Will World Population Day Open The Gates To Coercive Contraception?

On July 11, World Population Day, the British government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are hosting an international Family Planning Summit in London to launch an ambitious $4 billion contraceptive program initiated by Melinda Gates. Its aim is to get 120 million poor women, mainly in Africa and South Asia, access to modern contraception as well as to stimulate research into new birth control methods.

On the surface it all sounds good, wrapped in the language of saving and empowering women. But many reproductive health and human rights activists worry that the summit represents a serious backslide to the bad old days of population control when contraception was deployed as a technical fix to reduce birthrates. Indeed, the Gates Foundation's family planning strategy blames population growth for exacerbating all matter of social ills, from stressing government budgets to contributing significantly to "the global burden of disease, environmental degradation, poverty and conflict." It as if the fertility of poor women causes these problems and not the exploitative policies and practices of the rich and powerful.

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