Asymmetrical Information

I think it's because when we speak of the "poor" in America, many on the Left conjure up an image of a young minority girl with a baby. The next step in this mental process is to picture vigorous birth control as some Nazi-esque Klansman plot to stop the birth of any more "darkie" babies...so they fight it tooth and nail.

When these same people conjure up an image of a "foreigner" they picture a vaguely Hispanic couple in a generic poverty-stricken jungle/desert country being burdened by seven unplanned babies because those bastard Conservatives won't pay for abortions. They then have an idealized picture of life in Hispania after birth control...the couple lives in a clean, modern house with no more than 2.3 bright shiny smiling children who wave goodbye to Papa as he gets on clean, efficient public transportation to his well-paying union job at the widget factory.

The bottom line according to the Left is:
enthusiastic birth control will suppress non-whites in America, and liberate non-whites in foreign countries.

It's all for The Children.

Hey, I'm way to the left and I'm in favor of everyone being on birth control. Forced sterilization for mothers who want welfare sounds good to me.

Look folks, life isn't precious. Nothing that any two idiots can make is precious. Free IUDs and abortions for everyone. That my motto.

3rd worlders don't need to be bribed to use our birth control; they want it, but just can't afford it.

By contrast, the "sterilization for addicts" stuff is for people who don't really want it (do you think they'd get themselves sterilized if they had the money?), but will do it if you bribe them.

There's a big difference between gifts and coercion.

What strikes me as far more creepy is paying those who cannot even support themselves to have more children - but the gov't has been doing that since 1964!

There are a large number of UN and NGO "family planning" programs that center around offering women money to get sterilized or use birth control.

As it happens, people in developing countries don't necessarily want birth control. If you ask women why they don't use contraception, they almost never say "it costs too much." The highest percentage of non-users who say contraception costs too much is in Zimbabwe--and it's a tiny 2.5%. Most often, women don't use birth control because they want more children (55.6% in Guinea, 51% in Mozambique, 25% in Vietnam), because they're afraid of side effects (22.9% in Haiti, 18.1% in Ghana) or because they're personally opposed to contraception (27.8% in Turkmenistan, 17.9% in Nicaragua). These statistics are from recent USAID-funded surveys and are available at www.measuredhs.com.

Don't misunderstand me: I do think we should provide birth control to women in developing countries--just like I think we should provide food aid. But let's not kid ourselves: high population growth in developing countries is not the fault of greedy first-world nations withholding family planning aid. The vast majority of women who want birth control already have it; the vast majority of those who don't use it don't want it.

Another consideration is what they 'believe' about birth control due to propaganda from the other side. In the Philippines, despite birth control efforts by the goverment, many people believe that using the Pill to delay when the first child will be born means said first child will be born damaged or deformed in some way. This is probably spread about by the Catholic Church, which, as we know from recent events, cares about children sooooooooo much.

>>In the Philippines, despite birth control efforts by the goverment, many people believe that using the Pill to delay when the first child will be born means said first child will be born damaged or deformed in some way.

<sigh> Women in the Philippines also believe that the pill is bad for you because it decreases menstrual flow, and they think heavy menstrual flow is healthy. (Maybe they'd prefer IUDs?) So obviously there's plenty of work international organizations can do to promote family planning, short of bribing and/or forcing people to be sterilized. And frankly, I don't think there's a lot of that going on outside of China. Family planning organizations have more effective, less controversial ways to spend their money.

Why would we want to pay women to not have babies? Much of the world has such a low fertility rate that population is dropping. Worse, average age is increasing. This is happening even in desperately poor countries such as Bangladesh.

The old ideas that women must be coerced, or that they must be educated, or that they must have increased wealth have all been shown to be false. The latest idea is that women simply need to be in control of their own fertility to reduce the number of babies. Some will want lots of babies, some won't want any. On average fertility will decline. With wealth, education and technology fertility falls below replacement levels.

The problem of the future seems to be finding ways to encourage women to bear children... or finding ways to relieve them of the necessity.

Hasn't there been a population explosion in the last two hundred years? Allowing 6 billion more human beings to experience life & consciousness than had inhabited the earth previously?

Population explosion? No, more like death implosion. Infant mortality has dropped and life expectancy has increased.

But, looking to the future is more useful than looking to the past. The demographic consequences of increasing average age and inadequate fertility are the current problems. Too many old, unproductive humans are being supported by too few young productive humans. Population short falls are being masked by immigration, which has social and economic consequences too, and can't continue since the sources of immigrants are drying up. Brain drain isn't the half of it. Some European countries have begun campaigns to encourage child bearing, and the trends in even the poorest countries indicate they too will have problems in future.

Perhaps medical advances will allow old people to live more productive lives? Perhaps advances in robotics and computation will allow more work to be done by machines? There may be a way to have a high standard of living without large numbers of healthy, young producers, but it will be tricky to make the transition. We need to do some thinking.

An interesting bit of history is that these trends were known in the 60s. Population explosion hysteria happened anyway. It's funny how we focus attention and energy on the wrong problem or the right problem at the wrong time. Makes you wonder what we are missing now? What trend are we missing now while we focus on infertility, population decline and aging?

Google Search, first hit for 'population 1800', goes right to the crux of the buscuit of what I was trying to convey anyway:

http://www.prb.org/Content/NavigationMenu/PRB/Educators/Human_Population/Population_Growth/Population_Growth.htm

There are a large number of UN and NGO "family planning" programs that center around offering women money to get sterilized or use birth control.

This is the first I've heard of this. Google produces a few results about something in Peru; but do you have any better references?

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