Vervolg:
To address population growth, many grass-roots activists took the education of ordinary Americans into their own hands, distributing literature and leaflets, fighting legal battles alongside frustrated women who sought sterilization and being an active force in the abortion rights movement. They not only promoted birth control, but also held contests for free vasectomies and prescriptions for the pill. With catchy bumper sticker slogans such as “The Population Bomb Is Everyone’s Baby” and “Control Your Local Stork,” many members of ZPG emphasized the importance of population activism at local levels, highlighting the positive changes people could make for the world. Focusing on each person’s responsibility and action, in part, challenged the pessimistic, declensionist message of the modern environmentalist movement.
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For example, from 1971 to 1973, ZPG, along with the Association for Voluntary Sterilization (AVS) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), ran “Operation Lawsuit,” which provided resources and advice to men and women seeking voluntary permanent sterilization. ZPG members fought to give more Americans access to birth control, abortion, sterilization, pregnancy prevention and comprehensive sex education. In doing so, they maintained, parenthood would become more deliberate and voluntary and thus, fewer people would be born. But ZPG also advocated for wider changes to American cultural and social norms, which were largely pronatalist, pushing back against the idea that motherhood was the be-all and end-all of womanhood. Some labeled these norms “coercive pronatalism,” citing the problem of accidental teen pregnancy, attacks on abortion rights and the minimum-age requirements that hospitals placed on women who wanted to be sterilized. Addressing women’s inequalities, they said, would inevitably drive down population growth.
Unfortunately, while these efforts helped advance the cause of women’s rights, they also distracted from the larger drivers of climate change, such as high fossil-fuel consumption. (In fact, much of the support for the population movement, including its racist, anti-immigrant leanings, has been funded by powerful and wealthy people and corporations profiting off the consumption of fossil-fuel energy.)
Today, we are seeing a resurgence of individual efforts to address environmental problems. We should praise those who seek to tackle climate change by choosing to have fewer children, but we should also be careful not to reignite the darker forces behind population control or lose sight of the most harmful sources of environmental degradation. And, as history demonstrates, any efforts to curb the population must be voluntary. Rather than focusing on controlling global fertility rates, we need to support and protect policies, ideas and activism that foster greater reproductive choice, resources and education for everyone.