Put Family Planning First

For ten years SAPLER has been comparing middle-class rhetoric about women’s rights, women’s literacy and women’s employment with direct family planning. Direct family planning wins every time. If limiting population growth and preventing unwanted babies is your aim, then support the family planners. For the past 30 years this rhetoric has prevented millions of women from getting the family planning they need. There was once the UNFPA, standing for “United Nations Family Planning Association”.  In an attempt to be politically correct this was changed to “United Nations Fund for Population Activities”, with “Population Activities” never clearly defined.

UNFPA could stand for “Universally Nuturing Family Planning Availability”.

World Earth Summit

Johannesburg 2002

We would like all

significant environmental

organizations to sign

our RESA booklet and

commit themselves to the

 concept of UNIVERSAL

FAMILY PLANNING

How do we Know?

SAPLER did its “Survey of the Unmet Need for Family Planning in SA” in 1994.  We do not need to do this survey again to be convinced that this umnet need still exists.

 The figures for abortion, both legal and illegal (assessed by the number of women admitted to hospital for treatment of complications following bungled abortions), are one indication.

 The escalating numbers of AIDS orphans are another. In addition we know directly of many areas where it is for one or another reason too difficult for people to be consistently and pleasantly reached by family planners. Werner Fornos, President of the Washington-based Population Institute, stated in Brazil recently that 350 million women “either want no more children, did not want their last child, or want to extend the intervals between their pregnancies to protect their health of their babies”.

Werner Fornos also stated that “the loss of 26 billion tons of topsoil last year was a result of three phenomena, each related to rapid population growth: urbanization, marginal farming and desert expansion”. These quotes, and others in this newsletter, are taken from the March April Popline - the newsletter of the Population Institute.

Tins and Booklets

SAPLER produced RESA booklets a while back. (RESA stands for “Reach Every Southern African”.) The idea then was that we would collect one rand from one million people. This proved too time consuming. Most SAPLER members who took booklets sent them back empty, but with a cheque for one hundred rand. Each RESA booklet has space for the name and signature of each donor.  Each name now has to represent one hundred rand. This can either represent a single donor or a group of donors. A booklet would then be the means for fund-raising 100 x 100 = ten thousand rand!

Anyone who wants to give a smaller donation can pop a cent or more into one of our tins. Ninety of these tins are in shops in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, and are filling fast.

For the tins we have reduced the winning poster from the Young Advertisers competition (SAPLER newsletter No.9, June 1997). The poster says: “one child good job plenty food nice house” and we have added: “Please Help Us to Give Everybody Family Planning Services”.

The RESA Mini-Mobile

As a first step towards meeting the umnet need of women across the world, SAPLER is now collecting money for a very simple, very cost-effective, very friendly mini-mobile. Amongst all the other rhetoric is the idea that all women have to be introduced to all methods of contraception, and that it has to be done in a general clinic. This is unrealistic and unnecessary.  Much family planning is done that way, but what about the “hard-to-reach”?

We would offer the Depo Provera injection, condoms, and information about other methods and about AIDS and other STDs. Any woman who had side effects from the Depo injection, which is given once every three months, would be encouraged to go to the clinic. Depo is an outstandingly safe and effective contraceptives. No one ever died from Depo. From Popline comes the heading: “One Maternal Death Occurs Every Minute”, and from the article: “One in every 15 African women dies of complications arising from pregnancy, childbirth or unsafe abortion”.

Operation Freedom

Do, you remember “Operation Hunger”?  They did reach one million rand, and were able to teach trench gardening - but look at us now. Our “Operation Freedom” could prevent everything from desertification to AIDS.

In Winterveldt a young woman with three small children who is being forced to have unsafe sex in order to feed her children did not learn to “SAY NO” as a teenager.

Teenagers who benefit from learning to “SAY NO” at a school where our pioneers are active and who then have good contraception in the years after school can be free from abuse and bullying.

We hope to use alternative fuel for our mini-mobile. For our mini-mobile we have so far collected R11 200.

The sub-title of this book is The Environmental Basis of Political Stability. The theme is that war follows environmental breakdown and that we would do better to fix up the environment instead of spending billions on armaments.

