I am sure that by now you know that I am not writing about real jumbo jets, but an equivalent number of passengers. Every year, year in, year out, 600,000 women are dying, nearly all in the third world, from pregnancy-related causes, nearly all of which are preventable.(1) How many of us in the comfortable first world know? How many care? Some of us find it easier to worry about the impact on the global environment of explosive population growth than about the apparently hopeless difficulties of day-to-day life and death in distant countries of which we know little.

The problems are, however, related. Women are dying unnecessarily because they lack basic human rights and particularly because they lack full reproductive rights. These deficiencies fuel rapid population growth. There is plenty of evidence that many women in developing countries are having more children than they really want, but as Kalimi Mworia of the International Planned Parenthood Foundation (IPPF) in Nairobi has said, many third world women "do not own their own bodies."

Nowhere in the world do women enjoy full equality with men. A recent study by Agnes Wold and Christine Wenneras of peer review in the Swedish Medical Research Council (2) has shown that even in enlightened Scandinavia there is consider- able bias against women in science. In a large number of less-developed countries, however, women and girls have to cope with gross inequalities.

Discrimination starts before birth} In many countries sons are valued much more highly than daughters, and, in some, female fetuses are selectively aborted. Although female infanticide is much less prevalent than in the past, severe neglect of girl children can have an equivalent effect. Girls and women often have to work harder than boys and men and yet may be denied equal access to nutrition, health care, and education. In some countries young girls are sold into prostitution, and in quite a few they can be forced into early marriage. The adult woman may be unable to own land or inherit property. She may be denied access to credit and may have little hope of economic independence. Worldwide, girls and women are the victims of violent attacks and rapes. It is even possible for the victim of a rape to be jailed while her attacker goes free.

All of these abuses constitute a denial of human rights, and many are enshrined in law, despite countries' stated commitment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Even where laws uphold equality or embody protective measures such as forbidding child marriage, they are not necessarily enforced. Laws often seem ineffective in combating strongly entrenched cultural practices, such as female genital mutilation or early marriage. (We also see from the example in Sweden quoted above that, even with full equality guaranteed by law, a male hierarchy is able to hold onto power by subtle means.) Nevertheless, legal equality is an important first step in improving the position of women. We in the developed world should be working energetically to achieve it. A 1992 UNICEF report referred to "the apartheid of gender" and pointed out that discrimination against women was an injustice on a far

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greater scale than the apartheid system. Apartheid was rightly opposed by the international community on the ground that "a people's rights and opportunities-where they can live, what education and health care they will receive, what job they can do, what income they can earn, what legal standing they will have-should not depend on whether they were born black or white. Yet it seems that the world is prepared to accept, with none of the depth and breadth of opposition that has been seen during the apartheid years, that all of these things can depend on the accident of being born male or female." (4)

It has been widely recognized that raising the status of women and giving them more control over their lives is an essential step on the road to population stabilization. If women are valued for themselves, son preference is reduced, with a consequent lowering of average family size. Educated women marry later and have smaller, better-spaced families who are more likely to be healthy and survive. This in turn leads to lower birthrates. Women with a measure of economic independence have more say in their reproductive lives and can (and do) choose to have smaller families.

The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo in 1994 reached agreement on the need for the empowerment of women and the improvement of their status. In particular, governments were urged to eliminate all forms of discrimination against female children and to work to eliminate preferences for sons. The achievements of Cairo were trammelled by the obstructive, anti-choice behavior of the Vatican, which greatly weakened the international community's commitment to eliminating unsafe abortion, but it was notable for cooperative between the population lobby and feminists, groups who had previously been suspicious of one another, but who were now to some extent able to unite against a common enemy for the advancement of women.

