Our Way Out by Marq De Villiers

Author:Marq De Villiers [de Villiers, Marq]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-358-4
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2011-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

HOW TO DEVISE POLICY?

So how, in the middle of this swirling debate, in the face of apocalyptic forecasts on the one side and airy dismissals on the other, are we to devise policy?

In 1994, the UN International Conference on Population and Development acknowledged the need to slow global population growth, but could suggest no realistic way of achieving it. Instead, in the wonderfully platitudinous language of such conferences, it suggested a number of initiatives, some of which would reduce population, and others, equally necessary and fruitful, that would increase it. They included aiming for gender equality; eradicating poverty and hunger; achieving universal primary education; reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; combating AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; and ensuring environmental sustainability.

One reason for this bureaucratic tippy-toeing is that official attempts to control population growth have often veered into social engineering and worse. Author Matthew Connelly, in the disturbing polemic Fatal Misconception, documents some of the horrors that result – in extreme cases, the forced sterilization of “undesirables” and those deemed genetically inferior. All population control projects, Connelly declares, look at human beings not as individuals but as aggregate “populations” that can be shaped through the combined forces of faith and science. “That is why nativism, eugenics, pronatalism, and coercive or manipulative forms of ‘family planning’ share a common history,” he writes.

Connelly says that his book is the story of how some people systematically devalued both the sanctity of life and the autonomy of the individual,

how some people tried to control others without having to answer to anyone. They could be ruthless and manipulative in ways that were, and are, shocking. Perhaps we would expect no less of nativists or eugenicists, who assumed that people unlike themselves must be “beaten men from beaten races.” Yet many more actually had the best of intentions, hoping to reduce poverty and prevent conflict … even family planning could be a form of population control when proponents aimed to plan other people’s families, demeaning those targeted as “acceptors,” including tens of millions of poor people who were paid money to accept sterilization. No less manipulative were those, mostly churches, who denied hundreds of millions access to contraceptives and abortion because they wanted them to have more babies.7

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