Feeling grounded: a gendered view of population control.

On a slow boat in China, sailing up the Yangtze River, I observed construction beginning on what will soon become the largest dam on the planet.(1) I was on my way to the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing(2) and took the long way around to visit the famous Three Gorges(3) before the Yangtze is dammed.

The parallels between controlling a major river and controlling population are fairly obvious. Damming the river will reduce the danger of devastating floods.(4) In population policy discussions, the danger is often perceived as a "flood of humanity" threatening to overwhelm the planet's resources. A dam can also produce hydroelectric power, which permits industrial and military development, or raise the standard of living. In population policy, controlling the birth rate enables a state to regulate the size of the available labor and military forces, as well as the standard of living.(5)

In China, damming the river and controlling the birth rate go hand in hand. The Three Gorges Dam will limit seasonal flooding, which has periodically devastated crops and human settlements in the past, as well as provide sufficient hydroelectric power to support industrial development along the Yangtze from Shanghai all the way to Met. China is also implementing the "one child policy," which by limiting most couples to one birth, will ensure that sufficient food and other basic resources are available to feed their population.(6)

Both the dam and the one child policy are based on a methodology of control.(7) Control methodology involves a centralized decision maker, like a sovereign state such as China or the United States, or perhaps a multilateral funding agency such as the World Bank, which sets policy targets based on abstract statistical predictors and implements them through technological means.(8) The resulting dislocations to the environment and to the humans who are part of that environment may be viewed as sadly regrettable, but necessary to accomplish the greater good.

Questions regarding either the dam or the one child policy are often met with apocalyptic visions of the alternative. Either we build the dam and limit population, or we will face a revolution by starving masses of hopelessly unemployed people. The rhetorical strategy of population controllers, controlistas as feminists dub them, involve two related techniques. First, the appeal is created in highly emotional terms by exaggerating the dire consequences if the preferred method is not chosen. Second, the use of either/or dichotomies reinforces the sense that the dire consequences are inevitable unless the controlling method is used.

In a classic example of Malthusian rhetorical technique,(9) the Chinese government defended its one child policy in two White Papers. China stated that it had only two alternatives in handling its population policy: implementing the one child policy or allowing blind growth in births. As one commentator explains, limiting the issue to the resolution of these two competing extremes provides support for the Chinese government's choice of policy:

The former choice enables children to be born and grow up healthy and live

a better life, while the latter one leads to unrestrained expansion of

population so that the majority of the people will be short of food and

clothing, while some will even tend to die young. Which of the two pays

more attention to human rights and is more humane? The answer is

obvious.(10)

The imminence of the impending disaster is articulated in genuinely impassioned terms. As Professor Amartya Sen points out:

Even though Malthus's fears and dire predictions of doom and disaster have

not been vindicated--the world has many times more people today, who are

many times more opulent than in Malthus's time--it would be foolish to

dismiss the concern about the potential for excessive growth of population

given the increases that have already occurred and the continued rapid

increase that is now occurring.(11)

Pessimistic population predictions are often accompanied by a sense of urgency which has an almost frantic quality. Professor Sen describes this as "panic-based reasoning,"(12) and notes that "[g]overnmental interference and forceful population planning have often been advocated by persons seized by panic at the sight of--or the thought of--very large numbers of people and overcome by the reflection that further population growth of any rapidity cannot but end in disaster."(13)

Professor Sen argues that the pessimistic or panicked predictions of some population control advocates have not been substantiated by our actual experiences. The world's death rate has substantially decreased since the 1970s, not increased as Professor Ehrlich predicted.(14) Famines have been most severe in sub-Saharan Africa, which has relatively low levels of population density compared to Asia, but which is "battered by political instability, military dictatorships, and public disorder, which have immobilized economic and social development."(15)

Famine, it appears, is not particularly correlated to population density. The environmental degradation associated with human activity is clearly substantial, but the world's largest polluters are associated with military weaponry and activities,(16) not rural families in less developed countries.

As one commentator exploring these concerns points out:

Perhaps the most pervasive piece of misguided conventional wisdom holds

that rapid population growth leads inevitably to environmental decline.

Intuitively, this proposition makes sense: More humans consume more

resources and generate more waste. A quick look at the data appears to

support this equation.... However ... vast differences in consumption mean

that some populations have a far greater environmental impact than others.

With only 25 percent of the world's people, the industrialized nations of

the North generate nearly three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emissions,

accounting for about half of the manmade `greenhouse' gases in the

atmosphere. So in terms of global climate change, consumption in the North

poses a greater threat than population growth in the South.(17)

Yet advocating female fertility control as if it were the single most significant strain on the environment, or the most efficient and direct method for stabilizing or reducing population, retains a surprising vitality. It is female fertility which is described as a "bomb" with its "explosive" effect threatening the planet's very existence. Actual military pollution, the devastating impact of global arms sales, military maneuvers, and nuclear testing are ignored. Consumerism in industrialized economies and its devastating impact on the environment, while occasionally included in the debates, is not seriously targeted for re-education campaigns. Certainly no one seriously suggests "controlling" the consumer "explosion" in order to save the planet. Yet "controlling" female fertility, bolstered by the militaristic language and imagery of bombs and explosions, continues to carry influence in modern population policy debates.

Control methodology is typically presented as the practical, objective solution to the apocalyptic nightmare alternative of overpopulation, even though data analyses do not particularly or clearly support this view.(18) Apparently, it is not enough to simply explain the various studies regarding human fertility patterns. The resistance to seriously examining alternatives to controlling female reproduction appears to be beyond rational discourse.

A gendered analysis of the methodology of control may therefore be useful in recognizing the patterns of power in play. Once the forms of power play are recognized, it becomes possible to imagine counter-forms, other ways for power to flow, which redirect power into ways perhaps less harsh to the earth and her children.

Examining control strategies from the perspective of the object being controlled rather than the subject doing the controlling is the classic beginning point for gendered analysis. Simone de Beauvoir, in her masterpiece The Second Sex,(19) launched modern feminist theory with exactly that technique. Nearly forty years later, the official theme of the Beijing U.N. Women's Conference was "Looking at the World Through Women's Eyes."(20)

In the case of the dam, we look not only through the eyes of the human and animal populations being displaced, but also through the perspective of the earth, whose weather patterns may be affected by the creation of a lake of that magnitude. In the one child policy, we look through the eyes of the women whose fertility is being controlled.

Once we have grounded ourselves in the perspective of the object rather than the subject,(21) we can then observe the classic sign of a dominance power game in play: the use of formalist dichotomies(22) such as either/or. Either build the dam, or hoards of starving people will revolt. Either lower female fertility rates, or the planet will be crushed. The charm of formal dichotomies, of course, is their simplicity: black or white, easy to grasp, great for sound bites.

As those of us who have been through the joys of the Socratic method in law school know all too well, the use of formal dichotomies is classically paired with the slippery slope technique: if this, then that, and that. The next thing you know the sky has fallen. Apocalypse now. If no dam, then revolution. If no population control, then obliteration.

The key to effective slippery slope technique is to present the dire consequence as inevitable, unavoidable, and predestined. In the late twentieth century, this is often accomplished through linear quantitative analysis(23) or religion.

The effect, if not necessarily the purpose, of control methodology is often to preclude dialogue.(24) Control strategies operate through a rigid stance: my way or no way. Alternatives or suggestions regarding other options are understood by the control advocates as insubordinate challenges to authority, or perhaps as soft-hearted, fuzzy thinking, utopianism.

The Chinese opposition to the Three Gorges Dam project suggested that a series of smaller darns on the Yangtze's tributaries(25) could provide needed power with less disastrous environmental and population effects, and were better suited for a silty river such as the Yangtze.(26) After a close vote, the first open parliamentary debate since "the incident" at Tienanmen Square, Premier Li Peng prevailed.(27) One gigantic dam, coming right up.

Why? I kept asking. Why would China insist on going ahead with such a large project when many smaller dams might well do the job better, cheaper, and with less harm? Finally a Chinese friend well versed in Beijing politics took me aside. Looking around nervously to ensure no one was within earshot (we were outside, walking) my friend told me his view. Li Peng was educated by the Soviets as a hydro-engineer in the 1950s.(28) The Soviets built the Aswan Dam for Egypt. Egypt has the Pyramids. China has the Great Wall. China's dam should be bigger than Egypt's. China's dam should be Number One.(29)

My jaw dropped. I still can't quite fathom that this potential ecological transformation might ultimately be about who has the biggest dam. The "mine is bigger than yours syndrome," literally. In a culture that developed the notion of balance between yin and yang power, Peng's yang seems impressive, even allowing for the vast scale on which everything is done in China.

In population control policies, as Professor Paula Abrams has demonstrated, controlling female fertility is also frequently motivated by dominance competition game.(30) Sometimes it is an anti-natalist policy, as in China today or India under Indira Ghandi,(31) which aims to control female fertility to reduce population and move ahead in the standard of living competition. Other times, as is often the case with fundamentalist religions,(32) or Romania under Ceausescu,(33) or the United States in the late nineteenth century,(34) the competition is to out breed the other side by banning abortion and limiting access to contraceptives.

Still other situations involve selective breeding policies, in which favored populations are forced or encouraged to breed, while disfavored populations are murdered, involuntarily sterilized, or raped into extinction. Eugenics, whether practiced by Nazis, or in Bosnia, or in the U.S. against those of African ancestry(35) present the ultimate slippery slope of the population control game.

