Sex Education (As Good As The Show!)

Reproductive RightsSocio-Economic Justice

Oct. 27

Sarah Baillie and Kelley Dennings from The Center for Biological Diversity share their exciting initiatives and advocacy work on destigmatizing sex, contraception, and reproductive decisions. They also share the state of the sex ed curriculum across the states in the US, as well as their important work on awareness campaigns relating to population and consumption pressures on biodiversity.

Nandita Bajaj welcomes long-time staff member of Population Balance, Alan Ware, as her new co-host, and they discuss the recent news about the rising levels of climate anxiety among youth around the world, and how our current predicament impacts intergenerational justice.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Nandita Bajaj 0:00
Extinction is not inevitable, it's a political choice. Those powerful words are a call to action by the Center for Biological Diversity for the federal government to declare the wildlife extinction crisis a national emergency. We get to go deeper into the work of the Center in tackling this planetary emergency, next on this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast. This is it, the Overpopulation Podcast tirelessly making overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host and Executive Director of Population Balance. And if you are a regular listener, you will have learned from our last episode that Dave Gardner, our tireless podcast producer, co-host, and the father of the Overpopulation Podcast, has decided to retire fully from Population Balance. We will greatly miss Dave, and wish him all the very best. But in other news, I'm really excited to officially introduce my new co-host today, Alan Ware. A wise and deep thinker and a gentle, long standing staffer at Population Balance. You are probably familiar with Alan's contributions on many of our roundtable episodes. Alan assists with website research, writing, as well as public presentations. He brings immense breadth and depth in his understanding of the overshoot issue. But what's especially exciting for me in sharing the space with Alan, is that we both share a philosophical and ecocentric worldview. You'll get to hear our views on that as we embark on this special journey together. Alan, welcome.

Alan Ware 2:01
Thank you, Nandita, it's great to be joining you as co-host. And it's great to have you as the new Executive Director. You bring such a great collaborative spirit to this project and a sensitivity to multiple perspectives that this issue needs. And you're bringing it to the overpopulation issue and to Population Balance. So thank you. And thank you for welcoming me. I know I've got mighty big shoes to fill with the departure of the amazing podcaster extraordinaire, Dave Gardner, but I'll just have to do my best.

Nandita Bajaj 2:34
I think we're gonna have a great time. So we're gonna have a great conversation today with Kelley Dennings and Sarah Baillie from the Center for Biological Diversity. But first, we have a couple of news items to share. Alan, you have some listener feedback lined up for us.

Alan Ware 2:49
That's right, I've got one from Emma in Singapore. She says, "Hi, I'm Emma, a seventeen-year-old student in Singapore, and I'm currently studying geography in school. I recently came across your podcast and really loved how I get to relate what I learned in the classroom to the discussions you guys are having. One topic I would love to hear about is megacities and their impacts on standards of living, crime, etc. Thank you and hope to hear back from you guys. Smiley face."

Nandita Bajaj 3:21
I love that our podcasts are starting to make it into those Gen Z circles. Okay, not circles. It's just one person. But it's a start. When I first joined Population Balance, my hope really was for our work to start permeating school and college classrooms. So if we could make this topic common knowledge in the classrooms, I would say that we are partially successful in our work.

Alan Ware 3:48
Yes, a system of education is a system that can influence all the other systems and help change the culture in the way that we want it to be changed. She brings up an excellent issue for us to explore - the explosive growth of these megacities around the world and all the problems that it can create for people. So I think maybe it's worth looking into, maybe we get a guest on that knows something more in depth about megacities, or we can explore some articles about it, because that is where a lot of the future population growth this century will be happening. So we've got a few articles to discuss today that I thought would be interesting to look at. And one of those is from Carbon Brief, and the title is Today's Youth Will Face Unmatched Climate Extremes Compared to Older Generations. And another article related to the climate crisis from The Lancet is Four in Ten Young People Fear Having Children Due to the Climate Crisis. These were two large, new studies that have dropped in the past week or so.

Nandita Bajaj 4:51
Yeah, and both centered around youth and their experiences. Yeah, and it was startling to me 40% of the young people have expressed concerns about having kids in the future. And I study pronatalism, and I urge all young people to truly examine their beliefs and attitudes around having children before making that really important decision. And, you know, while I'm a huge fan of legitimizing the choice to not have children, or to form families in a variety of ways, this was really touching for me. The fact that this choice is actually being taken away from these young people, to not even be able to exercise their right to have kids, it's being forced upon them. And that's sad.

Alan Ware 5:42
Right. And it was such a large poll - ten-thousand young people, ages sixteen to twenty-five. It wasn't just in the Global North, it included Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, the Philippines, Portugal, the UK, and the US. So it's a large sample of a diverse range of countries, and the fact that it would show that four in ten fear having children due to this, and as a social justice issue, especially as an intergenerational social justice issue, this is huge. To the extent that we're really creating fear and limiting their choices for what they can imagine their future to be, is tragic.

Nandita Bajaj 6:24
It truly is. And, you know, the intergenerational justice issue that you bring up is a difficult concept for a lot of people to let in, because so much of our social justice focus tends to be on the people that are here, and protecting their rights. A term that I've often heard in this context is temporal myopia, where we can really only focus on our, you know, next few years, next few days, and not look at humanity as this evolutionary journey that has been going on for a long time, and that, ideally, will continue for a really long time. When you let in the fact that in the next thirty, forty years, I mean, it's starting to happen already, that young people, as the second article says, you know, anyone born today or after, is going to experience so much worse conditions compared to what we are experiencing, is egregious, right? It's very sad.

