LIBERATED, INFORMED, AND RESPONSIBLE CHOICES
Tackling Overpopulation through Dismantling Pronatalism
What is pronatalism?
Pronatalism is the sociocultural bias favoring biological reproduction, and it leads to unrelenting pressures, primarily on women, to bear children. Pronatalist pressures and norms profoundly undermine authentic choice about one of the most important decisions people make in their lives.
Pronatalist coercion occurs at every level of human experience, including:
Pressures and expectations for children or grandchildren exerted by family members. If a woman is unable or unwilling to comply, she may be disowned, subjected to domestic violence, divorced, socially stigmatized, and economically marginalized.
Religious messaging that includes scriptural commandments to “be fruitful and multiply,” and stigmatizes people who are single or who cannot or choose not to have children. Religious pronatalism also leads to restrictions and misinformation about contraception, abortion, and family planning services.
Medical and pharmaceutical pronatalism, which capitalize on the stigma surrounding childlessness and the anxiety around the so-called “biological clock,” to market IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies, while placing barriers to women who want elective sterilization.
Political pronatalism, which involves exhortations to grow militarily powerful nations; nationalistic, often anti-immigration rhetoric to grow “ethnically pure” populations; and alarmist narratives about the perils of a “baby bust” and the need for continued population growth to care for the elderly. These may be enforced by political restrictions on contraceptive use, abortion bans, or economic arm twisting, like tax incentives and baby bonuses for procreation.
Capitalist pronatalism, which favors and promotes population growth in order to expand the numbers of cheap laborers and consumers, thereby growing the economy and extravagant profits in tandem.
Family, religious, political, and economic pronatalist coercion is a product of millennia of patriarchal disempowerment of women. Pronatalist coercion is an enormous source of confusion and suffering for women and men, many of whom engage in forced or mindless procreation as they are prevented from considering, or even discerning, their authentic reproductive desires.
Pronatalist pressures are so pervasive and familiar that people often cannot see how they function as instruments of reproductive injustice and social oppression worldwide. In fact, pronatalism is foundational to our growth-based socioeconomic system, a pyramid scheme that relies on constant population growth for economic growth, which ultimately serves to enrich the elites.
Executive Director Nandita Bajaj’s presentation on pronatalism at the International Conference on Family Planning 2022.
The population taboo reinforces coercive pronatalism
Pronatalism is the main engine of ongoing population growth, yet challenging pronatalism and population growth remains taboo, primarily due to overpopulation denialism.
Egregious population policies that targeted particular groups with forced sterilization and restricted fertility, based on rationales of racism, classism, sexism, ableism, and nationalism, are invoked by population denialists at the mere mention of overpopulation or of overpopulation impacts on the environment.
Yet unjust population policies have been the exception and not the rule in the history of efforts to slow down population growth. The vast majority of these efforts, such as for example in Thailand, Bangladesh, and elsewhere, have been rights-based and voluntary and have resulted in vast improvements in human rights and well-being, especially of women and girls.
Yet these success stories have gone virtually unnoticed in the shadow of unjust outliers like China’s one-child policy or forced sterilization in India. Simultaneously, the coercive forces of pronatalism, which are especially abhorrent in the subjugation of females, are left entirely off the hook by population denialists.
Mechai Viravaidya, Thailand’s “Condom King” discusses the phenomenal family planning program he helped institute in Thailand, that lead the total fertility rate to drop from over 6 to under 2 in a matter of decades.
Those bent upon silencing conversations about pronatalism, overpopulation, and their impacts on human welfare and the environment, reinforce coercive pronatalism. Pronatalism is the oldest form of reproductive control and the surest means of subjugating women and girls. It continues to reign supreme, serving those who rely on population growth for structural power.
Victims of pronatalism
Dr. Amrita Nandy, Author of Motherhood and Choice discusses the impact of pronatalism in India in this podcast episode.
In communities where women have little or no reproductive freedom, they are repeatedly subjected to the dangerous experience of childbirth with limited or no prenatal or postnatal care. Approximately 270 million women worldwide (WHO) experience major barriers to family planning education and contraceptive uptake.