Unlike many environmental writers Myers does not leave out population growth. It comes quite naturally into every chapter, because the ultimate cause of environmental damage is the rapid growth of humans.

Of the two types of damage - first world and third world - it is no use arguing which is “more sinful”. Ultimately we share one earth - we are all Earthlings - and what happens in one area affects what happens in other areas.

Reading this book makes it easy to understand what has happened in Africa. When a war has happened, or a genocide, humans look for current explanations. But looking at the bigger picture, and giving a simple version, what happens is:1

1.        Public health and humanitarian aid lead to most babies staying alive. After the Second World War this meant very rapid population growth.

2.        Desperate people move an to marginal land. This is land which rapidly deteriorates so people depart for even more marginal land.

3.        When people get desperate enough they find enemies and make war on them.

The Story of Ethiopia

Myers says that the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 was “the first time a government had been ousted for primarily environmental reasons”. The population grew from 18 million in 1950 to 25 million in 1970. In the 1970s Ethiopia's main farming area in its highlands had been regularly losing well over 1 billion tons of topsoil a year, at the same time as the population continued to grow.

Farmland fertility declined, so large numbers of Ethiopian peasants began to migrate out of the highlands, some of them to Ogaden on the border with Somalia - leading to friction there. There was friction both about land and water, leading to war. The Russians provided armaments to Ethiopia, and the United States to Somalia.

Myers says, “If one-quarter of the sums consumed by the Ogaden hostilities had been assigned beforehand to safeguarding topsoil, tree cover, and associated factors of the agricultural resource base in traditional farmlands of Ethiopia, the migration toward the Ogaden would have been far less likely.

Ironically a similar amount of finance was required from the outside world in relief measures alone to counter Ethiopia’s 1985 famine - a famine largely induced by environmental rundown.”

Myers’s final conclusion is that Ethiopia has broken down as a nation:

“Devastation of the natural-resource base, accentuated by almost 20 years of civil war, has left the economy in shreds.” So Ethiopia can neither make things to exchange for food, nor grow sufficient food for itself. That was in 1992. And now? The worst maternal death rate: one in seven women dies in giving birth.

The Sudan

Consider Sudan, says Myers, and some root causes of the 1985 coup that toppled the Nimeiry regime. Four problems appear to have been at work.

First was the civil war in the south, provoked by fears that water that “belonged” to the southerners was being diverted to the northerners. Second was a 500 per cent rise in the price of food staples as a result of drought and associated problems of declining agriculture.

Third was a severe shortage of fuel wood in the north, after local supplies had been sorely depleted and the main supplementary supply from the south had been cut off, precipitating a demand for kerosene and gasoline with price rises of more than 300 per cent.

Fourth was the mass migration into the Khartoum area from the Kordofan and Darfur provinces, where gross deterioration of grazing lands had been aggravated by drought. All these factors had a strong environmental component - and all were accentuated by the pressures of a population growing at 2.8 per cent per year.

The African Renaissance

Myers wrote his book before the Rwandan genocide, and at a time when Zimbabwe was exporting food. The principles remain the same. Unless we can take an overview, and look at population, topsoil and water, we will have everlasting coups and wars. There are already millions of environmental refugees in Africa. Myers says that some can be called “political refugees” and others “environmental refugees” - but that the two are really the same. Extreme pressures lead to lack of tolerance and a wish to lay the blame on a sometime enemy.

We are having trials for the Rwandain leaders - but if we look further back the blame lies in avoidable conditions, and on those who did nothing to avoid them. We can have an “African Renaissance”, but only if we start with the underlying problems.

Driving a Car

Global warming is too difficult for most people to understand. So those with a vested interest in its not being true find an easy audience to accept their denials. Myers says:

“Let us think, then, of the future that is struggling to be born. At the same time, let us think about what we also do, without thinking about it, to pre-empt that future.  Spare a thought about, for instance, the number of times a day we inadvertently do something that pushes the cause backwards.

