Yuck

Nicholas Kristof ends his recent review of Matthew Connelly's new book, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Harvard UP 2008) thus:

The family planning movement has corrected itself, and today it saves the lives of women in poor countries and is central to efforts to reduce poverty worldwide. If we allow that past to tarnish today’s efforts by family planning organizations, women in poor countries will be doubly hurt.

Corrected itself? That's a hell of a thing to claim, given that the book jacket, as Kristof notes, refers to population control programming as “a humanitarian movement gone terribly awry.”

This is a tricky matter, and it's one I've been running into lately, particularly as I share some of my writings with a colleague in public health. Do I think international health, as a set of practices and institutions, is deeply problematic? You bet. Do I want it all to evaporate tomorrow? Um, I'm not sure...

Some people -- people I know -- benefit in some ways from international health programming. But that doesn't mean that these programmes are without problems or contradictions. It doesn't mean that they don't produce outcomes and consequences their designers cannot foresee or control, and that may have other, subtle, sometimes devastating effects on people. And it certainly doesn't mean that other agendas aren't at play. Post-war 'development' has hardly been a march towards the betterment of humanity in some kind of straight-forward way.

And I'm certainly not as willing (or as smug) as Kristof to celebrate the post-feminist enlightenment and the endless march of progress. I don't think power works that way. From the research I've done, I know it doesn't. Family planning responded to critique at a certain political-historical juncture. That's not the same thing as getting it right.