Reproductive Autonomy: A Human Right and a Foundation for a Healthy Planet

Jul 11

In honor of World Population Day, we are joined by Robert Engelman, researcher, writer, and former newspaper reporter on environmental, demographic, reproductive health and gender-related topics. Through his deep learning experiences over three decades at leading environmental, journalism, and population organizations, Bob shines a light on the intimate links between reproductive autonomy and planetary health, which were also the subject of his seminal 2008 book, More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want. We discuss the fascinating trends over the last 10,000 years that have led to the progressive diminishment of women’s reproductive rights, and the accompanying growth in population and environmental degradation. We also discuss the positive trend towards gender equality and the subsequent reduction in fertility rates over the last century, and the concerted efforts that are needed to sustain and accelerate that trend for the sake of reproductive and ecological justice.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Bob Engelman 0:00
Throughout anthropological studies of later hunter gatherer societies as well as to the evidence of very early agricultural ones, we see that female status tended to be much higher than it was in the later more populous agricultural societies that gave rise to cities. So there were societies, pre-agricultural and pre- urban societies, amazingly where women were essentially allowed to manage their own pregnancy, to manage the timing of childbearing. And to a surprising extent, it appears they were able to do so -and not just through infanticide, which is well documented in some hunter gatherer groups to have been under women's control - but through much more sensible and safer, given the dangers of pregnancy and birth especially in pre-modern times, contraception. And what's known about ancient contraception is that there was often rather effective contraception. You wouldn't want to rely on it today. But from a population perspective, it actually could well have had an impact on birth rates.
Alan Ware 0:58
That's Robert Engelmann, longtime researcher and writer on environmental, demographic and reproductive health. We'll be talking with Bob about the many experiences and illuminating insights he's gained over the past several decades working in the field of sustainable population in this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast.
Nandita Bajaj 1:25
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot, and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:49
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatlism, human supremacy and ecological overshoot, and offers solutions to address their combined impacts on planet, people, and animals.
Nandita Bajaj 2:09
And in honor of World Population Day today, we are excited to welcome longtime sustainable population advocate Robert Engelmann to our podcast.
Alan Ware 2:19
Robert Engelmann is a researcher and writer on environmental, demographic, reproductive health, and gender related topics. A former president of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental think tank, Engelmann is currently a senior fellow with the Population Institute and has held leadership positions as well with Population Action International. He co-founded and chaired the board of the Center for a New American Dream, an organization that advocated for lower consumption in North America. A former newspaper reporter, Engelmann has served on the faculty of Yale University as a visiting lecturer, and was founding secretary of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Prior to his association with the Population Institute, the organization awarded his book, More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want, the 2008 Global Media Award for individual reporting on population. His writing has appeared in scientific journals and news media, including Nature, Scientific American, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. And now on to today's conversation with Bob Engelmann.
Nandita Bajaj 3:26
Well, it is so great to have you here with us today, Bob. We've been chatting for a number of years and it's wonderful to have this opportunity to dig into your work more deeply today. You have a remarkable and varied background as a journalist, a researcher, an author, a lecturer, and a nonprofit leader. And in all of those roles, you've been exploring the interaction of population, reproductive health, and the environment while also trying to create a sustainable future for people and the planet. Thank you for your tireless work over the decades. And for joining us today. Bob, welcome to our podcast.
Bob Engelman 4:05
Well, thank you, Nandita. I've very much enjoyed interacting with you since you've taken on your current role at Population Balance. I enjoy getting to know you and I appreciate the kind comments. I'm honored to be with you and Alan today and I look forward to our conversation.
Nandita Bajaj 4:18
Wonderful. We'll go back into your history a little bit. Bob, you were a journalist for fifteen years before you moved into the field of population and sustainability research advocacy. What experiences or events prompted that shift into this work?
Bob Engelman 4:36
I had a wonderful career in journalism. I had the luxury of covering politics, including some presidential campaigns, the federal government, the Supreme Court, and foreign affairs, as well as a lot of local issues when I worked for a local newspaper for awhile in the Midwest. And all of this collective experience brought out an interest in making connections and I suppose played to a developing passion for finding responses to problems that could improve the situation, could make things better. While I was a reporter, I traveled to Haiti, and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere fairly extensively. I spent almost a year on a journalism fellowship in Latin America as a reporter for the Associated Press and freelancing for US newspapers. And later in my career, I spent several years in a Washington newspaper bureau covering science, health, and the environment. This was a beat that I had designed myself when there was sort of an opening for me to move into it, for the purpose of drawing connections among all these fields. I loved it, there was an endless opportunity for enterprise reporting in this area. I was, I was there at a great time, I had quite a few front page stories. Climate change was a new story at that time; we called it the greenhouse effect. The ozone hole, it just opened up over Antarctica, and there was a growing awareness of the loss of biological diversity. So I had a lot of fun with that, really learned a lot and got very interested in all these issues and how they interacted with essentially human activity and the human presence on the planet, the scale of human activity on the planet. Unfortunately, the beat didn't get full buy in from my editors. And eventually, I was promoted to cover the US House of Representatives where at that time, there was a combative conservative guy named Newt Gingrich, who was a newly emerging Republican leader in the House and was getting mobbed by reporters. I found I had no interest in being part of that mob. I gave myself a bit of time to see if I could find a reporting job with some other news organization, basically turning global environmental change into a beat, which seemed to me a sensible idea. This was basically in the very early 90s, the the late 80s and early 90s, I guess. Unfortunately, that beat didn't exist. And if you think that there isn't enough attention to these kinds of issues now you should have been around then, there was really effectively none, or very little, I should say. But by that point, I was beginning to feel that the expertise that I had gained as an environmental journalist particularly, could probably be better applied actually working for change rather than simply reporting on what other people were saying and doing. And around this time, I had met a family planning advocate named Sharon Camp who proposed to me an idea that really has guided my career ever since. Sharon had the idea that if women were really able to decide for themselves, if, when, with whom, and how often to become pregnant, without outside pressure, either pro or con, could make these decisions freely on their own, presumably in consultation with a partner, and could put these reproductive intentions safely into effect, that population growth would end. Well as a journalist, I was a little bit skeptical about that but I thought it was a really interesting idea. And I wanted to explore it. I ultimately took a job with her organization, developing a new program that explored connections between women's lives, population, and the environment. It was a huge career decision. It was a big decision to leave journalism, which I'd been in so long, and I had a degree in journalism I'd gotten from Columbia University. It surprised a lot of my friends and colleagues, but it was definitely the right decision. And I've never looked back.
