The Ethics of Reproduction on a Finite Planet
The Ethics of Reproduction on a Finite Planet
Talk by Roger Martin, Chair, Population Matters, to The Ethical Society
My organization, Population Matters, is an environmental charity, primarily concerned with
the accelerating rate of anthropogenic planetary degradation, and its implications for the future
of life on Earth, including human life.
It is axiomatic that: total human impact on the planet is the average impact per person,
multiplied by the number of people – like the area of a rectangle is length x width; and natural
resources per person is total resources divided by the number of people. Population growth is
thus a multiplier of all environmental and resource problems. Almost all environmental
problems boil down to ‘too many people, consuming too much stuff’; and the ethics of
consumption, and its grossly inequitable distribution between the world’s rich and poor, is
widely discussed in ‘green’ and developmental circles. But ultimately, a finite planet is like a
finite pizza: the more we are, the less for each.
Population Matters are, however, almost alone in campaigning on human numbers. Our
explosive population growth is very recent – it has tripled in my lifetime. Since 1950, our
numbers have increased at about 10,000 times the rate before the invention of agriculture, and
at 50-100 times the rate since. It is currently some 80 million per year, or 10,000 per hour; it
tracks the growth phase of a typical algal bloom or lemming migration; and it is a function of
more births than deaths. The UN now projects that by 2050 we will be somewhere in the range
8.1 to 10.6 billion – a range of 2.5 billion, or the entire population of the planet when I was 9 –
depending on our collective reproductive choices. Yet although some 40% of pregnancies
worldwide are unintended, and many unwanted, the moral high ground has nonetheless long
been occupied by those claiming that individual reproductive rights are sacrosanct; and that the
expression of any concerns about the wider implications is morally reprehensible.
The ethics of physics? We, however, do see a wider framework for the ethical debate than
pure individual human rights, namely the laws of physics, which dictate a harsh fact. Since
indefinite growth in anything physical is physically impossible on a physically finite planet,
population growth will definitely stop at some point. But this can only happen: either sooner
by fewer births, the humane way (contraception, backed by non-coercive policy to make it
universally available and encourage people to use it); or later by more deaths, the inhumane
way (the natural controls by which every other species is kept in balance with its habitat, and
evolution driven – famine, disease and predation/war). Campaigners against the former are in
practice campaigning for the latter.
In addition to this basic intergenerational ethic, we see several other ethical reasons for
people fortunate enough to have the ability to choose, to balance their individual reproductive
rights with wider social and environmental responsibilities.
International ethics: Every additional citizen of a rich country appropriates resources which are then
not available to the poor, and thus tends to ‘push someone else off the global plate’. The UK is an
extreme example. Its population is projected to grow by 10 million in the next 22 years; England is
already the most overcrowded country in Europe; every extra Briton has, for instance, the carbon
footprint of twenty-two more Malawians – and the poor will suffer first and worst from climate
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The Ethics of Reproduction on a Finite Planet
change.
Ecological ethics: If two people with two living children have a third child, they will in fact ratchet up
the global population and thus: ratchet up damage to the environment; bring nearer the day of serious
ecological failure; and ratchet down everyone else's share of dwindling natural resources to survive
this. So an individual decision to create a whole extra lifetime of environmental impacts and resource
consumption affect everyone else (including their own children). Having an extra child is by far the
biggest single environmental decision couples take; and the ethical option is two or fewer.
Inter-species ethics: The population explosion since the industrial revolution is a major driver
of the current 'Anthropocene extinction” of biodiversity, as humans occupy, degrade, pollute
and destroy wildlife habitats across the world, largely in pursuit of ever more food and
material products to supply ever more, ever ‘richer’ people. Apart from the folly of destroying
an important part of our own life support system – for instance the many $ billion we receive
free each year from pollination and other ecological services - other species have an intrinsic
‘right’ to a share of the planet.
There is another set of humanitarian ethics around the 215 million women with an unmet
need for family planning. There are some 50,000 deaths from unsafe abortions each year;
while the number of women dying from pregnancy-related causes is equivalent to 4 full jet
liners crashing every day. The close correlation of high fertility rates with high maternal and
child mortality (and hunger and poverty) is well established - every mother on $1 per day
knows that her family will be better fed if there are three children round the table rather than
ten. The denial to these poor women of their human right to take control of their own fertility
causes the monstrous abuse of coercive and dangerous pregnancy thousands of times a day.
The unethical neglect of family planning: UNICEF said: “Family planning could do more good for
more people at less cost than any other known technology.” Yet aid for family planning remains
derisory – at $450 million per year, it is about 10% of the Goldman Sachs bonus pot. All it would take
to meet the unmet need in full, and take a large step towards stabilizing human numbers, is an
additional $3.5 billion per year, or roughly half what Americans spend each year on Halloween. So
why on Earth isn’t the money forthcoming? It’s such an obvious ‘win, win, win, win’ – for women’s
health, for their families’ prosperity, for their countries’ development, and for a sustainable planet for
future generations.
