by Lisa Hymas
I’ve written about my
choice not to have children. What’s
all too easy to forget is that many women still don’t have any reasonable choice about their fertility.
An estimated 200 million women around the world don’t have
access to family-planning tools. If they
did, 52 million unwanted pregnancies could be averted every year, according to the Guttmacher Institute [PDF].
I’m not talking government mandates or coercion or
heavy-handed tactics—those approaches aren’t just ethically dubious, they’re
wholly unnecessary. We just need to give
every woman everywhere contraceptive options so she can have basic control over
how many children she has and how close together she has them—something that
we in the developed world take completely for granted. If we did so, many women would choose on
their own to have fewer children, or to space them further apart. Not only would there be fewer new
bodies on our already crowded planet, but the lives of women and the children
they do choose to have would be
improved.
Most green groups don’t like to talk about all this—population
has become the third rail of the environmental community (more on that in a
future post).
Technologists don’t like to either—they’d rather talk
about traveling-wave
nuclear reactors and CO2-sucking
machines and space
sunshades. We do need to explore and invest in cleantech options; climate change is serious enough that it requires all of our best efforts in all arenas.
But it may be that many of the technologies with the most
potential for averting climate change already exist—the Pill, the condom,
the IUD. We just need to spread them far
and wide.
GINK: green inclinations, no kidsBetter still, providing contraception to women who lack it
is one of the most cost-effective ways to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. Each $7 spent on basic family planning over
the next four decades would reduce global CO2 emissions by more than a metric
ton, while achieving that same reduction with the leading low-carbon technologies would
cost a minimum of $32, according to a recent study by
the London School of Economics [PDF], commissioned by the Optimum
Population Trust. And if you compare
contraception to the potential costs of geoengineering,
the potential savings are even more massive.
As Laurie Mazur puts it in
the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
[T]he developed countries’ share of
the cost to provide reproductive health services for every woman on earth is
$20 billion—about what the bankers on Wall Street gave themselves in bonuses
[in 2008]. The U.S. share of the cost is
$1 billion, less than 2 percent of what the United States will spend on the war
in Afghanistan [in 2009]. In contrast,
the scheme to launch mirrors into space is estimated to cost a few trillion
dollars.
When you look at those numbers, paying for condoms and IUDs
looks to be not just a huge bargain, but startlingly sane. It may not be as
sexy as space mirrors, but when’s the last time sexy solved a pressing global
problem?
Related Links:
Debunking the “you’d be a great green parent” argument
Say it loud: I’m childfree and I’m proud
Population growth should be curbed, argues Jane Goodall