Chapter 3 Coercive Population Policy by Judith Blake Department of Demography COMMISSION ON POPULATION GROWTH AND THE AMERICAN FUTURE; RESEARCH REPORTS, VOLUME VI, ASPECTS OF POPULATION GROWTH POLICY, EDITED BY ROBERT PARKE, JR. AND CHARLES F. WESTOFF ABSTRACT The formulation of explicit anti-natalist policies requires an awareness of existing pronatalist ones. Lacking such awareness, action is side-tracked by a spurious controversy as to whether coercion should be instituted or voluntarism maintained. This paper tries to show that our society is already pervaded by time-honored pronatalist forces whose constraining influence becomes obvious only when they are challenged and sanctions are invoked. The paper concentrates on two diffused and implicit pronatalist coercions in modern American society-the prescribed primacy of parenthood in the definition of adult sex roles, and the prescribed congruence of personality traits with the demands of the sex roles as defined. Given the existence of such coercions, it is argued that we cannot preserve a choice that does not genuinely exist. And, by the same token, it makes no sense to institute anti-natalist constraints while continuing to support pronatalist ones. The problem of adapting to low mortality is not one of browbeating biologically specialized individuals out of behavior that is "natural" for all. Rather, it is one of directing cultural and social institutions into the use of human variability for meeting the new functional demands of a modern, low-mortality society. In this endeavor, freedom for the development of individual potential may be greatly enhanced. The author seriously doubts that it will be curtailed. 2 |