Globally, one in four girls does not attend secondary school, and one in five is married before her 18th birthday. That the practice of “child brides” is acceptable in certain cultural enclaves does not negate the fact that it perpetrates child sexual and physical abuse. Child marriage and pregnancy rob girls of opportunities and put them at high risk of injury and death, while likely depriving children, born of children, to have their most fundamental needs met.
These social conditions underlie a vicious cycle in which continued population growth drives poverty and ecological degradation that further constrain autonomy for women and girls. Parents have little money to invest in each child—and more and more people cannot meet their basic needs as ecological conditions deteriorate.
As things stand right now, younger and future generations face the prospect of significant reversals in human rights. According to UNICEF, children born today and in the future will live “an unprecedented life.” Additionally, almost half the world’s 2.2 billion children are already at “extremely high risk” from the impacts of the climate crisis and pollution.
Pronatalism undermines reproductive responsibility in the face of ecological degradation
Dr. Trevor Hedberg, environmental and procreative ethicist discusses the ethical implications of of procreation.
Even in industrialized countries, lack of access to comprehensive sexuality education and reproductive care remain major challenges. In the US, 45% of pregnancies are unintended, out of which nearly one million unwanted children born each year. Children remain the foremost yet unrecognized victims of pronatalism, with nearly 424,000 children in foster care in the US on any given day.
Yet for those who can choose, a growing sense of reproductive responsibility is resulting in more and more people choosing to have few children, one child, or none.
Having one fewer child in industrialized countries (such as the US and Canada) is over 20 times more effective than other high-impact personal actions to reduce our carbon footprint, including going car-free, flying less, or becoming vegan, Thus, procreative choices in the Global North will have an enormous impact on the planet, and for many, the choice to be childfree is a powerful way to minimize that impact.
Anti-pronatalism vs. anti-natalism
The fact that we oppose pronatalism and expose its dire human-rights violations and ecological consequences does not mean we are anti-natalist. We categorically disagree with anti-natalism. Anti-natalism is a philosophical position that views procreation as in-principle unethical. As the flipside of pronatalism, anti-natalism diminishes people’s reproductive autonomy and authentic choice by positing ideologically driven restrictions.
Our goal at Population Balance is to promote conditions where people are neither pressured into having children nor scorned for having them. We support the societal transformations that enable people to arrive at the decision to procreate or not, with maximum autonomy, education, and responsibility.
It is certain that superseding coercive pronatalism will result not only in a more liberated relationship with our own lives, but also in a lowered global population, as more people freely choose to remain childfree, to only have one child, or to adopt.
Sociologist Orna Donath discusses why antinatalism, like pronatalism, is a barrier to achieving true reproductive liberation.
Our vision for liberated and informed choices
We work toward a future where people can make free, considered, and responsible family choices, including how they choose to define family.
Governments and institutions have a responsibility to enact universal policies that promote delayed parenthood, parental readiness and education, and smaller families. This responsibility extends to investing in rights-based family planning education and services, especially making contraception and counseling accessible and affordable. It must include ambitiously improving educational opportunities for girls and young women and supporting the integration of comprehensive sexuality education into curricula that include such topics as sustainable population, ecological overshoot, and children’s rights. Instead of pouring funds into incentives for women to bear children in order to pay into the social safety net, governments should put these funds directly into caring for the elderly and supporting their integration into meaningful roles in their communities.
PB advisor Robert Engelman discusses the interlinkages between reproductive and ecological justice in this podcast episode.
Such policies must strive to balance the right to have children with the rights of children, both existing and as-yet-unborn. They would benefit would-be parents by ensuring greater financial stability and health, better social and emotional outcomes, higher standards of living, gender equality, greater investment in each child, and a more ecologically vibrant planet. Family planning interventions do not only support human rights, they are also the most effective way to reduce population growth and are thus crucial in our efforts to minimize further ecological damage and avert collapse.