As childfree Indian women deeply concerned by the growing threat to reproductive rights globally, we are dismayed by Chief Ministers Chandrababu Naidu and M K Stalin’s recent call: Make more babies to fix what they see as a looming political crisis in South India.
Their push for more babies is driven by fear that southern states will become politically marginalised because of their smaller populations. While South India is economically and socially more advanced, it receives disproportionately less public funding than the northern states because resources are allocated based on population sizes. Southern states are less populous than their northern neighbours. This is because, for decades, South India has led the way in advancing gender equality and reproductive autonomy, resulting in lower fertility rates. Meanwhile, disempowered North Indian women, especially among the lower classes, continue to have larger families.
Declining fertility is a global phenomenon due to women’s increased autonomy and access to education, contraceptives, and reproductive healthcare services. This trend is cause for celebration, both for the greater gender equality it reflects and the reduced pressure on a planet crumbling under the weight of humanity. Yet politicians, economists, and media commentators portray this trend as a “demographic crisis” with allegedly disastrous consequences — compromised economic growth, increased health costs to support the elderly or the disadvantage of being outnumbered by opposing ethnic or political groups.
Meanwhile, the real crisis of ecological overshoot that threatens all life on Earth and our very survival — driven by climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, species extinction, resource scarcity, conflict, poverty, food insecurity, and more — is mostly absent from media and policy discourse. Obsession with growth — in population, consumption, and economies — is at the core of our existential crises, yet the proposed solutions from most policymakers favour more growth. And the proposed way to drive growth is as uncreative as it is exploitative of women’s bodies and lives: Pronatalism — pressuring women to produce more babies.
Ranging from subtle measures, such as offering baby bonuses, to coercive measures, such as restricting local election candidacy to those with over two children (Naidu’s proposal), to outright sanctions on reproductive services (including abortion bans), pronatalism is one of the oldest patriarchal levers used to serve political ambitions and power. Pronatalist forces reach back 5,000 years when, to consolidate power, empires depended on expanding populations and institutionalised patriarchy.
With their proposed solution, Naidu and Stalin would be rolling back hard-won reproductive rights in southern states for the self-serving motive of obtaining a “fairer” representation. Meanwhile, many women and girls in the northern states continue to have limited rights and autonomy. The admirable alternative to fairer funding allocation would be to champion the rights of North Indian women to reproductive autonomy and the protection of girls from child marriage — policies that would lead to declining fertility there as in the South.
The politically motivated push to bring even more humans into the world is a relentlessly self-destructive cycle, especially in India, the world’s most populous country. Profoundly troubling, as well, is the discounting of the rights of children. Before advocating bringing children into our highly unequal world, have we secured for them their birthright to a healthy environment, good nutrition, safety, psychological well-being, and education? Have we secured those rights for the children already here?
Due to its large population and warm climate, India is projected to experience devastatingly extreme weather events that threaten the future and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, a future UNICEF has warned will be unimaginably dire for children. Before these children become adults and are finally tasked to be caregivers to the elderly, the children themselves need quality childcare. Where is the family income and public infrastructure for all that?
Before we assume that future children will look after the future elderly, let us admit that present-day children are not able to look after the present-day elderly. Caregiving for the elderly has long been the silent pandemic no one wants to speak of and is absent from our public infrastructure and services. The labour of care has long been consigned to the family and especially to women. The unspoken message is that women — as mothers, grandmothers, aunts, nannies — continue to be obliged to prioritise caregiving over other pursuits. Unsurprisingly, women’s voices are missing from this recent conversation led by two male politicians.
This pattern is not unique to India. Governments worldwide are in a race to see which one can push the most women to have the most babies to build the next generation of worshippers, workers, consumers, taxpayers, soldiers, and of course, procreators.
All this political posturing entirely ignores the catastrophe looming over the planet and humanity. We must embrace and accelerate the positive trend of declining fertility, celebrating what it signifies about gender equality, children’s wellbeing, and easing our burden on Earth. We must adopt progressive policies that respect the biophysical limits of our planet and the well-being of the natural world — policies that strengthen social safety nets, wisely reallocate resources, and free up financial resources to care for the elderly and the growing number of people displaced by conflict and climate change. What we need is a radically new imagination for care and justice.
Bajaj is the executive director of the nonprofit Population Balance and a senior lecturer at Antioch University. Nandy is Visiting Faculty, National Law School of India University, Bangalore and author of Motherhood and Choice: Uncommon Mothers, Childfree Women
