Mass birth-control programmes

Mass birth-control programmes

Many people think that God's command to "be fruitful and multiply" can be taken too far. It's generally accepted that over-population will seriously damage the earth and the lives of most people on it.

Large increases in population have already damaged the environment and condemned many people in Africa, Asia and Latin America to poverty.

In the latter part of the 20th century, people began to put forward the effect of population control upon the environment as a justification for regulation of fertility, independent of economic concerns.

However, many people would have serious moral objections to plans to use contraception in order to control population.

One objection that isn't covered here is that the real cause of poverty and damage is overconsumption by a few, and that if rich nations stopped consuming far more than their fair share of resources there would be no need for population control to be applied unfairly to poor nations.

General objections

There are a number of general objections that can apply to any mass contraception programme.

• Imperialism: Both the following can be regarded as forms of imperialism:
  • rich countries funding contraceptive programmes in the third world
  • rich countries demanding the implementation of birth control programmes in exchange for financial or other aid
• Cultural imperialism: Bringing birth control to a community that has previously avoided it will inevitably change the relationships and power dynamics within that community. It's important to take appropriate precautions to minimise the impact of contraception on cultures to which it is introduced.
• Human rights: Mass birth control interferes with a person's right to have as many children as they wish
• Eugenics: Mass birth control programmes may be used to reduce the birth rate of certain classes, castes or ethnic groups
• Gender bias: The majority of mass birth-control programmes operate by controlling only female fertility. This is because there are long-term female contraceptives such as the pill, hormone implants, and IUDs, but no male equivalents. As a result:
  • women unfairly bear the burden of population control
  • female fertility is treated as something dangerous that needs to be controlled
  • this gender bias operates regardless of the good intentions behind programmes of mass contraception

Objections to the use of bribery or incentives

There are particular ethical objections to birth control programmes that use incentives of money, food or other benefits to reward people who take part:

• Coercion: Using incentives to get people living in poverty to practice birth control amounts to coercion and violates the reproductive freedom of poor people
  • i.e. offering people on the edge of starvation food or money to use birth control amounts to an offer they can't refuse, and so deprives them of freedom of choice
• Unfairness: Incentive programmes are only likely to work on poor people - that's unfair
• Eugenics: Incentive programmes which only work on poor people will tend to reduce certain classes and castes in society by causing them to have smaller families.
• Human dignity: Such programmes offend human dignity by treating children as a commodity - something that people can be paid to do without
• Abortion: Such programmes may encourage people to abort foetuses in order to obtain the benefit of small family policies if their birth control method fails

Coercion

This is a powerful argument because in many cases the incentive offered amounts to an offer that can't be refused.

Deciding whether a birth control programme amounts to unethical coercion requires consideration of issues like these:

• Is the incentive scheme a real incentive or a disguised punishment for those who don't take part?
• How much will the family suffer if they say "no"?
• How much will the reward change the family's life?
• Does the reward consist of necessities or luxuries?
• Is the reward something like money or food given to the family, or being given access to some poverty alleviation programme
• Is the rewarded available immediately, or spread out over time?
• Is there any alternative way of dealing with the population problem in the context concerned?

In some countries such as China and India, family size has been limited by law or by penalties for large families.

Real coercion has also been used. A sterilisation campaign in India in the 1970s included penalties for families with more than three children and was implemented in some areas some through

Such campaigns can be effective in India:

Coercion has been used in the West, too. The 1974 USA case of Relf v Weinberger showed that between 100,000 and 150,000 low income women were sterilised annually under federally-funded programs, and that some of these women had only consented to be sterilised after being threatened with losing welfare benefits.

Unfairness

There are two ways in which a mass birth-control programme might be unfair: it might distort the structure of the population, and it might discriminate against the children of large families.

It would be unjust if a birth control programme had the effect of distorting the balance of groups in the population, and any such programme should be applied to leave the ratios of rich and poor and other groups unchanged.

The ratio needs to be measured at the age of maturity rather than birth, to take account of different mortality rates between rich and poor.

However, since poor groups of society often have more children per family than better off groups, the disproportionate application of birth control policies may act to stabilise the ratio. But for such policies to be seen as fair it may be necessary to devise elements that restrict the birth rate of other groups in society.

The second potential unfairness is that children born to parents who rejected the scheme would be likely to suffer a lower quality of life than those born to parents who restricted their family size and got various benefits as a result. Since such children would have played no part in the decision to be conceived, it is unfair to make them suffer for the choices made by their parents.

Human rights

Some people fear that pro-contraception programmes interfere with a person's right to have as many children as they wish.

Some feminist groups argue that all women should have the right to have as many children as they wish, and that society has a duty to provide those women and children with the health care, housing, social security, education, and nutrition they need to lead good lives. They say that a woman has:

This argument is usually countered by saying there is no basic human right to have as many children as one wishes.

A less controversial point to consider under this heading is the relative importance of individual and community rights.

Eugenics

People who are in favour of eugenic action believe that the quality of a race can be improved by reducing the fertility of "undesirable" groups, and encouraging the birth rate of "desirable" groups.

Eugenics is nowadays regarded as morally wrong, but in the early 20th century it had many powerful supporters...

Early eugenicists often worried that the desirable sensible elements of the population would practice birth control and gradually die out, while the sexually careless and reckless would have lots of children and come to dominate the population.

In the past, selective birth control programmes have been used against particular groups in populations. In the USA, for example, sterilisation has been forced on people with learning difficulties, prisoners and members of ethnic minorities.

This practice was exposed and rapidly ended in the Relf case in the early 1970s.

Birth control programmes and forced sterilisation were also used in Nazi Germany to eliminate groups that the Reich disliked.

Human dignity

This argument is less seductive than it seems at first.

In all societies and groups within societies, parents take decisions about their children based on an informal cost-benefit analysis. When a couple say - "we'd like to have another child, but we're going to wait until one of us gets promoted to a higher paying job" it would be odd to denounce them for downgrading the human dignity of their potential child.