Nandita Bajaj 5:05
Wow. And did you see during that conversation that you had with Sharon Camp, that your proclivity to cover environmental issues were somehow related to the beat that she was offering you in terms of reproductive health?
Bob Engelman 8:32
Oh, yes. I should have pointed out that I saw population itself as seamlessly part of this picture. And particularly in traveling to Latin America and to Haiti, I saw really the impact of women and families and couples on the margins of society really having very, very little choice about the timing of pregnancy, the timing of childbirth, and putting up with some of the impacts of that. It was clear to me, when I was traveling as a journalist in these areas, that this wasn't some aspiration that people had generally, that everyone wanted to have large families, not that it was unknown to want to have a large family, but that it was didn't seem to be the rule to me. And I, in fact, had conversations. I learned to speak Spanish when I was in Latin America and I had conversations with young women who wanted to know, "What's it like in the United States, you know? People seem to have smaller families in the United States, how do they manage that?" And you know, this is why I mentioned the the impact of health in the beat that I was covering, because I was covering medicine and health along with the environment and science. All of these came together in a very unified way, I felt, as a journalist in population. And as a matter of fact, when I was still a journalist and hadn't been contemplating leaving journalism, I wrote a novel. It's another story. The novel ended up not being published, but it was formative in my own thinking, that very much involved family planning and basically a kind of a Messianic movement of people in Haiti at that time, it was fictional just to a large degree, but a Messianic movement to try to basically get access to family planning and change the way they lived and change the way they dealt with nature. And all of these things had a big impact on me. So when Sharon essentially offered me this idea of heading up a new program on population and the environment, I had reservations, it was such a big change from what I'd been doing. And as I say, a lot of my colleagues kind of looked at me quizzically, "You're gonna do that?" But I knew it was something I wanted to do. And I should say, I had the benefit of good advice from my wife, you know, she said to me, "This is something you are really interested in and really passionate about, you've to just grab this and do it." And that's what I ultimately did.
Nandita Bajaj 10:35
And that was the work that you were doing with Population Action International.
Bob Engelman 10:40
That's correct. Yeah, actually at the time, it was named The Population Crisis Committee, so it had an even more edgy title, particularly from the perspective of today. So that made it to leave basically, having been an Associated Press reporter and working for a major Midwest newspaper, whether it was the Kansas City Times, at the time was The Morning Paper in Kansas City. I was both working there and also in Washington for them. And then the news bureau I worked for was Scripps Howard News Service, which serviced about three-hundred and fifty newspapers. So to sort of leave this kind of prestigious journalism job to go start a new program with The Population Crisis Committee struck a lot of people as unusual. And you know, it's a little hard for me too, but actually, when I joined the organization, I said, "I think you really ought to change your name." And they were supportive of that idea, they had had the idea too, and we ultimately came up with Population Action International. I Interestingly enough, the organization later abandoned even that name and now is just known by the initials PAI, which says a lot about the evolution of how people have seen this population issue that's kind of interesting in itself.
Nandita Bajaj 11:40
Yeah, we definitely want to unpack that with you today, as well, it's just the taboo that has become of this issue over the last few decades, which you've been privy to in your own career. And then was it after a number of years that you ended up joining Worldwatch Institute?
Bob Engelman 11:57
Yeah, I worked for, similar to my journalism career, I guess it was around fifteen years with PAI, and I ultimately came their vice president for research, but I missed the environment. And there was a time actually, when basically, Population Action International was kind of, as a result of its leadership at the time, losing some of its interest in actually probing some of the environmental issues that I was most interested in. And, you know, almost through mutual agreement, my interests were increasingly lying in a more holistic look at the environment and its relation to population in the lives of women. I was already writing my book, More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want. So I really was wanting something more holistically engaged with all of these issues together. And essentially, I got an offer to be a vice president, sort of a comparable position, with the Worldwatch Institute, it's no longer really active, but it was a renowned, pioneering actually, environmental think tank that had pioneered a lot of work in water scarcity and renewable energy and biodiversity loss and all sorts of areas of the environment, but had been pretty weak on population. And they were in fact interested in expanding their work on population. So it's a great opportunity. And that's when I worked for the Worldwatch Institute for a number of years.
Nandita Bajaj 13:10
That is fascinating shift of careers over the course of these decades, but what we found so admirable about your path is your interest in actually remaining committed to the intersection of population, reproductive health, and the environment, because we often see them, even in current narratives, being separated. And people often make it problematic to talk about both in the same way as if we were somehow separate from nature.
Bob Engelman 13:41
I kind of like to joke the one reason I've remained so committed to it is that there's so little competition for a competitive person. And no, I mean, more seriously, I really feel it's a niche that is critical. I mean, really critical to the survival of human civilization and referring to your own organizational name, a balance between humanity and nature. I'm very pro-human, I'm not remotely misanthropic. And I want humanity to have the largest population possible, just as Paul Ehrlich once said, over time, not all at once. And in order to imagine how that will be possible, that humanity and all of the wonderful things that humanity has done and achieved - the arts, literature, interesting political arrangements, you name it, for that to last for centuries and millennia to come, I think it's critical that we recognize that scale is just so important, that when we are in balance with nature, when we have been in balance with nature, as we were, let's remember, for some 300,000 years before the rise of agriculture, you know, things go pretty well both for humanity and for nature. When we get out of balance with nature, as we have been, I would argue going back really to the evolution of agriculture, but more so critically, as the Industrial Revolution grew and changed the way humanity did things, then there really is the possibility not only that the all kinds of aspects of nature are degraded, but we threaten the ground on which we are sustained. That seems to me really obvious. And I guess part of my sticking with the issue has been something of a frustration that I know you feel as well, that this is not recognized better, more clearlier, that this is seen as somehow threatening or problematic, the various problems that prevent it from being talked about a lot more and explored a lot more and acted on a lot more.
