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The issue of family planning programming can be a difficult one to discuss. While the intent of organizations is almost always good, the common approach to such initiatives is usually far too oversimplified for such a complicated matter of culture. When I use the term "family planning," I am referring to initiatives that attempt to reduce family size by promoting forms of birth control with the belief that smaller families put less of a financial strain on the family structure, allowing for a better quality of life. The idea is that it's easier to maintain the well being of four children than it is of six. Four children accrue less medical bills, require less food, need fewer school uniforms and books. While this is a logical argument, it completely ignores the cultural beliefs and financial logic held by many in favor of large families, making these sorts of programs almost entirely ineffectual.
For starters, promoting a family size of five or six resonates very little with someone who plans to marry four or five wives, nor does it resonate with someone who plans to be one of four or five wives. If this is a decision that an individual has made based on their cultural or religious beliefs, they are unlikely to change their mind simply because it is supposedly cheaper to do so. We do not all share the same ideas about what constitutes a quality life, and we do not all see money as the chief indicator of our life's quality. Not only does the financial logic of many family planning initiatives not apply to these families, it's offensive to these families-- ethnocentrism disguised as community development.
But culture and religion aside, many families have their own financial logic that favors a larger family size. In rural sub-Saharan Africa there is no social security or retirement plan. The majority of people are farmers. They farm until they can no longer farm, and then their children farm for them. So while a large number of children act as helping hands on the farm in their youth; they, more importantly, become the support system for their elderly parents once they are grown. Sharing the labor and financial burden among six children is much easier for each individual child, than it is to share the same burden among four.
I am personally one of twenty-one children. My father had four wives. I have decided not to maintain this type of lifestyle, and I am sure many family planning proponents will claim me as a success story. The truth is, however, my reasons for wanting one wife and fewer children have nothing to do with what I was taught about family planning and everything to do with my personal beliefs and current situation. I think a general shift towards smaller family size is just the natural progression of a society that becomes more urban and more mechanized. There is no need to teach it. Even more importantly, there's no need to use valuable resources to teach it in the name of development. Smaller families do not lead to development; they are a product of development for the reasons that I've mentioned. It's important when doing development work that we do not misconstrue the phenomena of developed societies with the causes of undeveloped societies. We risk wasting resources, and in this case, being cultural insensitive.
Thank you for writing this!! This is something that I have a hard time forming a clear opinion on, because on the one hand, these programs in Africa seem obviously genocidal. And also in the US, Planned Parenthood seems to target poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods with its "family planning" initiatives but you don't see them with the same vigor in the wealthy, predominantly white suburbs. But at the same time, global population is over the sustaining capacity of the planet and exponentially increasing. We're in a bit of a bubble right now, not really seeing the effects because we're burning everything we can find under the Earth's surface. But the planet cannot sustain the amount of people on it indefinitely and definitely not the amount of people we will have 10 years from now. Agriculture initiated a human population explosion because, like you said, people needed farmhands. But those farmhands grow up and need their own land, further and further expanding the land needed for agriculture and for the making of more and more farmhands. You're totally right that this is practical, it's definitely a lot more practical than white soccer moms in the U.S. who just feel that they are entitled to have 5 or 6 kids that do nothing but consume. But neither mindset is sustainable. One woman producing 5 or 6 children that all grow up to reproduce 5 or 6 children is not a sustainable model for the planet. And I'm not saying I know what the solutions is; I feel like maybe if there was less land used for agriculture and instead left wild, there would be less work on the farm, there would be less need to have so many children, and thus in the future, less people who needed food. But how to do this in a humane way is obviously difficult and obviously this needs to be done on a global scale. I agree that this should not be part of any development program, nor is there any reason for "development" at all in that sense. But conscious steps need to be taken to reduce global population, or else the planet will eventually do it for us and that, I'm pretty sure, will not be humane.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this! I really appreciate hearing it from your perspective - it's a dialogue that we really need to have. Unfortunately, so many in the international development community have most of their "development" plans be entirely ethnocentric things, with little true regard for the identity of the people they're "developing". I really like how you said we need to consider the differences between "causes" of development and "phenomena" of development. Well written and a great perspective!
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