Its cause - the ‘mad taboo’, and the ethics of its founders: The answer seems to lie in a crazy and
profoundly damaging taboo on discussing population growth rationally. This emerged in the 1980s
from a bizarre and unconscious coalition comprising: the religious right, led of course by the Pope in
defense of his church’s monstrous and indefensible doctrine on contraception; the liberal left, who
assumed population concern must be somehow racist – old, rich, white, men (like me) telling young,
poor, black women to have fewer babies, and blaming them for their poverty if they did not; and the
feminist movement who objected, not unreasonably, to previous heavy-handed Malthusian
programmes instrumentalising women’s bodies for public purposes.
Perverse consequences; This coalition succeeded at the 1994 Cairo Population Conference in redefining the ‘population’ issue purely as one of ‘sexual and reproductive health and women’s rights
(SRHR)’, thus marginalizing it as merely a sub-set of ‘Health’, of no concern to people outside Health
ministries. Aid for family planning promptly fell sharply, while anti-retrovirals for treating HIV/AIDS
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The Ethics of Reproduction on a Finite Planet
pre-empted an ever increasing share of the ‘SRH’ budget. This left family planning as an SRH
residual, instead of the solution to a vast global problem.
Self-righteousness versus effectiveness: The feminists in particular, however, continued to insist on
their ‘SRHR-only’ approach in their claim for funds, apparently content to take their place in a long
queue beside malaria, tuberculosis, etc. They were fierce in their condemnation of those like
Population Matters, who wanted to engage the attention of all the other Ministries with a relevant
interest – Finance, Agriculture, Water, Environment, Education, Energy and not least Security, as well
as Health. We believe, however, that this will be more effective in raising the priority, and hence the
funds, to meet the unmet need of all those poor women whom our critics claim to champion. Given:
their own failure for 18 years to raise more than trivial sums; their apparently greater concern about the
faintest possibility of coercive contraception (which no-one advocates) than about the daily horrors of
coercive pregnancy they have failed to prevent; and their obsession with linguistics (eg ‘demographic
dynamics’ permissible, but ‘population growth/ stabilization’ banned), these critics’ claim to the moral
high ground is meretricious. Their sense of self-righteousness seems to matter more to them than their
clients.
The NGOs ‘silent lie’: The position of the environmental and development NGOs on population
raises a different ethical issue. Each of them knows individually that our Patron David Attenborough
was stating a simple fact when he said “All environmental problems become harder – and ultimately
impossible – to solve with ever more people”; yet with the honorable exception of SCF, they
deliberately omit any mention of this fact from their public statements, for fear of the mad taboo. They
thus imply that they can make the world sustainable and prosperous regardless of how many people
there are, when they all know it is not true. They thus tell a ‘silent lie’ – ‘suppressio veri and suggestio
falsi’, as we practitioners in the Foreign Office used to call it.
Governments’ ‘silent lie’: Official bodies rarely say anything potentially controversial until the
NGOs have done so first. Hence the slavish adherence to the taboo of all international bodies dealing
with problems of which population growth is obviously a driver, like the UN climate talks, the
Biodiversity Convention, and the ‘Rio+20’ Conference on Sustainable Development – in striking
contrast to the blunt comment of Maurice Strong, Secretary-General of the first 1992 (pre-taboo)
conference: “Either we reduce our numbers voluntarily, or nature will do it for us brutally”.
Ethical action: Giving very high priority to meeting the unmet need for family planning in
poor countries is uncontroversial. But population policy in Britain? How to achieve a
nationally agreed ‘Population Stabilisation Objective’? Coercion is clearly unacceptable in any
democracy; so the first steps are to break the taboo, recognize the problem, encourage rational
debate, and agree the objective. At the national level we recommend: seeking a ‘culture shift’
in favour of small families through public information campaigns; including population ethics
in improved sex and relationships education; adopting the long-term policy aim of balanced
migration; and replacing child benefit and tax-credit after a second child with ad hoc child
poverty relief payments. Some people see the last two as unethical; we see them as forced
upon us by the over-riding duty to leave our children a sustainable country.
Other ethical issues: There is also the ethical status of someone choosing to have more
children than they can afford to feed and house, thereby forcing the rest of us to feed and house
them through our taxes. We do not consider this morally justified. On the other hand we would
wish to give due credit to the unsung heroes of reproductive ethics: the child-free by choice;
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fertile couples who adopt instead of having their own children; and homosexual couples, by
definition sterile, who all leave more space for the rest of us and our children.
And finally: Three aphorisms of our founder David Willey:
“The children we have are a gift to ourselves; those we don’t have are a gift to humanity’;
“More humans, less humanity”; “Fewer people, better lives”.
17 April 2012
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