Grace, Kathryn

Merchant, Emily Klancher

Population Council: Knowledge Commons

Population Council Knowledge Commons 11-15-2022 The Data We Need for the Future We Want Kathryn Grace Emily Klancher Merchant Follow this and additional works at: https://knowledgecommons.popcouncil.org/series_pdr_essays-8-billion How does access to this work benefit you? Let us know! Recommended Citation Grace, Kathryn and Emily Klancher Merchant. "The Data We Need for the Future We Want." In The World at 8 Billion, edited by Raya Muttarak and Joshua Wilde, 18–21. New York: Population Council, 2022. This Commentary is brought to you for free and open access by the Population Council. POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW |  COMMENTARIES  (NOVEMBER 2022)  18The Data We Need for the Future We Want Kathryn Grace emily Klancher merchantThe world’s populaTion is projected to reach 8 billion on November 15, 2022. This makes it  an ideal moment to think about how demographers and other scientists account for and project population, and how demographic data and models represent and shape lived experience of people worldwide—particu-larly those who identify as women. The United Nations has recently adopted an innovative Bayesian approach to predict future fertility and mortality rates (Raftery et al. 2014). This effort generates more reliable confidence intervals around the world’s potential futures than the UN’s previous deterministic method. However, it still relies on older demographic methods and theory: the cohort component model, a projection method that came into widespread use nearly 100 years ago (Kiser 1973), and demographic transition theory, first articulated during World War II, according to which modernization trig-gers a fertility decline that will continue until replacement levels are achieved (Kirk 1996). The cohort component projection method calculates each country’s future population by subtracting expected deaths and adding net migration and expected births. Expected births are determined by multiplying the number of women in each age group by the fertility rate expected under the demographic transition for that group.1 The attribution of births to women rather than men is convenient — information about the mother nearly always appears on a birth certificate, whereas information about the father might not. (However, demographic metrics such as age-specific fertility rates and net reproduction rates could just as easily have been formulated with men in the denominator.) By calculating fertility as a function of the number of women in a population, demography designated women’s bodies as the site of reproduction. And with fertility behaviors situated within the demographic transition, deviations from the model were flagged as potentially problem-atic, justifying external interventions. Amid widespread anxiety about global Kathryn Grace, Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota. Emily Klancher Merchant, Science and Technology Studies, University of California, Davis.https://doi.org/10.31899/pdr2022.1007G r a c e  /  M e r c h a n T  19population growth in the decades following World War II, women’s bodies became the target of population control. The cohort component method suggests two ways to alter future popu-lation counts if mortality rates hold constant: change the number of women or change women’s rate of childbearing. Population control has mainly oper-ated through family planning programs,2 which attempt to do the latter by providing contraceptives and persuading women to use them. Many family planning programs have emphasized long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs), which act directly on women’s bodies and lower fertility rates by reducing the number of women at risk of conception. Because LARCs are controlled by medical professionals rather than users, feminist technology scholars describe them as “imposable” contraceptives (Senderowicz and Ko-lenda 2022; Takeshita 2012). Indeed, these methods are often recommended even to women without access to the follow-up medical care necessary to manage side effects or to remove the devices for any reason, including when pregnancy is desired (Britton et al. 2021; Gubrium et al. 2016).Over the past fifty years, the same research programs that have collected “country-representative”3 demographic data in low-income settings to project population—such as the Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices of Contraception surveys of the 1960s and 1970s, the World Fertility Survey of the 1970s and 1980s, and today’s Demographic and Health Surveys—have promoted the uptake of modern contraceptives, with a heavy emphasis on LARCs (Mer-chant 2021; Riedmann 1993). Such programs typically represent their goal as decreasing rates of “unmet need” for contraceptives as part of an overall effort to speed a country’s development or modernization (Halfon 2007). However, program sponsors also espouse quantitative targets (Hendrixson 2018). The aggregate nature of fertility indicators and LARC-uptake targets elides lived experiences and the multi-level complexity of childbearing and creates conditions ripe for coercion. Amid the population-bomb anxiety of the late 1960s and early 1970s, coercion seemed to many an acceptable means of reaching the seemingly necessary end of population control (Connelly 2008). But those days are be-hind us (Lam 2011). We now know that controlling fertility will neither pro-mote development nor protect the environment (National Research Council 1986). Our goals