Nandita Bajaj 6:24
Right. The whole lack of future orientation, and the lack of ability or willingness to see ourselves as being good ancestors, or that we have so little perception of that, I think because change these last two-hundred years maybe, especially, has just been constant in people's lives so it's made us the kind of eternal now - we're just always in this present. Because ten years, technology will move on and what you know will be useless. So we're always having to upgrade and modernize. So that forces us into the now and makes the future kind of just this gauzy, I don't know, maybe it's Elon Musk's rocket ships, or we go to Mars, or maybe it's apocalypse, both of which can excuse you to not do any action. If you think technology's going to save us, you don't have to do anything, if you think it's apocalypse, then you can be nihilistic, but this kind of realistic, hopeful future that we could create is within that broad distance between apocalypse and techno-optimism.

Nandita Bajaj 8:35
Yes.

Alan Ware 8:36
And to have that, we have to think like, yeah, good ancestors and create this new future orientation, future social justice, intergenerational social justice, like you mentioned.

Nandita Bajaj 8:47
Truly. And to realize that the number of people that will exist in the future are exponentially more than the number of people that exist right now.

Alan Ware 8:57
Right. Yeah, that reminds me, I forget who mentioned it, but maybe it was Paul Ehrlich. But trying to maximize the number of human lives over the lifespan on this planet, instead of all packing them in now and trashing the place so that there's not space for the future human lives or any other lives.

Nandita Bajaj 9:15
Yeah. And to that point, I wanted to also just put a plug in for a letter that we've been working on in partnership with the Fair Start Movement. It's an open letter to the UN and the COP26 leadership, calling on them to take a clear public position that this rising global inequality, gender inequity, and the climate crisis are in large part a result of this unsustainable population, these poor, unjust, unsustainable family planning practices. And, you know, we're hoping to gather a lot of signatories and support on that letter and to continue to do important work in normalizing and making this issue mainstream. And, you know, we'll see where that goes.

Alan Ware 10:06
Yeah, that's a great collaboration that you helped spearhead. And doing it with Fair Start, which really focuses on quality of human life, not quantity, right? That we, as a community, can help all humans coming into our societies get a fair start in life, and limit our family size to focus more on quality versus quantity, but then to help each other out to get rid of the inequalities that make so many people's start in life just wholly unjust, and abuses of power. So yeah, it's great that we're teaming with them. But you spearheaded it.

Nandita Bajaj 10:44
We are. Yeah. we're really excited to have our friends from the Center for Biological Diversity in our virtual studio with us today. We have Kelley Dennings and Sarah Baillie. Welcome both. Kelley Dennings is the Population and Sustainability Campaigner who helps lead the Center's work focused on rights-based solutions from voluntary family planning to the solidarity economy, to address how the effects of patriarchy, capitalism, and other systems of oppression impact our environment. Before joining the center, she worked in waste reduction and forest conservation. She is the Founding President of the Social Marketing Association of North America, which works to advance behavior change for social good. And as a certified family planning health worker, she holds a bachelor's degree in natural resources from North Carolina State and a master's degree in public health from the University of South Florida. We also have Sarah Baillie here. Sarah is the Population and Sustainability Organizer who leads outreach efforts to help people understand how the pressures of our growing human population and high levels of consumption hurt wildlife and habitat. She manages the Endangered Species Condoms Project, and coordinates events for Pillow Talk. Sarah holds a bachelor's in wildlife conservation from the University of Delaware, a master's in biology from Villanova University, and a master's of public administration from the University of Arizona. Kelley and Sarah, welcome to our podcast. Thank you.

Sarah Baillie 12:24
Thanks for having us.

Nandita Bajaj 12:26
Great. Let's start off by hearing more generally about the important work that the Center for Biological Diversity is doing. Why don't you guys start us off with just a general overview for CBD?

Kelley Dennings 12:36
Sure, of course. But first, thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with you all. Were really excited to be on. My pronouns are she/her. Before we get started, I wanted to acknowledge that I am on the Indigenous Omaha land, which actually happens to also be where I grew up. A little bit about the center. So we are a national nonprofit conservation organization. And we work through a combination of science, the law, organizing, and creative media to protect wildlife and the wild places they need to thrive. So we like to say that not only do we want to win in the courts, which we do very often, but we want to win in the court of public opinion. You can go to our website and see a range of the things that we work on. But you know, it's endangered species, climate change, environmental health, ocean pollution, public lands, energy, and environmental justice, along with the team that Sarah and I are on, which is population and sustainability.

Nandita Bajaj 13:36
That's really awesome. Because when I first met you guys, it was through our shared work in population. And I was excited to see just how big of a scope that you're working in, both legally and in terms of education for the public. And I just wanted to follow up because you guys just launched a petition with a wonderfully provocative title: Extinction is Not Inevitable, It's a Political Choice, demanding that the federal government declare the wildlife extinction crisis a national emergency. Sarah, could you speak more to this? What steps are you urging the current administration to take?

Sarah Baillie 14:18
Sure, so this is for the Extinction Crisis Emergency Act, and it would direct President Biden to declare the global wildlife extinction a national emergency, like you said, and this legislation would spur action across the entire federal government to stem the loss of animals and plants in the United States and around the world. So what that could look like at different levels is directing Fish and Wildlife and the National Marine Fishery Service to review all species that have been identified by scientists as imperiled, and then protect them under the Endangered Species Act. It would also direct federal agencies to prioritize rebuilding healthy wildlife populations, protecting critical habitat, and fully integrating climate change concerns into the conservation and recovery of endangered species. And it would also require the establishment of new national wildlife refuges and the marine protected areas to help protect declining wildlife. And not so fun fact from a 2016 study found that Congress only provides approximately 3.5% of the funding that the services own scientists estimate is needed to recover species, and roughly one in four species receives less than ten-thousand a year toward recovery. So obviously, a lot of room for growth there that hopefully this act can help with.