Nandita Bajaj 15:38
Yes. So well said.
Alan Ware 15:39
So this is the fifteenth anniversary of your 2008 book More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want. And in that book, you argue that throughout history, mothers haven't been wanting more children, but more for their children. And you provide many historical examples over millennia of how women have attempted to control their fertility and how that ability changes over time due to social, economic, cultural factors. Can you provide us a Cliff's Notes summary of some of the main highlights of that broad sweep?
Bob Engelman 16:11
Yeah, first of all, thank you Alan. I guess I would like to say that I would probably retitle the subtitle now, I think the phrase what women want has been somewhat misunderstood and probably provided a few barriers to people really grasping the work, it really was very much about, maybe not necessarily everything women want, but something that women want, which is what I will respond to in your questions. When people would ask me, you know, "What do women want in terms of your book?" One of the things I would say is, "They want what men don't have to ask for which is to be sexual beings without necessarily having to worry about being pregnant as a result, but that also among the things they want is really more for their children rather than necessarily more children, if they have children. Certainly the power to not have children, and not become pregnant is critical to what women want." Basically, the book is about historical trends in relation to this interest of women. There are two trends that are interesting to observe through history in the evolution of human culture. First, throughout the long period before agriculture, when people relied on a hunting and gathering, human population was small and it was growing very slowly and often not at all. Through anthropological studies of later hunter-gathering societies, as well as through the evidence of very early agricultural ones, we see that female status tended to be much higher than it was in the later more populous agricultural societies that gave rise to cities. And this oversimplifies a complex evolution that I go into much more detail in the book. But basically, it seems the patriarchy itself followed the development of, particularly of plow-based agriculture, which was partly a response to the fact that human society had kind of grown so large that it couldn't rely on hunter-gathering anymore and couldn't really even rely on the kind of dibble-based, sort of poking holes in the Earth that women had been pioneers in the very early era of the development of agriculture. But patriarchy seems to have followed the development of plow-based agriculture, the domestication of large animals that often required people with very large upper torsos and wide shoulders, i.e. very often, not always, but very often men, to manage. And this created a subsequent growth of population, and that led to the rise of cities with food surpluses several thousand years ago. Well, large populations, much more so than small ones, particularly if hunter-gatherers, were prone to conflict and warfare as more people needed more land and needed to migrate. And they kept bumping into each other. These developments made for something of a vicious cycle in which generally powerful males ruled and tended to want more laborers to build basically what I would call ego monuments, pyramids and giant structures to declare the glory of these male leaders, and also more warriors to hold the power structure together and to essentially expand their influence. And that's kind of a history that goes along with the early rise of cities. This unfortunately, raised the value of women as child bearers, basically procreators to the exclusion of their other creative roles, which had been very much valued as early human art gives us a hint of, and their role basically, as gatherers, medicinal experts, herbalists in much earlier in human history. So the progressive diminution of female status and power, until quite recently, is one historical trend. The other trend very much related to the first, is women and girls progressive loss of reproductive autonomy and control over their own bodies. And that's obvious as the stress on their childbearing increased. There are examples from deep in history and from all over the world, as I document in the book, of women's interest in managing and timing the frequency of pregnancy. For one thing, you have to remember that in early days, women could look around them and see their mothers and aunts and siblings, sisters frequently die in pregnancy. They knew that pregnancy was not exactly a safe enterprise. And they were also probably a little more clued into than men were in history to recognize the connection between sexual intercourse and conception and pregnancy and childbirth. So there were societies, pre-agricultural and pre-urban societies, amazingly where women were essentially allowed to manage their own pregnancy, to manage the timing of childbearing. And to a surprising extent it appears, and the research that I did convinced me, they were able to do so, and not just through infanticide, which is well documented in some hunter-gathering groups to have been under women's control, but through much more sensible and safer, given the dangers of pregnancy and birth, especially in pre-modern times, contraception, and what's known about ancient contraception is that there was often rather effective contraception, you wouldn't want to rely on it today, but from a population perspective, it actually could well have had an impact on birth rates and fertility. And then there was also the role of midwives who go back, I argue, and found through research I was not alone in arguing is basically other people's ideas, frequently women anthropologists' ideas, that midwifery and midwives go back to the very earliest days of human separation from their primate ancestors, and may have played a big role in bipedalism. Midwives were very active in helping women avoid unwanted births as well as having safe births. It's a fascinating story. And it propelled a lot of the research in my book. But like women's status, women's management of the timing and frequency of reproduction was increasingly limited and repressed. And eventually, it was all but stamped out as patriarchy evolved in most of the world. Now, happily, this trend reversed, at least in much of the world, during the last two or three centuries, particularly the twentieth century. But lately, it seems to be returning in many places to the sad historical pattern of the past. Finally, we see evidence in history, as well as today, that when times are hard economically, socially, or environmentally, human fertility often decreases. Now this is true when reproductive management is possible for women and their partners. And that strongly suggests the interest of women in closely monitoring their circumstances and conserving the benefits of careful parenting by limiting family size and focusing on fewer children. And there's evidence of this throughout history and I give examples in the book.
Alan Ware 22:27
Yeah, I like the examples you have of the emmenagogues - is that how you pronounce that?
Bob Engelman 22:30
Emmenagogues. That's a word you're not going to see very often in spelling bees unfortunately. A very important word.
