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Population policy forum. Women as subjects, not objects.

I very much agree with Marge Berer that feminists must recognize that there needs to be a population policy, worldwide and country by country, that encourages lower birth rates and that it is essential to start talking about population policies that respect and promote women's moral agency. Indeed I think it would be fair to say that the failure to respect and promote women's moral agency is the major reason why government-sponsored population policies have failed in the past. Male population planners habitually think of mass population as objects, rather than subjects, of population policy. This is why they think so readily of "incentives" or even more coercive methods. Birth control is thought of as a "war" to be imposed on the population, not as an integral part of the self-development of the people's own capacity to organize and become decisionmakers. If this is true in relation to the male population, it is even more so in relation to women. Population policy continues the basic male approach to women as bodies under their control, not as self-actualizing subjects. Until population policies take as their starting point women's human development as persons and moral agents in their own right, such policies both will be abusive to women and also will not "work." However, Marge Berer's remarks about oppressive, dehumanizing governments as incapable of promoting any other form of population policy give one pause. If this is the case, then neither national governments nor most international agencies linked to Western hegemonic neocolonialism can be the authentic promoters of feminist population policy. There must be a global effort to build parallel women's health organizations that work on the grassroots level with women, especially poor women, to empower these women themselves to become the leaders in educational and economic development of the women in their communities. Only in and through this larger context can such women both learn how to use and become empowered to use methods of birth control.