Alan Ware 15:28
Well, I think one hundred billion sticks in my mind for some reason, as a number which would be one seventh of the military budget, the annual military budget. The whole part of extinction is not inevitable, it does feel like that, as we hear over the years, and they just declared what another twenty-three species extinct. Yeah, the steady drumbeat of of all these extinctions, and this kind of feeling like, well, what are you going to do? Or that's, I think, where a lot of the mainstream feeling is - like this is inevitable. It's like, no, it's not inevitable. This is a choice that we're making through our population and consumption, to continue taking away mainly habitat, right? Being the primary offender of this extinction. So the Center we've always held in high regard, because you make the species population connection, I think, going back to 2009, maybe, around then, is when we started seeing a very direct population species connection. The Center has been doing that for decades now. Or well over a decade. And I was wondering about your personal journeys to seeing this population species loss connection. What brought you on that journey to recognizing population as a critical part of that equation?

Sarah Baillie 16:43
So my name is Sarah, my pronouns are she/her, and I am based in Western New York, which is Indigenous Wenrohronon land. And my journey, I grew up outside the suburbs of Philly, but got to do as much hiking as you can do in that area. So I always enjoyed wildlife and kind of knew that's where I wanted my career to go. And I majored in wildlife conservation as an undergrad and had a lot of jobs doing environmental education, which I really enjoyed. Kind of the informality of that and how it involves connecting people with nature in the outside, getting your hands dirty. And then as I went on to major in biology and study animal behavior, that just continued to be a passion. Then went to work kind of in the labs for a little while, and circle back around to nonprofit work. And actually, through my master's in public administration, I was required to get an internship and actually started as an intern in my mid to late twenties at the Center, so it's never too late to be an intern. And I just really enjoyed the crossover of conservation and reproductive rights, because I started with the Center in early 2017, when both the environment and reproductive rights were under attack. So it felt just really excited to get to work on both of those things. So yeah, that's how I ended up here.

Kelley Dennings 17:54
I was just thinking back to - Sarah went back to high school, but I remember in high school trying to figure out what I was going to do. And I was potentially going to be a cop, a female auto mechanic, hairdresser. But my mom was like, "You read these Greenpeace magazines all the time, have you thought about maybe the environmental field?" So anyway, you know, a good mom pushed me in that direction. So I left Nebraska, which is where I grew up. And I got my bachelor's degree at North Carolina State in natural resources. And most of my environmental career was in recycling and waste. I did have a small time where I was in forest conservation. But I kind of started to realize within the recycling community that we weren't really getting anywhere, like our recycling rate had been stagnant for, you know, the decade that I had been working in it. And we really needed to be decreasing, like the production and consumption of stuff. So I started looking at a career change and became interested at this intersection of health and the environment. And so, went back to school, and as you mentioned, in my bio, for a master's in public health, and also was an intern in my forties when I went back to school, so we have that in common. And so when I finished, I just was really like, where am I going to go to work on these intersectional topics that are so interconnected? And I was really excited to find the Center so that my newfound interest in family planning and public health was valued along with the experience that I held in my former career on waste and recycling, because, you know, it is, especially when we talk about it domestically, we need to address consumption, and also our reproductive freedom. So I was really fortunate to find this position when I when I got out of school.

Nandita Bajaj 18:37
That's really fantastic. I especially like the connection you drew between the different strands of interests: environmental, human rights, reproductive rights, population, consumption, and then wildlife and animal protection. And it is incredible actually how much of those strands actually intersect at the Center. And what a great place to work, for both of you.

Kelley Dennings 20:11
I'll say Sarah and I make a great team in that regard, because she is the wildlife biologist and I have kind of the public health experience. And so, I mean together, we are a perfect person.

Alan Ware 20:22
So you both grew up in the suburbs?

Kelley Dennings 20:25
Not really in Omaha, I kind of grew up in rural. So my reproductive years have been in the Midwest and in the South.

Alan Ware 20:33
So as a kid, did you see areas paved over and shopping malled and subdivided?

Kelley Dennings 20:40
They have since. You know, I've been gone thirty years, and now my town got annexed by Omaha.

Alan Ware 20:46
Wow.

Kelley Dennings 20:47
And yes, there is no farmland between my town and and Omaha, when in fact it used to be - yeah it was farms.

Alan Ware 20:55
That probably has affected you personally seeing that. I grew up in the city. It was built in the twenties. I never saw areas I knew that were recently paved or housed or shopping malled. So yeah, having that process of a personal attachment to seeing that lost has got to mean something I would think.

Kelley Dennings 20:55
Most definitely.

Nandita Bajaj 20:56
You just spoke about your interest in reproductive rights, something that, you know, we are taking a much bigger stand on with our new vision. Sarah, why don't we start with you. You use a lot of creative methods to engage people into population related conversations. And what I've noticed, what you've obviously picked up on, is that reproduction is inextricably linked to sex and contraception use - a big surprise. And there's a lot of stigma around both those things. Some of your cool initiatives include, as you mentioned, the Endangered Species Condoms and the Pillow Talk. And the one that I was so excited to participate in with you last month was the contraceptive conversations. I think these are all such important initiatives to help normalize these conversations. And I'd love to hear your experience of running these programs. How are they received by the mainstream? And just how effective are they?

