Claire at Feministe asks an interesting question- Is such a thing as a feminist population policy possible?

My short answer is yes, but only so far as educating and providing work opportunities as well as voluntary methods of birth control work together to make women choose to have fewer children. Notice the word choose.

I hear from a lot of well-meaning quasi-progressives who are worried about overpopulation. Almost exclusively they mean too many brown people in poor parts of the world. But a family of 8 in a third world country uses less resources than a family of 4 in this one. Hell, my poor family of 2 uses half what the average American family of the same size uses. Amazing what poverty does for your carbon footprint score.

But I don’t actually think we have an overpopulation problem. I think it’s a red herring of an argument. What we have is a resource distribution problem. Canada is not overpopulated. Europe is depopulating. The only reason America isn’t facing problems with a dropping replacement rate is because of immigration. And immigration, since the very earliest humans, has been our way of dealing with societies who have gone over their carrying capacity (along with war and new technologies, the first diminishes population and the second expands carrying capacity by increasing productivity). We have scientific proof the the first humans walked out of Africa in search of a better life and managed to spread themselves literally around the globe, not in one fell swoop but in groups over tens of thousands of years.

The crisis (or crises) we are facing right now won’t be solved by the immediate forcible sterilization of every woman of child bearing age ( or every brown person in India). We have a petroleum based society that is at carrying capacity coupled with the devastating weather patterns brought on by global warming (which happens to be caused by our petroleum economy). There is only one solution to both those problems, and fewer babies ain’t gonna change the weather anytime soon.

New technologies might though. The faster we can get ourselves off the gasoline standard, the better. And replacing it with some other non-renewable, global warming causing technology just shifts the problem slightly.