Of course population strategies which narrowly focus on controlling female fertility do not actually work very well to reduce fertility rates. Additionally, they do great harm to the women being controlled. Indira Ghandi's policy of involuntary sterilization resulted not only in the topple of her government by popular election, but also in a deep suspicion of family planning programs and clinics and a long period of stagnation in the decline of the birth rate.(36)

A consensus developed at the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD),(37) is that the most effective approach to lowering female fertility involves empowering women rather than attempting to control them. The 1992 World Development Report by the World Bank likewise expressed the view that gender equity, economic development, the environment, and population growth should be approached with an integrated set of policies which win produce a synergistic effect.(38) The United Nations Population Fund (UNPF) report Investing in Women: The Focus of the 90s, also published in 1992, stresses that investments in women include "social investments" such as health and education services, equal economic opportunities, as well as family planning investment.(39)

The problem of limiting population growth while respecting women's human rights is not an either/or dichotomy with the only choice between brutal coercion or massive numbers of births. This is similar to the situation with the Three Gorges Dam. The choices are not either/or, a simple choice between a huge dam or no development at all. Smaller dams along the tributaries could allow development, produce electricity, with apparently much less environmental damage.(40)

Controlistas often appear to be charging straight at women's fertility like an angry bull overcoming any perceived resistance with brute force. Women, of course, find ways to avoid the anger, ways around brutal efforts to coerce their reproductive lives. In China, the ways around such charging bulls are through sex-selective abortions, giving up their daughters for adoption, or even female infanticide until the much needed son is produced.(41)

Like water, women often yield on the surface to brute power, but flow away through the cracks and crevices, through the loopholes, taking their reproductive power with them. A more sophisticated and nuanced approach will achieve the goal of stabilizing or even reducing population levels in terms of new births. Approaching obliquely, at a forty-five degree angle instead of charging straight ahead, is a more sophisticated strategy, redirecting the energy of population policy makers toward creating environments in which lower fertility rates flourish because the women themselves, and their families, flourish with fewer births.

There are four major factors which the more sophisticated analysts have identified as influencing a reduction in births. First, and statistically most significant to lowering female fertility rates, is the increase of secondary education for girls.(42) Even just focusing on basic literacy helps significantly, but secondary education is preferable.(43) Second, ensuring access to a full spectrum of reproductive health care,(44) including family planning, but in particular treatment for reproductive tract infections, is a significant factor in the reduction of births.(45) Third, providing economic opportunities, especially employment for which actual wages are paid directly to the women workers,(46) and land rights directly held by women farmers instead of through male intermediaries, influences birth rates.(47) Fourth, strengthening women's ability to make and implement their own decisions about their education, health, and economic lives (empowerment) in both the private and public aspects of their lives can reduce the number of births.(48) Combining all four techniques is obviously the most effective approach to developing an environment, which will tend to encourage lower female fertility rates.(49)

So the question again is why? Why would individual states or multilateral funding agencies continue to support narrowly focused, coercive female fertility control as the central point for population policy when we know that education, economic empowerment, and access to reproductive health care apparently work as well or better to reduce female fertility rates with less harm to the women?

I suspect that people accustomed to dominance games find it very threatening to release their efforts to control others for fear that others will turn the tables and try to control them. Because controlistas are so accustomed to thinking in terms of either/or dichotomies, they can truly only envision two options. Be the one who is in control, or be the one who is controlled. The concept of a third way is simply beyond comprehension.

Thus the North/South debate on population versus consumption issues, which figured so prominently at the Earth Summit in Rio,(50) sometimes proceeds with each side insisting on the dominance of its vision. Of course it is clear to the rest of us that we need a balanced approach which includes attention to both population as well as consumption patterns. It is not an either/or situation.

In the context of dominance games of population control, however, we have an additional, and I believe significant, variable. The object of control in this particular game is female fertility--women, their reproductive systems, and their sexuality. In this world view, if women are not controlled, then their sexuality will run rampant.

The perceived dangers of wild, uncontrollable female sexuality are widely shared both by pro- and anti-natalists.(51) Many fundamentalist religions share that basic view. I will limit myself to one religious example. Some Islamic fundamentalists threatened to bomb the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development at Cairo on the grounds that discussing family planning was a "conference of lasciviousness" in which radical western lesbians would incite women to worldwide promiscuity and adultery.(52)

In China, there were reports of plainclothes security officers following women attending the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. The security officers carried large blue blankets to throw around women because they feared that a group of western radical feminists planned to protest by stripping naked and running through Tienanmen Square.

In the United States, discussions about controlling the fertility of women often highlight the perceived promiscuity of non-Caucasian women and teenagers as a method of dramatizing the need for control.(53) In Africa, one reason given to justify female genital mutilation is that it helps to control wild female sexuality and prevent promiscuity.(54)

Both pro- and anti-natalist population controllers too often view women as dirt, as the fertile field to be plowed or salted. Women's fertility, and the underlying (dirty) female sexuality it implies, are treated as explosive, untamed, wild, and in need of limiting, as if a good dose of asphalt, a nicely manicured lawn and tubal ligation, would solve all the environmental problems this planet faces.

At the moment, however, things are more than a bit muddy. In fact, the Beijing Women's Conference was inundated with rain, leaving the ground at Huairou a sea of mud. We were literally ankle deep in mud, 61,000 leaders from all over the planet, slogging our way through the acreage, soaked and exhausted. At night, we read the papers or listened to CNN, and heard about droughts all around the world--Africa, the U.S. Midwest, Europe. There were droughts everywhere and in Beijing we were joking about needing snorkels to survive.

Standing in a long line waiting to use the toilet facilities, one Chinese-speaking person attending the Conference asked the ancient Chinese woman who was there to clean the facility if it was always so rainy in September. "No, no," the Chinese woman replied, shaking her head vigorously. "But what do you expect with a these women here? So much yin, of course it rains."

I would be remiss in my duties, and I know you would all be greatly disappointed, if I failed to make the obvious radical feminist point here. It takes two to tango. Tea for two. Yin needs Yang. Vive la difference. In every culture, we've managed to figure out that babies have fathers too. It is my fervent, although probably utopian feminist dream that population policy discussions could incorporate this profound, although gendered, insight.

Controlistas target women as the bearers of children as if women were solely responsible for their own fertility. Yet in many, many cultures, women have little autonomy in deciding whether or when to bear children.(55) This is particularly true in the poorest, least developed cultures, where women themselves are regarded as having little value, and fundamentalist practices of patriarchal religions often encourage large numbers of births, especially of sons.(56)

Talking in terms of personal freedom to choose whether to have children misses the most important gendered perspective regarding how power is allocated to make actual decisions about reproduction.

Visiting a model family planning clinic serving a very poor population in rural Egypt, I pressed the question regarding whether family planning was "voluntary." The very kind and obviously dedicated doctor running the clinic assured us that planning was not coercive. I was told "this is a completely voluntary program. No one will force the wife to use the family planning without the husband's permission." He assured us thus with total sincerity that "voluntary" family planning meant the husband had the final say.(57)

As one commentator, Amartya Sen, points out:

One of the most important facts about fertility and family size is that

the lives that are most battered by over-frequent childbirth are those of

the women who bear the children. This is especially so in the poorer and

less developed economies in the world. It is not only the case that as

many as half a minion women die every year from entirely preventable

maternity-related causes, but also hundreds of millions of women have to

lead lives of much drudgery and little freedom because of incessant child

bearing and rearing.(58)

The role of male sexuality is often virtually invisible in population control discussions.(59) Few attempts have been made, to my knowledge, even to count male fertility rates. Few programs focus on changing men's sexual behavior patterns, even when it is clear that condom usage and vasectomy are also effective techniques for reducing human fertility. Few public relations campaigns target lowering male fertility rates as the primary thrust, which would challenge stereotypical notions prevalent in many cultures that a man who fathers many children is potent, virile, and admirable.

Yet to limit the focus to human sexuality and fertility, as if women or men made their reproductive decisions in a vacuum, stops short of a deep gendered perspective. For as we add male sexuality and fertility to the discussion, we then need to shift the ground from which we view policy impacts.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that we could add male fertility as a major focus in population policy discussions, the new object of potential control becomes couples. So the gendered technique involves regrounding ourselves. Now we can view the policy through the eyes of the couple being controlled.

In my experience, it is very important to consciously develop the capacity to shift the ground from which the object is felt and the subject is viewed. It is this flexibility and capacity to move with changing policy while retaining the deeply grounded gendered perspective that Will help develop more effective and responsive approaches to control methods.(60)

Thus, it is the technique that is gendered, not in the rudimentary sense of always taking the woman's side, but in the broader sense of approaching the discussion from the "side" of the object rather than subject of policy.

The couple whose fertility is to be controlled is often not an autonomous actor, free to decide in a vacuum whether to bear children, or how many to have.(61) The notorious preference for sons which causes such misery for women around the world, contributes, for example, to "cook stove accidents" in India, in which wives who are unable to bear sons, or who displease the husband or mother-in-law, or whose families cannot produce additional dowry payments, have cooking fuel poured on them and are ignited and burned to death.(62) In India, China, and many other cultures, son preference also often results in resistance to limiting family size until the requisite number of sons are produced. This son preference is not solely the work of evil husbands oppressing their victim wives.

The pressure to produce sons often stems from the parents-in-law, who see an ample supply of grandsons as the key to the family's economic future. Because economic opportunities for females are so limited, and the family no longer benefits from female productivity once the girl is married off into another household, future wealth rests on the sons. Efforts to educate girls are often seen as wasted since the girl's enhanced economic capacity will benefit some other family.

At the conference in Beijing, a teenage girl from Bangladesh described her work with even younger girls to try to encourage education, later marriages, and reproductive health knowledge as part of a International Planned Parenthood Program to reduce fertility rates. The names of the girls she worked with were translated as "Worthless Girl," "Hoping for a Brother," or simply "Third Girl," or "Sixth Girl."

My then thirteen year old daughter, Erica, and I listened together as the women of Bangladesh talked about the realities of son preference. Food, when available, goes first to the males. Once the males have eaten, whatever is left is given to the daughters. The mother eats last.

