Fatal Misconception: Birth Control for Others

[flashl]

The first large-scale scientific test of family planning took place in Khanna, India, beginning in the early 1950s. Backed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, researchers asked 8,000 villagers how often they had sex, whether they wanted to conceive and the details of the women’s menstrual cycles. The researchers met the villagers monthly and provided contraceptives, while closely monitoring another group that was given no contraceptives.

That initiative was an early warning that population policy can be very difficult to get right. In “Fatal Misconception,” Matthew Connelly, an associate professor of history at Columbia University, carefully assembles a century’s worth of mistakes, arrogance, racism, sexism and incompetence in what the jacket copy calls a “withering critique” of “a humanitarian movement gone terribly awry.”

...

Critics of family planning programs will seize gleefully upon this book, and that’s unfortunate, because two propositions are both correct: first, population planners have made grievous mistakes and were inexcusably quiet for too long about forced sterilization in countries like India and China; and second, those same planners have learned from past mistakes and today are fighting poverty and saving vast numbers of lives in developing countries.

...

“Fatal Misconception” is to population policy what William Easterly’s “White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good” (2006) was to foreign aid: a useful, important but ultimately unbalanced corrective to smug self-satisfaction among humanitarians. Connelly scrupulously displays a hundred years of family planners’ dirty laundry, but without adequately emphasizing that we are far better off for their efforts. One could write a withering history of medicine, focusing on doctors’ infecting patients when they weren’t bleeding them, but doctors are pretty handy people to have around today. And so are family planners.

NY Times

[Warpy]

1. Like most well meaning men, they simply misunderstood

the problems that women face, especially women in the developing world.

Women there are valued only for the number of sons they produce. No woman in her right mind would want to decrease her value as a human being by limiting that number. She would be abandoned by a disgusted husband and left to starve in the street.

Any family planning program that wants to be a success also has to work on the low status and limited horizons of such women, to educate them and facilitate setting up home based businesses. Women whose status comes from education and income generation will want to limit the time they spend recovering from childbirth and will be much more amenable to birth control.

Yes, the world is better off because a low percentage of women in the developing world used birth control because they were worn out from constant child bearing. However, the world would be much, much better off had the problem at the root of overpopulation in the developing world been understood and addressed.

The article acknowledges that these problems are finally being addressed after decades of arrogance and cultural myopia. However, there is much work to be done.
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If anyone reading this has $25.00 to spare this month, you can use it to change the world at http://www.kiva.org. You can lend it to a person you choose anywhere in the world and change this world the way it has to be changed, one poor woman (or man) at a time.