World Population Day: Who bears the brunt?
The
world is impregnated with myths. The Oxford
dictionary defines myth as fictitious, a
misrepresented truth or an exaggerated and idealized conception. Corroborating
with this definition could overpopulation be debunked as a myth? There are ambiguities concerning
overpopulation as to whether it is a menace or a myth. Today, we observe the
World Population Day. The Governing Council of the United Nations Development
Programme recommended its introduction in 1989. The inspiration for this came
from the interests raised by ‘Five Billion Day’ on July 11, 1987 – the day when
the population reached five billion. The theme for this year is ‘Family
Planning.’ This is because 2018 marks the 50th anniversary of
International Conference on Human Rights that affirmed family planning as a
human right. The Tehran Proclamation, adopted during the conference, states
that it is a basic right of parents to be able to decide on the number and
spacing of their children.
Before we engage with the theme, we take time to contemplate
on the various paradoxes engulfing overpopulation.
Overpopulation:
Myth or Fact?
In
1798 Thomas Robert Malthus through his work,
An Essay on the Principle of Population
made evident his fear that the world
population would outpace resources
leading to unprecedented problems. He
reckoned;
All the children born,
beyond what would be required to keep up the population to this level, must
necessarily perish unless rooms are made for them by the deaths of grown
persons…To act consistently, therefore, we should facilitate, instead of
foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operations of nature in
producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the
horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of
destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness
to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make
the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses and court the return of
the plague.[i]
This
Malthusian theory of population growth has been ridiculed. Take a look at this
video
On the same plane we have the Gandhian ethics with its central maxim
as “The world has enough for everyone's need, but not
enough for everyone's greed.” Karl Marx who
rebuked Malthus by arguing that there would be enough for everyone if the
earth’s resources were distributed fairly. For Marx the unequal distribution of
resources by the capitalists was the problem and not overpopulation. Marcus
Borg who remarked, “Most people who live in poverty are not poor because they
aren’t willing to work hard but because of systemic factors largely or
completely beyond their control.” Oxfam, an international organization that
stated, “Famines are not natural phenomena, they are catastrophic political
failures.”
Do these arguments then make overpopulation a myth? Actually
not. It is still one of the impending threats. In reality, both the number of
people and the nature of their consumption are equally an issue of jeopardy. The
world population as of now is 7.6 billion and is expected to reach 8.6 billion
in 2030 according to UN report 2017. India is currently ranked the second most
populous country in the world with 1.3 billion people.
The above video vouches that everyone could fit in Texas. On the
contrary, Eric R. Pianka, an American herpetologist and evolutionary ecologist,
does the math again. He opines;
The total
land surface area of Earth is about 57,308,738 square miles, of which about 24%
is mountainous and about 33% is desert. Subtracting this uninhabitable 57% from
the total land area leaves 24, 642,757 square miles or 15.77 billion acres of
habitable land. Divide this figure by the current human population of 7 billion
and you get just under one hectare per person. Again, however, we have not
allowed for nice amenities such as roads, schools, hospitals, shopping malls,
rivers, lakes, reservoirs, parks, golf courses etc. To increase the average
quality of life, the number of people on Earth must be reduced.[ii]
So these are the contingencies concerning overpopulation. Depending
on your analytical method, overpopulation may or may not prove to be a hazard but it is certainly a matter of prime concern.
Having briefly dealt with the ambiguities of overpopulation I
now solicit your attention to the theme decided by the UN for this World
Population Day i.e. ‘Family Planning’. The impediment now is how do we
communicate the necessity of family planning with certain Churches that believe sex
should exclusively be for procreation? Natural Law proposed by Thomas Aquinas becomes the
framework for this belief.
Natural Law and Sex
Natural law advocates that sex just for the sake of pleasure and
against natural order is sinful. To say succinctly the intention of any sexual intercourse should be
procreation and its consequence should be offspring. This invariably makes same-sex
intercourse sinful making sex the prerogative of the heterosexuals. Further
the right to have sex is snatched even from infertile heterosexual couples.
