Birth Control Can Fight Climate Change
But mostly only if you are in a rich country.
Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash
On my Friday Substack, I posted a picture of birth control pills, and in my 2 sentence post I said:
Nearly half of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended.
“These pills could solve climate change and the environmental devastation awaiting us.”
I always try to tee up what I'm talking about on Monday with a little preview of that on Friday. I want to plant the seed of that topic for people to think about over the weekend before I explore it in more detail on Monday. That's how it was in my head anyway when I thought up that structure.
Oops.
But on Friday someone reached out to me after that short post, expressing their disappointment that I was suggesting that birth control could be used to combat climate change. They never said so directly, but I believe they thought I meant that women in poor countries should stop having children – because this is something that some people in wealthy countries like to present as a solution.
It is not, and that's not what I was saying.
Birth control can help with climate change and the other environmental challenges we face because we humans are causing the problem. Birth control is not the only solution, of course, it's just one of many that we should be talking about, thinking about, and acting upon. Birth control should also not solely be the job of women. Men are just as responsible for bringing children into the world and should share responsibility and birth control choices.
Look at the per capita data.
The average CO2 emissions for a person in India, the world's most populous country, is about 1.9 tons per year. In the United States, that number is about 14.4 tons per year. Start your talks about birth control in the United States if you're talking about climate. And as you can see from the chart above you can also talk about Australia in Canada. The European Union and the UK have similar profiles of high CO2 emissions.
Rates of birth control use can vary widely between developed markets. Over 80% of women in Australia ages 16 to 49 use some form of contraception. Around 65% of women in the United States 15-49 use birth control, according to a survey conducted from 2017 to 2019 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Only about 39% of women in the 15-19 age group used contraception, but this rate steadily increases as women in the United States get older. This 15% gap in birth control between Australia and the United States is magnified even further when you realize that the population of Australia is only about 8% that of the United States.
While birth control is freely available to most women and men in Western nations, in some places, there are several forces hindering the use of birth control. These can be things such as a lack of access, healthcare costs (we don't have National Health care in the US), cultural and religious reasons. If someone is ever talking about birth control as a solution to climate change, they should probably start talking about the United States.
China and India have more people in the United States, but their per capita CO2 emissions are much less. It's a similar story with other countries with large populations such as Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Brazil, numbers 4 through 7 in the world population tables. But their per capita numbers for CO2 emissions are much less than what we have here in the United States.
The developed world can lean into population loss.
The chart below comes from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It shows the fertility rate of OECD countries in the past and present day. OECD countries are mostly the most developed countries in the world. These countries have both the highest historical contribution of CO2 and other greenhouse gases as well as the highest per capita numbers. The trend of lower fertility rates in these countries isn't a bad thing.
Lower birth rates are birth control. People deciding to have fewer children in these countries for economic or personal reasons, is birth control. We just don't think of it that way. The pill, condoms, or some other material birth control device is often seen as birth control, but the decision to use these methods is of course a conscious one. Birth control has intent behind it.
In our current economic thinking, this consistent line of blue bars for rich counties all below the replacement rate of 2.1 children is seen as a tragedy. How were we going to grow if we don't make more consumers?
The answer is, we won't grow. And that's a good thing. That is what we need. Stepping away from economic growth as the organizing principle for economic and personal lives is healthy. That means less throughput in the economy, less use of our resources, less environmental degradation, and less CO2 and other greenhouse gases. This also means more time spent on the things in life that we all say matter, such as belonging to something larger than ourselves and connections with other people. If these are the things we say we want, lean into having them.
The graying of these OECD countries does present problems. We have to care for the aging populations of these countries. We can do that. We can take care of those people.
Spending less energy trying to grow, and more energy on care, education, and the human outcomes we all claim to value over our economic lives, is the path we can take if we want to.
For the sake of humanity in the long term, that may just have to require fewer children in rich countries around the world. Data shows that with more education for young girls around the world and access to birth control for both men and women in developing markets, birth rates in those countries would also fall. But they shouldn't be made to fall just so all of us in the rich world don't have to cut back on our overconsumption and overpopulation.
Yes, declining “fertility rates” is the most promising way to save our planet. Green house gas emissions correlate closely with the number of people on the planet.
Declines in global fertility rates are already happening and will continue unless ethno-nationalist capitalists (think most right-wingers such as Trump and Musk) can shut down and reverse the progress of women in gaining a degree of freedom from the structures of patriarchy. Women choosing to remain single and unmarried until late twenties or early thirties is the fundamental factor in declining birth rates. This change results in 1.5 to 2.5 fewer children per mother than a generation ago. Green house gas emissions correlate closely with the number of people on the planet.
As your chart indicates, South Korea has the lowest fertility rate of “advanced” economies. It also has an ethnic-nationalist capitalist elite who recognize this “threat” to their dominant interests and they have consequently targeted women’s rights. I expect this right-wing reaction to grow as the environmental situation worsens. Women, men who support women’s rights and freedoms, and all who care about the planet must organize now to counter the right-wing reaction.
Thanks for having this important conversation. For thirty years many have shied away from the topic of population growth and/or have been reluctant to use the very accurate term, "overpopulation." If we're in overshoot, we're overpopulated (unless and until we get over our obsession with economic growth and curb our overconsumption). With 8 blllion + on the planet, we'd all need to live a very meager existence to get out of overshoot, so yes, we're overpopulated.
And you're right to focus on the rich, overdeveloped world, where each birth does represent a huge additional footprint on the planet. We should not relax about our birth rate just because it's below replacement level. At our level of consumption, we owe it to the world (and our kids) to contract our population (which we can do, voluntarily and ethically), even as we also contract our economic throughput.
But we should also be clear that - as long as we're working to clean up our own back yard, we can and should also acknowledge that the population numbers do also matter in the nations that are not yet overdeveloped - unless we're all planning to keep them living in poverty. As their lives improve, their footprints will grow. Of course, it will be very difficult for them to improve their lives unless they choose to have smaller families. Leaders in most of these countries know this and are working on it. So our support for family planning around the world is welcome and needed.
The fear of privileged, overconsuming white people in the rich world imposing birth control on black or brown skinned people in the "developing" world so we can maintain our obscene lifestyles is not helpful or needed. That attitude and motivation is rare. It is not shared by most family planning advocates today.