Is Reproductive Justice Compatible with Efforts to Slow Population Growth?
What Is Reproductive Justice?
The reproductive justice framework is based on three interconnected human rights: the right not to have a child; the right to have a child; and the right to parent a child in a safe and healthy environment (Cook and Dickens 2009; Davis 2019; Fried 1990; Nelson 2003; Ross and Solinger 2017; Ross et al. 2017; Silliman et al. 2016; Solinger 2019). In this context, “safe” means free from violence by individuals, corporations, or the state. This framework also demands sexual autonomy and gender freedom, so it includes transmen, transwomen, and gender-nonconforming folks. By centering their own experiences as women of color, the transnational cocreators of this paradigm recognized the relationships among reproductive freedom, human rights, and economic justice, which helped clarify the need to “fight for the necessary enabling conditions to realize these rights” (Ross 2007, 4). As such, this framework serves as a powerful lens for assessing proposals to slow human population growth as a response to ecological breakdown in the Anthropocene.
Reproductive justice is both a theoretical framework and grassroots organizing movement, both of which explicitly reject efforts to control or engineer populations. In the United States, the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective brought together sixteen organizations of women of color from four communities—Native American, African American, Latina, and Asian American—to focus on “better lives for women, healthier families, and sustainable communities” (Ross 2007, 4). “For women of color,” write Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena R. Gutiérrez (2004, 13), “resisting population control while simultaneously claiming their right to bodily self-determination, including the right to contraception and abortion or the right to have children, is at the heart of their struggle for reproductive control.”
While advocates of slowing population growth would prefer to set aside the “dark past” of population control, for many poor, racialized, and otherwise marginalized people, this history is still unfolding. As recently as 2017, a Tennessee judge issued a standing order allowing inmates to receive thirty days of jail credit in exchange for undergoing “voluntary” sterilization (Adams 2018). In 2013, reports from Uzbekistan revealed the forced sterilization of women with two children, or in some cases three, to control population (Antelava 2013). HIV-positive women have been subject to forced sterilization, particularly in countries with high HIV rates, such as Chile, Namibia, and South Africa (Bi and Klusty 2015). Recently, in some Indian states controlled by the right-wing, Hindu nationalist BJP, politicians announced the intent to introduce a two-child policy, designed to disproportionately affect Muslim minorities (Rao 2022). In China, the state attack on Uyghur baby making, which includes family separation, forcibly inserted IUDs, forced sterilization, and forced abortion, has been declared an act of “demographic genocide” (Byler 2021; Dyer 2021; Zenz 2020). After Hurricane Katrina, one Louisiana state representative proposed paying people who receive state assistance US$1,000 if they agreed to sterilization (Waller 2008).
At its radical core, reproductive justice echoes the simplicity and elegance of an idea expressed in the Combahee River Collective’s 1977 statement: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (Taylor 2017). If Black women can exercise reproductive freedoms, we can all exercise reproductive freedoms. If racialized, poor, marginalized women can raise their children in safe and healthy environments, then we all can, because for those conditions to be met, the ongoing ecological breakdown—including but not limited to the climate systems breakdown—will have been addressed in such a way that society is utterly transformed.
The “Win-Win” Proposition
Today, there are a host of organizations and individuals that link fertility with environmental concerns and argue population growth must be slowed, stopped, or reversed by targeting women’s fertility (Dodson et al. 2020; Hickey, Rieder, and Earl 2016; Plautz and National Journal 2014). They can be found across the political map, from extremist far right to liberal mainstream to biocentric far left (Crusius 2019; Mazur 2010; Voluntary Human Extinction Movement 2025). Many are openly or covertly ethnonationalist, racist, and xenophobic, while others attempt to align their positions with feminism and women’s “empowerment.” Indeed, by the time of the Cairo Conference on Population and Development in 1994, many mainstream and progressive organizations had acknowledged the human rights abuses and powerful critiques of population control brought forward by feminist coalitions, shifting messaging away from the coercive agendas of “population control” toward “reproductive health” (Bashford 2014; Connelly 2008).
Today, however, discussion of “overpopula-tion” and women’s fertility is on the rise again, driven in part by the convergence of climate breakdown and growing evidence that expanded access to education for women and girls is associated with lower birth rates (McCrary and Royer 2011; Castro Martín 1995; Zhang and Assaad 2024). Deep-pocketed organizations such as the Gates Foundation and governments around the world are eager to support women and girls in nations across the developing Global South who are themselves advocating for the cultural, health, and educational infrastructure necessary to make choices around when, and if, to have children (Gates Foundation 2025). Some environmental organizations now promote increased access to education and reproductive health care as a “win-win” proposition: a win for women’s empowerment and a win for the environment (Hawken 2017; Women Deliver 2026).
