A strange silence

Akey reason we haven’t made more progress in curbing population growth is that for the last 20 years, almost no one has talked about it.

The strange silence, during a period when the world population grew from 5.5 billion people to more than 7 billion, has its roots in the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. There, a number of activist women agreed that the International Conference on Population and Development, scheduled to be held in Cairo two years later, should broaden its focus to include a wider range of women’s concerns, including education, health and improved justice.

These are all worthy issues. But the tragedy was that a group of women’s advocates devoted themselves to making the terms “population” and “family planning” politically incorrect, suggesting that focusing on numbers of people somehow invited coercive family planning that was aimed at preventing women in developing nations from having children they wanted. This was absurd, since the vast number of family planning programs focused on enabling women to make their own decisions. But after the Cairo conference, due mainly to the unfortunate silence, international family planning budgets collapsed.

The results have been predictable. Kenya, for example, which had brought average family size from eight children per woman to 4.5 children with an excellent and completely voluntary family planning program, couldn’t sustain its progress when funding began to dry up. As a result, Kenya will have an estimated 12 million more people in 2050 than it would if family planning support had remained stable.

But there is finally some encouraging news. This year, exactly 20 years after the Rio summit, at the London Summit on Family Planning, Melinda Gates and a number of world governments decided to break the silence and put family planning back on the agenda. After two decades of silence, sensible people can finally unite in condemning both coercive family planning and the coercive pregnancies that result when women are denied access to family planning. Hundreds of millions of women around the world have paid a terrible price for the silence that began 20 years ago. They have been forced to have larger families than they wanted, giving up on other goals for themselves and their children as a result. We must never again be silent.

Martha Campbell is a lecturer at UC Berkeley and the president of Venture Strategies for Health and Development.