This is not because families in Bangladesh hate their daughters. It is because the economic survival of the family depends on males who can own land, pass title, and inherit property.(63) Males can obtain credit from lending institutions, become educated, develop a skill or profession, and earn a good wage. Females are left to the hopeless, heavy labor of toiling in the fields, carrying water, and tending livestock, while their better-fed brothers go to school.

One commentator exploring the economic valuation of the roles played by men and women in such a society notes that:

Conventional economic data do not reflect women's real economic and social

contributions. For instance, whereas the water industry is given an economic

value, the work of a woman who gets up at 4 am. every day, walks 11

kilometers to a bore hole, and carries back to her home 30 liters of water

in a tin balanced on her head is given no economic value and has no

statistical existence in male constructs of economic activity.(64)

Population policies which narrowly focus on controlling female fertility and target women as the objects of population control are unlikely to succeed without developing a more detailed, contextual understanding of the total environment in which women live and operate.(65) Approaching population rates of humans as the product of a complex ecosystem with many variables and varying conditions in different parts of the planet, allows us to draw on the knowledge we have gained from other environmental disciplines.

Demographic analysis should not be abandoned, rather it should be understood as a useful tool, like a satellite shot--a distant overview of the geography.(66) But in order to actually develop policy, it is still necessary to get out of the air, get down on the ground, and get our hands dirty. We have to dig in deeply, and to listen carefully, observing each cultural context. We need to think of each culture as a different and complex ecosystem in which the factors and interrelationships will differ. What works in a desert for one species may not work well in an ocean environment for a different one. Human cultures are no less complex or diverse than the natural environment from which they spring.

Clearly female fertility should not be abandoned as one focus of population policy. I am not in any way suggesting that we follow the strategy of the Reagan-Bush Republican Administrations enunciated at the Population Conference at Mexico City in 1984.(67) The notorious Mexico City Policy, under the guise of ensuring that American tax dollars not fund abortions, gutted international family planning programs.(68) The Mexico City Policy was a major setback to responsible, effective population policy. Fortunately, the Clinton Administration reversed the Reagan-Bush anti-family planning policy,(69) overcoming the resistance of the current Republican controlled Congress.

What I am suggesting is that female fertility should be addressed in terms of shaping policy to encourage female literacy and secondary education, enhanced economic opportunities for women, especially access paid work in the market economy and to owning their own farm land directly instead of through male intermediaries. Women need a full spectrum of reproductive health care alternatives, not just contraceptives. I am also proposing that male sexuality and fertility rates be targeted for discussion and serious analysis in a context which encourages male responsibility for their own sexuality, and respect for women's rights to personal liberty, including the right to refuse marriage,(70) to refuse sexual relations altogether, or to set conditions on sexual relations such as condom usage.

Enforcing human rights, particularly such personal and intimate ones, is obviously a complex problem. Can we, as I have asked elsewhere, really expect United Nations peacekeeping forces to deliver condoms? Can the troops require the local men to wear them?(71)

What are clearly comic attempts to control reproductive activity when applied to males need to be understood as equally futile but with potentially tragic consequences for females. Thus, we are asking here not only for liberty in our reproductive lives, but also for equality; that no policy be applied to women which would not also be morally acceptable if applied equally to men.(72)

Paragraph 115 of the Beijing Platform recognizes that "acts of violence against women include ... forced pregnancy.... forced sterilization, [] forced abortion, [and] coercive/forced use of contraceptives . . . ."(73) Nonetheless, the reality in many cultures is that a female without living sons has little economic status or value. A female who cannot produce sons may be divorced, cast out, and have no means of feeding herself except begging and prostitution. Or she may just be killed. Only by increasing the value of females as something more than merely the bearer of sons, through enhanced social, political, and economic power for women, can we effectively and efficiently address the problem of human population expansion.

The focus here is not especially on economic development overall, but specifically on development efforts directed to females. General economic development does not particularly affect female fertility rates.(74) Only where the social and economic power of women is increased do we see a significant decline in fertility rates.

The dramatic decline in China's birth rates may well be due to the relatively high status of women within China, where social and economic programs in place since the Liberation (1949-1950) replaced the traditional and extreme subordination of women in feudal Chinese culture with an emphasis on education and economic participation for women. Yet, as one commentator realizes:

[I]t is not clear how much extra lowering of fertility rates China has

achieved through compulsion. In fact, even in the absence of compulsion,

we would expect the Chinese fertility rate to be much lower than the

Indian average, given China's significantly greater improvements in

education, health care, female job opportunities, and other

ingredients of social development.(75)

The experience of those Indian states which have advanced social development, particularly those with relatively higher status of women, may provide an interesting comparison to China. Both Kerala and China have high levels of education for women, as well as other measures of empowerment. One commentator who has explored this comparison, Gita Sen, explains that:

Kerala's birth rate of eighteen per thousand is actually lower than China's

nineteen per thousand, and this has been achieved without any compulsion

by the state.... It is also worth noting that since Kerala's low

fertility rate has been achieved voluntarily, there is no sign of

the adverse effects that were noted in the case of China, such as

heightened female infant mortality and widespread abortion of female

fetuses.(76)

I sincerely hope that the dire predictions of imminent population disaster continue to be as wrong in the future as they have been in the past. But like the story of the boy who cried wolf, there is always the chance that this time there really is a wolf.

Assuming, then, for the sake of argument, that we really are facing a catastrophe if population levels are not immediately reduced, we must relinquish our old habits, let go of our old ways of thinking, and move beyond our fears. We can no longer afford to invest in control strategies which are not particularly effective in reducing populations and are cruel. Simple, quick fixes have not worked. Control methodologies simply cannot demonstrate objectively that their effectiveness warrants further in vestment of time and money.(77) The time for charismatic appeals to emotion is past.

Even if we do not care about the women whose lives are destroyed or damaged by these control policies, even if all we care about is the planet (as if humans and the planet could be artificially separated), even if we only care about ensuring sufficient resources to maintain high consumption levels for the U.S. population, we can no longer fiddle around with control methodologies. We have given this approach nearly thirty years and untold millions of dollars. It is time to approach the problem from a different ground.(78)

(1) Jonathan Spence, A Flood of Troubles, N.Y. Times, Jan. 5, 1997, at 34. The Yangtze River, 3,940 miles long, is the world's third largest river, surpassed only by the Nile and the Amazon. According to official Chinese governmental reports, the Three Gorges Dam will be 610 feet high, spanning 6,864 feet, creating a lake nearly 400 miles long and 600 feet deep. It will produce 18,200 megawatts of electricity. Id.

In the early 1950s, the Chinese government attempted to dam the Yangtze by building a network of sixty-two dams. On August 4, 1975, massive rains began, eventually turning into a typhoon. By the night of August 7, "all 62 beautiful new dams broke, one after another .... [A]ll the way down the river." Elizabeth Gilbert, Valley of the Dammed, Utne Reader, July-Aug. 1996, at 85. Tens of thousands of people died as a result of the floods, and a hundred thousand or more died from famine and disease in the following months. Id.

(2) The first United Nations Conference on Women was held in 1975 in Mexico City, which led to the U.N. Decade for Women. The second conference, held in 1980, in Copenhagen, emphasized education, employment and health issues. The third conference, in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985, adopted the Forward-Looking Strategies statement by consensus, which provided a framework for action to empower women. Margaret Plattner, The Status of Women Under International Human Rights Law and the 1995 UN World Conference on Women, Beijing, China, 84 Ky. L.J. 1249, 1262-63 (1996).

The Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, China, during September 4-15, 1995, was the largest conference in United Nations history. Over 25,000 registered delegates attended the Beijing Conference from 190 countries. An additional 36,000 people attended the related NGO Conference held in Huairou, China, from August 30-September 8, 1995. Valeriea Dormady, Women's Rights in International Law: A Prediction Concerning the Legal Impact of the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women, 30 Vand. J. Transnat'l L. 97, 99 (1997).

Working long hours through the nights and over the weekends, delegates at the official governmental conference adopted two documents by consensus. The thirty-eight paragraph Declaration and the 345-paragraph Platform for Action (Platform), call for global action to achieve equality, development and peace. U.N. Report on the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, Sept. 4-15, 1995), U.N. Docs. A/Conf.177/20 (1995); A/Conf.177/20/Add.1 (1995), reprinted in 35 I.L.M. 401, 407 (Declaration), 409 (Platform) (1996).

Thirty-seven states entered substantive comments or reservations on one or more points, primarily states with predominately Muslim or Roman Catholic populations. Dormady, supra at 102-08. The United States made interpretive statements to twenty-three paragraphs in the Platform, more than any other state except the Vatican, but the United States entered only one actual reservation. Id. at 102-03; see also Elizabeth L. Larson, United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women: Action for Equality, Development, and Peace (Beijing, China: September 1995), 10 Emory Int'l L. Rev. 695 (1996) (containing a detailed discussion of the Declaration and the Platform); Cynthia Kennedy, Cairo, Beijing, and the Global Environmental Crisis: The Continuing International Dialogue on Population Stabilization and Sustainable Development, 8 Geo. Int'l Envtl. L. Rev. 451, 457 (1996) (discussing the environmental issues in the (Beijing, Platform).

(3) We departed from Wushan, and the hot August evening crackled with a heat lightening display like fiery dragons dancing. After two languid days sailing up the steamy Yangtze, we entered the central of the three gorges, Wu Gorge. The chasm separates the ancient warring states of Shu and Chu, where the ancestral village of the legendary Lao-Tze is soon to be submerged. I began pacing the bow, eager to see the famous twelve peaks of Mt. Wushan, especially Shennu Peak. Local people translate Shennu as Goddess Peak which some guidebooks refer to as Fairy Peak. Not interested in quibbling over the name, I was just anxious to absorb whatever I could before the Three Gorges Darn altered this site of natural splendor and ancient civilization.

