From: budaraju@cae.wisc.edu (Srinivas Budaraju)
Subject: Population control - Ms. Magazine article
Organization: U of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering
Date: 3 Jan 93 16:29:48 CST

Excerpts from "India's Population `Bomb' Explodes Over Women" by Ammu
Joseph, Ms. Magazine, Nov/Dec '92, pp 12-14. Ammu Joseph is a free lance
journalist and a member of Bangalore-based Women's Health Forum.
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[India's] failure in its attempt to defuse the population `bomb' is due
to policies relying almost entirely on the technological `fix': sterilization,
almost exclusively performed on women, accounts for 70 percent of family
planning methods used...Far from attempting to create the conditions that
would enable people to opt for smaller families, and having long given up
on persuasion, the program uses bribery, deception, and coercion to get
people to test and `accept' contraceptives...

The program's strategies have been largely determined by its financiers,
mostly private and government sources in the United States, such as the
U.S. Agency for International Aid (USAID)[*]... [U]nder the guise of `wider
choice,' Norplant is to be introduced into the program on a limited basis,
even though the implant has been incompletely -- and often unethically --
tested in India...In the clinical trials that have been conducted, most
of the women involved were unaware that they were participating in an
experiment. The disturbing testimony of two Norplant trial victims, recorded
in a new documentary film, *Something like a war*, by Deepa Dhanraj
(see page 68), provides a firsthand information about the potential danger
that this form of contraception poses even to otherwise healthy women.
As part of Dhanraj's feiminst critique of India's family planning program,
the film tells the story of 3,500 women who were implanted with the
lesser known Norplant-2 -- before it was withdrawn from the world market,
due to concerns about the `teratogenicity and carcinogenicity' of the rods.
Nevertheless, the government is using the trials of the ill-fated Norplant-2
to introduce Norplant, which has undergone only limited testing in India...

Another worry is that women fitted with the implants will be impossible
to monitor. For example, many of the women who unwittingly participated
in Norplant trials were migrant laborers without permanent addresses,
although it is essential to keep track of the users so that the devices
can be removed after five years...

Birthrates have fallen and will continue to fall significantly only in
areas like Kerala (the state with the lowest birthrate), where women
have better educational and economic opportunities...Under such circum-
stances, the existence of family planning services offering full and correct
information on a range of contraceptives makes sense...Instead of desperately
and aggressively attempting to impose state control over women's reproductive
lives by pushing one dangerous or inappropriate contraceptive method after
another, the government ought to concentrate on ensuring equitable
development, social justice, and gender equality...
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-Srinivas					budaraju@cae.wisc.edu

[*] More details on USAID's population control strategies presented in
    "Women as Hidden Casualties of the Cold War" by Carole J.L. Collins,
    pp 14-15 of the same issue of Ms. Magazine.