Guest post by Ed Stephan
When 3,030 of our people were killed in attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, we retaliated with war against Afghanistan and a peculiar “War on Terror” which, somehow, morphed into an invasion and attempted neo-con conquest of Iraq, at a still-rising cost to us of $300 billion, nearly 2,000 American lives, perhaps 100,000 innocent Iraqi deaths, and who knows how many mangled bodies, psyches and lives. Other lives have been lost elswhere in surprise attacks in London, Madrid, Bali.
All these deaths are, understandibly and deservedly, attention-getting. But I’d like to call attention here to 530,000 deaths (worldwide) each year which go virtually unnoticed in any of our media. Every minute of every day, a woman dies of a pregnancy-related complication. Nearly every one of these deaths is easily preventable.
Sara Seims, who directs the population program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, has written
A couple of centuries ago, economist Thomas Malthus warned that world population (then at about 1 billion people) would rapidly overtake the food supply, leading to global famine. Today, we’re at 6.4 billion people and it hasn’t happened yet.
Malthus fell into the trap of discounting human ingenuity and adaptability. More recently, predictions of a “population bomb” based on trends of the 1960s didn’t happen, either. Increased use of contraception enabled much — though not all — of the world to bring down rates of growth.
Now, however, rather than celebrating this initial success, we’re hearing emotional warnings about global depopulation: a baby shortage, the “burden of aging societies,” dwindling markets for goods, and a “loss of creative edge.” Pundits conjure visions of empty playgrounds, a shrinking work force resentful at shouldering pensions for multitudes of seniors, and ethnic tensions from an influx of immigrants who look very different and come from alien cultures. These alarming scenarios are being used to undermine support for family-planning programs around the world.
This is a mistake. Like Malthus, the doomsayers ignore the human capacity to adapt and survive. But far more tragic, they overlook the “demographic divide” between rich and poor countries.
At the risk of over-quoting (she’s really the author of this item) she continues:
This divide is real and growing. The populations of most developed countries, net of immigration, are stable or even shrinking, and all are aging. But this is much less than half the picture. Of the 130 million children born each year, more than 90 million arrive in developing countries. Women in many sub-Saharan African countries are still having four to six children each, enough to double their populations every 25 to 30 years. This statistic has changed little since the 1960s.
In other poor countries, women are having fewer children than their mothers did, but still far more than the “replacement” level of 2.1 each, and downward trends have stalled. For those people, and not just in Africa, reality is desperate poverty, teeming slums without sanitation or clean water, and children’s playgrounds that are garbage dumps and open sewers, not empty swing-sets.
More than 1 billion young people — most of them in poor countries — are now entering their reproductive years. Their childbearing decisions will shape the future for all of us, so they need family-planning information and services right now if they are to make responsible choices in their own best interests. But this need is not being met. At least 120 million women say they would space or limit their children but lack access to family-planning options that wealthy nations take for granted.
How about the developed nations?
Polls show that many European families want more children than they now have. But women also cite the difficulty of combining parenthood with careers, the shortage of attractive and affordable housing, and reluctance to marry where traditional child care patterns and women’s roles persist, as in Italy and Japan. Farsighted governments and employers are trying to make it easier for women to balance careers with child rearing: bonuses for each child, paid parental leave, tax breaks and subsidized child care facilities.
Such countries as Sweden, Italy and Chile have also made major changes in their pension programs to cope with aging populations, while other nations are debating new options. While not every idea will prove effective, necessity is forcing change. As economist Herbert Stein once said, “When something can’t go on any longer, it won’t go on any longer.”
She concludes, with something the “family values” people ought to take seriously, though it’s hard to imagine them doing so:
No government or donor country should ever force individuals to have more or fewer children, but it is their legitimate role to create, monitor and tune policies that align what’s good for individual women and families with what’s good for their societies. Obviously, these policies must differ between rich and poor countries. And if they are successful, over time and thanks to human ingenuity and adaptability, they will narrow the demographic divide. A worldwide one-size-fits-all approach that dismisses family planning is not only wrong-headed and dangerous; it’s downright cruel.
I’d say, just for starters, that 530,000 preventable deaths a year deserves at least some of our nation’s attention, at long last.