The tour plan was for us to sail under Shennu Peak at 4 p.m., with the Yangtze's mists and Shennu's clouds illuminated by the sunset. Mother Nature had other ideas. As we entered the narrow gorge, with its treacherous shoals and sheer cliffs, a storm appeared, literally out of nowhere. One moment the captain was on deck chatting with passengers about the history of the gorges, and two minutes later he was at the helm, gripping the wheel himself, grimly facing the wild onslaught.

Everyone else sensibly went inside, soaked and disappointed. I was determined, though, and ran to the stem to see if Shennu could be seen through the rain. In hindsight it was probably not the most rational decision I've made, racing around the wet, windswept decks of a pitching and rolling ship, but at the time I felt compelled to observe this particular peak.

Since then I've learned that the Yangtze is famous for sudden and furious storms, especially in its treacherous gorges. But at the time I was greatly surprised and more than a little puzzled by the intensity of this experience. While I appreciate a walk in the woods as much as the next person, I don't really do environmental stuff. I'd gone to China, after all, to work on international women's human rights issues at the United Nations Conference, not to get involved in some Chinese river being dammed.

(4) The Yangai Valley Planning Office supports the Three Gorges Dam project in part based on their desire to prevent devastating floods in the Yangtze valleys. Spence, supra note 1, at 37.

(5) An interesting comparison between the pro-natalist position of the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the anti-natalist position of the People's Republic of China is found in Mark Savage, The Law of Abortion in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People's Republic of China: Women's Rights in Two Socialist Countries, 40 Stan. L. Rev. 1027 (1988).

Controlling fertility to regulate the size of the labor force and economy is not limited to Communist or Socialist governments. U.S. population control policies, for example, have been particularly brutal to non-Caucasian women. This history ranges from pro-natalist "breeding" of African ancestry slave women to produce a cash crop of new slaves in the nineteenth century to modem anti-natalism, the involuntarily sterilization of appalling numbers of African, Latina, and Native American Indian women in the 1970s. By 1976, over 35% of all Puerto Rican and 24% of Native American Indian women of childbearing age had been sterilized. Nancy Ehrenreich, The Colonization of the Womb, 43 Duke L.J. 492, 514-15 nn.70-74 (1993).

A critique of current domestic U.S. welfare reproductive control techniques is found in Meredith Blake, Welfare and Coerced Contraception: Morality Implications of State Sponsored Reproductive Control, 34 U. Louisville J. Fam. L. 311 (1996).

(6) "[C]ontrolling population growth is an important strategic issue facing our country's modem socialist construction" was the statement of the Central Party Committee and the State Council announcing the one-couple, one-birth policy in 1980. Xiaorong Li, License to Coerce: Violence Against Women, State Responsibility, and Legal Failures in China's Family-Planning Program, 8 Yale. J.L. & Feminism 145, 149 & n.9 (1996). For extensive citations to and analysis of the Chinese laws and documents regarding this policy, see id. at 148-50 & nn.5-20. See also Sharon K. Hom, Female Infanticide in China: The Human Rights Specter and Thoughts Towards (An) Other Vision, 23 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 249, 263-67 & nn.48-66 (1992); Lisa B. Gregory, Examining the Economic Component of China's One-Child Family Policy Under International Law: Your Money or Your Life, 6 J. Chinese L. 46, 48-50 & nn.8-30 (1992).

(7) In exploring and affirming this premise one commentator recently noted that:

Throughout this recent history, the basic premise of population policy has

remained unchanged. Government (public) intervention has been thought to

be necessary to influence or control individual (private) action in the

interest of the common good. Demographically driven population policies

have assumed that individual welfare would be advanced by collective

action to assist, persuade, or induce individuals to increase or decrease

their fertility to meet socially desirable goals. This premise has come

increasingly under fire, and population policies are at a crossroads.

Population Policies Reconsidered: Health, Empowerment, and Rights 4 (Gita

Sen et al. eds., 1994) [hereinafter Population Policies Reconsidered].

(8) China, for example, implements its one-couple, one-birth policy through annual birth quotas for each region set by the centralized government. The ability of local authorities to keep births within their quotas is

considered an index of political performance. Performance is rewarded by credits for promotion, "[f]ailure to make a quota entails the risk of disciplinary sanctions, demotion, or a reduction in salary. These circumstances enhance the likelihood that the use of physical force [against women and infants] to limit births is politically motivated." Li, supra note 6, at 152.

Penalties and consequences of noncompliance with the policy for individuals range from loss of day care, health care, housing, and education benefits for all children within a noncompliant family, demotion or dismissal from employment for parents, to intimidation, humiliation including public posting of menstrual periods, detention, beatings and destruction of residences. Id. at 154-55.

The United States has, in addition to the involuntary sterilization abuses of the 1970s and 1980s (discussed supra note 5), experienced a rash of coerced contraceptive proposals in the 1990s under the guise of welfare reform. In the 1991-1992 legislative session, proposals for incentives or mandated Norplant contraceptives for welfare recipients were introduced in thirteen different state legislatures. Blake, supra note 5, at 320 & n.64. Proposals ranged from mandatory contraception, id. at n.55 (proposal by Washington D.C. Mayor Marion Berry), to cash incentives ranging from $5,000 for sterilization, id. at 318 & n.49 (Oklahoma proposal), to $500 for those willing to receive Norplant contraceptives. Id. at 319-20, nn.53-64 (cited by Blake as the typical figure offered in many recent legislative proposals including, Kansas, Tennessee, and Washington).

The difference between "incentives" and "coercion" is often elusive, as the Philadelphia Inquirer discovered after publishing an editorial which called for the encouragement of welfare women to use Norplant. "We suggested incentives .... Our critics countered that to dangle cash or some other benefit in front of a desperately poor woman is tantamount to coercion. They're right." Id. at n.52.

(9) China's resurrection of Malthusian "impending disaster" type rhetoric to support the one child policy is particularly ironic since the policy was adopted "not at the time when China was facing mass starvation, but at a time when the basic problems of meeting the subsistence needs of its population had been solved." Hom, supra note 6, at 268.

In concurring with this assessment, several commentators point out that:

Although the Chinese government has adopted the questionable development

assumption of the developed countries and 'resurrected Malthus in order to

justify its population concerns,' the One-Child Policy was 'launched not

by the specter of Malthusian disaster, but rather by the ambitious new

economic strategy of the post-Mao leadership.'

Id. (quoting Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control and Contraceptive Choice 147-48 (1987)).

(10) Hom, supra note 6, at 269. Professor Hom questions whether indeed these are the only two alternatives:

Are these two extremes, China's One Child Policy and the `blind growth in

births' really the only two alternatives in responding to the

unquestionable need to address the relationship of population growth to

development? What about other factors such as the material level of

development; the allocation of resources to social welfare versus defense

and military spending; the attitudes and reproductive behavior of the

people; and the value choices implicit in who will bear the brunt of these

policies? Perhaps the first step in envisioning more humane solutions is

to recognize the human, programmatic, and policy complexities presented by

the problems posed by uncontrolled population growth.

Id.

For a concrete discussion of alternative policy shifts which could address China's population problems with less violence toward women and children, see Li, supra note 6, at 188-91.

(11) Amartya Sen, Fertility and Coercion, 63 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1035, 1035-36 (1996).

(12) Id. at 1042. Professor Sen critiques segments of Professor Paul Ehrlich's influential book, The Population Bomb (1975). Characterizing Ehrlich's approach as "alarmist" and panic-based," Sen claims that Ehrlich's dire predictions of worldwide famine have not been fulfilled. Id.

(13) Id.

(14) "Since Ehrlich published [The Population Bomb], the world death rate has not increased, but has fallen by, on average, nearly a third for poorer countries." Id. at 1043 (citing World Bank, World Development Report 1995: Workers in an Integrating World 212-13 tbl. 26 (1995)).

In fact it appears that the declining death rates are a primary factor in rising population, and that death rates have a more significant effect than fertility on current population growth. "Over the last 40 years, fertility rates have fallen in most parts of the world. But, because death rates have dropped even more steeply, the absolute number of births has gone up." Laurie A. Mazur, Beyond the Numbers: An Introduction and Overview, in Beyond The Numbers: A Reader on Population, Consumption and the Environment 2 (Laurie A. Mazur ed., 1994) [hereinafter Beyond the Numbers]; see also C. Haub & M. Farnsworth Riche, Population by the Numbers: in Population Growth and Structure, in Beyond the Numbers, supra at 95.

(15) Sen, supra note 11, at 1043.

(16) See generally Stephen Dycus, National defense and the Environment (1996); Seth Shulman, The Threat at Home: Confronting the Toxic Legacy of the U.S. Military (1992).

The dumping of noxious chemicals and mishandling of radioactive waste, spent fuels, oils, solvents, and other hazardous materials has won the United States military the dubious distinction of being labeled the nation's largest polluter. Kyle Bettigole, Defending Against Defense: Civil Resistance, Necessity and the United States Military's Toxic Legacy, 21 B.C. Envtl. Aff. L. Rev. 667, 667 (1994) (citing National Toxic Campaign Fund, the U.S. Military's Toxic Legacy, at ii (1991)).

The devastating impact of armed conflict on the environment is also well documented. See, e.g., Michael N. Schmitt, Green War: An Assessment of the Environmental Law of International Armed Conflict, 22 Yale J. Int'l L. 1, 7-22 (1997) (reviewing the history of deliberate environmental destruction as a weapon of war from the Dutch destroying their dikes in the seventeenth century, through U.S. environmental attacks in Vietnam, to the Iraqi destruction of oil wells with devastating environmental consequences in the Gulf War).

