As the world experiences an increasing number of climate-related calamities, it is high time to move towards the goal of a ‘human rights-based economy’ to mitigate vagaries of weather
Some recent photographs of Elon Musk, now, heading President Trump’s newly created DOGE, in several of the US government Official meetings, including the one with the Indian Prime Minister, showed him with his children and family. A section of the media considered this overture, apart from showing his familial love, also ‘as the promotion for his pro-natalist position’, a view shared by many conservative voters who elected Trump to power. Musk also made it clear that ‘demographic decline, is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming’.
While on the campaign trail, the Vice-President nominee, JD Vance’s comment ‘childless cat ladies’ referring to the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, and Musk’s calling her out as an “extinctionist”, for citing ‘climate anxiety’ as a reason for not having kids, amply indicated about the upsurge of an intense wave of pro-natalism in the US, once Trump comes to power. In Trump 2.0, pro-choice activists apprehend that the Mexico City Policy, or the Global Gag Rule, which banned the US global health funding to non-US organisations, providing abortion care, reinstated during his first tenure, is going to be expanded to all US foreign assistance. Many also expect a nationwide abortion ban this time in the aftermath of the overturning of the 1973 Roe vs Wade decision during his earlier tenure. Trump’s Project 2025, with its anti-choice agenda, casts a shadow on women’s reproductive rights, while, the ‘great replacement theory’ of white supremacists finds a new life inside the Republican Party.
Many consider Trump’s pro-life stand to be more ‘about controlling women’s bodies, rather than a genuine concern for the earliest stages of human life’.As the global average number of births per woman hovers around 2.3, a little above the ‘replacement level, and population ageing becoming a significant trend, policymakers and economists across the world expressed concern about ‘diminishing labour force, upending consumer culture, increased inflation, and the prospect of overstressed government programs for ageing populations’.
Around three in ten nations are now pursuing pro-nationalistic policies, restricting abortion and clamping down on family planning programs. A 2021 report, titled ‘Welcome to Gilead’, in a reference to a dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood, which examined the policies that promote childbearing in Iran, China, Turkey, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Germany, and the US, reported that ‘there is a rise in toxic mix of nationalism, xenophobia, and racism to serve nationalistic, economic and patriarchal interests, instrumentalising women’s bodies, though, pronatalism, is not, in and of itself, coercive(Researcher, Monica Scigliano).
Many feminists dubbed such pressures for high birth rates from family, religion, politics and economy as the products of millennia of patriarchal disempowerment of women, considering their bodies as vessels for advancing a growth agenda’.
On the other hand, climate protagonists debunk the theory of ‘perpetual growth’, which treats ‘babies as cogs in a growth machine’, and overlooks their rights to be born into social and ecological conditions that support their well-being’(Nandita Bajaj, Antioch University).
Almost half of the world’s 2.2 Billion children live in one of the 33 countries classified as ‘extremely high-risk’ facing a
deadly combination of exposure to multiple climate and environmental shocks. However, despite growing evidence, policymakers, journalists, and academics tend to de-link demographic factors from environmental sustainability concerns. As the world is besieged with rhetorics of pro-growth narratives and the racist ‘great replacement theory’, author Laura Carroll, an exponent of reproductive rights and ethics, in her book, the ‘Baby Matrix’ urged people to make ‘the most informed decisions about parenthood, as a society can no longer afford to leave pronatalism unquestioned’.
Many climate economists also discard the bogey of ‘Ponzi demography’, based on the ‘more is better’ philosophy for sustained economic growth. Several development economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, found the current yardsticks of the GGDP-based economicgrowth on only material consumption, and not quality-of-life factors, as ‘inadequate’ in measuring human well-being.
Many espoused for a new economic model which can work on declining populations, and also on the ageing demographics.
Researchers revealed that ‘fears about ageing population are often guided by the false idea that older people are homogeneously ill, dependent, and unproductive’. The recent economic analyses also disclosed that the costs connected with an ageing society are ‘manageable, while the economic, social, and environmental benefits of smaller populations are substantial’.
Moreover, a shrinking labour force is less likely to threaten economic growth as new technologies can take over more tasks. In the book, Decline and Prosper, the demographic expert, Vegard Skirbekk, argued that ‘low fertility is on the whole a good thing, and the outcome is good for people, particularly women, and beneficial for the planet’.
In 2021-22, the UN recognised the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment as a fundamental human right, which has been enshrined into law by 161 countries, barring the UK, US and Russia.
As the world experiences an increasing number of climate-related calamities, it is high time to move towards the goal of a ‘human rights-based economy’, which proposes to give women the option of ‘free choice’ about childbirth and work for economic prosperity without compromising ecological concerns.
(The author is former Director General, Doordarshan and All India Radio. Views expressed are personal)