“Like drive the car, 2000 pounds of steel, to transport just one person, and thus send a silent message of support to Detroit and its gas-guzzler fixation. “All those with life-styles that are simply not sustainable are security risks for everybody. President Bush declared at the 1992 Earth Summit that American life-styles were not up for negotiation on ways to change. Indeed not. 

They have already committed Americans to a track that will bring changes as momentous as they are inevitable. That much has been true ever since Americans embarked on a gasoline binge forty years ago, ever since they started to chop down their forests at a rate faster than that of Brazilian Amazonia, and ever since they caused the soil of Iowa to erode as fast as that of Ethiopia.”

Quotes

The simplest part of the Myers story is that Africa is collapsing because of over-population. It doesn't matter how many deaths there are from AIDS, car-crashes, violent conflicts, and famine. THE POPULATION STILL GROWS. Myers quotes from a number of interesting sources. For example:

The Brandt Report - released in 1980:

“Few threats to peace and survival of the human community are greater than those posed by the prospects of cumulative and irreversible degradation of the biosphere on which human life depends.

In a global context, true security cannot be achieved by mounting build-up of weapons, but only by providing basic conditions for solving non-military problems. Our survival depends not only on military balance, but on global cooperation to ensure a sustainable environment.”

Confucius:

“If a man take no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand.”

Margaret Mead:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Unwanted Babies Long Ago

The three great issues of our time are:

Over-population

Damage to land, water and air

Shortages of water and land

Every baby that is born will be faced with these issues. One hundred years ago there were only one and a half billion people on earth, compared with six billion now. Nevertheless unwanted babies abounded, then as now.

This is an account of childbirth in a London slum in 1900, written by Somerset Maugham who had worked there at that time as a medical student. The book in which he describes this experience is Of Human Bondage, published in 1915.

One family lived in each room, and in the daytime there was the incessant noise of children playing in the court. The old walls were the breeding-place of vermin; the air was so foul that often, feeling sick, Philip had to light his pipe.

The people who dwelt here lived from band to mouth. Babies were unwelcome: the man received them with surly anger, the mother with despair; it was one more mouth to feed, and there was little enough wherewith to feed those already there.

Philip often discerned the wish that the child might be born dead or might die quickly. He delivered one woman of twins and when she was told she burst into a long, shrill wail of misery.

Philip caught sight of the husband’s face as he looked at the tiny pair lying side by side, and there was a ferocious sullenness in it which startled him.

He felt in the family assembled there a hideous resentment against those poor atoms who had come into the world unwished for; and he had a suspicion that if he did not speak firmly an  ‘accident’ would occur.

Accidents occurred often; mothers ‘overlaid’ their babies, and perhaps errors of diet were not always the result of carelessness...

Sydney Lights

The ferry hoots

The yachts sway

The city subsides from its day.

Did I say I was lonely?

It’s not important.

The ferry hoots

The yachts sway

The lights begin

in Sydney city of sin.

Lights on through the night

are a sin - We are at war

Don’t they know that?

Half do Half don’t

so the lights stay on – skyscrapers screeching their erections.

The littlest lights

that flicker on the plugs

and switches

that tell us what is on

and what is not

MUST GO OFF say those who know.

Only through darkness

Can we come to light

and save our souls and soils

from dark loss.

The ferry hoots again

The yachts may sway again

And I be not alone.

South Africa’s political miracle - the avoidance of civil war - seems to have been too easily achieved. The AIDS pandemic could be regarded as a rough equivalent. The premature death of millions now seems unavoidable. Are the wages of apartheid to be paid in full after all? No - but only if we reject neo-apartheid: the retention of resources and work for ‘insiders’ only. South Africa has long been industrialised, with a Western tradition of freedom and enterprise that was damaged by apartheid and racism, but since earnestly revived. South Africa has skilled workers, an industrial base, good communications and governmental infrastructure. It is a “middle-income country”. Unemployment, poverty, hunger, destitution and crime should not be overwhelming problems.