Earlier major wars of the twentieth century are also well documented in terms of their destruction of the environment. See Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Warfare in a Fragile World: Military Impact on the Human Environment (1980) (examining the environmental impact of World War II and the Korean War as well as Vietnam); see also Carol Brophy, The Forgotten Factor: Environmental Implications of Military Activity, 6 Aldelphia L. J. 63 (1990).

Then, of course, one might consider the environmental impact of exploding actual nuclear bombs.

(17) Laurie A. Mazur, Beyond the Numbers: An Introduction and Overview, in Beyond the Numbers, supra note 14, at 3 (citing Mark Sagoff, Population, Nature, and the Environment, in Beyond the Numbers, supra note 14, at 33, and United Nations Population Fund, Population and the Environment: The Challenges Ahead 14 (1991)). Mazur notes that the term "overpopulation" itself implies that numbers of people have grown too large in relation to the available resources. Id. But because resources are distributed so unevenly it is difficult to assess the capacity to sustain a given population. Id. "The 25 percent of the world's population that lives in the developed countries lays claim to 85 percent of all forest products consumed, 72 percent of steel production, and 75 percent of energy use. Developed countries also generate about 75 percent of the global burden of pollutants and wastes." Id. (Citing United Nations Population Fund, supra, at 14, and R. Paul Shaw, The Impact of Population Growth on the Environment: The Debate Heats Up, 12 Envtl. Impact Assessment Rev. 17 (1992)).

(18) The conventional wisdom is that population growth is due to high birth rates and is responsible for increasing migration from the impoverished countries of the South to the industrialized countries of the North, and that rapid population growth leads inevitably to environmental decline. Various analyses of the current data suggest that all three of these are wrong. See generally Haub & Riche, supra, note 14. Declining mortality, not high fertility, is causing the current population surge. Id. at 95.

The region with the highest rate of population growth, sub-Saharan Africa, sends the fewest migrants to developed countries. Hania Zlotnik, International Migrations: Causes and Effects, in Beyond the Numbers, supra note 14, at 359, 365.

The relationship between population and environmental decline actually involves many more factors than a simplistic linear correlation. The factors influencing population's effect on the environment and the carrying capacity of the planet are very significantly influenced by consumption habits, technology, social and economic practices.

As M.I.T. economist Lester Thurow has written:

If the world's population had the productivity of the Swiss, the

consumption habits of the Chinese, the egalitarian instincts of the Swedes,

and the social discipline of the Japanese, then the planet could support

many times its current population without privation for anyone. On the

other hand, if the world's population had the productivity of Chad, the

consumption habits of the United States, the inegalitarian instincts of

India, and the social discipline of Argentina, then the planet could not

support anywhere near its current numbers.

Mazur, supra note 14, at 4 (citing Lester Thurow, Technology Review (Aug./Sept. 1986)).

(19) Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1953).

(20) For a brief history of the U.N. Women's Conference, see supra note 2.

(21) Shifting from the perspective of the subject (active policy maker) to the object (upon which policy is implemented) is a central concept of modern feminist philosophies. The classic political slogan of contemporary American feminism--"the personal is political"--reflects this shift of perspective.

(22) In undertaking such an analysis, one commentator notes that:

The dichotomy is central to liberalism--the dominant political, and legal,

philosophy of the west. It assumes a public sphere of rationality, order,

and political authority in which political and legal activity take place,

and a private, `subjective' sphere in which regulation is not appropriate.

Domestic, family life is typically regarded as the center of the private

world .... [I]n western society women are relegated to the private sphere

of home, hearth, and family. The public sphere of workplace, law, economics,

politics, intellectual and cultural life is regarded as the province of

men. This phenomena is explained as a matter of nature, convenience, or

individual choice....

The public/private dichotomy is gendered: it is a metaphor for the

social patterning of gender, a description of sociological practice, and a

category grounded in experience.

Hillary Charlesworth, What Are Women's International Human Rights?, in Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives 58, 68-69 (Rebecca J. Cook ed., 1994); see also Jean Elshtain, Public Man, Private: Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton Univ. Press 1981).

(23) I am reminded of the classic story about the statistical study which was performed to determine the effects of pornography. After extensive field work collecting reliable data on the patterns of pornography consumers, the data was closely analyzed and the conclusion was inescapable: pornography clearly causes baldness.

Linear quantitative analysis in population studies often proceeds by plotting fluctuations in one factor against population increases or decreases, then attempting to demonstrate a causal relationship between the two based on fluctuations. For example one could identify a tragedy, such as devastating hurricanes, or widespread poverty, or war, and then chart the population decreases associated with that factor. Such a method could cause one to conclude that war is good for the environment because it kills people. Similarly, if one were to actually believe that poverty reduces population, then I suppose one could argue that we should design policies to increase poverty to save the planet.

Linear quantitative analysis performed with a goal of identifying causal relationships is subject to challenges based on the insights of modern physics which have called into question the validity of techniques based on these kinds of causal associations as oversimplifications.

The arguments of population controllers based on this type of "simple arithmetic" fails to consider the effects of consumption and waste generation. "It ignores the empirical evidence that the relationship between population, area, and pollution is nonlinear and variable and is not determined, uniform, or stable." Janice Jiggins, Changing the Boundaries: Woman Centered Perspectives on Population and the Environment 42 (1994) [hereinafter Changing the Boundaries].

(24) Indeed it was the suppression of dialogue and debate about the Three Gorges Darn which provided the impetus for Dai Qing's controversial and influential book, Yangtze! Yangtze!. Dai Qing, Yangtze! Yangtze! (Patricia Adams & John Thibodeau eds. & Nancy Liu et al. trans., Earthscan 1994). Dai Qing, China's best known woman journalist, is a leading critic of the Three Gorges Darn project. She was jailed for ten months in a maximum security prison (including six months in solitary confinement), and told she would be executed. The book itself was banned on the ground that it abetted the turmoil. Patricia Adams & Philip Williams, Introduction: Opposition to an Unviable Dam, in Yangtze! Yangtze!, supra at xxiii, xxiv.

Dai Qing herself writes: "Today many Chinese and foreign newspapers and magazines have labeled me an `environmentalist.' I am quite flattered by the title ... [but our] goal was to push China a little bit further towards freedom of speech on the issue of government decision making." Dai Qing, The Struggle to Publish Yangtze! Yangtze! in China, in Yangtze! Yangtze!, supra at 2, 8. The book is composed of essays by forty prominent Chinese scientists who oppose the darn. A. Topping, Cracking the Wall of Silence, N.Y. Times, Jan. 5, 1997 (Magazine), at 40. One month before the major meetings at which the Three Gorges Dam project would be decided, these people met and decided to publish this book. It was produced in fifteen days and paid for by money borrowed from private individuals in Beijing. Dai Qing, Afterward to the Chinese Edition, in Yangtze! Yangtze!, supra at 262, 263-64.

Accepting the prestigious Goldman Environmental Award in 1993 for her determination to ensure a genuine debate within China about this project, Dai Qing quoted an ancient Chinese philosopher, who warned: "`It is more dangerous to silence the people than to dam a river.' China's authorities are doing both." Adams & Williams, supra at xxvii.

(25) Dai Qing, An Interview with Li Rui, in Yangtze! Yangtze!, supra note 24, at 117, 134. The Yangtze has many tributaries, with an annual water volume equal to or greater than of the Yellow, Huaihe, and Haihe rivers combined. Medium and small-scale, hydro-electric power stations on the tributaries can produce sufficient power for development, and can also serve multipurpose projects for flood control, irrigation, navigation, water supply, fish farming, and tourism. Having different power stations run by a number of enterprises, rather than by a single one, will quicken the development of hydro-electricity. By selling surplus electricity to the national grid, they could become self-financing. Sun Yueqi et al., Views and Suggestions on the Assessment Report of the Three Gorges Project: Written Statement Submitted to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party by Ten Members of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, in Yangtze! Yangtze!, supra note 24, at 53, 59-63.

(26) As one commentator suggests, there are a multitude of environmental concerns posed by the construction of one large dam as opposed to several smaller dams:

The Yangtze River is the fourth-largest river in the world and carries

substantial volumes of sediment. As it stores flood waters, the Three

Gorges reservoir would block the moving sediment and cause it to pile up on

the river bed. Ever-growing heaps of sediment around the end of the

reservoir might affect the navigability of the waterways, raise the water

level and increase flooding at Chongqing, and worsen flood disasters in

Sichuan province. Yueqi et al., supra note 25, at 57. A detailed discussion of the role of sedimentation as an obstruction to navigation is found in Lu Qinkan, Suggestions on the Construction Scheme of the Three Gorges Project, in Yangtze! Yangtze!, supra note 24, at 76-88.

"The Indus and Nile Rivers have the most sediment of any rivers in the world, but their dams were not constructed to ensure navigation.... Nowhere has such a large power station been built on a navigable river with such a high sediment content." Fang Xiangming & Li Weizhong, Once the Golden Waterway is Severed, Can Another Yangtze River Be Dug, in Yangtze! Yangtze!, supra note 24, at 171, 173.

(27) One third of the delegates at the People's Congress in 1992 abstained or voted against the project, "an unprecedented sign of hostility from a normally acquiescent body." Spence, supra note 1, at 38; see also Adams & Williams, supra note 24, at xxiv.

(28) Adams & Williams, supra note 24, at xxiv.

With the critics silenced, Premier IA Peng, a Soviet-trained hydraulic

engineer and one of the project's prominent champions, revived the Three

Gorges dam, aiming for its approval at the National People's Congress of

1992. There, despite another extraordinary display of opposition to the

dam--one third of the NPC delegates registered their opposition to the dam

by voting no or abstaining--the Three Gorges darn was finally approved.

Id.

(29) L. Sullivan, The Three Gorges Dam and the Chinese Polity, in Yangtze! Yangtze!, supra note 24, at xiv, xviii.

