Do you remember last year’s reports of undecided voters who vowed not to cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election because they just couldn’t see the difference between electing a Republican or a Democratic candidate?

Try convincing women’s health organizations and providers in developing countries around the world of the veracity of that empty argument. You can bet they’d set those non-voters straight without a moment’s hesitation. That’s because as dedicated health professionals they know from first-hand experience that poor women’s reproductive choices, their health, the health of their babies and children, their economic independence, and their very lives often depend on which party’s candidate occupies the White House.

The American president holds sway over women’s health worldwide as a result of policies and priorities concerning the use of foreign-aid funds that fall within the purview of the executive branch. One of those policy decisions concerns the Mexico City Policy or, as it’s more commonly called, the Global Gag Rule. The Global Gag Rule determines how life-saving foreign-aid dollars are spent on women’s health services in developing countries. The decision to enforce the rule or nullify it comes straight out of the Oval Office. On this issue, the difference between Republicans and Democrats could not be more profound.

What is the Global Gag Rule?

The Global Gag Rule was first introduced by President Reagan in 1984. The rule requires that NGOs (foreign non-governmental organizations) certify that they will not “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning” using funds from any source (including privately donated funds or funds from countries other than the U.S.). When the Global Gag Rule is in force, that certification is a pre-condition for receiving funds for family-planning and health-screening assistance from the American government.

Let’s unpack what this means.  What’s not at issue is how overseas organizations spend American aid dollars for abortion services. They don’t. That’s because since 1973 the Helms Amendment has disallowed the use of federal funds for abortion or for providing information about abortion in the U.S. or abroad. What the gag rule seeks specifically to accomplish is to dictate how foreign clinics spend their own private funds in order to be eligible for receiving American aid.

The Global Gag Rule’s history has been depressingly predictable. Democratic presidents, like Clinton and Obama, rescind it. Republican presidents, like the Bushes, reinstate it. The policy has been in effect for seventeen of the past thirty-two years. What happens to the health and well-being of poor women and their newborns and children whose fates fall into the off years seems to have been of no concern to past Republican presidents.

Where does Trump stand in this historical continuum of Republican versus Democratic presidents and their approaches to women’s health issues globally? In January—on January 23 to be exact, just forty-eight hours after the massive Women’s March in Washington—Trump decided to bolster his conservative bona fides with his base by bringing back the gag rule. Perhaps under the influence of Vice-President Mike Pence, who throughout his political career has consistently espoused far-outside-of-the-mainstream views on issues of reproductive health, rape, and choice, Trump signed a presidential memorandum that didn’t just reinstate the gag rule but expanded it. In yet another poorly considered and destructive decision, Trump’s radical expansion means that the gag rule will now apply not just to family-planning assistance but also to “global health assistance furnished by all U.S. government departments or agencies.” What that means is that the Global Gag Rule now applies to American aid to health organizations working to prevent, treat, contain, and eradicate some of the most devastating diseases and epidemics around the world.

What’s the human cost of bringing back the gag rule?

We’ve been here before, so it’s not hard to predict. Health providers in the developing world will lose desperately needed American assistance. The gag rule will make it more difficult for poor women in developing nations to access family-planning services and make informed decisions about their health and the health of their families. There will be more unintended pregnancies, more unsafe abortions, and more maternal and newborn deaths.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights in the United States and globally, funding provided in 2016 by the U.S. government for contraception (not abortion) prevented 6 million unintended pregnancies, 2.3 million abortions, and 11,000 maternal deaths worldwide.

On Trump’s expansion of the rule, we’ll just have to wait and see how deeply the expansion will impact the effectiveness of the global medical community to prevent and treat disease among the world’s poor.

Simply said, the human cost of the Global Gag Rule will be devastating. For more on how women will be affected, take a look at the International Planned Parenthood Federation video below.

The post The Global Gag Rule Is Back: The Human Cost appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Last night, I attended a presentation looking at trends in world population since biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in 1968, a best-selling work of non-fiction that scared everyone, and spurred the Zero Population Growth [ZPG] movement. This morning, I learned that China is ending its decades-old, one-child policy. What a juxtaposition!

