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Population policy forum. Beginning with individual women.

When IPPF was formed in 1952, its driving force was concern for women, for women's health and women's reproductive rights. 40 years on, those same issues are still at the heart of IPPF's policies and programs. Marge Berer has made a plea for a feminist approach within international family planning, and IPPF is in complete agreement that women's needs and choices should be paramount. All individuals and couples must have the basic human right to decide freely and responsible the number and spacing of their children. Women must also have the right to receive full information and counselling to choose their contraceptive method. Our secretary general, Dr. Halfdan Mahler, stresses that if family planning is to be effective, it must always begin with the individual, taking the whole issue of reproductive health into consideration. Men must share the responsibility for sexual behavior and family planning, and real equality will only be attained when women are empowered to regulate their own fertility. As nongovernmental health care organizations, IPPF's member associations offering services in 133 countries are able to work towards the principles of informed choice and voluntary family planning--even where governments may not be giving women the choices they deserve.

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Population policy forum. Women as subjects, not objects.

I very much agree with Marge Berer that feminists must recognize that there needs to be a population policy, worldwide and country by country, that encourages lower birth rates and that it is essential to start talking about population policies that respect and promote women's moral agency. Indeed I think it would be fair to say that the failure to respect and promote women's moral agency is the major reason why government-sponsored population policies have failed in the past. Male population planners habitually think of mass population as objects, rather than subjects, of population policy. This is why they think so readily of "incentives" or even more coercive methods. Birth control is thought of as a "war" to be imposed on the population, not as an integral part of the self-development of the people's own capacity to organize and become decisionmakers. If this is true in relation to the male population, it is even more so in relation to women. Population policy continues the basic male approach to women as bodies under their control, not as self-actualizing subjects. Until population policies take as their starting point women's human development as persons and moral agents in their own right, such policies both will be abusive to women and also will not "work." However, Marge Berer's remarks about oppressive, dehumanizing governments as incapable of promoting any other form of population policy give one pause. If this is the case, then neither national governments nor most international agencies linked to Western hegemonic neocolonialism can be the authentic promoters of feminist population policy. There must be a global effort to build parallel women's health organizations that work on the grassroots level with women, especially poor women, to empower these women themselves to become the leaders in educational and economic development of the women in their communities. Only in and through this larger context can such women both learn how to use and become empowered to use methods of birth control.

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Population policy forum. Redefining survival.

Although I agree with most of the content and the essence of Marge Berer's excellent paper, I beg to differ with her on whether there is a need for a feminist population policy. If we advocate respect for women's needs and right, then we have to believe that women will want to regulate and limit their fertility when it is no longer an essential element in their survival: today, childbearing is a social or economic necessity for many women, even to the detriment of their health. No set numbers should be designated as the ideal family size, nor should any form of ideal family be posed in the 1st place. However, there is an issue of pragmatism or opportunity value that we have to consider. Women need contraceptives to regulate their fertility, among the many other things they need to empower themselves. Those who control economic resources at both the national and international levels are more interested in investing in family planning programs than in other health or development needs. We will not be able to change their motives to some abstract egalitarianism in which they never believed. Our challenge, as feminists, is to develop our own capabilities in 2 ways. One is to gain the technical and intellectual know-how to make a clearer argument that demonstrates the link between effective contraceptive use and addressing women's reproductive health and other economic and social needs. We must convince a reluctant establishment that without empowering women they will not achieve their goals. The 2nd is to create our own organizations and modes of operation that will allow resources to flow into programs and activities that will work for women and not get marginalized and impoverished into paralysis.

Contraception↗