Voluntary Family Planning Key to Past Human Survival, Author Says

It is mostly when others move to control women's childbearing have populations become unbalanced, suggests Robert Engelman in his book More: Population Nature, and What Women Want (Island Press, Washington, DC). "Women making personal decisions tend over time, if those decisions can be made freely, to make population overall more sustainable," he said in an interview with National Public Radio.

Engelman, vice president for programs at the Worldwatch Institute, attributes the success of the modern human species in surviving extinction and expanding throughout the world largely to the cooperative skills of women in raising more than two children each to adulthood. When times were hard or resources scarce, women tended to have smaller families than otherwise. Contraception is mentioned in history "about as early as there is writing," he said.

Although crocodile dung was probably not very effective, herbs with some hormonal qualities might have been used widely enough in early times to put a subtle downward pressure on overall birth rates, said Engelman. "You don't have to bend down the arc of fertility very much to actually have a big impact over time on demographic change," he said.

In separate remarks, Engelman said he wrote the book to explore the idea that what's good for women's reproductive autonomy is also good for the environment. "There are few global problems where doing the right thing for individuals is also to do the right thing for humanity and nature, but population is clearly among them," he said. "There would be no downside to eliminating unintended pregnancy, and benefits at multiple levels."

In his book, Engelman notes that humans are the only animals that often need and enlist helpers during childbirth, an innovation that helped early children live to adulthood. "Assisted birth itself was a tremendous inspiration to language, to communication and to a whole way of raising children that was cooperative," he said in the NPR interview. "It involved probably not just a mother but a number of adults – the father, too, I might add – but probably especially grandmothers and cooperating women, to bring children to adulthood."

Deprived of contraceptives and free choice about childbearing, often by institutions demanding more or fewer children, women have routinely resorted to abortion and even to infanticide, even in modern times, Engelman said. "All the infanticide that's existed in history, it was because there were not safe and effective contraceptive options. We live in a world now where we have those. There's no reason for infanticide to exist in this world," he said.

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