Another major obstacle confronting dam opponents is the identification of

the project with Chinese nationalism and ethnocentrism. This is to be the

world's largest dam and, like many aspiring great powers, China wants to be

"number one": in walls, cities, grain production, and now dams. Small is

not beautiful in a country with 1.1 billion people. Opponents calling for a

series of smaller and less costly dams on the tributaries of the

Yangtze River constantly run up against the powerful force of Chinese

nationalism, now in a communist guise that prefers grandiose monuments over

efficiency.

Id.

Other opponents suggest that personal profits are the actual motivating factor, and the appeals to nationalist pride are merely the window dressing. See, e.g., Wu Jiaxiang, The Three Gorges Project in the Context of Present Economic and Political Conditions, in Yangtze! Yangtze!, supra note 24, at 243, 244-45. Nevertheless, the key is that the dam must be one very large project, since the profits on smaller, decentralized projects will not be as great or as easy to control as one massive, centralized project.

(30) Paula Abrams, Reservations About Women: Population Policy and Reproductive Rights, 29 Cornell Int'l L.J. 1, 5-6 (1996) [hereinafter Reservations]. Professor Abrams writes:

Population Programs can be characterized as either anti-natalist or

pro-natalist depending upon whether the governmental objective is to

decrease or increase population .... For many years, population was

perceived primarily as an economic issue with little attention given to

the social dynamics affecting fertility.... [I]ndividuals, overwhelmingly

women, are viewed as receptacles for contraception services.

Id.

(31) See infra note 36 for a discussion of India's campaign of involuntary sterilization.

(32) The textual bases in the Bible supporting pro-natalist positions within the Judaic and Christian religions are discussed in Paula Abrams, The Tradition of Reproduction, 37 Ariz. L. Rev. 453, 456-58 (1995); see also Reservations, supra note 30, at 8.

(33) Reservations, supra note 30, at 24. The Romanian government under Nicolae Ceausescu banned nearly all abortions and contraception, in an effort to breed a larger labor force, primarily to support the steel industry. "[T]he fetus is the socialist property of the whole society. Giving birth is a patriotic duty." Id.

(34) American anti-abortion statutes originated in the late 19th Century, motivated in part by arguments that by allowing mostly middle class Protestant women access to abortion, "real" Americans were committing "race suicide," allowing Catholic immigrants to out breed Protestant "natives." Elizabeth K. Spahn & Barbara Andrade, Mis-Conceptions: The Moment of Conception in Religion, Science and Law, 32 U.S.F. L. Rev. (forthcoming Winter 1997); see also James Mohr, Abortion in America 166-67 (1978); Reva Siegel, Reasoning from the Body: A Historical Perspective on Abortion Regulation and Questions of Equal Protection, 44 Stan. L. Rev. 261, 280-323 (1992).

(35) Ehrenreich, supra note 5, at 514-15. Female slaves of African ancestry were "bred" to produce a cash crop of slave babies, often by the white master raping them. Aboard the slave ships, African women were often raped by the sailors, because a pregnant woman brought a higher price at auction. Once the economic incentive to produce slaves ended, the breeding policies shifted toward limiting births to women of African ancestry. By the 1970s, involuntary sterilizations became the dominant problem. Id.

(36) Several million forced sterilizations were performed in India. Mahmoud F. Fathalla, From Family Planning to Reproductive Health, in Beyond the Numbers, supra note 14, at 143.

In some countries [the slackening pace of fertility change] may reflect a backlash against coercive family planning programs. In India, for example, the forced sterilization program brought down Indira Gandhi's government and is blamed for setting back the progress of fertility decline by about a decade." Laurie A. Mazur, Beyond the Numbers: An Introduction and Overview, in Beyond the Numbers, supra note 14, at 14.

(37) Mona Zulficar, From Human Rights to Program Reality: Vienna, Cairo and Beijing in Perspective, 44 Am. U. L. Rev. 1017, 1021-30 (1995). The United Nations ICPD Conference held in Cairo in September, 1994, after prolonged and very difficult negotiations, produced a Programme of Action which for the first time linked issues involving population with economic development and the empowerment of women.

(38) Changing the Boundaries, supra note 23, at 20. Jiggins critiques the World Bank's report on the grounds that it assumes the specifics of gender relations are not significant to the outcome of policies, that it treats the household or family as an undifferentiated unity, and that it fails to address the ways that empowering women will affect the organizations of human behavior.

(39) Nafis Sadik, Investing in Women: The Focus of the '90s, in Beyond the Numbers, supra note 14, at 209.

(40) See supra notes 25-26 and accompanying text.

(41) For a discussion of the social and economic context of son preference, see infra notes 62-64 and accompanying text.

(42) The goal of universal primary education in all countries before the year 2015 was adopted as one of the major items in the Programme for Action at the ICPD in Cairo. Zulficar, supra note 37, at 1024. The importance of education for women and girls is also stressed in the UNPF report:

Education is perhaps the single strongest influence on women's control of

their own future. Every large-scale survey in developing countries has

discovered that the education women receive is one of the most universal

and reliable predictors both of their own fertility and of their children's

health. This effect holds regardless of school curricula and different

cultures, and even though other factors, such as income and employment

opportunities, come into play. Sadik, supra note 39, at 220.

(43) Ruth Dixon-Mueller, Population Policy and Women's Rights: Transforming Reproductive Choice 120-24 (1993) [hereinafter Transforming Reproductive Choice].

A woman's schooling is among the strongest determinants of her

contraceptive knowledge and use of family size, especially in high

fertility countries. The relationship is not a simple one, however, nor is

it inverse in all cases.... Whatever way the causal mechanism works,

investment in female education appears to have a greater impact in reducing

family size than the same investment in schooling for males.

Id. at 121.

Dixon-Mueller explains that higher education for women can work indirectly to reduce fertility in at least three ways: first, by delaying marriage and increasing the probability of non-marriage; second, by creating aspirations for a higher standard of living and stimulating women's interest in activities outside the home, especially employment; and third, by exposing women to knowledge, attitudes and practices favorable to birth control including a higher level of equal communication between husband and wife. Id. at 122.

The World Bank 1992 World Development Report estimated the amount needed to bring primary education of girls to the level of boys, for 25 million girls per year, at $950 million. This figure is 2 percent of total educational expenditures by developing countries. Changing the Boundaries, supra note 23, at 244.

(44) Three interrelated investment strategies appear optimal to addressing the full spectrum of reproductive health. First, invest in women's reproductive and sexual health services, including but not limited to birth control. Second, implement policies and programs to encourage men to take more responsibility for their own fertility, for prevention of STDs, and for the health and well-being of their sexual partners and the children they father. Third, implement policies and programs to address underlying issues of sexuality and gender relations, especially for children and young people. Adrienne Germaine et al., Setting a New Agenda: Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, in Population Policies Reconsidered, supra note 7, at 27.

(45) Changing the Boundaries, supra note 23, at 156-57. Although the World Health Organization concluded that there is the potential for improving maternal and child health through treatment of reproductive tract infections (RTIs), the demographic effects of this are neglected.

The prevalence of RTIs is much higher, and the health and social costs much greater than is generally acknowledged in family planning or population control discussions. Id. at 52-53.

If the estimate is restricted to the economically productive period of a

person's life, sexually transmitted diseases rank second only to measles in

terms of their impact on health. The cost-effectiveness of treating

reproductive tract infections compared with other diseases appears to be

high.... The direct costs per child for full immunization were

$5 to $15. Data from a number of countries suggested in comparison the

$1.40 `would avert one case of gonoccal ophthalmia neonatorum, [which

results in blindness if untreated] and $12 would avert an adverse outcome

associated with syphilis during pregnancy.

Id. at 54.

(46) One commentator, Ruth Dixon-Mueller, has noted that;

Like schooling, participation in the labor market is likely to broaden a

woman's horizons, introduce new forms of authority and social organization

that compete with familial hierarchies, and offer a taste of independence.

It is exactly these fears that underlie the resistance of men in some cases

to having their wives or daughters work away from home.

Transforming Reproductive Choice, supra note 43, at 127.

[T]he least-likely candidates for transforming gender relations and

fertility decision making are those that do not confront patriarchal family

relations of production and reproduction. These include unpaid work in the

family fields or livestock herds (no matter how productive or valuable to

the household's consumption), unpaid work in other family enterprises such

as cottage industries, and self-employment in enterprises that have low

returns to labor or where women depend on men for their capital, materials,

or marketing. ... In contrast, work for wages is far more likely to

provide girls and women (as well as young men) with moral leverage to

challenge patriarchal controls over their sexual and reproductive lives if

the earnings contribute a substantial share of the household income or

could provide an independent livelihood.

Id. at 126-27.

(47) Changing the Boundaries, supra note 23, at 4. A study conducted by the World Bank in Africa demonstrated that a 150/6 increase in food production could be achieved, without new resources, if women only had better access to land, production inputs, such as credit, fertilizer, improved seeds, and to markets. Id. at 5.

Acknowledging women's contributions to agricultural production is the first step. Providing women who actually do the farming work directly with agricultural training, access to credit, and technology is also key. Older development programs provided the assistance to a male intermediary such as the husband, son, or brother-in-law rather than to the women farmers directly. Finally, adjusting development efforts to fit with the demanding schedules of women responsible for both agricultural and household duties is needed. See generally Gender & Agricultural Development: Surveying the Field (Helen K. Henderson & Ellen Hansen eds., 1995).

(48) Sadik, supra note 39, at 210.

In many societies, a young woman is still trapped within a web of

traditional values which assign a very high value to childbearing and

almost none to anything else she can do. Her status depends on her success

as a mother and on little else. Increasing a woman's capacity to decide her

own future--her access to education, to land, to agricultural extension

services, to credit, to employment--as an individual in her own right has a

powerful effect, not least on her fertility.

