Background Briefing

Are you worried about the future of the environment, or war, or hordes of refugees? The solution is not to manipulate population growth. Past results have been tragic, and ineffectual. Historian Professor Matthew Connelly of Columbia University proposes some alternatives.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Kirsten Garrett: As globalisation swirls about us, amidst all the implications for climate change, there's much talk about the incredible growth in human populations over the last 100 years.

Just one figure: in 1960, there were about three billion people in the world. Now, not quite 50 years later, that has more than doubled to about six and a half billion.

This is Background Briefing on ABC Radio National. I'm Kirsten Garrett.

Today's program is a talk by Columbia University History Professor, Matthew Connelly.

Matthew Connelly: Thank you very much. The last century, humanity has experienced more than four times more growth in population as in the previous 2,000 centuries. This history has literally transformed humankind. Because it is not just populations that have grown larger, but people.

When Thomas Malthus first warned that population growth would inevitably lead to starvation, this was some 200 years ago, the average Englishman was five foot six and averaged about 135 pounds. And these Englishmen were among the largest and best fed people in Europe.

People today, on the other hand, have an average body mass fully a third larger than when Malthus was writing.

To the extent that sheer numbers of workers and consumers will count in climate change, the collective weight of humanity will raise the seas and alter the very air that we breathe.

Kirsten Garrett: This is an edited talk given at the University of Melbourne recently by Professor Matthew Connelly. He spent seven years researching the history of attempts to slow down population growth around the world, and his recent book is called Fatal Misconception. Various attempts at enforced family planning or sterilisations eventually caused great misery and, in the end, it didn't work. Matthew Connelly.

Matthew Connelly: For more than a century, people around the world have organised to try to control populations. These were movements to control world migration, movements, to improve the quality, so-called, the quality of populations through eugenics movements to cut down the rate of increase; and movements to prevent what Teddy Roosevelt called 'race suicide' by reversing declines in fertility. And even now, long after the demise of population control as an organised movement, fear of the fertility and mobility of particular groups continues to spark ethnic strike. Population projections are fuel for conflict among Americans who are worried about Hispanics, among Europeans worried about Muslims, among Israelis worried about Palestinians, to name just a few.

At the same time, concerns that we have grown beyond the Earth's carrying capacity spurred demands for new global norms and institutions. Describing the development of global norms and institutions to control population and the backlash that they have often provoked can therefore help us to understand something that is as powerful as it is paradoxical. That is, how the world seems to be coming together and coming apart, at one and the same time.

But where do we begin?

For centuries, state sovereignty has provided the organising principle of world politics. If governments can exercise exclusive authority over a specified territory, it's usually because they claim to represent the nation that inhabits it, regardless of whether the people concerned come from different places, speak different languages, or even have different loyalties.

Individual rights derive from one's membership in a national community, and the state is the sole guarantor.

But when you think about it, you quickly realise that few countries conform to the ideal form of a nation-state, and you can recognise how often boundary disputes and cross-border migration and claims to minority rights have troubled international relations.

Controlling how a nation reproduces itself has provided an alternative approach to policing a nation's borders. The regulation then not just of reproduction, but also migration and public health, what I call the politics of population, provided a means to maintain these internal frontiers.

Barring entry to so-called 'beaten men from beaten races', promoting the fertility of the native born, and sterilising the 'unfit' could make nation seem like more than just a political construct, but a biological reality.

And yet, if you actually look at this history, the history of efforts to control migration, to manipulate fertility rates, to get certain people to stop having children, or at least stop having so many children, what you discover is that the most dedicated protagonists in these struggles were not government officials, rather in these networks of scientists and activists who worked across continents to advance common agendas.

But this challenge to the principle of state sovereignty, and especially the concern that the earth could not support swelling numbers of human beings, also inspired visions of world community.

Now this is why the population control movement, though it took a sinister turn, as I'll be describing, could still summon this kind of idealism where you could imagine the world sharing a collective fate, one in which all peoples would have to observe common norms, including norms about reproductive behaviour. It's why this idea still inspires loyalty among many people,even if they do not stay constant to an organised movement actually capable of achieving these kinds of goals.

But the people I write about, the scientists and the activists, organised world-wide for decades to try to press for common norms of reproductive behaviour.

