In the United States, the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 50-year-old legal precedent that ruled state-level abortion bans are (in many situations) unconstitutional and violate the rights of pregnant women.
Since 1973, legal challenges to Roe v. Wade have weakened the case significantly, most recently allowing for a spate of state-level abortion bans in-all-but-name (notably in Texas, but other states are following suit). Overturning Roe v. Wade is likely to lead to a flood of these state-level abortion bans in roughly half of the United States.
Deep Green Resistance is both ethically and strategically opposed to abortion bans. As a feminist organization, we believe a woman or girl has the right to choose an abortion if that is what she wants. Broadly, these bans disproportionately affect poor women, since wealthier women may be able to travel to a jurisdiction in which abortion is legal, while poor women will not. This entrenches cycles of poverty, since giving birth to and raising a child is extremely expensive and time consuming.
Women’s Loss is Earth’s Loss: Abortion Bans Make Sustainability Impossible
Abortion bans significantly harm the planet, since overpopulation (alongside consumption and technology) is a major driver of the destruction of the natural world.
- The United States population was 31.4 million in 1860. Today, it is more than 331 million.
- As one professor stated, “Since 1960, while human population has doubled, the global economy has quadrupled, and resource consumption quintupled.”
- That was in 1999. Now, twenty-three years later, there are 1.8 billion more people on the planet, equivalent to more than the entire populations of China and the United States combined.
- More than 80 million people are added to the global population annually, the equivalent of ten New York Cities or twenty Los Angeles’s.
- The biomass of mammals on planet Earth is now more than 96% humans and livestock, and only 4% wild animals.
This massive population is only sustained by consuming the planet. Agriculture is rapidly destroying the planet’s remaining soils, and crop yields only remain high due to massive infusions of fossil-fuel derived fertilizers. Dead zones are spreading in the ocean due to pollution from industrial farming running down major rivers. Rainforests are being felled to clear more land for agriculture. Global fish populations are collapsing due to overfishing, pollution, and global warming. Non-renewable aquifers are being overpumped and going dry.
The father of the “Green Revolution” himself, Norman Borlaug, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, warned that “There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.”
Can Overpopulation Be Solved without Violating Human Rights?
Coercive attempts to control population such as China’s one-child policy or forced sterilization policies in different regions of the world have been widely and rightfully condemned as human rights violations. Less widely known are population success stories that do not involve coercion. In Iran, for example, an exploding population in the 1990’s led the government to institute what is often celebrated as the world’s most successful humane birth-rate reduction program (which has since been rolled back in part to encourage economic growth.
Alan Weissman, writing in his 2013 book “Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth” in which he travels the world analyzing the issue of overpopulation, describes a conversation with Iranian Obstetrician and Gynecologist Dr. Hourieh Shamshiri Milani:
“There was no covert coercion [in Iran’s family planning program], she’d explain. The sole requirement was that all couples attend premarital classes, held in mosques or in health centers where couples went for prenuptial blood tests. The classes taught contraception and sex education, and stressed the advantages of having fewer children to feed, clothe, and school. The only governmental disincentive was elimination of the individual subsidy for food, electricity, telephone, and appliances for any child after the first three. By 2000, Iran’s total fertility rate reached replacement level, 2.1 children per woman, a year faster than China’s compulsory one-child policy. In 2012, it was 1.7.”
Reducing Birth Rates
To state the obvious, when birth rates are reduced below replacement level (2.1 children per couple), population will gradually and naturally fall over time. Eileen Crist, an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech and author of a book on population issues, describes that process:
Environmental writers and activists who highlight the calamities connected with overpopulation are motivated by deep concern for the well-being of all life; they also emphasize that a smaller global population can be achieved by policies and actions that promote fundamental human rights. To achieve a sustainable human population, they urge the global community to pursue full gender equity; ensure education for girls (and all children) through secondary schooling and beyond; make high-quality family planning universally available; include comprehensive sexuality education in school curricula; and aggressively oppose the abusive cultural practice of child marriage. With these human rights ambitiously pursued and universally attained, population growth can end sooner (than via ‘the invisible hand’ of globalization) and a smaller global population gradually attained.
And what is the role of abortion in this? Given that roughly 44% of all pregnancies are unintended, and about half of those unintended pregnancies are terminated through abortions, researchers have concluded that no country can effectively reduce its population growth “without the widespread use of abortion.”
We believe that birth control including vasectomies, family planning services, abortion by mail providers, and abortion should be available to all people as part of efforts to defend the planet. Non-abortion family planning measures actually reduce the number of abortions performed, and thus should be supported by everyone regardless of their political beliefs on abortion (for example, today’s abortion rate in the United States is roughly half what it was in the 1980’s, which is believed to reflect easier access to contraceptives such as abortion pills by mail).
For the rights of women, and for environmental reasons, we are opposed to abortion bans.
Two Indian states also stabilized their populations, simply by limiting government jobs and government loans to couples with no more than two children.
As for abortions, I have known several women who had abortions, at least three of whom later married, and had two children each. All three say they have no regrets about their abortions, and that having had them led to their valuing their children more.
The one thing I cannot understand about abortion opponents is why they believe there should be ANY unwanted children in the world — even one.