So, what happened? Why didn’t the population bomb detonate? And how does China’s policy reversal play into this story?

I learned most of what I now know about the complicated aftermath of The Population Bomb from Sara Weiser, a reporter for The Retro Report, an innovative, documentary news organization. Retro Report, founded in 2013, looks back at some of the big news stories of recent years to see what has happened since, how things may have changed, or even to correct the record:

From The Retro Report website:

How often does a great story dominate the headlines, only to be dropped from the news cycle? How often do journalists tell us of a looming danger or important discovery – only to move quickly to the next new thing? What really happened? How did these events change us? And what are the lingering consequences that may affect our society to this day?

…Complicating matters, the first draft of history can be wrong. When news organizations fail to invest the time and money required to correct the record or provide context around what really happened, myth can replace truth. The results are policy decisions and cultural trends built on error, misunderstanding or flat-out lies.

Retro Report is there to pick up the story after everyone has moved on, connecting the dots from yesterday to today, correcting the record and providing a permanent living library where viewers can gain new insight into the events that shaped their lives.

Weiser applied these questions and principles to Ehrlich’s predictions. Her reporting focused on India—whose exploding population inspired Ehrlich’s research and dire predictions. Ehrlich predicted that, if birth rates continued at their 1968 rate, by 2000 there would be so many people on Earth that there might not be enough food to sustain life.

The result of Weiser’s exploration of post-Population Bomb India is a documentary report, which you can view here. [Highly recommended.]

In her report, Weiser includes archival clips from 1960s news reports sharing Erhlich’s dire warnings, interviews with Ehrlich and some of his followers—then and now—an examination of India’s governmental policies [for better and for worse] that have impacted the country’s birth rate, and commentary on other factors that have played a role in defusing the predicted population bomb.

What’s the answer? It’s complicated. Weiser’s report shows that, while India has instituted policies that have been effective in promoting sex education, birth control and voluntary sterilization, the results differ in rich and poor regions of the country. There’s also measurable inequality between regions regarding the availability of education and healthcare services for women and children. One of the lessons of the report is that, as healthcare services improve, families—who often rely on children as revenue-producers in agricultural areas—feel more confident that their children will survive, so they don’t feel compelled to have so many.

And then, of course, there is the Green Revolution factor. As the report reminds us, you don’t need as many hands on the farm when you have modern machinery and better-yielding crops. Clearly, Ehrlich did not foresee the development of the genetically modified seeds that have revolutionized farming.

Finally, there’s the bottom line: It has been demonstrated many times that, as families—particularly women—become more educated and more economically secure, birth rates decline. And, in fact, as the documentary notes, we now have a situation in which economically developed countries—Japan is a prime example—are worrying that their birth rates are too low.

Which brings us to China.

China’s decision to end the one-child-family rule, instituted in 1979, may offer the ultimate repudiation of Ehrlich’s prognostications. China remains cautious about overpopulation–it’s still limiting families, but now the limit is two children, not just one. But the lifting of the one-child restriction reflects China’s worry that its population has begun to age out of the work force, with not enough younger replacements. Interestingly, although the one-child limit has been seen as onerous and inhumane by many, the rising economic status of many Chinese families has already spurred a trend toward voluntarily smaller families.

So, was Ehrlich wrong? Yes and no. He didn’t—and couldn’t– foresee some of the factors that drove lower birth rates. But he was prescient about the impact of having too many people on the planet. Today, while birth rates have diminished in many places, the same factors that spurred the slowdown—primarily the improving economic status of families—have created a new monster: We may not be growing in numbers as quickly as Ehrlich predicted, but each of us has access to and is using more of Earth’s finite resources. Now what?

The post The fizzling of The Population Bomb: China ends its one-child policy appeared first on Occasional Planet.

While browsing YouTube, I came across this video by Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki. He explains the concept of exponential growth and how it applies to the growth of world population.