Sarah Baillie 22:17
Absolutely. So I'll start with the Endangered Species Condoms. That program has been around for twelve years, so proceeds me by quite a bit at the Center. I've been here about four years. And I don't have a visual to show anyone. This is audio. But what it is, is we give away condoms that come in little cardboard packages about the size of a pack of gum that have an illustration of an endangered species on it. And then we've got goofy slogans on the outside, like, "Before it gets hotter, remember the sea otter," or "Wrap with care to save the polar bear." And the idea is just to really illustrate for people the connection that safe sex can have with saving wildlife. Because when you practice safe sex, you can avoid an unplanned pregnancy and contributing to population and your family before you're ready. So basically, the condoms are really great, the goofy slogans really help break the ice, and it uses humor to kind of make that conversation more approachable. Someone who may not want to come just take a plain foil condom might enjoy the cute polar bear on the outside and take it for that reason and be more open to that conversation with that piece to kind of center the conversation around. And overall, these have been received really positively. And we have a nationwide network of volunteers that give these out in their communities. So whether it's their college campus, their local farmers market, the youth group they volunteer with, they have all kinds of places where they give these out. And we really prioritize opportunities that have space for conversation. So rather than just kind of leaving them in a fishbowl for people to take, we want them to hand them over and someone to say, "Hey, what's this about?" And discuss what that connection is. And in the twelve years that this has been around, we've given away over a million condoms. So we've got a lot of awesome volunteers working on this. It's been a little slow with COVID. But we're hoping it'll pick back up. And then the Pillow Talk program you mentioned is sort of an extension of the condoms. And this is actually what I - my internship was created to build up this program. And it's an outreach program specifically geared towards zoo, museum, and nature center audiences. And it's geared towards their adult only events. So when you have a brew at the zoo or an after hours, you can reach an audience that cares about wildlife and wants to know how they can reduce their individual impact. And because we don't talk about population and sex, they get to learn that safe sex is a new conservation action and it's a fun one. And with that we also have activities that help people understand their environmental impact. So bringing in that consumption part of the equation. And once again, these people are out for a good night and having fun, they have a drink in hand. So again, always super positively received, an initiative that wouldn't be possible without our volunteers. As much as I'd love to travel around the country going to these events, I cannot. So we reach out to supporters in those cities. We've actually worked with the Ripley's Aquarium up in Toronto, up your way, Nandita.

Nandita Bajaj 24:58
Yeah.

Sarah Baillie 24:58
When I can go to a local event, I'm always really excited to. And that's been great. We've been able to partner with about forty-five institutions around the country and over a hundred and twenty events in-

Nandita Bajaj 25:09
Wow.

Sarah Baillie 25:09
The three to four years. And again, that's with like, basically a year off in this last year as well. And then finally, Contraception Conversations is our newest one that started last fall. And we take different topics around contraception and family planning and interview several people about their experiences and perspectives. Because obviously, there's not just one around any one topic. And it just puts a face to the story, and helps normalize those conversations. So, so far, last year, we launched a series on vasectomies, and just a couple of weeks ago, we had our series about being child-free by choice, which Nandita participated in.

Nandita Bajaj 25:43
Yeah, and I can't tell you how much I appreciated having that conversation. And as I said in the interview, it was probably the first really thorough, wholesome conversation about contraception that I've had with anyone other than my partner. I went through forty years of my life, you know, not really having any real education on how to control my own fertility. How is that possible? I grew up in a fairly, you know, liberal home, and in a relatively conservative country. But even after moving to Canada, there is so much stigma around speaking about sex and reproduction and contraception, that it kind of behooves you to be surprised at why there are 50% of the pregnancies in the US are unplanned. So I'm a huge fan of normalizing these really important conversations. And that's a really fantastic number in terms of the number of institutions you've been able to reach despite this long break that you've had during COVID. Although I must say that, you know, your operations have slowed down, but I think so has sexual activity. In case you haven't noticed there's been a lot of alarmism in the news around how few babies are being born. So it sounds like really great work.

Sarah Baillie 27:05
Thank you.

Alan Ware 27:06
Yeah, we've we've just had a few tabling events, but the condoms are just a huge hit.

Sarah Baillie 27:12
Always good to hear.

Alan Ware 27:13
It's one of the only things we really get laughs on immediately are those those condoms, and they open up the conversation, they open people up to talking about it.

Kelley Dennings 27:21
Yeah, and to your point of like, just feeling awkward can stop people. So I'll say the condoms are always received really positively. I've never had someone outwardly angry at me for giving them away. But I have had people - I always really enjoy like parents of teens. I have some who are like, "I'm going to take these home and give these to my kid." I'm like, "Amazing." And then I've had some who are like, "This is kind of awkward." I'm like, "But would it be more awkward to hear you're going to be a grandma before you're ready, or grandpa?" Like checking that a little awkwardness now saves a lot of it later, perhaps?

Alan Ware 27:51
Yeah. All right.

Nandita Bajaj 27:52
I don't want to sidetrack the conversation too much, but have you heard of the show, the British teen comedy/drama TV show Sex Education?

Kelley Dennings 28:01
We love it. I love it.

Sarah Baillie 28:03
I haven't watched it.

Kelley Dennings 28:04
You haven't watched it yet?

Sarah Baillie 28:06
I need to add it to my list. You both recommended it to me, I know.

Nandita Bajaj 28:09
It's just so fantastic. And for the listeners who are just learning about it for the first time, it's a teen comedy/drama series on Netflix, that dives very deeply into sexual intimacy and relationships. Initially, when I started watching it, you know, I grew up, as I mentioned, in a fairly conservative culture, where we never spoke about sex or reproduction. So when I first started watching the show, I found it to be a little raunchy, very sexually explicit. But once you get over the initial shock, some of the scenes, you start appreciating, you know that this stuff is actually quite normal. And we just have been conditioned so deeply to have this complicated, stigmatized relationship to sex. And that is why we see so many complications around our relationship to just intimacy and reproduction and what it means to be a parent and the readiness around parenting, etc. But I have to tell you, I have learned so much from that show. It's not just an entertaining show. It's an educational show, so I can't recommend it highly enough for for our listeners.

Nandita Bajaj 28:47
And that's the world I live in. So I'm always bringing some of that stuff to the table.