Alan Ware 22:40
Yeah, that there used to induce menstruation, these different plants that I've also seen in North American medicinal plant guides, that Native Americans and European colonists used. And this is everything from snakeroot, to common milkweed, mugwort. I mean, you list probably a dozen different plants that women were looking for and knew the efficacy of to try to prevent pregnancy. He also mentioned pessaries?
Bob Engelman 23:07
Pessaries, right, which are essentially can be placed in the vagina and block sperm from reaching the fallopian tubes, which is something that obviously it's the principal of the diaphragm and female and male condoms. But there were lots of plant pessaries that were able to be used. And also, there's good evidence that women, and perhaps men as well in ancient times, were aware of a really important principle of modern contraception, which is that if you use two at the same time, you're going to be much better protected than if you simply rely on one. So there is some evidence that women may have used pessaries and emmenagogues or other plants that apparently could have limited their fertility in various ways. So using those kinds of principles, and then of course, there is withdrawal, which was probably known for who knows how many tens or hundreds of thousands of years, which isn't something that is ideal as a contraceptive today, but again, on a population basis for cultures that were conscious of and able to use withdrawal successfully, particularly if they were using other contraceptives, that could easily have resulted in family size that was pretty close to what people were wanting to have based on their environmental circumstances at the time.
Alan Ware 24:18
You give some interesting information about the witch trials and some of the research that shows a lot of them were older women, postmenopausal, who had knowledge of plants, probably emmenagogues and pessaries and were herbalists and health specialists of different types, so it's interesting that as part of the patriarchy, combined with the religious system that you'd go through the Axial Age religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and others that you mentioned, they became more sky God oriented instead of Earth Mother goddesses and very much more male-oriented. And the witch trials seemed to be a culmination of that kind of process. And then in the 1800s, there was the whole men pushing women out of health altogether, right? As they were trying to professionalize medicine?
Bob Engelman 25:10
Right, sort of removing from women the responsibility that midwives had for the whole field of obstetrics and gynecology. And, yeah as I say, it's been pretty consistent evolution through time as populations have increased. And I think there could be connections between the actually the increase of population itself and the kind of adjustments that have been necessary in human culture and human technology that helped encourage essentially the taking away of women's power, both personal power and collective power, the power of midwives for example, to be involved in this area. But there's a lot of writing that makes very, very clear that men were aware that there could be hazards to sort of allowing women to decide for themselves or women to be involved in the whole process, which they pretty much owned until quite late in human history of birth, safe birth, and pregnancy and conception and as well as abortion and other areas.
Nandita Bajaj 26:08
Yeah, one of the interesting things how with the domestication of animals, engaging in agriculture, the value of women as procreators was elevated at the expense of all of the other roles that women were playing pre-agriculture, pre-urban time, and part of what you mentioned is there was a need for more warriors, more laborers, more people on the farm, just a need for more people. Something that we're also looking at in kind of contemporary society, a very similar narrative of pronatalism, and how it continues to undermine reproductive autonomy in a number of ways. We are seeing now that women in many developed countries, and even in some developing countries, are gaining education, skills, income, that rival or exceed men's, and this is leading to the transformation of family structures, people are generally having fewer children, and many are even foregoing marriage and childbirth. And from what you've shared historically, there's kind of a reclaiming of reproductive autonomy. Women are rejecting some of the institutions that have suppressed their power over themselves and their bodies. What do you think this kind of rise in reproductive autonomy might mean in the future for the size and structure of families? And how are you generally seeing this kind of trend being reported in the media? We've got our ideas of what we're seeing, but you've been at this for a lot longer and you've kind of looked at the historical aspect of autonomy.
Bob Engelman 27:54
It's an excellent question, Nandita. I have seen this consistently as basically one of the best news stories going right now. The changing view of the family, particularly among women, and women's increasing ability, writ large over the past several decades, and even a century or more, ability to achieve their own reproductive intentions as one of the most positive trends, positive factors in the direction of human society. When you think about the fact that fertility has come down from about five children per women on average worldwide in the 1950s, to something like 2.3, 2.4 maybe, it might be even going lower than that now worldwide. Imagine what world population would look like. And along with world population, climate change, food security issues, water scarcity, so many environmental issues and probably social issues as well. Imagine if fertility had stayed at five children per woman from the 1950s to today, the 2020s. We would probably have well over ten, maybe even eleven billion people in the world right now. And we're not doing so great managing the world with eight billion people. I've often said this in environmental circles that, you know, when people feel doom and gloom about trends in the environment and climate for example, I frequently point to the fact that fertility has been falling. And that's a really good sign for the future of the planet. However, it's not enough. Obviously, falling fertility is not going to solve all our environmental problems, and it's threatened. And this is what is both, you know, the Chinese definition of crisis, it's danger and opportunity. Women and couples around the world are increasingly wanting to postpone childbearing, and really just to have one or two children, I mean, that's been the story now for decades, that fertility has been trending down in almost all the world, not all the world, which is part of the problem, and not trending down consistently or as fast as it probably could have trended down if there had been the right policies in effect, and there's some places where it's still way higher than what women really, I think want. But in general, women and couples want to have fewer children. Raising children today is increasingly expensive and stressful. And there's ever rising uncertainty about what kind of world environmentally, economically, politically, and socially young people will inherit. So when you talk to young people, and not just in developed countries, you're right, Nandita, in developing countries as well, in my experience, and I've spent a fair amount of time with women in developing countries and also read a lot about this, you find that people are increasingly nervous about their ability to raise a lot of children and also the kind of world that those children will grow up in and that these are playing into feelings about, attitudes about family size. But the ability of women to achieve their reproductive intentions is naturally limited by the, not necessarily just their education as important as that is, but by the accessibility of reliable, safe, and affordable birth control, along with the needed contraceptive information and counseling. And sadly, the importance of this limitation is generally poorly recognized in the media and by policymakers. There are exceptions among reporters and stories, there's actually a news story online right now that would be of interest to you if you haven't run across it. It's about the difference in