Population Action International submitted the following letter to the editor to The Washington Post regarding this article:

Dear Editor:

Ellen Knickmeyer’s article “Egypt’s President Urges Family Planning” (June 11) effectively highlights the challenges that continued population growth can pose for countries’ development by increasing demands for jobs, food and education. It has been shown the world over that investing in women is essential to the well-being of families, communities and nations. As Egypt’s president has recognized, voluntary family planning results in smaller families and is a cost-effective means to ease demographic pressures. Although the U.S. has historically been a top donor of international family planning, the Bush administration has repeatedly proposed drastic cuts to family planning aid. This year, the administration requested $7.7 million for family planning programs in Egypt. This is a little more than half of what the U.S. provided at the time of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development — held in Cairo by the way. This is despite the fact that Egypt’s population grew by 27 percent in the same period. The U.S. government is long overdue to reaffirm its leading role in providing this assistance. In an interconnected world, Americans stand to benefit directly. The prospects for peace and economic development in this century will depend, among other things, on meeting the most basic family planning needs of couples in the developing world and slowing population growth.

Hi, Caroline, thanks for your post; Geoff asked if I would respond. I think perhaps we miscommunicated: my comments were not “remedies for Egypt’s food shortage woes”; rather my comments concerned the Egyptian government’s stated desire to reduce fertility to 2.0 children per woman. There is a growing scholarly consensus that government-implemented population planning is simply not as optimally effective in this regard as raising the status of women. Two recent comprehensive examinations of the question, Connelly’s Fatal Misconceptions and Engelman’s More, coming at the question from different political positions, concur on this conclusion.

Women determined to have children will have them (as have I). However, women in many societies negotiate sexual reproduction from a vastly inferior position relative to men. Connelly and Engelman show that the more inferior the position of women relative to men, the greater the discrepancy between the number of children women want and the number of children they have. Both conclude that governments are more successful in reaching their population goals when they empower those who do the actual reproducing in their nations–women. Their arguments and evidence are well worth reading and considering.

Governments can lead out in social change to elevate the status of women, and find success in doing so. Egypt itself has progressed strikingly in the area of female education and female workforce participation (though, as mentioned, there is room for improvement in the former), which is no doubt part of Egypt’s lowering of fertility to 2.7. Other Islamic nations, such as Tunisia and Morocco, have made significant improvements in the status of women, for example by making polygamy much more difficult and implementing greater parity in family law. Egypt is a party to CEDAW, and CEDAW is a good place to start for ideas on how to address these issues.

The consequences of improving the status of women go far, far beyond fertility, however. To give but one example, there is a robust empirical literature linking prevalence of polygyny within a society to both levels of societal violence and degree of governmental authoritarianism. Issues concerning women, that we often think of as ‘private,’ with few implications for the public sphere outside of fertility, are turning out upon more serious examination to have major ramifications for the public sphere. My colleagues and I are engaged in this very research agenda, and our data and analysis, located at http://www.womanstats.org , might be of interest in this regard. Thanks again for your post!