Now if this were only an international history, that is relations among and between nation-states, how would we explain the importance of the Vatican? The Vatican, the most implacable opponent of birth control programs worldwide. Now in terms of population and territory, it is the smallest state in the world, the only one in the world with no mothers and no children, and yet it has permanent observer status in all of the United Nations bodies. Why? Because it's not after all just a state, its power is not represented by a few hundred acres of Roman real estate. Instead it represents the largest non-governmental organisation in the world, and that's why it was able to be for so long, and even now, the most effective opponent of population control and reproductive rights, for that matter.

Now when Pius XI for instance, condemned Malthusianism and eugenic sterilisation in 1930, this is the first Papal Encyclical to address these subjects, he insisted that the patriarchal family was more sacred than the state. So a man's role in ruling over his family was something that no government could interfere. And he, like every pope who followed, asserted an authority that trumped state sovereignty.

Many of the leaders of the population control movement, for their part, claimed to represent future generations, and they did not identify themselves primarily in national terms. The foremost proponent of birth control from the United States, from my country, Margaret Sanger, said that she never had a country, and she spent much of her life travelling the globe, trying to promote birth control. Now for eugenics as well, population control was a secular religion. It was a belief that had to be handed down from generation to generation in order to save humanity from de-generation.

Now all of these leaders tended to treat governments as a means to an end, and they claimed to represent groups that would not fit within national frameworks, whether universal sisterhood, or future generations, or the community of the faithful, in the case of the Catholic church, the community both living and dead.

Networks of scientists and activists set the agenda for the global population control campaigns of the 1960s and '70s, what I'll be talking about and showing to you in a moment, non-governmental organisations pioneered the most influential projects, and it was all carried forward under the auspices of the United Nations.

Now together they created a new kind of global governance, in which proponents tried to control the population of the world, without having to answer to anyone in particular.

Kirsten Garrett: Professor Matthew Connelly, from Columbia University.

This is Background Briefing on ABC Radio National.

After many years of research, Professor Connelly has concluded that family planning and birth control movements have had some sinister outcomes, and they've largely failed. He says, as you'll hear, that the answer is not interference using biology, but must come through politics, through creating societies where people don't want or need large families. And one of the best ways to do that is to educate the women. Matthew Connelly.

Matthew Connelly: This story begins in the last decades of the 19th century. It was a time when rival empires were seizing the last remaining regions that had withstood settlement until this point. It was a time when observers began to see trends in fertility, mortality and migration as interconnected.

In Europe and the United States, the decline in fertility brought fears of 'race suicide'.

And many in the United States believed that it was caused by immigration, especially the immigration of Chinese. They argue that northern Europeans would not start families on the wages that they earned in competition with people they called coolies.

This so-called 'yellow peril' inspired the first concerted effort to regulation migration worldwide, one that eventually included not just the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa, but also several countries in Latin America that also barred Asian immigration.

Now at the start of the 20th century they had begun to contain Asians within their own continent.

What was the thinking behind this campaign? Well for at least some of them, for instance the veteran leader of the US Immigration Restriction League, a man named Prescott Hall, this was a policy of 'world eugenics', so here's how he put it.

'Eugenics among individuals is encouraging the propagation of the fit, and limiting or preventing the multiplication of the unfit. World eugenics is doing precisely the same thing as to races considered as wholes. Immigration restriction is a species of segregation on a large scale, by which inferior stocks can be prevented from both diluting and supplanting good stocks.'

So the idea was that they could contain Asians to their own continent, many of them would die out because of higher rates of mortality, and at the same time preserve settlement colonies like Australia and South Africa and the Western States of the US for good stock, so that they could propagate and spread.

By the 1920s more and more eugenicists in the United States, and many other countries too, came to believe that it would not be possible to contain people in poor countries indefinitely. In the 1930s, in India and Indo-China, North Africa and Korea and Puerto Rico, in the West and East Indies, colonial officials reported rapid population growth, and they often called it the principal cause of poverty and political unrest. And it's understandable why they would. After all, rather than acknowledging the gross economic and political inequality between settlers and indigenous peoples, it was easier to explain nationalist resistance as attributable to a demographic difference, a difference in fertility rates between these populations, and to see them as populations instead of seeing them as incipient nations.

