Henrietta Hay's Column

Where in the world will we put all the people? How on earth will we grow the food to feed them? When on the planet will we give women the power to control their reproductive lives?

These are some of the questions that were asked by hundreds of men and Women from 180 nations who met in Cairo at the U. N. Conference on Population And Development, as they discussed global strategies for stabilizing world Population.

The Program of Action, which came out of Cairo, sets guidelines for the next 20 years for slowing the population explosion and encouraging Third World Development. It is not binding on any country but is designed to serve as a model for individual nations. Its goal is to stabilize world population at 7.27 billion by 2050.

It took roughly 10,000 generations for the world to reach a population of 2 billion. But in the last two, we have tripled that to almost 6 billion. The world's population is growing at about 90 million every year. If you want a frame of reference, there are 1 billion teenagers roaming the world today. That should get your attention. It is estimated that world population could reach 11.5 billion by 2050.

The conference was torn by controversy over abortion, but the real issue was, and is, saving women's lives. Where abortion is legal it must be made safe. Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland put the matter quite succinctly on the opening day of the conference. She said, 'I have tried in vain to understand how the term "reproductive health care" can be read as promoting abortion as a means of family planning. Rarely, if ever, have so many misrepresentations been used to imply a meaning that was never there in the first place.'"

The issues are family planning and women's reproductive health care. In a recent column, Dottie Lamm wrote that, " 500,000 women die each year of pregnancy related causes. A great percentage of these deaths are due to the complications of unsafe abortions, or postpartum hemorrhage, which is brought on by too many closely spaced pregnancies." When we read of the 35-year-old woman in Central America who died after 21 pregnancies, and know that there are all too many like her around the world, the time is long past for action.

There is now a consensus worldwide that development, education for women, and a woman's right to choose the number and spacing of children are the chief factors in slowing out of control population growth. According to Lamm, virtually all the world's great religions and 93% of religious leaders support family planning. The Clinton administration has given strong leadership on this issue.

What we are really talking about is empowering women, giving them control over their bodies, a very threatening idea. Countries where women are treated as people rather than chattels, where they have some choices about their own lives, have lower birth rates. Countries where women have some degree of education and economic security have the lowest rates.

Italy's fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, with an average 1.3 births per woman aged 15-49. The U. S. rate is 2.1, while the rate in Nigeria is 6.4.

Some nations are lowering birth rates without industrial development by giving job opportunities and birth control knowledge to women. Bangladesh, a name synonymous with poverty, starvation and overcrowding, has cut its fertility rate from 7.4 to 4. Nurses and social workers go from village to village each month, checking the health of women and dispensing condoms, birth control pills and other contraceptives. The program is now being extended to cover all aspects of maternal and child health and education, and employment for women. This reflects the belief of experts that the best long-term way to reduce fertility rates in the Third World - or in any other world - is to raise the status of women.

Robert Cassen in a recent essay wrote, "The case for activist population policies is fundamentally a moral and humanitarian one. Individuals and couples should only have the children they want and can support; children have a right to be wanted and to enter a family and community that values them." And women have a right to be valued for human qualities beyond their reproductive capacity.