fertility between Tamil Nadu and Bihar in India. Tamil Nadu is well below replacement while Bihar continues to be well above, I think around three children per woman. And the reporters actually relate this very explicitly to the difference in access to family planning and they make clear that much of the pregnancy in Bihar is unintended. And they quote women saying, "I never wanted to have this many children. It's really a problem for me, but my husband doesn't want to use condoms, he thinks they're going to kill him, or I just can't find any good information." But unfortunately, stories, and this was a pretty good story, it's in the Washington Post, unfortunately, stories like these stand out precisely because they're exceptional. There's a lot of confusion in the media about reproduction and reproductive intention. Not only is the importance of contraception as essential to intentional childbearing routinely understated or ignored, but reproductive intention itself is widely misunderstood. Here's an example. Some in the news media seem to believe it's a real travesty that women in developed countries on average are having fewer children than they say they want. And what they say they want is their reported desired family size. This is a demographic term of art, and their desired family size, which suggests that they really want to have two or even more children on average, and yet they have fewer than two, sometimes closer to one. But people don't seem to understand that desired family size is an aspirational ideal that has often very little to do with people's real circumstances. It's something like desired house size or desired car size. In a perfect, stress-free world with a secure future, the perfect partner, abundant money and time, people might imagine it'd be wonderful to have X number of children. If you can avoid being pregnant when it's not an opportune time, or you don't have the right partner or the right job or the right home, or you're insecure about the future, you're likely to end up with fewer children than your quote desired family size. Instead, you're probably going to have a lower number which has resulted from your own conscious, month by month, week by week, day by day reproductive timing intentions to either not be pregnant or to become pregnant. And that's a good thing because it is the result of intended reproductive timing. But society is not adequately supporting the exercise of these reproductive timing intentions based on one's actual circumstances from month to month and year to year, rather than reverse. The media for the most part seems to imply that having fewer or no children is a bit selfish. It's leading us to the economic stagnation, failure of pension systems, loss of collective dynamism, and if only we could support women and men in having the children they're dying to have, they really want to have, somehow all these problems would go away. Now once in a while in the media, you do see a pro forma nod to the possibility of environmental benefits of smaller families. But I have to say, such benefits are never, and I think I can say never, seriously explored in the media. The media is not comfortable really digging into are there good reasons for population to grow more slowly, to stabilize and in fact, possibly to decline, and particularly looking at the environment, but looking at other issues as well. Finally, there's also little understanding of demography. So there's this frequent repetition, it bugs me, of the idea that fertility below so-called replacement value of roughly two children per couple essentially immediately causes a declining population. You see this said in the media very often and it's simply not the case. Population continues to grow for years and even decades after a society reaches below replacement fertility, not just because many developed world societies have an influx of people from other countries to add to their population. But even if they didn't, there are simply so many young people in the populations that there's this momentum of these young people, they're much more numerous than the old people who are, not to put too fine a point on it, are dying to leave the population, that for the longest time, you have still a rising population. It takes decades for the sort of elephant and the, and the snake to work its way to the end of the line and for you to eventually have what I think is a kind of sustainable population age structure, which instead of being a population pyramid of largely young people and few older people, to be something that we're approaching today in many societies, where you have essentially a population column of roughly equal numbers of people in each cohort. And under those circumstances, replacement fertility does result in absent migration in or out, it does result in a fairly stable population. But journalists don't get this. And that's my main point. I would like to see more demographic education go on in journalism schools and just in the college and on a graduate level generally, because we're not well informed as a society about how demography works. And that's a problem. It's one of the reasons we don't talk much about population. We don't get it. We don't understand it. And we need leadership in that area.
Nandita Bajaj 36:18
Yeah, we're with you completely on that. Yeah, and there were so many little nuggets that you brought up that I want to try to respond to a couple of those. One was, of course, you talked about this really positive and natural trend that we have been seeing toward a declining fertility from five in 1950 to 2.3 today. And that of course, has been a result of concerted, positive, empowering efforts to help realize reproductive autonomy for women that hasn't been available for so long. And we see that in every country that women gain autonomy, we see that trend accelerate toward a declining fertility. And so, you know, instead of continuing to support and accelerate that trend in the right direction, we have been seeing this kind of alarmism that a declining fertility, for some reason is a really bad thing. And it is completely bizarre to see that kind of reporting happening in media because it's just missing the point of why the fertility is declining is because we are moving toward a more gender equal society where people have lots more opportunities, people have decision-making power in what to do with their lives, both in terms of reproductive choices, but also other life choices. The other thing that was so fascinating, what you brought up about the way the desired family size is being reported. Two things there is one is of course, what you're saying the aspirational desire is very different from people's personal circumstances. But also, people's desire is not an immutable thing. You might have a desire for three children at a younger age and then, you know, you go through life, have experiences, end up having one child and realize that that's completely fulfilling, and you change your mind. And you end up not having what you thought the desired number of children was. So to what degree are surveys capturing life satisfaction at the current level of fertility compared to what you said you wanted? You know, and why is it being reported as a gap that needs to be fixed? Of course, the other aspect of cultural norms that a lot of people don't think about is the degree of coercive pronatalism that is at play in, for a lot of people, constructing what the desired family size is. The desire itself is a product of the cultural norm within which people reside. And you know, we've talked about that in our papers, the degree to which people are asked their desired family sizes, how much that matches what the cultural norm or the fertility level within a certain culture is, and the different types of punishments that are in place for people who move away or not conform to that fertility level, depending on the degree of patriarchy and religious control that's driving that. There's a paper that was written by Partha Dasgupta and Aisha Dasgupta, they call it socially embedded preferences and desire cannot be taken at face value without first deconstructing all of the different patterns and norms that are preventing people from making authentic and liberated choices. So that all has to be taken into context when these surveys are being conducted so that we're not aren't adding implicit bias to them.