Now this was a crisis of the colonial world, and it was a crisis for the whole of the colonial world, not just because the populations of subject peoples were beginning to grow, and grow rapidly, but also because at the same time, the fertility of countries like Britain, France, the United States and Japan was thought to be declining, especially in the 1930s with the coming of the Great Depression.

This was the historical conjuncture that produced the idea of family planning. The phrase, which first emerged in this period, in the 1930s, the phrase 'family planning' was meant to convey the idea that population policies and programs could be family friendly; that is, family friendly was not necessarily meant only to discourage people from having larger families, much less only meant to provide them with the means of limiting their own fertility.

In fact, family planning was expected to reverse fertility declines among fitter families.

The genius of family planning was that it did not specify who would actually do the planning. Now the people I write about work to create incentives and disincentives to ensure that people would make the right choices; ensuring that certain kinds of people would have more children, and others would have fewer.

But colonial administrations could not take the lead. They declined to take measures to stem population growth for fear that it would spark a backlash.

The Nazis were the only power that systematically attacked the fertility of conquered peoples by promoting a whole range of measures, a concerted program, including abortion, child abductions, separating men from women through forced labour, and deportations.

Their example made it even more difficult for other colonial powers to try to undertake anything of the kind, or even more limited measures to try to limit fertility, or else risk the charge of genocide.

Now instead, it was international and non-governmental organisations that spearheaded family planning programs around the world. In a sense, they were taking up the unfinished civilising mission. And in fact the influential Swedish advocate of the social welfare program, Gunnar Myrdall, said that these United Nations officials were -- and he said this explicitly -- 'were undertaking a civilised mission'. They were undertaking the white man's burden. And many of these United Nations programs, especially in the field of population and family planning, many of the more important non-governmental organisations in the field, were led by former colonial officials. Even the Ford Foundation described its men (and they were almost all men, by the way) who were working to control the populations of Asia, as constituting a 'thin red line', recalling what Rudyard Kipling had said about the defenders of empire.

But international and non-government organisations, unlike colonial administrations, could use the language of the global family in calling for family planning.

But I hasten to add that this was not just something that white, wealthy people imposed on the rest of the world. They could not have gotten anywhere if they did not find people to work with, and that's why part of this history includes the eugenics movements that proliferated not just in the United States and Europe, but in India and China and Latin America, where there were lively groups that also felt the differential fertility was a threat to their survival.

Now in 1940, just to give you one example from India. In 1940, even before independence, the National Planning Committee of the Congress Party ordered a report with recommendations on the population problem. And the authors of this report worried that upper classes and upper castes were more likely to practise contraception, leading to what they called 'the gradual predominance of the inferior social strata.'

The committee called for disseminating contraception through the public health system, but they also called for compulsory eugenic sterilisation. And here's what they said: 'Caste has created the outcastes and contributes to make the problems of eradication of the defective types probably easier than in the West.'

And this report of the Indian Congress Party called for 'selectively sterilising the entire group of hereditary defectives'.

But there were many things about population control that appealed to the leaders of newly-independent nations, even if they weren't interested in eugenics or even the quality of populations, so-called. Many of these nations, most of them had ethnically diverse populations.

Now for them especially, controlling how the nation reproduced itself, policing these internal frontiers that I was talking about a moment ago, this provided an alternative way of policing their borders. And I first noticed this when I was researching India's own program, a program that began, it was the first in the world, in 1952, the one that was dramatically ramped up in 1965 when India was in the midst of a border war with Pakistan. And the Minister of Planning described how it is that unwanted births, constituted 'the enemy within the gate. It is a war that we have to wage, and as in all wars, we cannot be choosy. Some will get hurt, something will go wrong. What is needed is the will to wage the war so as to win it.'

So in other words, the enemy was unplanned births. And it justified a military-style program. And this kind of military rhetoric was rife through the history of these population control programs, many of them often run by members of the national military, especially the medical services of military establishments in India and Pakistan and other countries as well.

