Should We Control World Population? by Diana Coole

Author:Diana Coole [Coole, Diana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509523443
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2018-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

Reproductive rights as human rights

Liberalism’s individualist defence of personal freedom is closely related to its protection of basic human rights. Within this theoretical framework, reproductive rights raise some specific questions. Whose rights are they? Are they already covered by the universal category of basic (fundamental) rights, in which case can gendered aspects be deduced, or are they specifically women’s rights? In the context of population control, how do reproductive rights stand in relation to other rights such as the right to develop? Are reproductive rights in principle antithetical to political interventions in fertility choices, regardless of demographic or development outcomes? Do population policies necessarily violate reproductive rights? To address such questions, it is helpful to distinguish between different kinds of reproductive rights (see below). But first it is useful to understand the importance they assumed in response to charges levelled against population control programmes by the IWM. Four main objections may be identified here.

The first echoes a wider post-colonial critique of population control, which denies that there is a population problem at all. Instead, population’s problematization is understood as a political construction. Proponents of this objection rarely discuss numbers or biophysical limits. Rather, they identify demographic, development and environmental discourses as discursive strategies within a global power struggle. Hardt and Negri encapsulate this judgement in Multitude, where they argue that most ‘discussions of demographic explosions and population crises . . . are not really oriented toward either bettering the lives of the poor or maintaining a sustainable total global population in line with the capacities of the planet’. Instead, their supporters are ‘concerned primarily with which social groups reproduce and which do not’.11 Western population politics since the mid-eighteenth century is perceived to have been dominated by this colonial, eugenic logic.12 The feminist dimension of this critique maintains that worrying about overpopulation is a way of rationalizing control over women’s bodies. Betsy Hartmann exemplifies this view when she argues that the population (qua environmental) problem is an ‘over-exaggerated’ myth deployed to justify abusing women’s rights.13

While this objection focuses on fertility control, with feminist critics stressing its implications for women’s reproductive rights, it is relevant to mention that this constructivist, post-colonial position is applied also to a second key demographic variable, namely migration, which is addressed in similar terms. Immigration control and its justifications are opposed in this case to open borders, equated with a right to free movement. While this is too vast a topic to be considered here, it is important to appreciate the challenges it poses for national stabilization population policies inasmuch as these logically imply balanced migration (i.e. zero net gains), which social justice opponents consider immoral and economists undesirable.14

The implication is that it is not only unnecessary but also politically too dangerous to pursue demographic goals, given the sinister geopolitical interests and dubious morality of elites. Such concerns sound a salutary warning about the ease with which anxieties (commonly parsed as ‘fear of the other’) about reproduction, gender and ethnicity can be co-opted for reprehensible political purposes.

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