I can’t help but recall Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” when I read the internet buzz around the recent U.N. data analyzed in a “FEWER EMITTERS, LOWER EMISSIONS, LESS COST,” a report from the London School of Economics. 

 

The New York Times Science Blog reports that the data suggests:

 

[T]hat meeting unmet need for family planning would reduce unintended births by 72 per cent, reducing projected world population in 2050 by half a billion to 8.64 billion. Between 2010 and 2050 12 billion fewer “people-years” would be lived – 326 billion against 338 billion under current projections. The 34 gigatons of CO2 saved in this way would cost $220 billion – roughly $7 a ton [metric tons]. However, the same CO2 saving would cost over $1trillion if low-carbon technologies were used.

 

The blog is entitled “Are Condoms the Ultimate Green Technology” and the author, Andrew Revkin, writes, “I recently raised the question of whether this means we’ll soon see a market in baby-avoidance carbon credits similar to efforts to sell CO2 credits for avoiding deforestation. This is purely a thought experiment, not a proposal.”

 

Really? Not a proposal? Pardon my skepticism, but why entertain such a “thought experiment” when the forced sterilizations and “contraceptive incentives” (read coercive family planning) that took place in the Global South at the hands of Western trained academics and physicians are well within the institutional and personal memory of many in the international family planning community? Population experts from that time still lament that the Programme of Action that came out of the 1994 Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt was “hijacked by feminists.” Yes it was, and as a consequence we have an international document adopted by 179 countries stating that, “The empowerment of women and improvement of their status are important ends in themselves and are essential for the achievement of sustainable development,” and that,  “Reproductive rights…rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so…free of discrimination, coercion and violence.”

 

These statements and the birth of the Reproductive Justice movement may be the most positive consequences ever to come out of a hijacking. 

I want to be shocked that supporters of the Green Movement would place the burden of reducing global warming upon women’s shoulders. But I’m not. After all, as history has shown, it’s much easier to coerce poor and uneducated Women of Color into tubal ligations than it is to stem rampant Western consumerism and convince multinational corporate polluters to reduce their emissions. 

 

Some might argue that I’m being too harsh: “the authors of the report and its commentators couldn’t possibly support coercive family planning measures; they’re just pointing out an additional reason to support meeting the global unmet need for family planning.”

 

Yes, universal access to contraception and the ability of couples and individuals to plan when and whether to have children is a laudable goal. However, once a “greener globe” becomes a reason for increased access to contraception, women’s autonomy and rights (especially those of women of color) risk getting subsumed in the name of the “greater good,” and women’s reproductive capacities—and the fact that they can be controlled—risk becoming a means to an end that is not the “empowerment of women and improvement of their status.” 

 

While I support any activism the Green Movement would like to undertake on behalf of women’s empowerment, women and their bodies cannot be a playing card in the hand of the Green Movement.

 

The fact that Jonathan Swift’s proposal to engage in cannibalism to prevent “the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country” is satirical is often lost on many first time readers. I can only hope I missed Mr. Revkin’s punch line.

 

Lauren R.S. Mendonsa

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 26th, 2009 at 1:34 am and is filed under population control, pregnancy, human rights, international. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.