Bob Engelman 40:03
It's a really good point, Nandita. And there's a fascinating discussion I had with individual women and then groups of women in Mali that I actually write about in the book, where in speaking with women individually, when I could really spend some time talking with them, with one other person basically in the room, an interpreter, finding out what their own thoughts were about having children. And then having sort of a focus group with a large number of women in a particular village where I asked these women, "So what is the right number of children to have?" And a few women spoke up and said, "I think two would be great." And then you could hear other women saying, and the translator was relating to me, "Oh, let's not say two, that's that's too few. We need to say at least three or we need to say four." Next thing I knew, the whole group had decided that that four was the right number. And it was just really real evidence of how a thesis that I have, in part that I was trying to demonstrate in the book, but it just unfolded delightfully for me right in this dark village place that I was at in Mali, this room I was in, that women if when they're looking at themselves in the mirror and asking themselves, "Do I want to be pregnant right now or do I not?" Frequently, I think the reflection in the mirror says, "No," and yet, when they go out and they join the society they're in, their mothers, their mothers-in-law, their tribal chiefs, their religious leaders, their friends, their peers, the women they see around them who are having a number of children, then what the reflection in the mirror is saying to them is weakened. And they say "Well okay, I guess maybe I should go ahead." Now I can't be positive how common this is, how frequent it is, but my thesis that was basically, and I'm not a woman myself obviously, so I'm interpolating as a man and I accept that there's some risk and problem in doing that. But as best I can, I'm trying to figure out what women are thinking. I would love to see more research on this question, but I don't see a lot happening. And it's one reason I keep sticking to this linkage, as you pointed out because I just feel it's so important and there is so much more work that needs to be done on it.
Nandita Bajaj 42:15
Right. And then additionally, Bob, in your book More, you state your belief that all government policies have to help women and their partners have children when and only when that is their intention. We fully agree that government policies should promote people's reproductive autonomy. And at Population Balance, right now we're feeling the need to push back against many pronatalist and often coercive, pronatalist policies that are being advanced by governments around the world, especially in response to this panic about the very small actual levels of population decline or projections of future population decline. Are you seeing a growing awareness in the broader community of population concerned people that some of our energy needs to shift toward pushing back against the increasing prevalence of these explicitly pronatalist policies?
Bob Engelman 43:13
Yeah, there is a movement to pushing back on this. There are a number of people who want to push back on it. It's just not enough. I have seen a few very refreshing op eds, specifically pushing back on the idea that we ought to be frightened about fertility decline and even possible future population decline. And amazingly, you often see this in letters to the editor, it's like newspaper readers who write letters to the editor are far more aware of this side of the issue than the reporters and editors themselves, which is always a frustration to me. And on one side, it is important to notice that there is a considerable pushback against the growing criminalization of abortion and efforts to restrict abortion and also to restrict contraceptives in itself. There are some people who want to do that who are in positions of influence actually, which is particularly frightening. And that's something that I think people who care about population itself need to be very supportive of. You don't have to be concerned about population to be concerned about the fact that women are losing the power to make their own decisions about when to become pregnant and when to give birth. The recent Texas judge that had this blatantly religious and ideological overturning of the Food and Drug Administration safety approval for mifepristone that prompted a letter from four hundred pharmaceutical and related leaders opposing the absurd reasoning of this judge. So that's good. I mean, I think that the fact that this kind of thing is happening and there is this outrage that's almost society-wide against these kinds of restrictions of women's management of their own bodies, ability to control their own bodies, is a positive sign that people concerned about population should take encouragement from and indeed should support even a population is never mentioned. But unfortunately, there's no comparable prestigious community of leaders calling for politicians in the media to stop panicking about fertility decline amidst still growing world and most national populations. It'd be great if demographers work to educate policymakers and journalists about how fertility, mortality, and migration interact to affect age structures and population size and momentum, but we don't see that happening. It'd be nice if leading demographers and other social scientists would team up with environmental leaders to describe the environmental, social, political, economic benefits of gradual population decline based on people's reproductive intentions. It'd be nice if there were more research, well-funded rigorous research on these connections. And it would also be nice if people would recognize that it isn't just better education for girls and women, which is a point that is frequently sort of more safely made about fertility when fertility is addressed at all. If women get access to education, if girls get access to education, their fertility goes down. That point is occasionally made in policymaking circles and in the news media, but it would be nice if there were more people recognizing and more thought leaders educating the public about the fact that even education has to go in tandem with access to reproductive health care, and specifically access to family planning commodities and counseling and services of all kinds so that people can actually use contraception reliably, safely, and affordably to become pregnant when they want to be pregnant and not to be pregnant when they don't want to be pregnant. And that's something that needs a lot of work. Support for this financially, by the way, is stagnant. It's not recognizing that even if we assume, as the media often assumes, that there is going to be some sort of population stability coming fairly soon, that fertility is declining and so population is sort of bound to stop growing, quote unquote, on its own in just a few decades or before the end of the century. Nobody is thinking about the level of contraceptives that that would require given the larger number of women and men, young people in their reproductive age, and that population continues to grow. But also the greater number of contraceptives and contraceptive services that will be required for lower fertility to actually happen. People need to have reliable contraception for the vast majority of every week, every month, every year of their reproductive lives, pretty much from puberty or the beginning of sexual experience to the end of their reproductive lives. And there's just very, very little thought that's given to this and understanding this given to this. This is what we really need to work on relative to the news media and to policymaking.
Alan Ware 43:20
I thought it was interesting what you mentioned about demographers. It would be wonderful if they worked with environmentalists and academics to prepare us for population decline, and that it's not a cataclysm. But it seems to me demographers usually work in service to growth economics, looking at how many retirees, how many kids in the schools, how many workers?