All of the governments that first adopted family planning programs in the 1950s and '60s had contentious borders, including India, again, Pakistan, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey and Honduras. For these, and other countries as well, population planning was a means to achieve 'modernisation' in a single generation. The planned family would not only be smaller, it would produce healthier, cleaner, better-educated and consumption-oriented individuals.

Kirsten Garrett: History Professor Matthew Connelly. In this quest for smaller populations of better people, with the income to improve their standard of living, teams of doctors and nurses, NGO workers and government officials toured the world to promote sterilisation and birth control.

At this stage in his talk at the University of Melbourne, Professor Connelly put up on a screen many images of posters and leaflets and film scenes used by various population control groups over the years.

Matthew Connelly: They used Disney, and they used Donald Duck, because they wanted the whole family to come, and to see how it is that family planning, having fewer children and planning their births, was a way to ensure that these children would be happy, would be healthier, would be cleaner, and that they would have more things. And this is something I want to show you is ubiquitous through this history, that whenever the planned family was shown, it would be surrounded by consumer goods, and especially the ubiquitous transistor radio, through which they would receive these messages about how to be modern. And what they should want if they were to be modern.

But alongside that happy planned family, you would also almost invariably see the unplanned family, the unhappy, unplanned, unhealthy unappealing family with too many children. And as you can see in this case, it's not just that there were too many of them, and you can see this even more so in the succeeding images, how it is that they tended to be sickly, and in some cases, in many cases, violent.

Now this film, family planning again was shown around the world in dozens of different countries, what you can see on the right is not just a smaller family, though one that still has four children actually, but also a family that's obviously more prosperous, the father dressed in a business suit, the children are well-groomed. And on the left you have not just an extremely poor family but a violent family, in which the children are beating one another, and some of the other images I want to show you, you find also very often in these images, the parents beating their children.

Sometimes this message of how it is that improving the quality would require planning the quantity, how does sometimes this message that was rooted in the history of eugenics, was sometimes made explicit, even if it was more often implicit. Now one of the challenges they face in trying to broadcast these messages and display them around the world, is that many of the people actually volunteered for these programs. Many of the family planning workers were relatively well off; these were middle-class people. Middle-class women in the case of the volunteers who local family planning associations, and sometimes there is a very clear class divide between them and those who they were trying tor each. And in this case, if you look in the background of this poster, you can see how it is -- here again you have the images of the planned and the unplanned family, but in this case it's been hand-drawn, and the model, because she's wearing exactly the same outfit for that image of the planned family and what it's supposed to look like, is actually the family planning worker herself who in this case is explaining the use of an intrauterine device to her audience.

Now family planning programs increasingly favoured intrauterine devices because this was something you could count on. If a woman was inserted with an IUD it was expected that she would not become pregnant, unlike say, the pill. But the programs, many of them, did try to offer a variety of different methods, and in many of these clinics, the workers were even paid incentives according to the numbers of sterilisations and abortions that would have been carried out. So they had an incentive to encourage more of these women to avoid childbirth or end pregnancies, as the case may be.

More and more, because people could not be relied on to use pills, because they could not be trusted to use barrier methods, people working the field looked for a technological solution. They would simply take care of the problem, ideally something modelled on public health programs like the Depo-Provera shot because it was thought that providing a contraceptive through a shot would help people associate contraception with health, that it was healthy to get shots, so it was healthy to have a Depo-Provera injection. But as you can see, many of these programs were stand-alone programs, they were not public health programs. They were programs that measured success solely through the numbers of contraceptives distributed, the numbers of sterilisations and abortions carried out, and in this case the numbers of Depo-Provera injections that were performed.

But more, in addition to providing incentives to providers, healthcare workers and sometimes social workers to perform IUD insertions and even perform sterilisations, these programs began to rely on incentive payments for the acceptors themselves. And everybody has heard about -- or almost everyone I think, has heard about the famous transistor radio that was to be provided if people agreed to sterilisation. What happened more often is that people were simply offered cash, in some cases as much as two or three months' wages, if they agreed to sterilisation.

Now India, once again, led the world. It was the cutting edge of population control throughout the 1960s and '70s. In this case they did it by creating a sterilisation camp where they temporarily set up an operating theatre, and they wanted to create a festival-like atmosphere, to encourage as many people as possible to turn up and agree to sterilisation. In this case they show how they performed 60,000 sterilisations in a single month, in what they called the family planning festival of Vernaculum in the State of Kerala in South India.

