In Our Control (48 page)

Many women are choosing to go green in the bedroom, eschewing hormones and opting for less polluting birth control options like an IUD or a barrier. But barriers, too, have an environmental impact. Because condoms are the only effective method besides abstinence in preventing sexually transmitted infections, giving them up is not a good option for anyone at risk of these problems. Environmental organizations including the EPA are concerned about improper condom disposal. The Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit group based in Washington, DC, estimates that 30,252 condoms are picked up on beaches each year, and the devices are among the many pollutants making up the growing amount of sea trash disrupting coral reefs and ocean ecosystems.

Most condoms are made of latex. Because this is a natural product, they will (in theory) biodegrade with time. But since a condom isn’t entirely made of latex (there are other chemicals and material components involved), it does not happen very quickly. Polyurethane condoms, an important alternative for people with latex allergies, won’t break down because this material is a type of plastic. Female condoms are also made of polyurethane or equally unbiodegradable synthetic rubber. Lambskin condoms, literally made from animal skin, are completely biodegradable, but they don’t offer protection against sexually transmitted infections (however, if you are in a fluid-bonded relationship, this can be an option for you).

There is currently no way to recycle condoms. The paper box that the prophylactics are packaged in can be put in the recycling bin, but the foil or plastic wrappers and the condoms themselves cannot be. Health educators at Columbia University note that because of this, the best thing to do is to wrap condoms in a biodegradable material—like tissues or a paper
bag—and throw them into the trash can
⁴²
(wrapping them in plastic and other indestructible materials can prevent the already slow breakdown of the latex). The worst thing to do is to flush them down the toilet: this can clog your plumbing, and even rubber-based latex won’t biodegrade if it is underwater.

Some environmentalists argue that the environmental burden created by contraceptives, including estrogens and condoms, is offset by the prevention of many births. They insist that nothing creates more pollution than the birth of new people. A 2009
Washington Post
article chronicles this movement, noting, “Every new life … is a guarantee of new greenhouse gasses,”
⁴³
adding that “birth control could be one of the world’s best tools for fighting climate change.” A report published in 2009 out of Oregon State University estimates that one baby born in the United States will create 1,644 tons of carbon dioxide in his or her life, five times that of a child born in China and ninety-one times the amount of a baby born in Bangladesh.
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This sort of thinking—get rid of polluters rather than pollution—is obviously problematic. The suggestion of incentive programs to encourage family limitation smacks of older government efforts in the service of eugenics and social engineering. Research from the London School of Economics suggests that if governments offered free contraception, they could more effectively reduce carbon dioxide than by using alternative energy like solar and wind power. While making contraception accessible and affordable is, in itself, an admirable project, trying to limit or encourage births on the population level should not be the work of government. History tells us that these efforts generally create more problems than they solve. Instead, empowering and educating individuals to make informed choices and offering them the resources to do so is a more ethical course for leaders with respect to the reproductive lives of their citizens.

Luckily, leaders of most environmental groups don’t endorse this sort of thinking. The Sierra Club’s David Hamilton says, “I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade, but the primary solutions to climate change have to deal with what we do with the people who are here,”
⁴⁵
noting that encouraging renewable energy and reducing greenhouse gases should be chief among these efforts.

So what can a woman do if she wants to be green and also avoid pregnancy?
Considering a reusable barrier, like a diaphragm or a cervical cap, might be a start. While a condom must be thrown out after each use, a diaphragm is good for one to two years. This means saving money as well as preventing pollution and pregnancy. And for the committed environmentalist, particularly if she is in a committed relationship, the fertility awareness method offers the ultimate green birth control. This method requires education and dedication, but has no chemical or material waste. Many FAM educators emphasize that the method seeks to bring practitioners in synch with the rhythms of the natural world around them and with their own bodies.

We have much to learn about the environmental impact of our contraceptive choices, but including birth control chemicals and devices in our conversations about creating a greener world is a start. The effects of our choices on the natural world is a subject that touches on many intimate parts of our daily lives: how we get from place to place, what we eat, how we use the basic resources in our lives like water and heat. It should come as no surprise, then, that the massive project of environmental responsibility has moved into the bedroom.

Chapter Twelve
Around the World in Twenty-eight Days: International Issues in Reproductive and Contraceptive Health

Americans are used to thinking of birth control and abortion as thoroughly domestic issues, but reproductive politics have been global from the start
.
—Michelle Goldberg

The ground didn’t actually shake under John D. Rockefeller III as he spoke to a crowd of several hundred onlookers on a hot day in Bucharest, Romania, in 1974, but it might as well have. The occasion was a talk he gave at the United Nations’ first international conference on population. Rockefeller, a longtime supporter of population control initiatives, had been influential in establishing decades of American policy dealing with global fertility. During the height of Cold War hysteria about burgeoning third-world births, the grandson of the legendary industrialist had helped create the Population Council, a massive organization that remains active around the globe to the present day. Once a stalwart believer in plans to curb births in the developing world at all costs, Rockefeller announced to an astonished crowd that he had “changed his mind.”
¹

It wasn’t that he felt any less passionate about achieving this outcome; as one commentator would later summarize, he would come to feel that “people’s socioeconomic status, especially women’s, must improve before they will want to limit their families.”
²
Instead of creating massive programs that sought to provide birth control to faceless masses by any means, Rockefeller had come to believe that a better method lay in empowering women. “In my opinion,” he explained, “if we are to make genuine progress in economic and social development, if we are to make progress in achieving population goals, women increasingly must have greater freedom of choice in determining their roles in society.”
³

The speech, besides enraging the more traditionally minded sects of the population movement, signaled the start of a new chapter in the story
of American involvement in global reproductive politics. While the thirty years that followed the Bucharest conference would prove as tumultuous as those that preceded it, they charted a different course, one that was increasingly set by women. The government of the United States played a part in both leading and derailing global efforts to help women control their fertility and their lives. As the United States alternated between Republican and Democratic administrations, funding for women’s health became a ball in an increasingly raucous match of political tennis. Domestic politics were negotiated in an international arena, and women (often poor and with limited access to health care) were the losers.