@Mark Behrend
The Indian state of Kerala went from having the highest birthrate in India to the lowest by getting all women PhDs and getting a 100% literacy rate for everyone. The birthrate was still to high to lower population — it was around 2 — but that’s certainly a big improvement and a good start. This story is in Weissman’s book Countdown.
As to abortions, I very strongly and unequivocally believe in individual bodily autonomy, and a fetus is part of a woman’s body. Therefore, in addition to lowering human population, I fully support every woman’s right to abortion for that reason also (I too have friends who have had them, and none of them have any regrets, but that’s not the issue here). Abortions should be free and completely unrestricted (no required parental consent or notification, no time limit, etc.). Instead and unfortunately, this backward country is going in the opposite direction. Most if not all of the anti-abortion BS is driven by religious fanatics, to give another of the endless reasons why religion, especially monotheistic religion, is so evil.
If getting more of the population to have PhD certificates from years of schooling, or merely to be literate, is valuable to you, how does that fit in with – it seems contrary to – the stated goal of DGR to end civilization?
What good does literacy or a PhD do for a person who has to survive in Nature, beyond civilization?
Abortion will never be stoppable, regardless of laws, and that is true the less it hinges on technologies and pharmaceuticals, so I see no reason for those who profess a love for Nature (and a related desire to see the end of techno-industrial society) to be distracted with Leftist causes like “women’s rights” or “abortion rights”.
Priorities matter most in politics. If you’re a radical environmentalist, lowering human population by any method other than killing people should be the priority. Any sane and halfway moral person would want to do that as humanely and non-coercively as possible, but that should not be the priority, lowering human population should be. In his book The Myth of Human Supremacy, Derrick Jensen talks about exactly this situation, and concludes that ends may very well justify means, it’s a case-by-case analysis. I fully agree, and that includes this issue. Start with fully empowering women and girls, and get them all at least college educations if not PhDs. But if that doesn’t reduce birthrates enough, more coercive means will be necessary, such as providing benefits to those who limit their families to one child (or zero), and removing those benefits and fining those who exceed one child. This is a situation where the ends clearly justify the means, because human overpopulation MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE is killing the Earth and all the life here. Even overconsumption would be greatly reduced by reducing human population, because humans as a whole would consume a lot less if there were far fewer of us, and because some things like industrial society and “advanced” technology would not be possible without human overpopulation.
As to Alan Weissman, keep in mind that he’s strongly anthropocentric (what Derrick calls a human supremacist) and thinks that it would be great if lowered our population to 2 or 3 billion and all lived a western European lifestyle. He admits that this would still result is some extinctions, but he’s OK with that. I read Countdown and it has some great information on human overpopulation and attempts or lack thereof to do anything about it around the world, but Weissman’s conclusions are just more anthropocentric BS.
During his “The World Without Us” book tour, Weissman stated repeatedly that a global one-child policy would return Earth’s population to the 1900 level of 1.6 billion within 200 years (which he thought was a realistic goal).
Paul Ehrlich sees a sustainable world population as something less than 700 million, which was the number at the beginning of the industrial revolution. He recognizes that, even with 700 million, we might still be slowly destroying ecosystems, due to deforestation, etc.
But both Weissman and Ehrlich were talking in terms of what might be achievable, rather than of ideals.
The fundamental problem is that civilized humans remain the only species that doesn’t accept natural population controls.
As Riane Eisler mentions, in “The Chalice and the Blade,” it was the abandonment of nomadic lifestyles, the establishment of settlements, and the subsequent development of territorialism and war that caused humans to declare population increase to be a good thing, and childlessness to be antisocial, if not “sinful.”
Tribal rivalries over property led to wars, while settlements led to disease epidemics, crop failures, the hoarding of food, and famine. And it wouldn’t have taken much of any of the above for community leaders, priests, etc. to declare fertility and childbirth to be “blessings,” and insurance policies against tribal extinction.
Hence the establishment of an economic system that declares the “growth” of anything other than tumors to be a good thing — until “growth economics” becomes a cancer unto itself.
This is the kind of Leftist attachment which hinders DGR from being more effectively on-target )revolution against the worldwide techno-industrial system). Since most abortions are today performed via technology or manufactured medicines, they are not sustainable or to be advocated. They will go along with everything else delivered by techno-industrial society, thus there is no point in diverting attention from the problem of Technology itself and having defenses of (legal) access to abortion facilities which use technological and chemical means. Even the touted Iranian policy is a case of govt oversight manipulating the natural birth rate that the humans in that area would otherwise choose to undertake; is that what is desirable?
It is not the *birthing* which is a problem, it’s *the prevention of death* and the perpetuation of all humans: newborns unfit for survival need to be let die if that is their trajectory; injured children and adolescents (I’m especially thinking of risk-taking young males) need to not be saved by technological medical interventions; and elderly people who have done their approximately 80 years of life need to be allowed to exit the stage to make room for the next round of humans to come.
If this strikes a reader as callous or heartless or anything other than rational and historical and natural, I suggest you have not stepped beyond the values and ethics inculcated by Civilization. Death has its place and needs to not be defeated constantly by Technology.
“It’s not the *birthing* which is a problem”
You are not a woman, are you.