There is a sharp contrast between persistently high fertility rates in

some countries--most of the Arab world, for instance, and many parts of

south Asia--and decreasing fertility rates in countries with equivalent

levels of socioeconomic development--China, for example, Sri Lanka and the

state of Kerala in South India. One of the key differences between the two

groups is the status of women, whether among themselves or relative to men.

Women who have managed to acquire a measure of self-determination tend

to have smaller families than women with no such assets. Broadly speaking,

in the second group of countries women have a wider range of choice. Their

status and security do not depend only on bearing children.

Id.

(49) Narrowly focused approaches which use female education or employment as instruments to reduce fertility are inadequate without strategies which focus on:

women's empowerment, lead[ing] to their increased autonomy and

decision-making power, providing them with an alternative power base that

is independent of the domination of men.... Available evidence suggests

that the most effective strategies are likely to be those that support

women to organize peer groups and mobilize community resources and public

services, including women's health services.... [P]rograms that treat

women as subjects who can and ought to shape their own destinies.... [I]t

is essential that their empowerment occur not only within their personal

spheres, but also in the broader spheres of the community and the state.

Simeen Mahmud & Anne M. Johnston, Women's Status, Empowerment, and Reproductive Outcomes, in Population Policies Reconsidered, supra note 7, at 157.

(50) See Changing the Boundaries, supra note 23, at 11-12 (discussing the North/South dimension to the population and environment debate).

(51) Abrams, supra note 32, at 453, 456-80 (tracing the pro-natalist religious traditions within Judaism and Christianity that attempt to control and direct female sexuality and limit legitimate sexual activity to procreation only). As one author notes:

Women's perspectives on contraceptive technology challenge the belief,

deeply embedded in religious and cultural convictions, that men have the

right to control women's fertility and sexuality. An age-old fear of

unbridled female sexuality not directed toward procreation haunts the

debate. The rejection by women of the view that the purpose of their

sexuality is to satisfy the sexual needs of men is profoundly threatening

to existing patterns of male dominance. Changing the Boundaries, supra note 23, at 153.

(52) Elizabeth K Spahn, Waiting for Credentials: Feminist Theories of Enforcement of International Human Rights, 44 Am. U. L. Rev. 1053 (1995). "Egypt's Islamic Group Warns U.N. Conference" was the N.Y. Times' headline on August 28, 1994.

The Islamic Group advises all foreigners taking part in the licentiousness

conference known as the population conference, which all sectors of the

Egyptian people have rejected.... The Islamic Group, as its [sic] starts a

new round of operations, urges all foreigners not to come to Egypt during

the coming period for the sake of their own lives.

Egypt's Islamic Group Warns U.N. Conference, N.Y. Times, Aug. 28, 1994, at 6 (quoting an Islamic Group fax to news agencies).

I was reading the Sunday paper when I saw the article. Having never attended a "licentiousness conference" before, I decided I'd better head to Cairo. There were ultimately no acts of terrorism at the ICPD Conference, although security was very tight and the atmosphere quite tense for the first few days.

(53) Blake, supra note 5, at 321-22. Blake suggests that:

Modern day welfare rhetoric has encapsulated and perpetuated a series of

myths regarding the traditional welfare recipient .... [P]ut even more

bluntly, `comfortable Americans more and more often bemoan the waste of

their tax money on lazy black women with a love of copulation, a horror of

birth control and a lack of interest in marriage.'. . . This collection of

myths and stereotypes has resulted in welfare policy and rhetoric

reminiscent of that expounded by Malthusian theorists.

Id.

In fact, welfare families are no bigger than other families, and welfare mothers actually bear fewer children while on welfare than do women who are not on welfare. Id. at 323.

(54) A number of reasons are given to support female genital mutilation (FGM). Some, but not all, practitioners of both Islamic and Christian religions believe that it is commanded by their holy texts, the Koran and the Bible. Some believe that mutilation promotes good hygiene and health. Some African groups believe the procedure aids in preserving tribal identity. See Hope Lewis, Between Irua and `Female Genital Mutilation. Feminist Human Rights Discourse and the Cultural Divide, 8 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 1, 21-25 (1995); Melissa A. Morgan, Female Genital Mutilation: An Issue on the Doorstep of the American Medical Community, 18 J. Legal Med. 93, 94-96 (1997). Some believe FGM increases the sexual pleasure of the husband because a smaller opening into the vagina increases male pleasure. Morgan, supra, at 96.

Furthermore, some believe that the procedure `preserve[s] virginity and

family honor' and prevents promiscuity and immorality. Uncircumcised women

are considered wild, and female genital mutilation is believed to help

control their emotions and sexuality .... Another man in San Jose,

California, circumcised his three year old daughter and also defended his

actions on the basis that his child was wild. He stated: `She liked to

play outside too much. She had friends who were boys .... [T]his will tame

her.' In fact, in many areas where the procedures are routinely performed,

uncircumcised women are treated as social outcasts who are unworthy of

marriage.

Id. at 95-96.

European and American medical doctors during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also performed FGM on women who masturbated, or were "promiscuous" or aggressive. In some cases, the surgical techniques were perfected on African-American slaves or freed women, and on working-class European women. Lewis, supra at 23-24.

African women have been at the forefront of opposition to FGM, both at the personal and the public levels. As one commentator notes, often this opposition involves the feigning of circumcision, allowing the woman to live to make her own decisions:

Everyone tries to persuade me that it must be done to my daughter, saying

that no one will marry her, but I tell them I don't care. Let her get old

enough to decide what she wants for herself. In a year or so I will have a

party for her and pretend that I am going to circumcise her. I will buy

her new clothes, paint her hands with henna and call in the midwife ....

Then I will pay the midwife to do nothing, and tell everyone that it has

been done.

Id. at 26.

African feminists object to the manner in which international human rights discourse defines and describes FGM, to the disrespectful portrayal of African women's bodies, to the oversimplification of the debate, and to the portrayals of African mothers and traditional practitioners as callous or even cruel. Id. at 28-29.

Rather than fall into the either/or formal dichotomy trap of either respecting local religious and cultural practices and allowing FGM to continue unchallenged, or imposing Western medical and cultural values through the heavy hand of international law and economic pressures, leading African-American feminist scholars have proposed relying on the international human rights for a as a source of space for the creation of consensual human rights norms, through consensus-building. This approach relies on a relatively slow, grassroots process of health education and norm creation and prioritizes collective context and consensus over state control. Id. at 42 (citing Isabelle R. Gunning, Arrogant Perception, World-Traveling and Multicultural Feminism: The Case of Female Genital Surgeries, 23 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 189, 241 (1992) and Kay Boulware-Miller, Female Circumcision: Challenges to the Practice as a Human Rights Violation, 8 Harv. Women's L.J. 155, 163 (1985)).

(55) Changing the Boundaries, supra note 23, at 14. Jiggins notes that:

In practice, controlling births under the demographic imperative too often

has come to mean controlling women's fertility.... The consuming interest

of population control advocates in controlling fertility, however, has

blinded them to the importance of sexuality and the power relationship

between men and women.

Men often feel ambivalent about allowing their wives and girlfriends to

use contraception lest they thereby lose control over the women's sexual

behavior.

Id. at 150.

(56) Transforming Reproductive Choice, supra note 43, at 25-26. One commentator describes this dynamic as follows:

The essence of patriarchy is that girls and women have little control over

the circumstances under which they work, the returns for their labor,

their sexuality, and the timing and number of their children....

Patriarchal control over reproduction can produce very early arranged

marriages (sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia) or later marriages (East Asia)

depending on the benefits flowing to elders from each pattern. It can

produce high or low rates of divorce and female remarriage (Muslim,

Catholic, and Hindu countries, respectively), monogyny or polygyny,

pregnancies closely or widely spaced. And it can produce not only high

birth rates and low levels of contraceptive use, but also more controlled

birth rates and higher levels of contraceptive use. Among the Chinese in

Southeast and East Asia, for example, the interests of powerful kin lie in

investing more heavily in fewer children, especially sons, for the

family's social advancement.

Id.

(57) The potential influence on fertility decisions of the husband or other family members is often ignored by population planners. In Ghana, for example, only 23% of couples reported the same desired family size. In Thailand, 20% of couples differed on whether more children were desired. In Egypt, 17% of urban couples and 22% of rural couples differed. Often, when there are differences within a couple regarding family planning, it is the male view which prevails. Charles B. Lloyd, Family and Gender Issues for Population Policy, in Beyond the Numbers, supra note 14, at 249.

(58) Sen, supra note 11, at 1051-52.

(59) One commentator examining this dynamic notes that: "[a] number of case studies in rural communities of Pakistan have notably revealed that most of the male villagers considered that neither population growth nor environmental degradation were major issues ... whereas they were considered major issues at the national level." Franck Amalric, Finiteness, Infinity and Responsibility: The Population-Environment Debate, in Feminist Perspectives on Sustainable Development 226, 231 (Wendy Harcourt ed., 1994).

(60) I am indebted to Don Ethan Miller for this insight.

(61) As one commentator suggests, "[e]conomic theories of fertility are closely associated with the `new' household economics.... The main criticism [of such theories] centres on the assumption that actual fertility is the result of choices made by a homogeneous household unit innocent of power and authority relations based on gender and age." Gita Sen, Women, Poverty and Population, in Feminist Perspectives on Sustainable Development, supra note 59, at 217.