Bob Engelman 48:02
Absolutely. Demographics has a whole new meaning today, and it's actually about business. The demographics of marketing, the demographics of who will buy this and who will buy that. There used to be a time when a leading demographers called attention to the growth of human population and concerns about it. And now the whole field has really, just like so much of the academic and intellectual and elite world, turned away almost out of fear to calling attention to what's happening, really happening in the world's population, that is a risk and a danger to our continued existence as human civilization and focusing on sort of micro issues of, particularly related to business but also related to education and some other areas where demography matters, and it is indeed important, but yeah, demographic leadership is, is sadly lacking and it's much needed right now.
Alan Ware 48:52
Yeah, that's right. We were very glad to interview Vegard Skirbekk, population economist and author of Decline and Prosper, who's one of the rare demographic economics kind of guys who says it won't be all doom and gloom. And actually he's having some European governments invite him in, not just to look at how do we prevent this in a panicked sort of way through raising birth rates or immigration, but how do we, how are we going to adapt to it realistically? And what are all the great benefits, environmental and otherwise, to it? So I liked how you laid out what could be if we just had a reasonable welcoming of this population decline and all the intellectual firepower that could be directed toward that project, and how there's very little.
Bob Engelman 49:39
Well, I think it's important that your group and groups like yours look at the alternative to endless growth, which I might call endless sharing. That I mean, this is an important response to these concerns. And I think it's it adds to the name balance in your organizational name that you've both acknowledged human rights and the importance of rights-based access to reproductive health and sexual health and rights. But as well to the point that economically we really, we need to be thinking about counterbalancing the need to improve human wellbeing, not just through continued growth worldwide, but through reexamining and reimagining what equity could look like - economic equity, social, and political equity - because that's really where those of us who are saying we cannot grow indefinitely and we need to think now about managing a retreat from growth. We need to be engaged in the dialogue and the conversation that's occurring about how do we reshape society so that growth is no longer necessary, but poverty still comes to an end eventually, and at least moves toward an end. That's a really important discussion that you're touching on, Alan.
Alan Ware 50:53
Right. And we definitely have tried to balance a concern with consumption and population. And unfortunately, we often get a pushback from a lot of commentators that it's all about consumption, you shouldn't be addressing population.
Bob Engelman 51:07
That argument that it's it's all about consumption, it's not at all about population, it's a go-to argument that people use to sort of keep the discussion away from population, I think. It's more ideological and it is scientific, certainly, although there's just enough science or data behind it to give it a semblance of a certain amount of power. I often compare that to the argument that it isn't the height of a rectangle that determines its area, but the width, when obviously it's both height and width. There's certainly a lot of truth to the fact that the wealthy or high consumers of the world are emitting more fossil fuel carbon dioxide into the air, and that's part of the inequity and injustice that we need to be working on, there's no question we need to work on it. But that doesn't take away from the fact that population itself has major impacts on multiple, multiple areas of the environmental stresses that the world is feeling right now particularly scarcity of renewable freshwater, which is not much affected by high-end consumption in a different continent altogether, and the loss of biodiversity which is much affected by the expansion of food production, which is needed for higher population, and the expansion of of living space, which is needed by higher population. So the argument is not difficult to show in a more scientifically-based alternative analysis. But unfortunately, it's just common enough and powerful enough to be useful in shutting down the discussion on population and the environment. I was fortunate enough to write an article that was accepted by Science Magazine, great place to have a peer-reviewed scientific paper, co-authored with Eileen Crist, who's now on your board, wonderful author and expert on these issues. And Camilo Mora, who's a prominent biologist out of the University of Hawaii, on the trade off between the needed expansion of food production to feed higher populations and the loss of biodiversity, that there is a well recognized tension between expanding food production, whether it's by expanding farmland or just intensifying the use of inputs to produce more food in the same amount of land, and biological diversity, not just the diversity of wild animals and plants but the sheer number of wild animals and plants, which is decreasing in many cases around the world. And our purpose in writing this was not to draw attention so much to this tension, which is well recognized in the field. But to point out that very few people, almost none we could find, were noting the benefits that positive, rights-based population policies could have in easing this tension by eventually bringing population growth effectively to an end. And that was the whole point of the article. And it was wonderful that it was published by Science, and it's gotten a lot of attention. It's been cited possibly hundreds of times, I keep seeing new citations of it, which is very gratifying but it's been frustrating to see that almost all of the uses or citations of the article have used it basically to just point to this fundamental tension between increased food production and decreased biodiversity and almost none of them have drawn attention to the point that we were making about the usefulness, the the importance of thinking about rights-based population-related policies to help ease this tension, and particularly the strategies that we recommended, which focused on the wellbeing and education of women and the removal of barriers to family planning and reproductive health services. So this again, is one of the difficult challenges we face in writing about these issues. And I think the lesson I draw from it is just keep at it. We just need to keep working and eventually I think the message will get through more and more.
Alan Ware 54:44
So you've been on the frontlines of understanding the relationship of population and environment for over thirty years, quite a bit over thirty years. You noted in a YouTube video that we've got to face the gloom and doom, and if we help to come up with realistic answers to our problems, we have to face that gloom and doom. Despite the great need to be realistic and sober in our diagnosis of our ecological predicament, there's still an enormous amount of overly optimistic thinking, especially around the idea that technology and markets can save us. And you had noted in an article in 2013 you wrote called Beyond Sustainababble, that you were seeing a lot of greenwashing and many governments and business pronouncements inactions. And do you think society as a whole has moved forward in directly addressing the scope of the challenges we face or has the greenwashing and greenwishing gotten worse in your opinion?