Alan Ware 29:28
Yeah, Kelley, you've done a deep dive into the state of the sex ed curriculum in the US in a Ms Magazine article, Birds and the Bees: The Need for Sex Ed Curriculum Updates. And in that article, you state that quote, comprehensive sex education has been shown to lower the risk of teen pregnancy by 50%, delay the initiation of sex, reduce the number of sexual partners, and decrease the incidence of unprotected sex. That sounds like quite a harvest of good consequences. And you do mention how poor the state of current sex ed programs are on the US. Do you want to elaborate on that? What you found?

Kelley Dennings 30:08
Sure, a little bit on the state of sex ed, and I will not take credit for this at all, there is an organization called SIECUS, who tracks all the different sex ed throughout the states. And, you know, I share a link with the podcast for that. This is as of August 2021, there are thirty-three states and DC that are mandating sex ed. Now, that could mean it's abstinence only sex ed, it is not necessarily the gold standard, but twenty require that the curriculum be age appropriate, medically accurate, culturally responsive, and evidence-based. So that is kind of the gold standard, right? Only sixteen states require instruction on condoms or contraception. And only ten have policies that include information affirming sexual orientation regarding LGBTQ identities. And so, that's really where there could be a lot of improvement, is around the more gender affirming work that we have to do in sexual orientation. I will say, we did a survey that we put a report out in 2020. And we asked would you want to get involved in local sex ed? Because that's where this stuff happens, right? And 47% of respondents were interested in getting involved in local sex ed policy. And I gotta tell you, I came back to Nebraska. And there happened to be an opportunity to testify with the Nebraska school board, because they are updating their sex ed standards. And so last month, I went and testified in relationship to the sex that I received thirty years ago, and, you know, have found the type of sex ed that's been received today, and it is not wildly different. There have not been a lot of improvements. And so we really need to focus on this at the local level. Because in Nebraska, in particular, the health standards are just a guidance. And sex ed is just a piece of the health standards, you know, they're also talking about nutrition and mental health, and then it is up to the local school system as to whether they adopt them or not. So it's a way for people to really get involved in their communities to make change because it is happening at the local level. Even if you're advocating for state policy changes in relationship to sex ed, it may not be trickling down to your local community. So you know, this is kind of something that we've been dipping our toe in, and part of a couple of sex ed coalitions. But at the federal level, there is a bill that's being discussed right now called the Real Education and Access for Healthy Youth Act. And this kind of includes that gold standard, it says, "We need to be talking about LGBTQ, you know, we need to be giving folks the skills to negotiate consent, and these other things that we might not traditionally think of when we think of sex ed, or you know, just contraception," which still isn't necessarily in all of these. That's one way people could get involved. And again, another option at the federal level is to advocate for continued funding for things like the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, you know, that is funding this great success that we've seen in lowering teen birth rates in the United States, the last thing we would want to do is go backwards in that statistic and that trend if we start to remove some of these funding mechanisms. So that's a little summary on on sex ed.

Alan Ware 33:42
So it sounds like some hope, at least at the federal level with this new act coming in.

Kelley Dennings 33:47
Yeah, well, it needs to get passed. But yeah, so it would be great, the more folks that could reach out to their congress people about it. But local school boards too, we need people to continue to fill those seats, many of which are unpaid. And, you know, unappreciated.

Nandita Bajaj 34:04
Right.

Kelley Dennings 34:05
That we really need people to get active there in their communities,

Alan Ware 34:08
Right, that's the local education element in the US. Whereas in France, or probably Scandinavia. You aware of any cross-cultural, other countries' sex ed,

Kelley Dennings 34:19
I'm not, since we don't really focus globally. We do most of our work here. I don't know.

Nandita Bajaj 34:25
Yeah, that is so interesting and stark, right. Even the experience that you're mentioning - the curriculum, not having changed that much significantly, you know, in the thirty-three years that you went through school. That to me seems quite prevalent and consistent across a lot of places. Within our province of Ontario in Canada, we've adopted much more of a diversity equity inclusion curriculum over the last three or four years where we are openly speaking about LGBTQ gender equity. And there seems to be a little more emphasis on even critical race theories is starting to enter the curriculum. But like you say, it's really left up to individual schools on how far they are willing to go. And you can't mandate things like this when it's left up to a health education teacher to mix the curriculum with whatever values they've grown up with. So it's so complicated, but at the same time, this is the real work - it's the bottom-up work, right? It's the education. And I, being a professional educator most of my life, I really see that as the one system. If we could reform the educational system at so many levels, sexual ed comprehensive curriculum, but also more awareness around ecological overshoot, animal protection, you know, animals are hardly spoken about in the curriculum. That is the one system that really has the power to translate into other systems. And we wouldn't have to worry so much about other kinds of top-down policy change approaches if we were doing the right thing within our most important system. So thanks for the enlightenment on that. And Sarah, I had alluded to this alarmism piece that there's a lack in education, you know, bottom-up and then top-down, there's all of this miseducation happening at the policy level where we are hearing all this alarmism in the news about how we're not having enough children, and there's a lot of baby bust alarmism going on in the media. And you wrote a really excellent piece a few months ago challenging that narrative called Stop Panicking - There Are a Lot of Positives to the Baby Bust
. You've both spoken about intersectionality. There are obvious concerns with this kind of alarmism in how humans and women and children are often commodified to basically keep the economic engine going. Partly, I'd love for you to speak about the really lovely article you wrote, but then also how do these political pressures impact the work that you are doing on reproductive justice?

Sarah Baillie 37:13
Yeah, so I think what this alarmism does is it's a double whammy, where it ignores the positive trends that are moving in the right direction, and then negates the real barriers to reproductive freedom that many people are still facing. Like you were saying, they use these really alarming terms in the headlines like crash and baby bust. When in reality, if you look at a graph of birth rates in the US, it's just like this very gentle, gradual decline. And this is due to, like my little title in the magazine said - positive. Women are getting more education, continuing their education longer, being able to focus on their careers. And this usually tends to delay the start of having children, which also will have the effect of usually having fewer children. And then there's also programs like Kelley mentioned, the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. Programs like that are reducing birth rates across very specific age groups where I believe we want to see that decrease. But I mean, all is not perfect, there's still an unintended pregnancy rate in the United States, that is close to 50%. So that means we do still have a lot of room for improvement and making sure people are having children only if and when they're ready. So if you just kind of always like have this blanket message of, "We need to have more kids," why would anyone try to address solving this lack of reproductive freedom, and having full autonomy over your reproductive future?

