Chapter Five：The Modern State and Family Planning Program in Taiwan and Singapore
5.4 The Struggle at the Crack of Economic Reason
In 1968 Paul and Anne Ehrlich published the book The Population Bomb which gained the neo-Malthusians’ concern. Anne Ehrlichs was responsible for theorizing the equation: I= P*A*T to interpret the relationship among population and economic development. Where I is the impact on the environment and is function as population size, when P the population multiplied by stream of goods and per person and A identified by per capita consumption or income as proxies multiplied by a factor that embodies the level of technology T, such as energy, commodities, and space. For Neo-Malthusians, they believed that too many people reproducing would retard
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economic growth. Furthermore, too many people would destroy the environment, social service, and may fuel conflict and poverty (Sen, 1994). The neo-Malthusians and eugenics provided the main ideology, the set of belief that gives the coherence to the collective activities of population control movement. The neo-Malthusians attempted to adopt more strong stands that ‘beyond family planning measures’ were needed. The advocacy in the media, target and incentive were considered to lowering fertility (Davis, 1967)
There are three demographic assumptions of Family Planning programs: (1) Rapid population growth impedes economic development, to lower rates of population growth as well as to lower fertility will lead to improve the living standards of human welfare. (2) Couples in developing countries want fewer children and have more interest in regulating their fertility. (3) Making contraception widely available is an effective way to meet couple’s need for fertility regulation and to lower fertility levels as well as the small size of family. These three assumptions are also the basic economic ideas for the advocators of population policy. Under these assumptions, the unborn child having no any economic competiveness while the developing countries seek their dream of striving to be the modern nations in global politics. With the plots of trends of fertility in Thailand (1969-83) and in Taiwan (1965-85) reached to the tremendous regression line in the Eastern Asian elites (Bongaarts, 1987), the human dignity of the unborn child is determined to be the weak-tie of the economic development.
Dose the unborn children have the rights to life? Most people tend to choose silence on the issue of abortion. Some people might have the experience of aborting babies, some don’t. The most difficult part is to tell others about their true stories. Sometimes, even the families are enclosed to know the true stories about their missing babies, grandchildren, nieces or cousins. The United Nations held World Population Conference in Bucharest, Romania from 19-30 August 1974. Representatives from 137 states, 109 international NGOs, various UN agencies and demography communities attended. That conference signaled an international forum which was not the same as previous conference limited within demographers from 1954 to 1965 (Finkle and Crane, 1975). Furthermore, in 1984 the United Nations International Conference of Population was held in Mexico City. President Reagan took a strong stand to oppose abortion and announced a new policy, known as ‘Mexico City Policy’
to prohibit the U.S. Family Planning funds to any overseas organizations that offering counseling about abortion or abortion referrals in other nations. This policy marked the greatest triumph of the pro-life movement. The Policy was continued by President George H.W. Bush, but rescinded by President Clinton in 1993, and reinstated by
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President George W. Bush in 2001. And President Obama rescinded it again in January 23, 2009.
The core idea of Mexico City Policy plans to protect the human dignity, especially the embryo. Abortions only could be done in response to rape, incest, or threat to the mother’s life or health. President Reagan stated that “We believe population programs can and must be truly voluntary, cognizant of the right and responsibilities of the individuals and families, and respectful of religious and cultural values. When they are, such programs can make an important contribution to economic and social development, to the health of the mothers and children, and to the stability of the family and of society.” The Policy provides the stand of protection for the children before birth as well as after birth. The empirical investigation of the relationship between state population policies and individual childbearing decision is expected to provide a clearer picture of individual perceptions and experiences of state policies of human reproduction. People are blocked by their complicated interplay and led by the mass media only labeled the pro-lifer as the conservative Catholic stand (Hudgson, 2007).
The abortion is a sex-based inequality which is embedded both in biological nature and the social structure. The altitude of pro-or anti- abortion may be very personal or public issue to different people. ‘No harm principle’ is also ignored by feminists.
The pro-abortionists use the term of ‘unwanted pregnancy’ and adopt the provision of civil liberty of human right. To some extent women’s social statue is determined by the male and hierarchical structures, such as wealth, power, and prestige.
Margaret Sanger used the ‘absurd cruelty’ to criticize the abortion and promoted the birth control the feminists used to authorize her as their pivotal initiator of abortion movement. In her precise wording is “The absurd cruelty of permitting thousands of women each year to go through abortions to prevent the aggravation of disease…we also know that particular disease can be more easily combated after such an abortion than during a pregnancy allowed to come to the full term…Why put these thousands of women who each year undergo such abortion…. (Sanger, 1920)?”. The truth of the debate usually exaggerated to liberalize the restriction of Penalty or the human rights of women on one side, but the human right of the unborn on the other side is thoroughly neglected. Some radical feminist have accepted that the role of ‘care’ of a mother, though reject the simple fact of giving birth with the influence of the studies of attachment by psychologist Bowlby. ‘…. Motherliness is a way of life. It enables a woman to express her total self with the tender feelings, the protective attitude, the compassion love of the motherly woman.’ (Friedan, 1965). The serious inclusion of
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the female half of humanity would lead to a better understanding of social justice. If women are only assumed to be attached to or subject to the male, some problems are obvious throughout the history. The same outcome will be if women claim their priority to the unborn.
Morality is relative to culture which needs time to shape and to build in the real daily life. The concept of the meaningful world is constructed limited for each person. The idea we have may only constructed by the knowledge of past thirty years or two decades. To broaden our knowledge and mind to the different disciplines become more urgent. We are all limited. The Alasdaire MacIntyre reminds us that ‘it has made us blind to …a concept according to which standard of rational justification themselves emerge from and are a part of a history…’.when he studied the philosophy of ethics in the tradition of Enlightenment. John Rawls advices that the disputes about the values are subject to reasonable disagreement because our understanding of what is good and valuable is especially subject to he has called the ‘burned of judgment’ (Gaus, 2003). And no wonder how to apply and interpret the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) in the light of political contrac-tariansm or law which is necessary for all rational beings in Kantian, and how rational choice is problematic to deal with the collective actions (Barnes and Sheppard, 1992), then need other more essays to investigate. (Kraus & Coleman, 1987)
Women are clearly using abortion as a major means of controlling their fertilities though the policy direction has been made ‘ …in no case should (abortion) be promoted as a method of family planning…’ in the International Conference on Population in Mexico City in 1984. Section 8.25 has been characterized family planning as an ‘anti-abortion endeavor’ or ‘contraceptive only’ in the International Conference on Population and Development’s Program of Action in 1994. “All governments and relevant intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations are urged … to reduce the recourse to abortion through expanded and improved family-planning services.”’(Hudgson, 2007).
This essay will examine the origin and evolution of family planning programs to present how the fallacies of mixing abortion with contraceptive methods occur and are widely adopted in the world political domains. The development of population policy of United Nations will be first reviewed, including the key population conferences and policies. In the second section, the role of the family planning programs and International Planned Parenthood Federation which are the main practitioners of UN are also under investigation. The ethical criticisms are illustrated in the third part of the paper. Finally, how and why the fallacies of the
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population policies occur in the context of policy theories/criterions and practitioners are critically analyzed in the last part of the paper.