissions by more than a ton. To achieve the same results with low carbon technologies would cost a minimum of $32.00. If we just meet that need that women have already expressed for fewer children and access to contraception, we will save 34 gigatons between now and 2050, equivalent to nearly six times the annual emissions of the US.
Were this 1960 or even 1990, there would be understandable and widespread opposition to the idea that the way to solve environmental problems is through contraception. During that era, conventional wisdom held that the world faced imminent crisis unless we drastically reduced the number of people competing for land and food, and it became easy to justify draconian measures to control female fertility. Women's rights activists, for example, had long reported on the negative effects that an obsession with reducing population had on women.
In 1983, the United Nations awarded China its first annual Population Prize, willingly overlooking the massive human rights violations that accompanied China's one-child policy. Massive forced abortions, sterilization following the birth of the first child, houses bulldozed to find and punish those who violated the policy offended the conscience of women's rights advocates. Less draconian policies in Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh and India were cited by human rights advocates as examples of what happens when having "too many people" is defined as the problem -- and reducing their numbers is seen as an easier solution than compelling those of us in the developed world to reduce our consumption, or forcing corporations to stop clear-cutting forests.
Family-planning programs in many developing countries that received foreign assistance from the developed world were often sub-standard, offering women no choice but whatever contraceptive was being pushed at the time, usually a long-acting method that women could not control. Developing country governments, eager for the funds, set targets that poorly paid family-planning workers had to meet in order to get a bonus. If they could convince a woman or her husband to get sterilized the bonus was even higher. After all, the experts admitted, consumption and corporate greed were responsible for a hell of a lot more environmental degradation than poor people having kids -- but stopping Japanese and American lumber companies from chopping down trees in Brazil was too difficult. And, even if population programs were occasionally coercive, many believed they were in poor people's interests as fewer babies meant less poverty and more opportunity for women and families in the developing world.
But the other side of the coin, even in those early years, was always the undeniable fact that women wanted family planning. It improved their lives. As individual family size dropped, families were able to send girls as well as boys to school, girls got married later, women entered the workforce and their physical health improved.
Steve Sinding, former director of USAID's Population and Reproductive Health program and an ardent advocate of rights-based family-planning programs, stresses that such programs have been a global success story, comparable to the Green Revolution and the eradication of smallpox. Along with four former USAID program directors, he issued a recent report that describes successes between 1965 and 2005. Excluding China, they note that during those 40 years, the use of family planning by women of reproductive age in the developing world rose from 10 percent to 53 percent and average family size from six children to just over three.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/09/29/climate_change/
The UN estimates that the humanitarian crisis caused by the recent floods in Pakistan's Indus Valley is larger than the combined effects of the three worst natural disasters of the past decade. Some experts attribute the severity of the floods to climate change.