QUESTION AND ANSWER

Q Why focus on family planning and women’s issues in studying population?

A Women have always been the agents of population change, not only as the bearers of children but as the much more involved sex in assuring they are born safely and survive to adulthood. History and modern experience show that when women can make decisions for themselves about the timing of childbearing-and when they can put these decisions into effect-they have children later in life, and fewer of them. The net effect is slower population growth or none at all.

Q What do women want? And what’s preventing them from having it, and what does that have to do with population and environment?

A Women want good health and long life for their children as for themselves. That’s not surprising, but its implications may be. The aspiration is at odds with pregnancies that occur too often or at the wrong times. Women want welcome pregnancies, and the means to prevent unwelcome ones. Because societies tend to be uncomfortable with sex and to hope for populations that grow, they tend to discourage contraception. One result has been high infant and child death rates. Another, especially in recent times, is ongoing population growth and the risks it poses to the natural systems on which long life depends.

Q These issues about family, gender, and reproduction are very personal. Can government influence them?

A Reproduction is a personal matter, ideally subject only to the decisions of those-especially women-who engage in sex. Governments nonetheless provide health care directly or set the ground rules for providers. Education, too, is a largely government function, and governments make and execute laws governing ownership, inheritance, the vote, employment and family leave, and countless other aspects of life that determine the status of females relative to men. Where governments assure access to reproductive health care, including the means for women to plan pregnancy and childbearing in good health, fertility settles at or below two children per woman. Generally these are the same countries in which governments encourage equal opportunity for both sexes. Where governments fail to do these things, fertility tends to be higher, often much higher.

Q Why do you contend that women and their decisions about family planning and children are so critical?

A Human population never would have grown nearly so large as it is today if women always had been able and free to choose when and when not to have children. Given the environmental and social challenges humanity faces today-especially the unleashing of a human-caused warming of the planet with no certain endpoint-we’d be well advised to allow women everywhere and at all ages to be effective decision makers on when to bear a child. Population growth would end soon, and it would do so because women chose to have fewer children later in life, rather than because they wanted to have children and couldn’t or, worse, they or their children died in higher proportions. While such a peaking of population wouldn’t single-handedly lead us to utopia, it would be enormously helpful and has no downside.

Q Green issues are everywhere today, from cars to lights to food. But environmentalists like Al Gore rarely if ever talk about population. Why? Should we talk more about reproduction and less about recycling?

A I won’t call for less talk about recycling, but some perspective would be welcome. It’s naïve to think that any human being, let alone more than 6 billion, can be “environment-neutral.” Every environmental problem we face would be more manageable if human numbers were stable or decreasing gradually. Population is perhaps the hottest of hot buttons, touching as does on sexuality, contraception, abortion, family size, migration, ethnicity and race. I wrote More, however, because I’m struck by how few people understand that population growth is anything but inevitable. It’s not because we love children that our numbers grow. Growth isn’t even typical of our species’ 200,000-year-existence on earth. Population growth stems from circumstances specific to relatively recent human history. When women get what they want, it probably won’t happen at all.