Even after Cairo, however, suspicions remained. Many feminists have viewed population advocates as fanatically wedded to "population control" and prepared to countenance any means to achieve this end. It is quite true that in the past some population programs have been coercive and insensitive to the reproductive needs of both men and women. A few still are. One problem is that, in countries where the power structure is overwhelmingly male, official programs can be run without a real understanding of the needs and problems of women. It is also possible to run population programs by focusing on the goal of eventual population stabilization and various intermediate targets without paying much attention to what people really want in the present.

Those concerned about population growth are also criticized for putting demographic goals first and "pursuing public policies that are likely to have the most direct impact on reducing birthrates even if they are not the most important in terms of improving the quality of people's lives." (5) The same critic also points out that family planning may be divorced from basic health care and funded at the latter's expense. Given the dramatic improvement that has resulted in quality of life wherever birthrates have been reduced, it s hard to see the validity of the first claim. According to UNICEF, "the responsible planning of births is one of the most effective and least expensive ways of improving the quality of life on earth," and "family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single technology now available to the human race." (6)

The second charge is clearly true in certain countries, but it is difficult to see how really poor countries can do otherwise. Given their very limited resources, they are never going to be able to provide all the services to their people that we would like to see. They are forced to prioritize. Faced with a rapidly growing population and therefore ever-increasing needs, it seems to make sense to give priority to slowing down population growth, provided that human rights are respected and that the measures taken do genuinely benefit the people who are affected by them.

I have personally been attacked by certain feminists for daring to "talk numbers" in the context of population. There seems to be a misconception that, if one uses statistics in discussions about groups of people, then one is ceasing to think of them as people and must also be wedded to coercive methods of "population control." I disagree profoundly. A baby dies, and everyone who knows the family is sad. The world in general, however, knows nothing of that baby or its death. A mother dies as a result of an unsafe abortion, trying to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. This is a tragedy for her family, and particularly for her surviving children, who may even die as a result of their loss. The world remains ignorant. Statistics tell us that each year about 4 mil- lion newborn babies die. Each year there are about 20 million unsafe abortions. (7) These statistics help us to under- stand the scale of the problems and the human misery they embody. They make us realize that the problems need to be tackled urgently.

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In the same way, the knowledge that a country's population is likely to double in only 25 years shows us that it is facing an uphill struggle to improve the lot of its people and that standard of living may even deteriorate as a result of population pressure. This should galvanize us to action. The real problem is not the population researchers statistics but that the statistics are brushed aside. Except at international conferences, most developed countries have shown great sensitivity to the pain behind the figures and have been I willing to live up to the funding commitments they made Cairo, leaving the poorer countries to stagger along as b they can, parceling out their inadequate resources. Development aid is seen as a way of promoting the commerce of the donor country --only a week before I write, the British Minister for International Development was heavily criticized saying that it was not part of her job to help British business achieve contracts overseas. Only a very few rich countries; meeting the U.N. target of 0.7% of gross national product going to overseas aid, with 4% of that money being devoted population programs.

So much needs to be done. My hope is that population advocates and feminists can unite in the common cause of working for reproductive rights and empowerment of women. We may never agree in the details, but we should not fight one another. If we succeed, the prize will be a better quality of life for all humanity.

2. A. Wold and C. Wenneras, Nature, 387 (1997): 341-343.

3. For an accessible account of discrimination against girls, see People and the Planet, 7 (1998): 3. Their Web site is www.oneworld.org/patp/

4. The State of the World's Children, UNICEF, 1992.

5. B. Hartmann, "Cairo Consensus Sparks New Hopes, Old Worries," Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy, Summer 1997.

6. State of the World's Children, UNICEF, 1992.

7. Data from World Health Organization.

Diana Brown represents the International Humanist and Ethical Union at the United Nations in Geneva and is a former chairman of Population Concern in London.

From Free Inquiry Spring 1999. pp. 25-27. 1999 by Free Inquiry.

Article Citation:

Brown, Diana. 2001. "The Misery Behind the Statistics: Women Suffer Most." Robert M. Jackson (ed.), Annual

Editions: Global Issues 01/02 Seventh Edition. pp. 43-45.