POPULATION

Families to order
Debbie Taylor argues that family planning should be about expanding human rights, not reducing them.

Mythconceptions
Six population myths exploded in true NI
style.

The wages of sin
‘I’ve been pregnant 20 times’: the story of one woman in Northem Ireland.

Malthus and morality
Peter Stalker explores the competing
ideologies of population planners.

Africa’s precious few
On why Africa seems underpopulated — to Africans. By Nigel Twose.

They call it la operación
Annette Fuentes investigates the popularity of sterilisation among Puerto Ricans.

POPULATION-THE FACTS

At cross purposes on abortion
Kathleen McDonnell plots a course through the moral maze.

Childless by choice
Are women in England any freer than
women in Nepal? Kathleen Muldoon reports.

Better safe than sorry
Women may prefer the known dangers of
pregnancy to the unknown dangers of
contraception, argues Mary Warren.

Date with a diaphragm
Judith Kellner recalls one very sticky
afternoon.

SIMPLY...
Two ways to plan a population programme. The right way — and the wrong way.

NOW that I’ve finished researching this issue of NI, I have come to hate the very word ‘population’. Not because I’ve tapped it into the word processor so many times — though that would be reason enough — but because once it is uttered even the most sensible, humane people tend to
react in a disturbing, almost totalitarian, way.

‘Having too many children is like smoking,’ said one to me. ‘Why should I get lung cancer because of your self-indulgent habit?’ And that was one of the milder arguments. One man I met on holiday even suggested that sending aid to Africa was ‘compounding the problem’ because it allowed so many potential breeders to survive.

The problem, I believe, is that the word ‘population’ is an abstract, statistical term. It’s a word we use to talk about masses of undifferentiated humanity — like buying a pound of whitebait for your supper, rather than, say, 341 little silver fishes that once frisked and swam in the dappled shallows of the ocean. I’m being deliberately fanciful, but I think that when we talk about ‘population’ exactly the same thing happens: individual people — laughing, working, scratching their heads trying to solve this problem or that — simply disappear.

And once the people have disappeared, it then becomes possible to manipulate the ‘population’ in your mind as if it were any other variable in a mathematical equation. Need more workers for the factories and plantations? Simple: ban contraception. Need fewer people in the shanties and the ghettos? Simple: launch a sterilisation campaign. Need fewer poor people, black people, disabled people? Simple: target the sterilisation campaign.

Given that the majority of people are as rational about their fertility as I am — and God knows we are the ones who have to live with our decisions — it seems that any government which tries to overrule those decisions for the sake of some nebulous ‘common good’, or ‘future benefit’ is not to be trusted. If they are disinterested in my individual welfare today, what assurance do I have that they will miraculously become interested in my welfare tomorrow, after I have had the number of babies they tell me are ‘necessary’?

Of course there is a danger that anyone who criticises population policies is assumed to be against family planning per se. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is precisely because I am so in favour of family planning — of women (and men) planning their own families — that I am so supicious of any population policy that attempts to do anything but help them have the number of children they think is best for them.

This is the reason there are so many personal stories in the magazine this month and why the entire keynote article is devoted to an attempt to understand how poor people make decisions about their childbearing. I wanted to bring the people into the spotlight for a change and shove ‘population’ into the background, where it belongs.

Letters
Letter from Mawere
Update
Briefly
Endpiece: by Carol Fewster
Reviews: including Lorca classic
Country profile: Benin

COVER PHOTO: Sarah Errington / Alan Hutchison
ONLINE MAG MAINTAINED BY SIMON LOFFLER