Bob Engelman 55:37
I think it's actually improved somewhat. Again, just not enough, I guess I would say. I have been amused and delighted that sustainababble seems to have become, with a certain limited audience, something of a neologism or a thing. And this article has been cited a fair amount. And most of the people citing this particular article or chapter in Worldwatch book seem to get it. They understand what I was trying to say, that a lot of the discussion of sustainability and things being sustainable, sustainable fish or sustainable clothing or sustainable airplane rides or whatever, that it is a kind of babble. It's that sustainability is too vague a term. And there are more commentators suggesting this now, that is not enough to rely on what some people have called hopeism, which I think is another great term, hopeism being the kind of the addiction to the idea that well, we can always hope. A hope will pull us through. And, you know, we've got to come to our senses of on these problems eventually, so we will because we must. Quite frankly, as a society, even if we're recognizing the importance of acting, and I think we are increasingly and I think that's good. But as a society, we're far from acting with sufficient urgency on the range of very high risk problems that stem from an imbalance between human activity and the needs of the nonhuman world, whether it's the living world or in the case of climate change, just the physical and geological world. That's why organizations like Population Balance are so important, I think, to call attention to the issue of coming into balance. I do see a lot of positive activity coming from young people, the movements of people like Greta Thunberg, and the childfree movement on the part of a lot of young people. And for individual choices not to have children if you don't want to have children. I think this is real progress. I didn't see this happening in a big way when I wrote that article ten years ago. So I find this exciting. But we can't expect young people who are so pressed themselves by these problems to solve them on their own, either now or in the future. And we can't expect the handful of commentators who are calling attention to the sort of over-optimistic approach to dealing with these problems to actually find the solutions. We need a lot more people engaged, and we need a lot more intellectual leadership. And that's, again, why policymakers, academia, and the news media are so important in saying that these problems are indeed urgent and to a large extent existential and need to be dealt with on that level. And I haven't seen that happen yet. I think we're moving in the right direction, but we still have a long way to go.
Nandita Bajaj 58:09
As a former journalist, what advice would you give us and our listeners about the best strategies for getting more and better coverage of the population issue in the media?
Bob Engelman 58:20
Well, it can be discouraging, but I think it can also be encouraging. I think that a part of the key is to identify and cultivate journalists that appear at least somewhat open to population factors, and interaction of population and the environment, or they're covering issues where the importance of population is especially obvious, say, for example, water scarcity or biodiversity loss. I have found it useful sometimes to email reporters individually, not write necessarily copying the letters to the editors, but just writing to them privately one on one, no BCC or CC, privately to discuss population issues and to try to make what I hope are helpful and positive and reinforcing suggestions about their coverage that might bring in a little bit more about population. And somewhat to my surprise, a number of these reporters have really given me their attention. And we've had some positive interactions on them, whether it's going to have a positive result of their coverage, I can't say I've seen tons of examples where it was obvious they took my advice, but it offers at least the possibility of teachable moments and influence to journalists. And then I think trying to find opportunities to address organizations of journalists whenever possible, perhaps students who are interested in going into journalism so that you're building your efforts into the future. You can offer yourselves as speakers to groups like the Society of Environmental Journalists, at whose annual conferences I presented several times on population issues, to considerable interest I might add, and then particularly when you're writing, whether it's a letter to the editor, or op eds or other articles, try to find a diversity of authors to join you. And I don't mean just, not just ethnically or gender diverse authors or those who come from the developing countries, although I think that it is important to show the diversity of interests around these issues, but also authors that bring credentials from other fields of inquiry so that the people who are judging whether they want to publish your work can see that it isn't just sort of the population activists on this issue but people who are prominent in other fields are concerned and seeing the importance of these connections. And then try to design projects and articles that demonstrate the importance and the wide potential appeal of the cause so that the you're seen as not just, you know, an isolated individual, sort of self-interested interest group, but really have a broad diversity of people who are seeing how important this is to the world as a whole. But I think my main advice to you wouldn't be so much strategic or tactical, but actually attitudinal which is, keep at it. Just don't be discouraged when something you've written or proposed is rejected. Have courage and stamina. This is a long-term game, it's not about the short-term, this is about big wiggles not little wiggles. Continue to look for new avenues to get the word out, realize that there's never been a time since human numbers surpassed one billion, and it's at eight billion now, when the concern about population and its growth has actually disappeared. There are always people who can understand and who do understand that no tree grows to the sky and that no population can grow indefinitely. It's common sense, really, that simply needs to be said out loud, often, and as clearly as possible. The issue is not going away. I think you can be confident about that as you continue to do your work even when you face obstacles. Groups like Population Balance are always needed and going to be needed to point the way to responses that are fair, just, non-racist, and beneficial to women, girls, family, and communities. The benefits of this work are multiple. They're beyond the essential one of bringing humanity to sustainable population levels in balance with the rest of the planet. Continue to make clear your values on rights-based reproductive autonomy, on equity, and on justice. Never give up. Think of yourselves as a flame that cannot be allowed to snuff out because it is needed more than ever right now. And it will be needed even more, shining more brightly than ever, tomorrow, next year, and beyond.
Nandita Bajaj 1:02:22
All of those are absolutely lovely words, Bob. Thank you so much for not only the wisdom that you've shared with that advice, but also, you are a remarkable example of someone who has been doing this exact work for decades and haven't allowed your own flame to be snuffed out. So thank you for such a great interview. And also, we are so glad to have had this opportunity to chat with you about all of these things and to also see how much overlap there is in the work you've been doing for all these decades and the pathway that we're on through Population Balance right now, so thank you.
Bob Engelman 1:03:02
Well thank you, Nandita and Alan. It's been a wonderful pleasure to talk to you about these issues, and given my excitement and commitment and passion about them, it's tremendously encouraging for me to see you and Population Balance taking on these issues and working hard on them and it's just great to realize that there are people moving in this direction and taking this on who are younger than I, frankly, even if you've had fewer decades of work on it so that I can be confident that the work will be carried on because that's absolutely critical. So thank you very much for your important work and for your time today.
Alan Ware 1:03:35
That's it for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations write to us using the contact form on our site, or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. And if you feel inspired by our work, please consider supporting us using the donate button. Also, to help expand our listenership please consider rating us on whichever podcast platform you use.
Nandita Bajaj 1:04:04
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for all your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.