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Salient. Official Newspaper of Victoria University of Wellington Students Association. Vol 40 No. 19. August 1 1977

Methods of Population Policy:

Methods of Population Policy:

There are three basic methods by which population policies can be implemented, methods which are very different in terms of their social implications. These are the encouragement of family planning, the generation of improvements in living standards, and coercion, whether by compulsory sterilisation, discriminatory taxes or whatever.

People might be surprised to discover that improvements in the standard of living are an effective way of bringing about population policy. Yet it is a widey observed fact that, in the more developed countries of the world birth rates are much lower. Genuine economic development, even in centres of [unclear: Cahtolic] population such as Quebec in Canada is accompanied by lower rates of population increases.

There is a corollary from this argument which will be valuable for the discussion of the other methods of popuation limitation. This is that, within any country, because of the relationship between standards of living and population increase, those who are able to receive the highest standards of living will have a much tower rate of population increase than those who are poorer. Thus it was in Britain that a Conservative MP was expressing concern at the population increase amongst the lower classes, who might have increased to such an extent as to threaten his privileged position.

This can be given a very specific interpretation for New Zealand in that the Maori and other Polynesian peoples make up a disproportionately large component of the less well off groups on society. These peoples therefore have higher rates of population increase, and will therefore be more affected by any policies on population. Thus the implementation of population policies in New Zealand could very easily be seen as racist in their implications.

The encouragement of family planning is another means by which it is proposed that population policies should be impemented, on the basis that if people are given the opportunity to limit their families, they will do so. But in a number of cases, and particularly in underdeveloped countries, cultural factors will tend to work against any policies of family limitation. And family planning campaigns can again be construed as having a racial bias.

In discussing family planning, however, we should remember that the term "family planning" is, in many instances, only a euphemism for "birth control", and talk of birth control has definite coercive overtones. Family planning, as a method of population policy, can be show to have such implications in the past, with such activities as those practised by US Peace Corps workers in Latin America, sterilising women without their knowledge or understanding when they went to US hospitals to have children. Another instance of coercive family planning was, the compulsory sterilisations reported to have been masterminded by Sanjay Ghand in India.

A prime example of a country where repressive family planning population control policies have been introduced is Singapore, and these policies now appear to be providing a basis for some of the rising protesl there. Sterilisation is changing from a voluntary measure to a compulsory measure and there are increasing financial disincentives against having children. The political implications of this are well demonstrated in a speech made by Lee Kuan Yew in parliament in 1969: "One of the most noticable trends in developed countries is that parents with more education have much smaller families than those with less education. This trend is also descernable in urbanised though still underdeveloped societies like Singapore. If these trends continue to their ligical conclusions, then the quality of the population will go down . . . We will regret the time lost, if we do not now take the first tentative steps towards correcting such a trend which can leave our society with a large number of the physically, intellectually, and culturally anaemic".

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