Nandita Bajaj 38:26
It truly is a double whammy. It's very disappointing to hear these kinds of messages, because they are so singular in focus. They really lack this holistic vision of what is going on in terms of reproductive freedom and lack thereof for so many people. Thank you for the work that both of you are doing. And Kelley, you also wrote a really interesting piece on The Fight for Reproductive Health Care Is a Fight for Human Rights, and I wonder if you wanted to just tag along and speak to that piece here?

Kelley Dennings 39:00
Sure. I mean, Sarah was alluding to the ways that reproductive oppression occurs, right? And so much of it came from the attack of the former administration. And so we're building that back. But you know, from reinstating the global gag rule and repairing what was done to the Affordable Care Act - they pushed Planned Parenthood out of Title 10 which is just now coming back. Filling the Supreme Court full of right-wing conservative judges. That all to me speaks of reproductive oppression, right? Like all of that. And so we're making some headway, kind of at that federal level. But I don't know if anybody has not heard of the news coming out of Texas and SB8. Right now, the fights are at the state level, where we just continue to see that loss of reproductive freedom and this idea of reproductive oppression coming forward at the state level. I'll just say that, you know, this oppression of course, disproportionately impacts low socio-economic people, and Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. And so we need to be focusing those folks on the work that we do, uplifting their voices, centering them, because unfortunately, they're also disproportionately impacted when it comes to environmental pollution, climate change, contraceptive deserts. That's like the triple whammy. COVID morbidities. So really, we need to be coming at this from all directions, because whether it's the ability to pay for an abortion, even if Roe v Wade stands, it might be transportation to get to having an abortions.

Nandita Bajaj 39:05
Right.

Kelley Dennings 39:13
You know, and so all of this is part of that. And to me, I feel extremely, as if it's the movement I've been meant to work on, you know, and this, this is the time because it feels pretty strong. This idea of reproductive oppression right now.

Nandita Bajaj 40:51
Yeah, and just given our shared work in the population arena, I see the population pressures, I see overpopulation actually as something that is premised on a misuse of power. It's premised on reproductive oppression. When we speak about overpopulation and population related concerns, there's a lot of denial or nervousness around speaking about the issue, because so much of the reproductive oppression, you know, of our historical, but also current practices that are preventing people from being able to have children, they come up. And that usually stops the conversation in its tracks, because you can't move past the horrible history that population control has had. But what often doesn't get talked about is population control is at play in two ways. It's at play in preventing people from having children, but it's also at play coercing people into having children, which to me creates this urgency to get past this overpopulation denial so we can actually get to the root of dismantling these power structures that are really at the height of reproductive injustice. But also, as you said, it just really permeates into all levels of injustice. So thank you for shedding light on that.

Kelley Dennings 42:16
Sarah may have something to add also.

Sarah Baillie 42:20
Oh yeah, I mean, just that ultimately, the number of people on the planet paired with unsustainable consumption, especially in a high income country like the US that's driven by pro-growth economies is what's going to cause population pressure. So without ensuring that everyone not just has the choice, but again, these necessary tools, and resources to manage their reproductive health, we're only going to continue to see the negative effects of this pressure, like habitat loss and species loss.

Nandita Bajaj 42:45
You've made a very obvious connection, population pressures are inextricably linked to sex and reproduction. And we have a really messed up relationship to those things, both at a personal level and as a collective level, that really needs to be addressed. And as you mentioned, the consumption piece, the pro-growth piece is driving more births, driving more population, to keep our system growing, so we can, you know, keep producing more and consuming more. It is a bit of a closed loop, isn't it?

Sarah Baillie 43:17
Yeah.

Nandita Bajaj 43:18
And to that effect, I wanted to also give a shout out, Sarah, to another piece that you wrote Reproductive Justice is Climate Justice: Why I’m Celebrating My IUD This Earth Day. And I also wanted to touch on the fact that you both have chosen to be child-free - to not have children. Can you speak to the process of coming to that decision? Was that choice easily available to you? Did it take a lot of thinking, wherewithal? What was involved for each of you for making that choice?

Sarah Baillie 43:54
Yeah, I can start. And with the IUDs, I actually got my first IUD on Earth Day unintentionally, which was like a hilarious connection to make-

Nandita Bajaj 44:01
That's really awesome.

Sarah Baillie 44:02
Years later when I started at the Center. So for me, my choice to be child-free - not particularly fraught. I've kind of always felt ambivalent about having kids. It wasn't something I felt particularly enthusiastic about, but I did just kind of like expect it as an inevitability when I was an adult. And I babysat, I was a camp counselor, like, I don't dislike kids, I just did always feel tired after hanging out with them. I enjoyed the time off part as well. So I met my partner in grad school in our twenties. And we talked, we actually like had like our serious talk about having kids a few years into our relationship after living together. So as we got more serious, it was worth asking whether either of us saw kids in our future, even though like at the present moment, we were always trying to avoid having them. And it was a fairly anticlimactic conversation of just, "Are you interested in that?" "I don't think so." "Okay, me either." And that was kind of it. And I realized how lucky I am that it was like that simple. And then, you know, later on, continuing to learn the impacts that having a child has on the environment really just solidified that for me. So I really do try to not take for granted that I had a pretty easy, I had a partner on the same page, our families have largely, and to our faces, been very supportive of that. I used to hear, "You'll change your mind," when I was younger. That's kind of tapered off. I now I'm just a little more attuned to when various strangers just kind of assume you'll have kids, which I just I think it's interesting now, I'm not like personally offended by it. So yeah, I think it's becoming a little more normalized. And I do, part of that I do kind of appreciate parents who are really candid about how hard having kids is. I think that really helps open people's eyes to that and being thoughtful about that decision.