Now how is it that you perform 60,000 sterilisations in a single month? In the case of the sterilisation camp of Vernaculum, it was by creating an operating theatre with some 50 beds capable of performing sterilisations simultaneously. And as you can imagine in these circumstances, again with providers and even local government officials giving cash payments to incentivise them to increase numbers of sterilisations, in many cases at the leas, you would not have a lot of privacy, especially as you can see on the left were foreign donors insisted on seeing the results, it was Care International that actually provided much of the money for the incentive payments in this case, but also even more seriously, the danger that working so rapidly, people would be tempted to cut corners, as happened shortly thereafter in another sterilisation camp in the case of Gujerat where 11 men died from tetanus from dirty instruments.

Now I'm not going to talk about it, we don't have the time for it, but all this culminated in the case of India, with the Emergency Period when the government and Indira Gandhi performed some 8-million sterilisations in a single year, using these kinds of methods. And when in addition to incentive payments both for providers and for acceptors, when they also deployed the army and police, and literally rounded people up and fired on crowds to keep sterilisation camps running, when this became known to the foreign donor community, the World Bank, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Swedish International Development Agency, the Norwegian Aid Agency, all of them decided to increase funding.

Robert McNamara, the president of the World Bank, flew into India to offer his personal support, and pronounce himself pleased with how India had finally gotten serious in dealing with the population problem.

Kirsten Garrett: The fear was of hordes of certain people swamping other groups, or nations. But eventually there was a backlash against population control programs like these.

At the University of Melbourne, Columbia History Professor Matthew Connelly.

Matthew Connelly: Now looking back, we can see that critics of population control were right when they perceived it as a new chapter in the annals of imperialism. After all, what is the essence of empire, if it's not making rules for other people without having to answer to them?

Now it might be argued that whatever we might think of the means, imperial power could achieve much good. Now in Question Time I'm happy to take questions about the actual achievements of population control campaigns. Did they make people rich? Did they save the world? Save the environment at least? I'm sceptical, but again we may want to go into that in Question Time.

But one of the real ironies for me is that it was actually in the end ineffective. Population control programs did not actually control populations. They did not have more than a marginal impact on fertility rates. Far more important was whether women had access to education and paid employment. Now the people I write about though, they knew all along, that more educated women tended to have smaller families. Why do they know this? Well if you go back to the history of eugenics, for 100 years eugenicists had worried that more educated women were not having enough children so they did not see that as a solution, if anything it was part of the problem. So instead of focusing on increasing access to education, they tried to find ways of getting uneducated people to stop having children. They resorted to increasingly blunt instruments, that simple people did not plan their families in ways experts found intelligible. Researchers had to come up with simpler methods. When people were too poor to afford it, they could be paid for using it, with group pressure, providing added inducement. And when many people would not accept intrauterine devices or sterilisation or implants or injectibles, population controllers dreamed of something that could be diffused through the air or the water, making everyone sterile without an antidote that only authorities could provide.

I kid you not, this is research that was supported by the Ford Foundation on the Population Council, research into involuntary methods of population control. Now when no such technological fix was forthcoming, they decided to resort to disincentives, like denying maternity leave, or access to public housing or health care. And in some cases most notoriously in the case of India, but also in the case of China, simply dragging people to abortion and sterilisation clinics.

Now to conclude, I want to make it clear that the work I've done is meant to be an argument for reproductive rights, and I've tried to do that by writing about what reproductive rights advocates were up against. And I want to make clear as well how there's nothing wrong with feeling urgency about helping people to avoid an unwanted pregnancy, but the problems began with those with money and power on their side, the dialogue was one way, just a way of telling other people what is best for them.

Now the challenge for historians and for everyone else is to come up with transnational means of addressing transnational problems that will not simply lead to new forms of unaccountable power.

So with that, I thank you for your attention and I welcome your questions. Thank you very much.

Kirsten Garrett: Matthew Connelly speaking at the University of Melbourne. He took a wide range of questions from the audience. One asked about the details of how the birth control schemes failed.