(62) See Elizabeth Bumiller, May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India 10 (1990); Laurel Remers Pardee, The Dilemma of Dowry Deaths: Domestic Disgrace or International Human Rights Catastrophe?, 13 Ariz. J. Int'l & Comp. L. 491 (1996). While a man might chose to divorce a wife who cannot bear sons, he would have to return the dowry. If she dies, he is able to keep the dowry. As one commentator notes, "[i]n urban Maharashtra and Bombay, 1996 of all deaths among women from 15 to 44 years of age are due to `accidental burns,'" and the comparable figure in other developing countries such as Guatemala, Ecuador, and Chile is less than 1%. Pardee, supra, at 521 n.52. Furthermore, as one study conducted in Delhi reported, "of 109 police diaries and reports concerning severely burned women, 63% were dismissed as accidental with no investigation, despite laws requiring investigation." Id. at 521 n.75.

(63) One commentator exploring this dynamic notes that:

The limited research that has been done on this subject--primarily in rural

Bangladesh and India--suggests that the production of children, especially

sons, is a form of insurance for women who are denied independent access to

income and land. Facing a high probability of divorce, desertion, or

widowhood, and with no public assistance for the destitute, and no pensions

in old age, rural women in resource-poor households have little option but

to turn to their sons for support.

Transforming Reproductive Choice, supra note 43, at 135 (citations omitted).

(64) Changing the Boundaries, supra note 23, at 27. Jiggins also notes that:

[B]y the early 1990s, the world was spending more than $800 billion a year

on the military and security. Furthermore, Third World countries with high

military and security expenditures receive two times as much in aid as

moderate spenders and four times as much as low spenders.... It is a world

that counts weapons of destruction as economically productive and women's

domestic work as economically valueless. Id. at 41.

(65) One commentator advocating this position suggests that "population policies, rather than concentrating simply on fertility control, can only be effective and humane as part of broader human development approaches that create an enabling environment within which people can attain their health and rights ... giv[ing] priority to two strategies: women's empowerment and reproductive and sexual health services." Sen et al., Reconsidering Population Policies: Ethics, Development, and Strategies for Change, in Population Policies Reconsidered, supra note 7, at 5-6.

(66) Helga Moss, Consumption and Fertility, in Feminist Perspectives on Sustainability, supra note 59, at 243. As Moss explains:

The rhetoric of the population discourse is so dangerously seductive

because thinking in numbers closes our eyes to these links and divisions in

the global household, including the power relations embedded in it.... For

instance, it is often claimed that it is the high and increasing number of

people which creates environmental destruction in Bangladesh. But there are

countries in Europe, such as Belgium, with a higher population density than

Bangladesh. In Belgium, we find no World Bank conditionalities on reducing

population. Belgium's ecosystem, however, could hardly sustain such a heavy

density of people were it not for their integration into the world

market.... In this demographic, `population explosion' line of thinking, it

will always be the poor who are too many, no matter (or because of) how

little they consume.

Id.

(67) Laurie A. Mazur, Beyond the Numbers: An Introduction and Overview, in Beyond the Numbers, supra note 14, at 12-13. Mazur explains the harshness of the "Mexico City Policy," and the negative impact it had on population policy:

[I]n a stunning policy reversal, Reagan's U.S. Delegation [at the 1984

World Population Conference in Mexico City] declared population a `neutral

factor' in development. The U.S. announced its so-called `Mexico City

Policy,' which denied U.S. funding to any organization that provided

abortion services, counseling, or referral-even with money from other

sources. The Mexico City policy dealt a serious blow to the International

Planned Parenthood Federation, which was forced to scale back its programs

worldwide.

Id.

(68) The U.S. government's retreat from leadership of world population efforts bears at least part of the blame for slower progress made toward population stabilization in the last decade. Id. at 13.

(69) Sharon L. Camp, The Politics of U.S. Population Assistance, in Beyond the Numbers, supra note 14, at 130.

(70) The United Nations Convention on Consent to Marriage, adopted in 1962, provides that a woman cannot be married against her will, a practice the U.N. terms "similar to slavery." United Nations, Convention on Consent to Marriage. Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages, UN Treaty Series, vol. 521, No. 7525, p. 231, reprinted in United Nations and the Advancement of Women 170-72 (1996); United Nations, General Assembly Resolution Adopting the Recommendation on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages, A/RES/2018 (XX) (1965), reprinted in United Nations and the Advancement of Women 173-74 (1996). Yet the practice of involuntary marriage continues to be widespread. The Convention provides that marriage not be permitted for girls under the age of 15, yet more that 30 countries, including the United States, continue to permit child marriages. Transforming Reproductive Choice, supra note 43, at 128.

(71) Spahn, supra note 52, at 1067.

(72) Many women do not want to relinquish control over their contraceptive practices to males, and as two commentators note:

[E]xploring the problem more deeply reveals that women's distrust of men's

taking responsibility for fertility control and reluctance to relinquish

methods women control are rooted in other kinds of gendered power

imbalances that work against a `gender equality' approach to reproductive

health policies. These include social systems that provide no

educational or economic incentives toward men's involvement in child care

and cultural norms that stigmatize women's sexuality outside the bounds

of heterosexual monogamy.

Sonia Correa & Rosalind Petchesky, Reproductive and Sexual Rights: A Feminist Perspective, in Population Policies Reconsidered, supra note 7, at 107, 116-17.

(73) U.N. Report of the Fourth World Conference on Women, supra note 2.

(74) One commentator exploring this dynamic suggests that:

Because men contribute a proportionally smaller share of their earnings to

the family budget, development programs that favor male-controlled

cash-crops can drive women and children deeper into poverty. In Africa,

a World Bank report found that "it is not uncommon for children's

nutrition to deteriorate while wrist watches, radios, and bicycles

are acquired by the adult male household members."

Where women have little access to productive resources and little

control over family income, they depend on children for social status

and economic security. And because they are often responsible for

securing food, fuel and fresh water, women tend to have a greater

interest in preserving croplands, forests, and other resources for

perpetual use. Men, on the other hand are more likely to regard

natural resources as commodities that can be converted into cash.

Laurie A. Mazur, Beyond the Numbers: An Introduction and Overview, in Beyond the Numbers, supra note 14, at 10 (citing Jodi Jacobson, Gender Bias: Roadblock to Sustainable Development 13 (1992)).

Another commentator examining the differing views held by men and women with respect to such resources notes that:

Household studies in some `developing' nations indicate that in families

men react to increases in their income differently from women. A

man is more likely to increase spending on luxury items for himself--for

example, on cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, another woman (a prostitute,

girlfriend or another wife). A woman, on the other hand,

tends to spend the extra money on children's and domestic needs: more

food, educational expenses, improving the home. Thus, increases in

income can have greatly different social welfare implications

depending on the gender of the recipient.

Pamella Sparr, Feminist Critiques of Structural Adjustment, in Mortgaging Women's Lives 13, 17-18 (Pamella Sparr ed., 1994).

(75) Sen, supra note 11, at 1055-56.

(76) Id. at 1056. A second Indian state, Tamil Nadu, has also experienced a successful and voluntary decline in female fertility rates in an environment of high female participation in market economy jobs, high literacy rates, and relatively low infant mortality. Id. at 1057. The success of voluntary and cooperative family planning in an environment of relatively high female status can be compared with other Indian states in the northern heartland, where female status is relatively low. There, high birth rates are continuing despite very heavy handed methods of family planning, including coercion. Id. at 1058.

(77) Peter Manus, The Owl, the Indian, the Feminist, and the Brother: Environmentalism Encounters the Social Justice Movements, 23 B.C. Envtl. Aff. L. REV. 249, 296 (1996).

The population control example illustrates that the most effective route to

an environmental goal may not be the most direct, narrowly focused,

regulatory route. Supporting the empowerment of women in Southern

countries, as divergent as that is from the cause of a self-sustaining

natural environment, indeed may be a more effective environmentalist

tactic than many direct attacks on polluters and exploiters of the

earth's resources.

Interestingly, the holistic approach to environmentalism first was

presented by Rachel Carson.... [whose] thesis of interconnectedness

focuses on the synergy between elements of the natural

environment.... [E]nvironmentalists might ... observe ... that

the interconnectedness of nature also includes the human element.

Thus `human husbandry,' in the form of promoting a healthy

environment for females, is part of the symbiotic web of

self-sustaining life.

Id.

(78) "Ecofeminism" is the term often given to the approach of environmental issues from a feminist perspective. Kari Norgaard, Explorations of Culture and Nature: Ecological Feminism and the Enrichment of Human Ecology, in 5 Advances in Human Ecology 213 (1996). Ecofeminism has contributed three major insights to human ecology: "(1) the description of a cultural association between women and nature; (2) the theory that individual forms of domination (e.g. sexism, racism, the control of nature) arise from common underlying ideologies; and (3) the description of how specific forms of domination reinforce one another." Id. at 215 (citations omitted). For an excellent analysis of the history and analyses of ecofeminism, see id. at 225-37.

Although many of the ideas discussed by ecofeminists are shared by other scholars, ecofeminists place a strong emphasis on systems of domination, describing different forms of oppression as resulting from the same ideological system and structurally interlocking in ways that reinforce one another. "The ecofeminist approach is unique in its theoretical arguments regarding dualisms and a logic of domination, the nature and depth of its social and cultural critiques, and because it explicitly challenges all systems of domination." Id. at 237.

Elizabeth Spahn, Professor of Law, New England School of Law. I would like to thank the Feminist Majority Foundation, Eleanor Smeal, Peg Yarkin, Jennifer Jackman, and Christine Onyanga for inviting me to represent their delegation at the Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women, Beijing China, 1995. The Feminist Majority Foundation, together with the National Council of Negro Women, were the co-chairs of the U.S. Network for Women, a group of 258 women's organizations which sent delegations to the related Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) Conference at Huairou, China. The views I express are my own, and not necessarily shared by the Feminist Majority Foundation. I would also like to thank Reed Boland, Allison Dussias, Judi Greenberg, Peter Manus, and Curt Nyquist.