They are major problems because the country has an advanced economy and millions of poor people who are excluded from participation, except as recipients of assistance. Its middle-income status is based on a statistical average. As in the past, people are still systematically excluded, so the dynamism of typical free societies is impeded. Because abandoning apartheid was so liberating, the fundamental continuity - the exclusion of the poor - is incompletely recognised. In societies with large disparities between groups, group membership is often the decisive interest of an individual. Race is no longer the criterion in South Africa - but an artificially privileged labour force remains politically dominant, and the excluded still scrabble for a living. It is fatuous to call for massive job creation under current labour statutes. However, modestly-paid community service work for a lot of jobless people can be a cost-effective, affordable answer.

In South Africa, most of the millions of marginalised people are at high risk of getting the HIV virus. These include the labour migrants who are living away from their homes and the impoverished women who transact sex with them. Women who have little power are unable to insist on responsible sexuality from their partners. Couples do not talk about sex. Men are unable or unwilling to take responsibility as husbands and fathers. Promiscuity is boasted about rather than disapproved of. Many youths who face poverty, poor schooling, unemployment and personal insecurity, begin sex at an early age, change partners often and have more than one current partner. Girls transact sex with older men; boys coerce girls in communities where crime and violence are commonplace. Much sexual activity is intended to breach economic exclusion. There is also the problem that hedonism and self-gratification are projected through the media.

The historical record seems to indicate that most communities had strong family and community cohesion and social discipline, in the past. Sexual brutality, family failure and illegitimacy were uncommon and were punished.

Young people’s sexuality was allowed limited expression under the surveillance of the peer group. It shaped young men’s aspirations to be accepted as responsible men, husbands and fathers. Young women were also mainly socialised by their peer group. Traditional beliefs, centred on the approval of the ancestors, supported people’s respect for each other and the right way to live.¹

These collective strengths - social capital - have been ebbing for more than a century. Christianity, industrialisation, urbanisation and labour migrancy led to the demise of formal initiation, the traditional peer group, openness about sexuality and indirect control of adolescent sexuality by adults.

In the United States, rising divorce rates, the ‘feminisation of culture’ and the, loss of self-reliance caused by widespread life-long wage-earning (rather than self-employment) caused concern in the decades after the Civil War that ended in 1865.² Since the 1960s individuals’ rights to freedom, self-expression and self-gratification have, through judicial action, overridden the rights of communities and families to decency, order and safety.³  

Compare the brutality, pornography and Jack of musicality of rap, grunge and rock in the affluent 1990s to the dances, melodies and lyrics of popular music and jazz in the Depression period of the 1930s. Spiritual desolation is now reflected in all the indices of social dysfunction - crime, alcohol and drug abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, divorce, illegitimacy, promiscuity, ignorance, and so forth.

Ordinary Americans know that social arrangements are profoundly disturbed - the Million Man march, Promise Keepers, Christian revival and many other initiatives testify to ordinary Americans’ determination to re-establish families, love and respect. The way forward in South Africa is to put the work of people’s salvation largely into their own hands.

Family planning in Zimbabwe⁴ was run very successfully by rural non-professionals with the support of an excellent minimal administrative training and professional organisation. Building a new moral consensus that restores moral culpability for sexuality to every man, woman and youth is the work of ordinary people and their local organisations, like the SAPLER pioneers working in schools who are given basic training, income and administrative support.

Most of the everyday tasks required to roll back the pandemic, including maintenance of anti-retroviral treatment and TB treatment, and related issues such as sexual violence and teenage pregnancy, belong in the hands of ordinary people who are currently without work or incomes but who are already experts on their own communities.

All too often people are given training and develop skills, competence, leadership and workloads. They are then promoted or recruited into formal jobs paid according to formal sector norms. They can now afford to move out of the community where they are effective, to join the expensive, largely ineffective insiders in the city. HIV/AIDS is the people’s task.

NOTES

1.        Peter Delius and Clive Glaser, Sexual Socialisation in Historical Perspective. Paper presented at the conference, Aids in Context, University of the Witwatersrand, 2001.

2.        Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites.  Norton, 1995.

3.        Robert Bork, Slouching towards Gomorrah.  Regan Books, 1996.

4.        Peter Dodds, Zimbabwe.  SAPLER Survey, in www.population.org.za, 1994.