Matthew Connelly: Well imagine for instance that you're living in Bihar in 1967 at a time where famine threatens, and some people are living on 800 calories a day. In some cases literally subsisting on leaves and bark. And you hear that there is a government program that will pay people cash if they agree to sterilisation. What happens? In many cases it's grandma and grandpa who end up getting sterilised. In the case of Kerala, it was found that many of these men and women who came forward were over 50 years old. In other words, they were never going to have children in any case. But for those program managers who were provided payments according to numbers of sterilisations they carried out, it didn't matter, right? Because they were going to get paid regardless.

A case of one study in Gujerat where they did -- and this is one of the rare instances they did on-the-spot verification, it was found that the average age in one program was 50. So that gives you an idea how it is that population control programs even in the case of carrying out sterilisations, even on a mass scale, can sometimes actually not reduce fertility rates. And this is something I should make very clear: many of those who came out did not need to get paid, they wanted to have fewer children, they wanted at least to space childbirth, and so that's why so many of them would have preferred something like an IUD rather than sterilisation.

But imagine the kind of impression they would have gotten, these early adopters, from programs that were run in this fashion, where in this case it was the government, and not just government, but also non-government organisations and UN agencies that were paying money to agree not to have children, and not on the other hand, providing incentives for doctors to provide post-operative care to deal with complications, or even to remove the intrauterine devices from those who wanted to have them removed. When these camps moved on, and these were mobile camps and mobile clinics, there was nobody who would come back for those when they decided to have their IUDs removed, or those who were suffering, as many did, side effects that could be particularly devastating in the case of an IUD, the most common of which is prolonged menstrual bleeding. Something that would be appalling in a place where most people lived on a vegetarian diet and women, most of them, had chronic iron deficiency.

So even now, we don't know the full scale of the public health disaster that ensued when hundreds of thousands of women were inserted with IUDs in these circumstances, when millions of people were sterilised in these circumstances. But one thing we do know, for instance in the case of IUD, after it was introduced in 1967, after for a time the number shot up, they collapsed. And it was 20 years before numbers of people opting for the IUD returned to the level that it was at in 1967. So that's just an example of how it is a population controlled program could actually fail to reduce fertility, and actually discouraged people from going to family planning clinics or trusting family planning workers.

Kirsten Garrett: The next question from the audience was about the research Professor Connelly has done which found that eugenics, in various guises, was universal and not confined to right-wing governments, or to the Nazi era, or even to totalitarian States.

Matthew Connelly: Yes, that's one of the main findings that people are now working on, the history of eugenics, as we begin to recognise that there's an international and even a global history of eugenics. It wasn't just the Nazis, in other words and a few races, but lots of people, people like in the United States, WEB Du Bois, the leader in the African-American community, or John Maynard Keynes, a liberal economist. And in India, as you could see, many of the leaders of the National Congress Party also felt that eugenics could be part of a program of national development and national improvement. That is one of the amazing things about the politics of population, is that it defies the conventional kinds of political categories and polarisations that we're used to. It went to the United Nations; for instance you would have these crazy coalitions where Communist states would ally with Catholic countries, like Italy, and countries across South America, in opposing family planning programs, international aid for family planning. But not, I hasten to add, because the Catholic church was against population control per se, not if you recognise that depriving more than half of humanity of the means to control their own body, and not for the purpose of upholding patriarchy, is also a form of population control. And probably the largest and still ongoing form of population control in the world.

Kirsten Garrett: There were also some personal questions. One member of the audience pointed out that Shakespeare said that before we look at the faults of others, we should face our own. Professor Connelly is American, and 'the population of the United States will grow to 400 million and the waste of resources and production of greenhouse gases,' said the person, 'is appalling. It can't go on like this,' he said, 'I can't afford you.'

Matthew Connelly: Well I hasten to say that I personally am childless, if that matters to you. But I don't know why it should. I mean I feel we can talk about these kinds of issues dispassionately, and I think it's important that we try because, for instance, one of the things I wanted to point out in this history of family planning, how is it that these programs try to persuade people to have fewer children? Well they did it by promising them that they could have more things. I know this is a little hard to make out, but in the case of the poster above, you see the planned and the unplanned family, in this case this is Sri Lanka. On the right you find a family that miraculously has achieved the American dream in Sri Lanka. And you can see it with the suburban home and also they're at leisure, you know, they're consuming more goods. In the case of Nigeria, the one on the bottom, you can see how it is that fewer children, these people are being told, anyone who is to see these posters, mainly in family planning clinics, that they would achieve good housing, sound education better health care and all the rest, all that by having fewer children. By having fewer children, they could have more stuff.

