Globally Pro-Choice

Last week, I was walking across Georgetown's campus when I was stopped by an acquaintance and asked if I would give a minute for "Global Health Day."  Behind her, a large banner proclaimed "Half the world lives on less than $3 a day... that is what we spend on a cup of coffee."  After filling me in on several additional depressing statistics regarding starvation, malaria, and infant mortality, this well-meaning girl asked if I would help global health awareness by writing down something that I believed everyone in the world deserved.  Without pausing, I wrote "access to birth control."

My response was met at first with a smirk, then with irritation, as she suggested that I write something else. "Please take this seriously," she pleaded, implying that my answer had deliberately mocked the plight of millions of starving children worldwide.  It was as if I had suggested sending vibrating cock rings and flavored lube to the war-torn Congo.

http://www.foogle.biz/starving_world/starving.htm

Poverty and global health are issues that we love to talk about.  Starving children in China/Africa/Southeast Asia are eternally the subjects of guilt-tripping rhetoric.  Droves of celebrities and well-meaning high schoolers descend on developing nations each year, all seeking to "combat hunger" and "fight AIDS" in fairly non-specific ways.  Images of barefoot toddlers crying in the muddy streets of Delhi and Lima rouse us to donate to a myriad of international charities.  Yet in all of this discussion of child poverty, there is no mention of the children themselves being a compounding factor.

The correlation between high fertility rates, poverty, and low life expectancy is well established.  According to the UN TFR Ranking (2009), the top twenty nations in terms of fertility rate per woman include Niger, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan; each of these countries has a fertility rate more than three times that of the U.S. and Western Europe.  The UN TFR has also provided this helpful visualization of average fertility rates worldwide:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_rate

Anyone who has taken a class in logic knows that correlation does not imply causation.  With a little imagination, though, it's not difficult to picture how a rapidly growing population coupled with a finite number of resources keeps literacy rates low and poverty rates high, fuels political unrest, and greatly facilitates the spread of disease.  And that's not even touching the impact on the women who are actually bearing these children.

http://www.glpinc.org/Web_pages/Illiteracy_Globally.html

Unfortunately, the international community is unlikely to embrace worldwide family planning measures any time soon.  For one thing, one of the world's most powerful men, Benedict XVI, would not approve.  A large number of charities aimed at alleviating poverty are religiously affiliated, and these groups prefer to combat world hunger by collecting canned food, building new churches, and praying.  Contraception, of course, is not in the Catholic or Evangelical vocabulary.  This view has played no small role in the House's recent defunding of the United Nations Population Fund.

It's not just the right wing that's to blame, however.  Even liberal and pro-choice groups shirk from advocating contraceptive use abroad, less they be accused of promoting eugenics or forcing Western practices and culture upon the developing world.  Additionally, the realm of international charity seeks to project itself as bipartisan, eschewing controversial issues such as contraception.  Food, water, health, and education are all hot topics of conversation, but one of the best long-term solutions remains, for now, grossly overlooked.

At the end of the day, it's touching and inspiring to see a a picture of volunteers building a school abroad or serving food to little brown children.  It's very difficult to evoke the same feelings with a picture of a couple using a condom.