should therefore center on advancing reproductive justice, improving the lives of women and members of other marginalized groups, and promoting equitable and sustainable global and local economies. Achiev-ing these goals will require data capable of assessing the barriers women face in achieving their personally determined health goals – especially in terms of actual lived experience at the local level. Recent efforts to address climate change have demonstrated that interactions between person and place mat-ter for vulnerability assessments and understanding behavioral change. In fact, local climate conditions impact all aspects of women’s lives—including 20  T h e  d aTa  w e  n e e d  f o r  T h e  f u T u r e  w e  w a n Treproductive health goals, needs, and outcomes—in ways poorly captured by existing data and research (Grace 2017; Lau et al. 2021; Sasser 2014). In recognition of reproductive and environmental justice (Cutter 1995; Ross and Solinger 2017), it is more important than ever that data and metrics of success capture women’s true childbearing and family planning needs and experiences. Documenting fertility and family complexities with attention to context is vital and demands new place- and person-based data collection - motivated by the goals and barriers to achieving these goals that women themselves identify.ReferencesBritton, Laura E., Caitlin R. Williams, Dickens Onyango, Deborah Wambua, and Katherine Tumlinson. 2021. “‘When it Comes to Time of Removal, Nothing Is Straightforward’: A Qualitative Study of Experiences with Barriers to Removal of Long-Acting Reversible Contraception in Western Kenya.” Contracept X 3: 10063.Connelly, Matthew. 2008. Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Cutter, Susan. L. 1995. “Race, Class and Environmental Justice.” Progress in Human Geography 19(1): 111-122.Grace, Kathryn. 2017. “Considering Climate in Studies of Fertility and Reproductive Health in Poor Countries.” Nature Climate Change 7(7): 479-485.Gubrium, Aline C., et al. 2016. “Realizing Reproductive Health Equity Needs More than Long-Acting Reversible Contraception (LARC).” American Journal of Public Health 106(1): 18-19.Halfon, Saul E. 2007. The Cairo Consensus: Demographic Surveys, Women’s Empowerment, and Regime Change in Population Policy. New York: Lexington Books.Hendrixson, Anne. 2018. “Population Control in the Troubled Present: The ‘120 by 20’ Target and Implant Access Program.” Development and Change 50(3): 786-804.Hvistendahl, Mara. 2011. Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. New York: Public Affairs.Kirk, Dudley. 1996. “Demographic Transition Theory.” Population Studies 50(3): 361-387.Kiser, Clyde V. 1973. “Contributions of P.K. Whelpton to Demography.” Social Biology 20(4): 438-447.Notes1 Demography has traditionally assumed a two-sex model in which everyone is either male or female and only female individuals can conceive.2 Some evidence suggests that some twentieth-century population control enthu-siasts also supported sex-selective abortion to reduce the number of women (Hvistendahl 2011). In the other direction, Kolk and Jebari (2022) demonstrated that the trend toward daughter preference could increase population growth rates. 3 Climate change occurs at very local levels owing to the spatial heterogeneity of natural systems and human–environment interactions. Health surveys were designed (with the use of weights) to be representative for calculating country-level health indicators. However, because the weighting schemes do not consider climate or environmental conditions, the ability of the data to represent general experiences with climate change in a given country is unknown.G r a c e  /  M e r c h a n T  21Kolk, Martin, and Karim Jebari. 2022. “Sex Selection for Daughters: Demographic Consequenc-es of Female-Biased Sex Ratios.” Population Research and Policy Review 41: 1619-1639.Lam, David. 2011. “How the World Survived the Population Bomb: Lessons from 50 Years of Extraordinary Demographic History.” Demography 48(4): 1231-1262.Lau, Jacqueline. D., Danika Kleiber, Sarah Lawless, and Philippa J. Cohen. 2021. “Gender Equality in Climate Policy and Practice Hindered by Assumptions.” Nature Climate Change 11(3): 186-192.Merchant, Emily Klancher. 2021. Building the Population Bomb. New York: Oxford University Press.National Research Council. 1986. Population Growth and Economic Development: Policy Questions. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.Raftery, Adrian E., Leontine Alkema, and Patrick Gerland. 2014. “Bayesian Population Projec-tions for the United Nations.” Statistical Science 29(10): 58-68.Riedmann, Agnes Czerwinski. 1993. Science that Colonizes: A Critique of Fertility Studies in Africa. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Ross, Loretta, and Rickie Solinger. 2017. Reproductive Justice: An Introduction. Oakland: University of California Press.Sasser, Jade. 2014. “From Darkness into Light: Race, Population, and Environmental Advo-cacy.” Antipode 46(5): 1240-1257.Senderowicz, Leigh, and Al Kolenda. 2022. “‘She Told Me No, That You Cannot Change’: Understanding Provider Refusal to Remove Contraceptive Implants.” SSM – Qualitative Research in Health 2: 100154.Takeshita, Chikako. 2012. The Global Biopolitics of the IUD: How Science Constructs Contraceptive Users and Women’s Bodies. Cambridge: MIT Press.

The Data We Need for the Future We Want

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The Data We Need for the Future We Want

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