If you’re reading this Update, you already support PM and agree in the main with what we’re working to achieve, ultimately: a smaller human population in harmony with our planet’s ecosystems. A key positive pathway for achieving that is to enable people everywhere (especially women) to have the choice and right to manage their family size. The practical tools and policy measures are universal access to education and family planning, underpinned by the fundamental right to bodily autonomy. In turn, those bring greater life opportunities, personal wellbeing and wider horizons for hundreds of millions of people. Sadly, that positive vision and respect for people is frequently scorned by politicians seeking not a more sustainable population, but a larger one. Our major new report, ‘Welcome to Gilead’ (see below) is the first comprehensive account of the way in which the drive for more babies for the state can lead to control, abuse and suffering. With its title referring to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, PM’s report shows an alarming rise in extreme ‘pronatalism’, with governments and groups around the world seeking to instrumentalise and control women’s bodies in order to serve narrow nationalistic, fundamentalist and racist dogmas, or shore up flawed, short-term economic policies. It is an urgent wake-up call, especially to those so preoccupied with the population 'control' abuses of the past, that they are failing to see the clear and present threat. Coercion, control, restricting rights, curtailing choice have no place in our lexicon, but increasingly they do amongst regressive forces rising up across the world – it is those forces that all of us who seek to defend hard-won freedoms should focus our attention on. - Robin Maynard, Director, Population Matters |
