newjerseynewsroom.com

BY SUSIE WILSON

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

SEX MATTERS

After listening to Governor Christie and other conservatives attack Planned Parenthood, watching Octomom Nadya Suleman and her octuplets crawl all over the set of The Today Show, and reading in Frank Bruni’s “Time for Oratorical Contraception” how Republican presidential candidates preen about how many children each has, I began to wonder if the U.S. is becoming a pro-natalist country. By pro-natalist, I mean a nation whose government and culture actively promote human reproduction and large families and downplay contraceptive use to limit childbearing and overpopulation.

To check on this hunch, I called Brian Dixon, vice president for media and government relations for Population Connection, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit whose mission is to “ensure that every woman around the world who wants to limit her childbearing has access to the health services and contraceptive supplies she needs in order to do so."

Dixon cautioned me against drawing this conclusion too quickly and assured me that the U.S. is moving in the right direction when it comes to limiting population growth. He understood why I drew a false conclusion about our population policies, because during the last Republican administration—when religious conservatives were in the ascendancy—there was a backlash against women’s reproductive rights and a general “fear about women’s sexuality and abilities to make their own choices,” Dixon said.

The U.S. has always been the global leader for population issues and the biggest provider of foreign aid for family planning in the world, Dixon said. It has also been the driving force behind the United Nations Population Fund, an international development agency that promotes family planning. These facts reassured me.

I asked Dixon why the media seems to relish stories like Octomom and Duggar family of 19 kids, who appear regularly on The Today Show after the birth of each new child.

He says the media likes to “focus on oddities” that make more news. The public has “a weird, morbid curiosity,” and the media feeds it with these out-of-the-ordinary stories. (Come to think of it, I’ve seen few stories about families with adopted children or even families that have decided to remain childless to lessen overpopulation. Perhaps these aren’t sufficiently odd enough for the media.)

“Most Americans want small families,” Dixon added.

He was surprised by the recent attacks on family planning, because “support for family planning and public funding for it, when polled, is so high that it is has become a cultural norm.”

He thinks that politicians like Governor Christie, who has refused to fund Planned Parenthood affiliates in New Jersey, might pay a price at the polls, “because most people’s views about family planning do not match those of conservative Republicans in these wars against women’s health.”

Dixon praised the Obama administration’s stance on population issues. It has increased family planning funding, lifted the global gag rule, and restored funding to the UNFPA. He worries, however, that with the Republicans back in control of the House of Representatives that our annual $40 million contribution to UNFPA may be once again in jeopardy.

Dixon had especially kind words for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her commitment to family planning worldwide. “She is a strong advocate for family planning and really gets the idea that an important part of her work is the improvement in the status of women,” he said.

Our conversation turned to world population issues. The United Nations predicts that world population will top the 7 billion mark on October 31. I admitted that I hadn’t realized that this milestone was approaching.

“Most people do not know that we’re adding another billion every 12 years, and this is great cause for alarm,” Dixon said.

Under the most conservative estimates, world population is currently growing by about 80 million every year and could reach 10 billion by 2100. The rise will occur primarily in the developing world in countries already prone to poverty, violence, and instability: Pakistan, Sudan, Niger, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are projected to see their populations rise dramatically in the next decades.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

One takeaway lesson from all these dire numbers is that there is a huge demand for family planning worldwide. Dixon’s organization estimates that there are “215 million women in the developing world who have an unmet need for family planning. These women are of reproductive age, sexually active, and do not want to become pregnant in the next two years, but are not using a modern method of contraception.”