But on the right, what you find is a study that, surprisingly, was authored by Paul Ehrlich, the author of The Population Bomb, and this was a study on household dynamics, and he and his co-authors looked at how it is paradoxically as you reduced the rate of fertility, you can reduce the rate of population growth, right? You tend to do that by reducing the household size, so instead of having big multigenerational households living under one roof, you have more and smaller households, in some cases even a couple, a childless couple, even a single person, will have not only their own home, but a vacation home. And what they found was that in fact because of these household dynamics, a smaller population which has more households within it, can actually have a greater environmental impact. And at present the increase in numbers of households worldwide is increasing at twice the rate as the numbers of people worldwide.

So this is not a population crisis, and population control is not the solution. This is a consumption crisis, and I completely agree with you that the ways of my countrymen are profligate and unsustainable, but if you want to do something about it, it's not like getting Indians to have fewer kids, or Africans for that matter. It's like any people who think harder about their own lives. As I understand it, one of the only countries in the world that has a larger per capita impact than the United States, is Australia. And I don't mean to seem like an ungrateful guest, but I was amazed to learn this because nobody can possibly be as profligate as the Americans.

Kirsten Garrett: The same person asked another question about the make-up of the population of America. By 2050 about 40 years away, most people in America will not be English speakers. 'Hasta la vista', he said.

Matthew Connelly: I don't have a problem with it. I think my country has grown infinitely more interesting and rich due to the contributions of immigrants, of which my family is a very recent example.

Kirsten Garrett: One member of the audience asked why people still refer to Thomas Malthus. Malthus wasn't trying to help the world, he said, he was coming up with reasons not to feed hungry people. Thomas Malthus was conducting a war on the poor.

Matthew Connelly: I agree with you, that ultimately this history comes down to the most fundamental questions, you know, about how you value human life, and how you define the good life. And I share your sense of outrage at the way some people would put a price, literally, on the lives of poor children and poor countries and try to, based on these calculations to the penny, calculate how much they should provide their parents, pay their parents if they would agree to a sterilisation. It was that kind of research that persuaded Lyndon Johnson to withhold food aid for India in 1967. This period again that India was facing famine. But I disagree with you on the other hand, with the idea that everybody involved in this history was equally sinister, because that for me is one of the great tragedies here, and why we really have to confront this history in all its complexity.

People like Margaret Sanger at least at the outset, really did think that providing contraception was going to liberate people, and especially women, and she clung to that vision as much as she could throughout her life, even after all the compromises, only a few of which I've described. And that's the tragedy here, is that many of these people really were well-intentioned, they really did think that this was going to help other people, and it was a long, hard slog for people of goodwill to reform these organisations from without and from within. But I think that's why we really have to confront this history in all its complexity because otherwise we're going to imagine that it's simple. But I'm sorry, you know, a lot of their contemporary humanitarian campaigns are also posing very excruciating ethical choices, and it's not always obvious what the right thing to do is. But I do think at the least we could try and benefit from experience.

Kirsten Garrett: Another question suggested that eventually the over-population problem will fix itself. If economic growth increases, people and societies do better. And as the standard of living improves, families tend to have less children, and so the population issue may take care of itself.

Matthew Connelly: Well I agree with you that usually, people especially when they're given the benefit of education and good health, they tend to make sensible choices, in the aggregate, even if some of them won't. And I don't think it works when you try to manipulate them to make them better, especially if it means trying to breed better people, because it won't work; we don't know how to do it. And trying to do it has done untold harm.

But you know, the fatal misconception, the reason why I called the book Fatal Misconception for me is the idea that political problems like poverty and war have biological causes and technological solutions. So I don't know that I agree that this problem, if you still think that population growth in itself is a problem, I'm not sure that you could see increases in wealth as necessarily solving it, because I share the concern about the long-term impact that people are having on the planet. I just think that if your concern is about war or poverty or the environment, then that should be the focus for your efforts, not other people, not us making other people go away.