While examples of racist and xenophobic proposals to address “overpopulation” abound, it is worth focusing on such “win-win” propositions because they are more nuanced and are increasingly visible in the cultural mainstream while being vehemently rejected by advocates of reproductive justice.
Consider Project Drawdown, one of the most visible mainstream climate organizations, which includes lowering fertility rates in their plan for global decarbonization (Hawken 2017). In their “solutions” rubric, lowering women’s fertility is tucked under “health and education,” which itself falls under the category of “society,” shifting the goal of slowing human population growth into a passive “side effect” of providing education and voluntary family planning services to women and girls:
Honoring the dignity of women and children through family planning is not about governments forcing the birth rate down (or up, through natalist policies). Nor is it about those in rich countries, where emissions are highest, telling people elsewhere to stop having children. When family planning focuses on health-care provision and meeting women’s expressed needs, empowerment, equality, and well-being are the result; the benefits to the planet are side effects. (Hawken 2017)
Similar rhetoric can be found proliferating in the overlapping spheres of environmentalism, international development, and what feminist scholar Susan Watkins calls “global feminism” (Watkins 2018).
One reason this “win-win” approach appeals is that it dovetails with international development goals (Sohn 2020; Starbird et al. 2016; UNDESA 2022). The idea is that with fewer mouths to feed and a lighter workload in the home, women will have more time, energy, and money. The lighter economic burden that results from having fewer children, particularly when coupled with greater opportunities for women to work outside the home, could help lift families out of poverty and increase GDP. In addition, decreasing fertility rates can create conditions for developing nations to reap an economic boost known as a “demographic dividend” (Bloom et al. 2003; Lee and Mason 2006). This boost is the accelerated economic growth that can, under the right conditions, accompany the shift in a country’s age structure that occurs when people start having fewer babies. When the majority of a population is young, working age, and not caring for dependents at home, more of those young people can enter the labor force. Countries looking to seize this economic boost are eager to accelerate fertility decline, as well as to create the socioeconomic conditions that would drive increased economic activity (Malin and Tyagi 2023). A relative increase in the working-age population compared with dependents can lead to higher per capita production and higher rates of savings and investment. Less money spent caring for dependents can also mean families have a surplus of income that can be used to raise their living standards—at best, it means a bridge out of poverty. Given a real incentive for governments in developing countries to get people doing less care work inside their families and more work in the formal economy, women’s “empowerment” becomes a tool of accelerating economic growth.
An additional benefit of lowering women’s fertility may be reduced climate risk and greater resilience among communities most likely to be impacted by environmental crises (International Planned Parenthood Federation and Population and Sustainability Network 2016). As Ugandan youth climate justice activist Vanessa Nakate wrote for the TIME 2030 project:
Girls who have been to school grow up to be empowered women. They are not forced into early marriage, and they tend to have healthier, smaller families, reducing emissions well into the future…. [They] have the tools they need to be more resilient to climate disasters. They are economically empowered, are empowered in their communities and know how to respond to extreme weather…. [They] can grow up to be women leaders, who have been shown to be more likely to ratify environmental treaties. (Nakate 2021)
Here, the message is clear: empower women, solve the climate crisis.
One problem is that “win-win” propositions can succeed, on their own terms, only if additional and often more complex social and economic goals are met (Senderowicz and Valley 2025). Nations can benefit from the demographic dividend only if working-age people with smaller families are both educated and employed. But getting young people into the workforce tends to be more complicated than increasing access to education or contraception (He et al. 2023; Parida and Madheswaran 2023). Armed conflict also creates profound challenges. “Want to fight climate change? Educate a girl,” Shabana Basij- Rasikh exhorted a rapt TEDx audience in 2012 (Basij- Rasikh 2012). She went on to become cofounder and president of the School of Leadership, Afghanistan, the country’s first and only all-girls boarding school. Just days after the Taliban took over the government in 2021, she helped the school’s staff and students flee to Rwanda (Basij-Rasikh 2021). This is not to say such efforts are not worthy projects or that they are doomed to fail, but rather that the path from increased access to education to ecological benefits is far from straight or smooth.
But Is It Justice?