Nandita Bajaj 44:02
Yeah.

Sarah Baillie 44:04
So that's my story.

Nandita Bajaj 44:09
Thank you.

Kelley Dennings 44:10
Well, and I'll just say here, I'm about fifteen years older than Sarah. So for me, when I reflected on this, I had to think back, I really did. I have friends who are becoming empty nesters now, so it's like a whole different situation, right? But I remember the angst and the frustration and the sadness and just just emotions that I went through when choosing to be child-free. But time does heal a lot of things. I met my partner in college, we've actually been together twenty-five years. But when we were in our twenties, we were both on the fence about having kids. And we were one of those people that like, "Oh, if it happens, it happens," right?

Nandita Bajaj 46:18
Right.

Kelley Dennings 46:18
Like rolling the dice. So when I was in my thirties, you know, my friends and sister and everybody was having kids. That's when they when I remember struggling with it and feeling the loss of you know, people making this decision. So I finally decided parenthood wasn't right for me. My reasons for that are extremely varied, you know, the financial independence, the I was not interested in actually, the birthing experience, I didn't necessarily want to pass my genes on. So, and the concern for the environment. But to be honest, it was not necessarily the top for me. You know, when I'm thinking back to this, back in the day. But the difference was, kind of between Sarah and I, is that my partner wasn't necessarily at the same place as me. So thankfully, he was willing to go to couples counseling, and we did that. And we ultimately got through this decision together, I think, to be child-free. And you know, so when I remember those years, it was - you don't just all of a sudden say I want to be child-free, and voila, you're child-free. Like there's all this work involved on somebody's part to not have a child.

Nandita Bajaj 46:18
Yes!

Kelley Dennings 47:30
So this is kind of where my interest in family planning came about. It was from this very personal perspective. I was so frustrated with my birth control pill, I have a laundry list of the different ones I tried, that we just scrapped it all together. And we were using the withdrawal method. And we were using that method for like six or seven years. And so when, I mean I thought I was infertile, I was like, this can't be right, like... Yeah, so finally, you know, when I like made this decision, like, I don't want kids, we can't keep doing this method. This is crazy. So you know, here I am then trying to I wanted to tubal ligation, you know, I wanted my tubes tied. There was nobody in the South that was going to tie my tube at age thirty. So I got an IUD because that was a new thing to me, though. Nobody ever shared with me, "Oh, you don't like birth control pills? Why don't you try this other method?" Like, what? Where was that? Nobody ever told me that. So I did love the IUD. Did that for two rounds. But then I was like, "Okay, I'm I'm pushing forty now. I want this tubal ligation." Well, of course, at forty, they're like, "Wash your hands." You know, they're like, "Fine."

Nandita Bajaj 48:39
They finally trust you.

Kelley Dennings 48:40
They finally were like, "Yeah, okay." And I had to move to DC. Let me just say that was where I got it done, a more progressive area. I get my tubes tied. And here's the kicker - a year later, I have to have a full hysterectomy because the inner lining of my uterus was attacking the outer lining of my uterus, and the only way to like control the pain was to have that removed. Yeah, that's like my reproductive history of just ahh the things we go through. And of course this whole time, I'll give you an opportunity to speak here, Alan, on behalf of your your male counterparts. You know, this whole time my partner, no offense, could have gotten a vasectomy.

Nandita Bajaj 49:19
Right.

Kelley Dennings 49:19
But there is just this...

Alan Ware 49:22
Right.

Kelley Dennings 49:23
It just doesn't happen as often.

Alan Ware 49:26
Yeah, I never got one. We had talked about it, but then we kind of timed out. We started late and then timed out of it. That is my, I know my dad did after he had me. I was a third.

Kelley Dennings 49:41
Yeah, it needs to be shared. It needs to be a shared responsibility.

Alan Ware 49:44
Oh yeah.

Kelley Dennings 49:44
And so often it isn't. Everyone can enjoy side effects.

Alan Ware 49:47
Yes, right.

Nandita Bajaj 49:49
And here's to full transparency, right. It's just so nice to normalize these conversations and bring them out into the open and I love that you guys are doing that work in public education, you know, with all of your volunteering opportunities, but bringing this into this podcast, too. It's so refreshing to hear, you know, nothing being left off the table. Because these choices, these conversations, they have real consequences. And we are dealing with the impacts of these real consequences in every way. And thank you for sharing your journeys. And I just love how unique and different they are too, for our listeners who are on different parts of their journey in defining and figuring out what family means to them. It's nice to know that people can have so many different motivations for choosing this path to not be a biological parent, and that it's a very legitimate path. And, you know, here's to normalizing that.

Kelley Dennings 50:48
And please, I implore people to talk with their health care providers. You kind of started us out with that too, Nandita. You know, you weren't getting the information that you needed. And, you know, that was why I went back and got this family planning counseling certificate, because you know, I just - the struggle I went through is what I don't want other people to go through.

Nandita Bajaj 51:07
Yeah.

Kelley Dennings 51:07
Is finding the method that's right for you.

Sarah Baillie 51:10
You maybe see your friends and family more than your health care provider. Granted, they are medical experts, but talking to your friends and family about your experiences. Alan, you mentioned knowing your dad had a vasectomy, so you like have that. You can get those people's individual experiences with these things and kind of use that as a good starting research point to find out what's right for you. That's how I figured out an IUD would be good for me was talking to my friends about it. And then my doctor.

