Educating women and girls to reduce population growth...

[BogstandardBelle]

I hope this qualifies as a feminism thread: it's kind of inspired by the various climate change threads popping up.

I keep reading (and agree) that population levels are the big elephant in the room, so to speak - that no matter how many reuseable wipes we switch to, or electric cars we choose, the resources needed to support the lives of 10+ billion people on this planet will confound all attempts to address climate change.

One oft-proposed solution to this is the education and emancipation of girls and women in the developing world: as they are lifted out of poverty, they have fewer children. But doesn't that just mean that their /their families expectations of living standards will also rise? That they will (rightly) expect their higher levels of education and wealth to translate to running water, roads, houses, universities etc and all the consumer / leisure stuff that we in the developed world already have access to. Isn't this what drives women and girls to reach higher? Doesn't it just shift the problem from lots of people living low-impact lives, to fewer people living much higher-impact lives?

Pretty much, yeah. It's also an issue with the massive migration we've seen in the last few years from poorer nations into Europe (but doubly so, because they're still likely to have a lot of children too, due to cultural norms).

That’s what usually happens, but I don’t think it necessarily has to be that way. My MIL has family from two neighbouring developing countries and has lived in both. She explained to me that in one of the countries women are expected to go to uni and work so they all have children much later and have fewer compared to her other country where women tend to get married earlier and uni is not so common. The first country doesnt have western standards of consumption.

But it’s a good point - women’s emancipation does usually coincide with raised living standards for the whole population, and therefore higher consumption.

There’s another elephant in the room about this whole population thing and that is that as soon as women gain other options beyond popping out baby after baby, they jump at them, and this holds true across cultures and across time and space. It’s painfully obvious that women are not the drivers behind overpopulation. That would be men. But no one ever talks about that.

I think for the majority of the places this advice is supposed to target, women have little to no say on whether or how many children they have.

It’s painfully obvious that women are not the drivers behind overpopulation. That would be men. But no one ever talks about that.

I get so depressed when I think about overpopulation. Huge numbers of women have no say over whether they participate in the sexual act or not, let alone persuading those men to use a condom.
How can they access good quality gynaecology for supplies of the pill or for coils or other contraception?

I watched an interesting presentation suggesting that population growth is not an issue, poverty is. If we tackle poverty, population growth slows.

Yes, agree with Bernadette the situations is dire for many.

So what is needed are some basics:

• clean water and sanitation everywhere on the planet. It'll mean girls don't miss education to fetch it, and reduces the need for women to have many DC in the hope one or more make it to adulthood

• education, education, education - it might not solve everything, but it gives one hell of a better foundation for everything else to follow in from

Even in the West. Look what is happening in USA, with reduced access to abortion and birth control.
This article is from 2012, but it's eye opening - what decent contraception costs in the USA - we don't give a second thought to our right to free contraception in the UK thanks to the NHS.

Sorry, forgot the link.

www.good.is/articles/birth-control-costs-more-than-you-think-even-for-the-lucky-ones

Patriarchy ( men) is definitely to blame for over population . They've been forcing women to marry for hundreds of years , and forcing us to have babies we don't want. They also rape quite a lot too.

I do have children myself but I'm beginning to wonder how humane it is to bring children into a dying world, into a patriarchy. Women can't protect their children from the ravages of patriarchy. We just can't