BULLYING BIRTH CONTROL

...The mounting evidence that assured food supplies bring birth rates down, by offering greater assurance that existing children will survive, lends new urgency to expand food output in the less developed countries where supplies are most tenuous...

...Other Third World leaders, perhaps using the forum of the UN General Assembly, would promptly join in the same chorus...

...But if the passkey is having an effective program almost none of the most needy countries would qualify...

...domination is already a formidable barrier to concerted government action...

...Governments succumbing to "imperialist" pressures might face nasty riots or coups by more nationalistic power contenders...

...It remains for cultural historians to explain the American infatuation with family planning for export...

...The sudden withholding of food aid could easily obliterate the hard-won psychological gains of all previous reductions in child mortality...

...That is, parents are more willing to chance having too many children rather than too few, too many sons rather than none...

...Demographers calculate that in a country with a life expectancy of fifty years, couples need at least five children to be sure that a son will survive the father's sixty-fifth birthday...

...The net result would be an electrification of the family planning question to the point where it might not be able to be touched for decades...

...There is not much payoff in the first alternative, since about 90 percent of the people in the world already live in nations with policies favoring reduced demographic growth...

...Charges of foreign aggression would quickly reach astronomical proportions if the cut-off of food aid was palpably linked to deaths from starvation...

...One immediate question is what precisely the developing countries should do to qualify for Food for Peace...

...mounting national family planning programs to implement that policy...

...India has orchestrated a large birth control effort for more than twenty years, but with little apparent impact on its growth rate...

...The unique blend of sexuality, technology and evangelism seen in the birth control movement seems to hold an irresistible fascination for the American character...

...And here is exactly where feelings toward national family planning programs are most ambivalent and resentment of foreign influence on these questions is most acute...

...And the millions who, because of the psychic turbulence wrought by economic insecurity, never planned their family size at all, would scarcely find incentives to do so in an even more precarious situation, To complicate matters, the disappointment effect following a sudden downturn of fortunes might well lead to the full reinstatement and even reinforcement of the powerful rituals, tough institutions and tenacious attitudes favoring high fertility...

...This year he is living in Mexico...

...But also at work is an immense and well-oiled propaganda machine extolling the magic and elegant simplicity of family planning programs...

...This basically leaves the recalcitrant nations of Africa and Latin America...

...Thus some governments would almost certainly resist nutritional blackmail, even at the cost of starvation...

...s are most tenuous...

...The second criterion would be equally senseless, for many of the most populous countries already have government-sponsored family planning programs...

...The strategy of rejection by partial incorporation is commonplace in bureaucratic warfare, and suffuses more than one existing program...

...If there is an answer it is much more likely to lie in social justice than in international coercion...

...Lester Brown is on very solid ground when he claims that "perhaps the most pressing need of all is for an adequate, assured food supply...

...Quite sensibly, parents will want to be doubly sure that the specter of pestilence and famine is well behind them before they scale down their family size...

...Jerry Litton (D., Missouri) is reported to have taken offense when African delegates said that family planning was considered indecent in their countries...

...The fact remains that for large numbers of village dwellers in the poor nations hypothetical questions about how many children they might have wanted have absolutely no intellectual or motivational meaning...

...Visible mass starvation in the Sahel and Bangladesh, the global economic crisis, and rising food prices at home have lent new respectability to Draconian methods of population control...

...For people victimized by myriad inequities and locked into time-honored fatalistic cosmologies, the very notion of rational limitation of births will take on meaning only when there are improvements in their conditions of living...

...This is but one example of the ways in which social scientists have been coopted by easy population money to service the myths of the family planning crusaders...

...Should the threat of starvation be used to compel more decisive action...

...Further, on vital questions such as fertility there will always be a lag between shifts in objective conditions, such as infant mortality, and preferences for numbers of children...

...or giving evidence of effective programs-those which make a demonstrable difference for fertility...

...government announces that henceforth food aid will be tied to the establishment of birth control programs...

...Litton, a congressional delegate, retorted that the idea of helping countries which refuse to help themselves is becoming indecent in the United States...

...Even now an entrenched fear of infant mortality seems to be a prime motivator of high fertility in the poor nations...

...Yet the hard evidence suggests that family planning programs make a difference only when preceded or accompanied by better education, improved income distribution, urbanization and related kinds of development...

...American organizations have pushed their wares so hard and with so little cultural sensitivity that fertility control, whose boundaries know no national limit, is widely billed as a foreign intrusion...

