The switch in emphasis in population policies from family planning to the development of socioeconomic policies that would encourage smaller families--summed up in the word "developmentalism"--is charted from a 1967 paper by Kinsley Davis to its culmination at the 1974 World Population Conference, when even as staunch a supporter of family planning as John D. Rockefeller came out in support of placing population policy in the context of economic and social development. The real question is, however: To what extent does developmentalism represent a true shift in policy and how much is simply a more sophisticated rhetoric designed to deflect the growing opposition to population control? On the one hand, the endorsement by a man of Rockefeller's stature indicates a significant change. On the other, the changes which the implementation of developmentalism would entail seem irreconcilable with the present political and economic structures of underdeveloped nations and of relations between them and the more developed countries. Further, developmentalism is neither as progressive as its advocates suggest, nor as threatening as its opponents cry. It is, in fact, a prescription for enhancing the effectiveness of family planning through a form of social engineering from the top; its details--more aid, investment, and trade--would involve an expanded Western role in the Third World. It is even suggested that developmentalism might be a cover for the creation of a more stratified society, where marginal members are restricted to their own quarters in an effort to secure political stability and economic growth. In the end, developmentalism might be shortlived, as pressure to step up birth control programs is felt from many quarters.
A summary of a "scientific report" on the development and implementation of population control in Latin America is presented. The report is to be presented at the Bertrand Russell Tribunal 2, concerned with repression in Latin America, in Brussels, Belgium, in January 1975. Hearings from the 1966-1968 U.S. Senate subcommittee on Foreign Aid Expenditures are cited to show evidence of American economic and military interests using theories of population control as a solution to deteriorating material conditions in Latin America. Explosive populations are also regarded as causes of political instability. The report further cites the "widespread use of coercive and misleading birth control propaganda" which distorts cultural and economic factors determining personal choices available to Latin American families. High birthrates are pictured as a major cause of poverty, slow economic growth, and scarcity of raw materials. Evidence of dangerous clinical testing of birth control products in Latin America, beginning in the 1930s in Puerto Rico, is presented. The questionable population policies of such institutions as the World Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation are also discussed.
At the convention of the World Food Conference, leaders of the underdeveloped nations hoped to press for changes in international trade relations while U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger hoped to use the conference as a forum to link food shortages to overpopulation. Kissinger tried to put the blame for the food crisis on the oil producing nations and the "energy crisis" they brought about and made it clear that the U.S. no longer plans to provide most of the world's food aid. The underdeveloped nations did not accept this. They still blame the crisis on the U.S., which they say controls more food than the fuel the oil producing nations control. The U.S. has historically used food as a tool of foreign policy, and with the increasing dependency of the U.S. on the raw supplies of the underdeveloped world, there is growing talk of using food to blackmail nations into adopting population control programs. One such proposal came in Rome by former U.S. government official Richard Gardner, who suggested a "global survival pact" under which rich nations would conserve food, energy, and raw materials in return for commitments by Third World nations to change their suicidal demographic, agricultural and environmental practices. Another proposal was made by Congressman Jerry Litton who said he would introduce legislation banning food aid to any country with above average population growth and which was not doing anything to reduce it.
The author, a representative of the Feminist Women's Movement in America, presents her views of events at the World Population Conference. She noted that the U.S. does have an unwritten population policy and that it is decided by the male-dominated medical profession who make all decisions concerning women's reproductive selves. While Planned Parenthood and International Planned Parenthood Federation with government support export ideas directly "ripped off" the Women's Movement - specifically menstrual extraction - and export them to all "the peasants in the rice paddies," they simutaneously deny these ideas and procedures to American women, by means of licensing. AMERICAN are harassed for doing precisely what they are teaching and giving women abroad equipment to perform.
The decision to have a number of children by a family located within the working peasantry or the appropriated masses is essentially a rational decision, a judgment of their social environment. The pitfall of neoMalthusian liberalism is precisely its "rationalism" - that it assumes a universal rationality and forgets that in a class society there exists class rationality. The demand for population control may be rational in one class situation, but not necessarily in another. The specific historical relation between high rates of population growth in particular social groups is obscured when the phenomenon is defined as the "population problem". Its core assertion is that people are poor because they are too many. Exploitation is reduced to poverty and the explanation of poverty becomes the poor themselves.