I thank you again for your time, and thanks again for coming.

Kirsten Garrett: History Professor Matthew Connelly was speaking at the University of Melbourne some weeks ago.

He was also interviewed on ABC Local Radio in Canberra, the Drive program, presented by Louise Maher. On the phone, Professor Connelly talked to Louise Maher about population control in Indonesia and China.

Matthew Connelly: In Indonesia would it be done, especially in 1969-1970, when the World Bank promised along with the United Nations that they would provide in current dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars to finance programs to try to not just sterilise, but persuade women to be inserted with IUDs, and also distribute other kinds of contraceptives. In the case of Indonesia they didn't actually pay people to be sterilised. What they did do though, was they paid providers, they paid hospital staff, sometimes non-medical workers, social workers, according to numbers of IUDs inserted, numbers of sterilisations carried out. Though the Indonesian military in some cases actually set up barracks outside of villages just to make sure people understood that this was government policy and they had to comply.

Louise Maher: But isn't it the case that some people do want access to birth control, and this is the only way through such agencies that they are able to get it cheaply and safely?

Matthew Connelly: Well you're absolutely right, that many of these people wanted to plan smaller families, so at least they wanted to stage childbirth, so then they could have safer childbirth and have healthier children. The problem is, many of these earlier doctors got the message that it was the government, even a kind of world government in the case of the UN that was trying to plan their families for them, and even paying them if they wouldn't have children, if they agreed to be sterilised. And unfortunately that, together with the kind of medical abuses that occurred when people died from dirty instruments, for instance, they gave them a very poor first impression to say the least. And the whole field of reproductive rights is still recovering from this.

Louise Maher: In what way?

Matthew Connelly: Well because of these kinds of excesses eventually sparked a backlash, you know, especially in the United States where the pro-life lobby still uses this history as a weapon to try to discredit the whole field of family planning. But what I'm trying to do is make a case that the people who work in this field, people who care about reproductive rights, have to acknowledge this history if we're to move past it.

Louise Maher: What is your view of the one-child policy in China?

Matthew Connelly: Well it's been a disaster, it really has. For China and for all those who care about reproductive rights. Because it was especially the one child policy, especially in the US, in my country, they gave pro-life people the opportunity to discredit every kind of family planning, and unfortunately International Planned Parenthood and the UN went ahead and helped China implement the one child policy, even knowing what it is they were walking into.

Louise Maher: Why do you say it was a disaster?

Matthew Connelly: It's been a disaster because for instance in parts of China, boys outnumber girls now by 30% even 40%. There are tens of millions of young men who are not going to find partners. This is one of the biggest social engineering experiments that has ever been conducted, and we still don't know what the long term consequences are going to be. At the very least though, all of those Little Emperors, that is those only children, are now going to have four grandparents and eight grand-parents to take care of, because there is no social security system in China. So even as China is doing relatively well now, in part because there are so many of these working-age people who have relatively few children to take care of, when they retire it's going to create a colossal problem.

Louise Maher: But what would the population of China be now if that hadn't been implemented and would all those people have been able to be fed? I mean that was the argument for it. But does anyone know?

Matthew Connelly: I'll tell you what we do know. The fertility rate in China in 1970, that is 10 years before the one child policy, was over six children per woman. By 1980, when the one child policy was implemented, it was two point seven. So the fertility rate was already dropping rapidly in China, even before the one child policy was implemented. And the reason for that, as happens in most countries, is that when you give women access to education, when you give them access to paid employment, they almost invariably choose to have smaller families. You don't have to coerce or bludgeon them to choose to have smaller families, you just have to give them some choices in their lives.

Kirsten Garrett: Speaking to Louise Maher on ABC Local Radio in Canberra, Professor Matthew Connelly of Columbia University.

His recent book is called Fatal Misconceptions: The struggle to control world population and it's published by Harvard University Press.

This is Background Briefing on ABC Radio National. I'm Kirsten Garrett.

Further Information

New York Times Review of Fatal Misconceptions by Matthew Connelly

Matthew Connelly's home page

Presenter

Kirsten Garrett

Producer

Kirsten Garrett