...In a dazzling display of political stupidity, the very act of forcing birth control on the unwilling would nullify its possibility for later generations of believers...

...Bangladesh is so enmeshed in the problems of political survival that no quantity of external pressure will accelerate action on population control-or much else...

...Political leaders so foolish as to broach the subject would find themselves impaled on opposition charges of "genocide...

...Brown, usually a perceptive commentator, on the Third World, had been had by the salesmen on this issue...

...In Africa and Latin America the alleged linkage between family planning and U.S...

...The other giants of Asia-China, Indonesia, and Pakistan-already have active programs, so that the scope for coercion on that continent is miniscule...

...In his recent book In the Human Interest Lester Brown writes: "Given the enormous demand for family planning services in the world, there, is probably no expenditure of funds which can approach the effectiveness of family planning services in breaking the self-reinforcing cycle of poverty and high fertility...

...It would be supremely ironical if the net effect of United States policy was to produce pronatalist protective measures in 1980 which were even more robust than a century before...

...An astute government could undercut the coercion by adopting a nominal family planning program and then sabotaging its implementation...

...threats were well advertised...

...The source of his optimism is dozens of surveys showing that in the less developed countries ideal family size is often lower than actual size-parents would have wanted fewer children than they actually had...

...Underlying proposals for coercive birth control is the naive assumption that governmental family planning programs in themselves will bring down fertility...

...In recent months, not only such inveterate hawks as Garrett Hardin but more moderate observers have seriously proposed either selective food aid or total abandonment of "hopeless" countries...

...Beyond the moral atrocity which they would represent in themselves, increased mortality and malnutrition would produce effects exactly opposite to those intended on fertility...

...This is a clear case in which policy zealots have molded the data to suit their objectives...

...Suppose that in 1975 the U.S...

...Comments by other American officials in Rome suggest that he is not alone in this view...

...Three plausible criteria immediately come to mind: having an official policy advocating lowered fertility...

...To translate verbally stated discrepancies in family size into assumed motivation for family planning is not only to violate elementary rules of survey analysis, but to overlook the very cultural situation in which the data were collected...

...Now that mood has changed...

...Argentina and Brazil have also complained sporadically of undue external (read U.S...

...What would happen if these countries were peremptorily told: no birth control, no food aid...

...Future efforts to introduce family planning, even when initiated by nationals, would spark as much enthusiasm as a German offer to open sterilization clinics in Israel...

...donald P. Warwick, currently on leave as professor of Sociology at York University, Toronto, is serving with the Institute of Society, Ethics and Life Sciences as manager of a cross-national study of values and population policy...

...BULLYING BIRTH CONTROL DONALD P. WARWICK American infatuation with family planning for export The mounting world food crisis has stirred fresh interest in proposals to use American food aid to press birth control programs on the more fertile underdeveloped countries...

...Early in 1974 the Peruvian government summarily shut down the few private climes operating there because of excessive outside influence...

...The demographer Philip Hauser puts it well: "the world has yet to witness a population mired in illiteracy and poverty that has managed to reduce its fertility...

...Parents who might have responded to a benign environment by lowering their ideal family size from six to four would now aim for six, seven, or "however many God sends...

...National leaders would lose no time in heaping blame on the heartless imperialists, if only to protect their own flanks against domestic criticism...

...There is no political or technological quick fix for the complex and perplexing phenomenon of high fertility...

...Riding on a cheery faith in technological solutions to social problems, American boosters invent demand and chase the chimera of a perfect contraceptive...

...The selective withdrawal of food aid from these nations would inevitably step up the politicization of birth control...

...But in areas such as Peru and Francophobe Africa this option would be foreclosed by national politics, especially if the U.S...

...interference in this delicate area...

...In the late 1960s Paul Ehrlich in The Population Bomb and William and Paul Paddock in Famine-1975 advocated similar measures, but the mood of the times was such that only the most muscle-bound birth controllers took them seriously...

...He then promised to introduce legislation banning Food for Peace funds to any nation which has above-average demographic growth and is not trying to dampen it through family planning...

...Until mortality falls very low," the economist Julian Simon argues, "parents will continue to have more children than they want, on the average, because of the conservative but rational desire to err on the high side rather than the low side...

...The stoning and burning of family planning clinics during the 1968 anti-Ayub riots in Pakistan would be mild compared to the recoil in a country with a heavy death toll linked to birth control...

...One example came in the wake of the World Food Conference in Rome, an event which dramatized the problem but abdicated at the point of solutions...

...Often this desire is heightened by deep-rooted cultural preferences for at least one surviving son...