Rather than try to present a polished “position” on population and reproductive justice, I will point to a few of the thorniest issues that demand deeper consideration. Following the lead of thinkers such as Barry Commoner, who considered population before the Anthropocene was visible as such, I do not suggest that Earth can hold an infinitely growing number of humans or support endlessly growing consumption, nor do I dismiss rapidly growing population as a potentially serious concern, particularly in developing countries (Commoner 1971 and 1979; Egan 2007). Rather, I consider population through a reproductive justice lens to explore the idea that in the Anthropocene, environmental crises can be attributed to “overpopulation” and that reducing fertility rates would necessarily help solve such crises. While climate is just one of the Earth systems undergoing massive changes at breakneck speed, I focus on climate change because this crisis is the focus of “win-win” proposals (Rockström et al. 2009; Richardson et al. 2023; van Vuuren et al. 2025).
To be clear, what we’re talking about here is reducing the total number of babies born so that global population peaks, in this century, a little lower than it otherwise would, before beginning to decline (UNDESA 2022; Vollset et al. 2020). Given that fertility rates are already at or below replacement level in most of the world, we are also talking specifically about the fertility of women across parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, where birth rates remain high, as well as the fertility of women defined by class and race within national borders, whose birth rates tend to remain higher than national averages (Passel, Livingston, and Cohn 2012; World Population Review 2026).
Reproductive justice critiques of “win-win” propositions tend to fall into two categories: theoretical concerns and practical concerns related to implementation. A primary theoretical concern is that the people with the highest fertility are not the ones driving carbon emissions. In fact, in countries where population growth is minimal, emissions are soaring (Satterthwaite 2009). Another is that even if “win-win” programs could slow population growth and reduce emissions, there is a mismatch of timescales: there is not enough time for the generational project of slowing population growth to matter in terms of climate destabilization. By embracing the goal of lowering fertility as a solution to ecological problems, such an approach labels baby making by some people—usually poor, racialized, and gender nonconforming people—as a problem, an ideological stance that can and does have devastating effects (Roberts 1997). “Win-win” proposals also risk placing the burden of solving the climate crisis on individual women (particularly the fertile ones), which a reproductive justice lens suggests deflects pressure from systemic actors (Kallman and Ferorelli 2024).
One of the thorniest problems is whose interests are centered. Environmental movements and organizations (which tend to be mostly white and middle class) center species and ecologies, while reproductive justice centers women of color. While some argue that movements and organizations can center both, in practice, this doesn’t always work out so well (Climate Justice Alliance 2022). Even environmental justice and reproductive justice movements have not made easy bedfellows (Loretta Ross, interview by the author, December 12, 2022; Khalil Shahyd, interview by the author, April 3, 2023).
Then there are practical concerns. Existing funding and infrastructure often serve the goal of reducing fertility among targeted populations, rather than supporting people’s freedom to determine the number and spacing of their children or providing comprehensive health care. Jade Sasser observed this when she worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Madagascar, globally recognized as a biodiversity hotspot, where at-risk species find safe haven in protected areas that also attract tourism revenue (Sasser 2018). When she first arrived as a health worker, she “thought that the issue for these girls was simply that they didn’t have enough access to contraception to make choices about their reproductive lives.” She observed that the provision of sexual and reproductive health services was “targeted toward providing contraception near parks, wilderness areas, and protected zones in ways that had nothing whatsoever to do with actual reproductive needs and demands of local communities.” Sasser also observed how women who came into health clinics, regardless of their initial complaints or concerns, were regularly routed toward contraception (Jade Sasser, interview by the author, February 10, 2023). Feminist scholars have shown how, once routed toward contraceptives, many women are not provided follow-up treatment, so they have no medical recourse when pills, IUDs, or sterilization procedures result in painful and sometimes life-threatening complications (Hartmann 2016). “In fact,” writes Loretta Ross, one of the cocreators of the reproductive justice framework, “these efforts are embedded within the context of a dominant neoliberal agenda which trumps women’s health and empowerment” (Ross 2016).
Indeed, because efforts to slow population growth are embedded in a dominant neoliberal development agenda, they may, paradoxically, undermine environmental efforts by supporting the systems that cause ecological breakdown. This presents a troubling contradiction. Consider the otherwise baffling spectacle of a Nike-sponsored New York Times fringe event at COP26 featuring Malala Yousafzai, Vanessa Nakate, Leah Thomas, and Emma Watson touting girls’ education as a climate solution (The New York Times Company 2021). The interests of a corporate behemoth such as Nike are not aligned with addressing the climate crisis or supporting reproductive justice (Moeller 2018). Rather, transnational corporations profit off what environmental historian and historical geographer Jason Moore has termed “cheap nature” and “cheap labor” (Moore 2015). When women in developing nations have access to education and contraception, declining fertility frees them up to work outside the home, offering an injection of “cheap labor” into eager markets. This influx of labor can spur increased extraction of natural resources, or “cheap nature,” for the benefit of transnational companies.