Nandita Bajaj 51:32
That was really great.

Alan Ware 51:33
Kelley and Sarah, I'm asking you to give us a little inspiration. What keeps you going in the face of this sustainability crisis, particularly with biological diversity? In the face of all these challenges we see with this, of protecting the more than human life, as I've heard it described, not nonhuman, in this growth addicted world that we have. What keeps you going?

Kelley Dennings 51:57
I think, for me, it is the work that we're doing at multiple levels, right? We can talk about individual actions, but we also work at this systems level advocating for various policy changes. We know that both are crucial to saving wildlife and wild places. And I kind of mentioned this survey earlier, I think, but when we did this survey, you know, for one of the questions in particular was, you know, are you willing to reduce your personal consumption? And 81% are willing to reduce their personal consumption, but 31% said they needed more information. And when we asked about policy, 44%, were willing to vote for policymakers that support reproductive rights, but 28% need more information. So that, to me is the crucial role that we play, okay. So there's motivation, there's attitudes, but they need that how. They need the where. So I do see that that is kind of our place. We're not a healthcare provider, we're just trying to kind of connect people. And we also talk about it at the individual level and systems level, we do definitely see it as both consumption and population. So you know, we are over here working on the growth mentality, whether that be people or GDP. And again, really trying to address the disproportionate impact that we have in this world, knowing that I'm coming from a place of privilege as a you know middle class white woman. So trying to figure all that out within the framework. That's our purview.

Sarah Baillie 53:25
That was really eloquent, Kelley. I just like to know that every day I get to get up and I get to try to help in what like whatever little way like our goofy condoms can help start that conversation and get people thinking about it in a new way. And like Kelley said, with the individual and systemic actions. Giving people something they can do today to feel empowered that they're making a difference and a change as well. But also knowing like, it's not all on you as an individual either to like, fix it all. And what are the broader changes and policies you can advocate for, to help make those changes more accessible to everyone? Because not everyone has all the options at their hands that are accessible to them.

Nandita Bajaj 54:03
Such great answers, and such great words to live by, too.

Alan Ware 54:07
Well, I think it's great. You're both able to use your own interests and personalities to find meaning and motivation in this. And we've all got to do that. We all bring different interests and motivations and talents to the table. And if we join together, we can do something. But just individually, we're so much less. And I thank you two for helping with such a great organization at the Center. Doing your part and helping all of us and future generations of human and more than human.

Nandita Bajaj 54:37
I do love that, Alan. The more than human.

Alan Ware 54:40
Yeah.

Nandita Bajaj 54:41
Yeah. And on the subject of, you know, working together too, as you mentioned, Alan, it would be such a pleasure to do more things together with the Center and with you both. I see so much overlap in the work we're trying to do. And there is definitely power in collaborating in our efforts. So I hope we will have many more opportunities to do that. Thank you so much, Sarah and Kelley, for the candid conversation that you brought to our podcast today and for the inspiration and your personal examples that are a true inspiration for people as well. Thank you so much.

Kelley Dennings 55:17
Thank you!

Sarah Baillie 55:18
Thank you.

Alan Ware 55:19
Well, that was great. Those two are such a great interview. They had such excellent energy and amazing experience across everything from biology to public health, family planning, social marketing. It's really a powerhouse of experience and knowledge. And I love how they're joining the concern for the more than human world with the family planning and limits on the human world. And there are so few environmental organizations, animal conservation organizations, that make that connection the way that the Center for Biological Diversity does.

Nandita Bajaj 55:55
Absolutely. I know I said that in the interview. I loved how candid the conversation was. And given their work in the arena of sex and reproduction, it's so important to keep normalizing these conversations and speaking about contraception and sexual intimacy so that it's not so stigmatized for people to then talk about population pressures and what impacts our reproductive activities have on the planet, especially if they're not examined and thought out.

Alan Ware 56:28
Yeah, great point about the normalizing the contraception conversations. That's quite innovative, to really explore that in detail and bring it out into the open, a lot of things that people haven't talked about with hardly anybody and making it public and making it more comfortable to talk about.

Nandita Bajaj 56:46
And as we come to the close of this episode, we usually end off with an inspirational quote. And given that this is your first day as the new co-host, Alan, I would let you do the honors.

Alan Ware 56:59
Okay, I've got one from Sir Peter Scott, who is the co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund, who I'm sure you've heard of with their Living Planet Report every four years, I think, they come out with that, showing how much the populations ten thousand different populations of over three thousand species they look at and how it's down 68% since 1970 in the latest Living Planet Report. But he says quote, you know, I have often thought at the end of the day, we would have saved more wildlife if we had spent all of WWF's, the World Wildlife Fund's, money on buying condoms. So I thought that was a great connection to what the Center for Biological Diversity is doing what the Endangered Species condoms.

Nandita Bajaj 57:45
That's a great quote.

Alan Ware 57:47
Yeah, extinction alone is not everything. The genetic variability within that species goes down as there are fewer individuals and they're less able to withstand shocks that could lead to extinction. So depopulation's a big deal.

Nandita Bajaj 58:02
Yeah.

Alan Ware 58:03
They've been tracking that really well. And depressingly, over the decades.

Nandita Bajaj 58:07
Well, thank you for sharing that very appropriate quote, Alan. That's it for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Thank you, as always, Alan, for being such a great co-worker, for the vital work that you and our volunteers and staff at Population Balance are doing.

Alan Ware 58:27
Thank you, Nandita. You can visit populationbalanced.org to learn more about how you can help solve world overpopulation. And while you're there, click on that donate button and make sure Population Balance can continue important initiatives like this podcast. And don't forget, please, to recommend this podcast to friends, family, colleagues, journalist and maybe even elected representatives.

Nandita Bajaj 58:51
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, reminding you that we can all make a dent in this movement by choosing small footprint families, whatever family means to you.