KILLING-US-SOFTLY1

Even though China has started to control population 25 years later than India, it has used a more
effective method and has sustained its effort. That is why it is far ahead of India in the
demographic transition, as the graph above shows at a glance. Overt legislation is clearly a far
better way to defuse the population bomb than coerced surgical sterilization.
Let us now look at the drawbacks of India’s coerced surgical sterilization method.
coercive
The most unappealing feature of India’s method of population control is that it is for the
most part forced upon the people and is therefore involuntary. That it takes place
without the people’s knowledge or consent has far-reaching implications, not least of
which is that it invalidates India’s democracy and violates the people’s fundamental
rights and liberties. To get away with it, the country’s media has been co-opted to
maintain a veil of silence, which means that India does not have a free or truthful media.
discriminatory
From the very beginning of its population control efforts, India has targeted primarily the
poor, which makes for a discriminatory and divisive policy. This being said, its most
recent efforts are more even-handed.
insufficiently effective
For coerced surgical sterilization to bring the nation’s total fertility rate below
replacement level, thus below two women per woman – which is necessary if the
population is ever to decrease – it would have to be performed on most women after
their first child and not after the second or third as is currently the case. India’s leaders,
however, unlike their Western counterparts, are too humane to violate their people’s
reproductive rights to such an extent as to leave them with only one child. But as India
becomes more overcrowded and desperate, future generations of women will certainly
find themselves sterilized after their first child.
What India and China have in common as far as population control is concerned is that they both
use methods that allow all women and all families to have at least one child. The same cannot be
said about the Western method of population control, covert chemical sterilization.
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