"Books & Culture Corner: More Sex, Fewer Children"
"Mixed messages on condoms, contraception, and fertility"
John Wilson
September 1, 2001
Two headlines: "Contraceptive Shortages Loom in Less Developed Countries"; "Low Fertility Not Politically Sustainable." Both come from the August/September issue of Population Today, that indispensable publication from the Population Reference Bureau. The first article, a front-page piece by Population Today editor Allison Tarmann, deplores the lack of "contraceptive security" in the developing world. "Analogous to food security," Tarmann writes, "contraceptive security denotes an adequate supply of choice of contraceptives and condoms for every person who needs them, whether for family planning or for disease prevention."
About the choices that make "contraceptive insecurity" such a threat, Tarmann is silent. The people she describes are active agents only in seeking to limit births and prevent infection from sexually transmitted diseases.
Meanwhile, on page 3, demographer Peter McDonald notes that while "the population field" has been dominated by "concerns" over high birth rates, "for many … countries the problem is now very low rates of birth." The goal of population-control advocates has been the "replacement level of two births per woman," but in fact "the birth rate has continued to fall in nearly all populations that have reached the replacement level."
...
You can almost hear the Planners tut-tutting around the conference table. Why don't people behave sensibly? We laid it all out in our last report. …
But no one seems to be paying attention. They have too many children, or too few. They have unprotected sex (or have it forced on them) and die from AIDS. Solution? More condoms, more reports (a graph showing "Condoms Supplied by Donors to Sub-Saharan African Countries"), more policy recommendations. Considered in the ...
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