While women may thus attain some degree of control over their reproductive choices, they are not freed from the larger structures that order their lives and exploit their labor. It is against these forces and the instrumentalization of women’s lives and bodies in service of such perverse incentives that reproductive justice is positioned. Indeed, a reproductive justice analysis suggests “win-win” propositions not only fail to challenge the structural causes of ecological breakdown but serve to prop them up. While there are many critiques of efforts to slow population growth from the left, this critique—a critique of capital accumulation served by the neoliberal agenda—emerges from the radical core of reproductive justice and suggests that it may not be possible to reconcile reproductive justice with the goal of slowing population growth.
Even if these could be reconciled, it’s not at all clear that the desired ecological outcomes would follow. Population is a variable that has poor data, and its relation to the environment—except in terms of local resource or land use, such as overfishing or deforestation—is poorly understood (de Sherbinin et al. 2007; Panayotou 2000; Samways 2022). In fact, there are no data suggesting population decline will necessarily lead to better environmental outcomes, while it can certainly lead to worse local outcomes (Barrahmoune et al. 2026; Stott 2021). Falling fertility tends to be accompanied by higher development and a shift toward nuclear families, leading to fewer people living in more households and suggesting worse ecological outcomes (Esteve and Reher 2024; Liu et al. 2003). In this sense, environmental crisis is not a problem of population growth but of societies developing both economically and socially along the same lines as developed nations, which is a wicked problem, indeed.
It’s also not clear that the desired social outcomes would follow. When fertility falls in developing countries, it tends to do so unevenly across classes. It falls fastest among those in the highest income brackets, and the benefits of the demographic dividend tend to accumulate there. This accumulation of wealth at the highest levels contributes to inequality within countries, which can further entrench poverty (May 2012). Furthermore, “win-win” proposals normalize linking fertility with ecological concerns, which can be weaponized by those on the far right. Recently, particularly within former colonial powers, tactics of using population panic and environmental crisis to push reactionary programs have weaponized environmental issues against migrants, women, communities of color, and the poor (Arvin 2021; Turner and Bailey 2022).
The data on whether lowering fertility would be effective for climate goals are inconclusive, and the risks of linking fertility to environmental concerns, particularly for the most vulnerable, are high. Such risks outweigh the uncertain benefits. Perhaps the most promising path forward is to take ecological limits seriously by focusing on transformational change in catastrophic patterns of production and consumption while welcoming efforts to expand access to education and reproductive health care for women and girls. Not because fertility is a main driver of ecological crises, but because “when family planning focuses on health-care provision and meeting women’s expressed needs, empowerment, equality, and well-being are the result” (Hawken 2017). And because healthy, educated women and girls will be better equipped to navigate the accelerating and cascading effects of ecological disruption.
In a profoundly unjust world, it is tricky to ensure that the perfect does not get in the way of the cobbled-together good. While providing access to education and contraception linked to environmental goals risks demonizing the reproduction of some people, instrumentalizing women’s bodies, poor health outcomes, propping up systems that drive ecological crises, and providing tactics that can be weaponized on the far right, it is crucial to acknowledge that such efforts can also significantly improve women’s lives. Organizations that arise from local concerns and center the needs of local women suggest promising models (Hall et al. 2023; Mosley et al. 2022).
At the same time, it’s equally tricky to ensure that the easy does not get in the way of the necessary. “Confronted with an urgent need for change,” write Kallman and Ferorelli (2024), “who do we pressure for that change: those with the most or the least power? One of those projects is certainly easier than the other.” Women’s fertility is low-hanging fruit for those who believe that preserving “business as usual” serves their interest. It is far easier to flood the African continent with contraceptives than to transition the Global North away from endless growth. In the short term, transnational corporations and global elites have powerful incentives to choose the former over the latter. Population “solutions” for exhausted Earth systems can be leveraged by powerful interests to further entrench systems that other, more genuinely sustainable solutions seek to radically transform. As we face accelerating and overlapping ecological crises, a reproductive justice analysis reminds us that how we define problems shapes how we define solutions.