Robert Gray is a philosopher who
has argued that “sexual activity” should be analyzed in terms of the production
of sexual pleasure. He asserts that “any activity might become a sexual
activity if sexual pleasure is derived from it, and no activity is a sexual
activity unless sexual pleasure is derived from it”[iii]. If we accept Gray's
analysis of sexual activity, that sexual acts are exactly those and only those
that produce sexual pleasure, the general point is this. If “sexual activity”
is logically dependent on “sexual pleasure”, if sexual pleasure is the
criterion of sexual activity itself, then sexual pleasure cannot be the
yardstick of non-moral quality of sexual activities.
The unsanctioned gaze of
theologians and prelates have obscured the concept of sin. To put it in the words of Met. Kallistos Ware, “Trying
to gaze through the keyhole is never a dignified posture.”[iv] Further, Marcella Althaus
remarks, “All the concepts of sin and grace seem to be unendingly tangled
around the theologian’s gaze at other people’s beds, bathrooms or sofas.”[v]
Family
Planning: Yoke of Women
It is a matter of indignation that when we speak of
family planning the onus rests on women. It is shameful that women are
considered nothing but a giant womb. Kandathil Sebastian – a
Public health researcher states;
"Currently a wide range of birth control technologies are
available for women in the market. They are: combined oral contraceptives,
progestin only oral contraceptives, injectable, Norplant implants, tubectomy
(sterilization), condoms, IUDs, spermicides, diaphragms and cervical caps.
Available methods for men are only condoms and vasectomy (sterilization). From
these listing, we find that most of the technologies are reserved for women
whereas just two methods are available for men. Interestingly more research on
male methods of family planning was dropped because the researchers thought
that men may think male pills would lower their libido and hence no ‘choice’
was offered to men. Women are offered a basket of choices, despite unpleasant
side effects and in some cases adverse impacts."[vi]
How could we afford to forget that even corporates like
APPLE, Google and Facebook had offered their female employees ‘egg-freezing’
fostering a parochial notion that pregnancy would take a toll on their career. It
is so disrespectful and offensive for womanhood to tell them that they will be
respected until their bodies are lucrative.
The groaning of various women in the sterilization camps is left unheard. In 1991, Deepa Dhanraj made the prevalent gender biased
violence explicit through her documentary Something like a War. The situation hasn't changed much. Inevitably the burden of contraception is to be borne by the women. Take a
look.
James
Gustafson, the American ethicist, writes;
“The arguments for contraception
and more specifically abortion are made by an external judge. It means that
rules and guidelines regarding contraception are written from the perspectives
of the person who claim the right to judge the past actions of others as
morally right or wrong or to tell others what future actions are morally right
or wrong. The individual then have no right to either make a moral claim or
decide and personal responsibility is removed. The second arguments are made on
juridical model. Here the action is right or wrong depending on whether it
conforms to or is contrary to a rule, a law and the outcome of a moral
argument. Here again the individual responsibility is decisively limited. The
third argument is physical. The concern lies with the physical life, its
sanctity and its preservation. But it does not take into consideration the will
and the rights of the mother.” (James M. Gustafson, “A Protestant Ethical
Approach” in The Morality of Abortion.)
Let
me conclude. This World Population Day may we not make women’s bodies our
experimental apparatus. The responsibility to preserve the family is not only
of the women but the men have an equal share too.
Do not go for a family planning at the expense of the family itself.
Prayers
Dn.
Basil Paul
[ii] Eric R. Pianka, “Let’s put
everybody into Texas”, http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/thoc/texas.html.
[iii] Robert Gray, “Sex and Sexual
Perversion” in Alan Soble ed. The Philosophy of Sex 3rd
edition, (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 57-66
[v] Marcella
Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions is Sex, Gender and
Politics (New York: Penguin books, 2001), Loc 1851 (Kindle edition)
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