OMG! Well, I had to explore this further. On to Wikipedia, the “World Population” entry, and an amazing collection of charts and graphs on population growth through time including projections for the future.

I chose the year 10,000 BC as a starting point. At that time only 1 million people inhabited the entire planet. Fast-forward 10,000 years to the year 1 AD, and the Earth’s population had “ballooned” to 2 million. As a point of comparison, the greater metro area of St. Louis, MO, the city where I live, has a population of 2.8 million.

Leaping ahead—way ahead—I chose my mother’s birth year, 1915, as the next milestone. No entry for 1915, but Wikipedia says in 1900, the world’s population was 1.65 billion. My mother died in 2009 at the age of 93. By 2010 the world’s population had reached 6.9 billion. On March 12, 2012, the United States Census Bureau estimated the world population had exceeded 7 billion.

Where do we go from here?

Environmentalists are warning we are doomed to a dangerous and ultimately suicidal population explosion beyond what the Earth can support. Can that be true? Let’s try another YouTube video.

This one is a BBC documentary on world population by Swedish professor of international health, Hans Rosling. The title, “Don’t Panic,” drew me in. Rosling made the film to specifically counteract the population doomsday predictions of Microsoft scientist Stephen Emmott. I won’t embed “Don’t Panic” here as it is about an hour long. But, click here if you want an amazing and informative presentation on the facts about the health, wealth and population of 200 countries over the last 200 years. Rosling has been dubbed the “Jedi master of data visualization,” because of the innovative animated graphics he uses to explain complex data.

Using projections from the UN Population Division, Rosling suggests that global population will indeed continue to grow dramatically, but will level off at about 11 billion by the end of the century. He admits we will have to face huge challenges, but that we have reason to hope—that the problems associated with such a huge increase are “surmountable.” “Don’t Panic” informs a mostly uninformed Western audience that many Third World countries have, for decades, been working to decrease birth rates while simultaneously providing better healthcare and reducing poverty.

From the  Telegraph’s review of Rosling’s documentary:

And we’d all better hope that [Rosling] is right. Because a near 50 per cent increase in global population by the end of the century is already a done deal. In the BBC programme, [he] explains that the mechanism that will power population growth on such a scale has already—and irreversibly—been put into motion, and to suggest that efforts should be made to limit its growth is to effectively propose a “holocaust” and prepare “the intellectual ground for killing people”. This is because of a phenomenon that Rosling describes as “Peak Child”.

Briefly put, the surge in the number of people on Earth isn’t any longer being caused by more people being born, but is because of those who are alive. There are now more children on the planet than ever (about two billion under the age of 15) but the global decline in birth rates means that the number has leveled off, and is not expected to increase. The reason the global population will continue to rise until around 2100 is because of a “demographic lag” and longer life expectancies.

As an example of the “Peak Child” phenomenon, Rosling uses modern-day Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated countries in the world. For decades, Bangladesh has made great efforts to educate its population about the benefits of smaller families and has provided free birth control. As a result, since 1972, the average number of children per woman has fallen dramatically from seven to a little over two. In fact, the world birth rate has dropped from an average of 6 per two adults in 1800 to 2 today. According to Rosling, it’s the worldwide drop in fertility rates that will save us.

The environmentalists have a very valid point—the Earth’s resources are limited. But, I agree with Rosling that the problems are surmountable. That is, if in the next century, the world moves away from capitalism to a more equitable and humane economic model, perhaps yet to be invented, that prioritizes the human needs of the many over profit making by a few. In such a new economic system, the belief, for example, that every human being deserves clean, safe, adequate housing would take precedence over the capitalist understanding of housing as a vehicle for investment and speculation. In other words, human use value has to trump exchange value. Democratically run, cooperative work places would supplant for-profit corporations, providing meaningful work and a living wage for everyone. If basic human needs are met first—and they can be—then our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren will inhabit a livable world. If we fail to grow beyond capitalism—a system that depends on unsustainable economic growth punctuated with boom and bust crises, funnels money to the top 1%, and drives the real doomsday scenario of climate change—then all bets are off.

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