When American feminists look at issues of reproduction and contraception, they tend to be preoccupied with domestic problems; abortion rights, insurance coverage for birth control, and the availability of new contraceptive methods often dominate discussions. While a comprehensive look at the particularities of international contraceptive access is beyond the scale of this chapter, it is important to understand the ways in which our social and political battles at home have impacted women abroad in complex and often dangerous ways.

The Most Dangerous Bomb: The Cold War and Population Fears

For the men who brought the population control movement to the forefront of American life, uncontrolled population growth was a threat far more tangible than the atom bomb or the other bogeymen of the anti-Communist United States in the 1950s. Eugenics, the pseudoscientific movement that had dominated early the twentieth-century contraceptive conversation, melted away, tainted by the revelations of Nazi atrocities and the Holocaust. But the ideas of Thomas Malthus, the eighteenth-century thinker on whose work many eugenic ideas were based, still carried currency. Malthus argued, among other things, that growing populations would eventually lead to a world without enough food to sustain its swelling throngs. After World War II it became apparent that fertility in the developed world had slowed, and that the developing world was for the first time showing higher rates of population growth. The social and political figures tracking this change saw it as a cause for alarm. Certainly,
part of their concern was attributable to simple racism and nationalism. The burgeoning population in Asia, Africa, and Latin America posed a potential threat to both white and American power. Many believed that if these growing groups ran out of resources, they would turn to Communism as a possible solution to their problems. On the other hand, some population control advocates were driven by humanitarian concerns. They believed that growing numbers would lead to starvation, suffering, and violence. The answer, thought men like Rockefeller, Dixie cup creator Hugh Moore, and others, was to provide poor countries with the means to limit fertility. Perhaps, they reasoned, waging a battle from within resource-strapped nations would prevent the need for one from without.

All these ideas were in the air when veteran journalist Arthur Krock published an October 1959 newspaper column called “The Most Dangerous Bomb of All,”
⁴
in which he summarized the impending peril for the general public. Concern about population control went mainstream. The idea of exporting contraceptives was radical at a time when birth control was still illegal in certain parts of the United States, and politicians avoided the issue, afraid of alienating powerful Catholic supporters. President Eisenhower, bowing to Catholic pressure and a general distaste for confronting sexual subject matter, insisted at a December 1959 press conference that the United States government was not, and would not be, in the birth control business.
⁵
By 1963 the former president had come to regret this stance, and as domestic politics shifted under the weight of the approval and popularity of the birth control pill and the official legalization of contraception, exporting modern family planning methods seemed increasingly possible. By 1965, President Johnson officially announced the intention of the United States to “use our knowledge to help deal with the explosion in the world’s population and the growing scarcity in world resources” in his State of the Union address.

Early efforts were at best simplistic and at worst coercive. Journalist Michelle Goldberg explains that “in one shameful instance” Johnson used “food aid as leverage to pressure India to adopt both agricultural reforms and family planning.”
⁶
Richard Nixon continued and expanded on Johnson’s work, buying the classic population control arguments lock, stock, and barrel. In the same year that Nixon was elected, a scientist named Paul Ehrlich published a best-selling book called
The Population Bomb
that assured the public in grim and fatalistic tones that “in the 1970s, the world will undergo famines; hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”
⁷
During these years, many organizations continued or initiated programs to help spread the contraceptive gospel, including the Population Council, Planned Parenthood, the Ford Foundation, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Ironically, in later decades conservative presidential administrations would work to inhibit the work of groups that earlier Americans had fought so hard to create.

During the early decades of population control, many people got involved out of an earnest desire to help people in distant lands. There was tremendous contraceptive creativity in these early years. For example USAID workers, concerned that plain, dry condoms would prove distasteful to users, switched to colorful lubricated models. In another innovation, seven iron tablets (the equivalent of the seven sugar pills in most birth control packs) were added to the twenty-one-pill regimen to streamline the transition between months for female patients who didn’t have calendars. An added bonus, of course, was that the iron supplements helped treat anemia.
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Thousands of people began to receive reproductive technologies as a result of these early efforts.

The biggest problem was that the (mostly male) members of the population control movement were only concerned with big picture issues. They worried about women in the abstract, not understanding the realities and specificities of individual lives, cultures, and families. They were concerned with outcomes and numbers, not with helping women change their lives for the better. By the mid 1970s, as birth control was moving from mainstream acceptance to outright respectability, a group of women was beginning to change the course of the movement from the inside. In her important chronicle of the history of modern reproductive justice struggles,
The Means of Reproduction
, Michelle Goldberg documents how, energized by the growth of second-wave feminism, these women began to ask questions that sought to reprioritize the international birth control business.