Contraception is no cure-all.

• Author: Shah, Sonia
• Position: More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want - Book review

More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want

by Robert Engelman

Island Press. 320 pages. $24.95.

In More , Worldwatch Institute's Robert Engelman wades deep into human history, fishing for clues to support his suspicion that what women really want is better contraception and smaller families.

According to Engelman, male domination originated to control women's fertility and, by undermining women's natural restraint on childbearing, contributed to a boom-and-bust cycle of wanton population growth and catastrophic collapses. Give women control over their reproduction, with accessible contraception and safe abortion, he says, and smaller families with longer generation gaps will result. Fewer humans and demographic stability will mean more trees, more food, bigger paychecks, and even shorter wait times at online stores. In other words, female liberation--or at least, properly funded family planning programs--will save the planet.

If only!

Engelman's primary evidence for his contention that women want fewer kids is the long history of women's attempts to control their reproduction through contraception, abortion, and infanticide. This history is well-told, but presented as evidence that women--all women, everywhere, throughout time--would prefer to have small families, it is unpersuasive.

It's true that women, who must gestate and nourish the young, invest more of their personal resources into each child and so may tend to prefer to lavish care on a few select progeny for that mason. Men, by contrast, with their minimal biological investment might generally prefer to spread their seed far and wide. But at the same time, it is only fair to note that historically, large families have benefited both men and women. Human communities that have been able to grow larger and thus more socially complex, more genetically diverse, and more resilient to pathogens have again and again taken over the territories and resources of those that have not. The Bantu didn't have to kill the Khoisan and the San and the hundreds of other linguistic groups that populated the wide expanse of southern Africa 3,000 years ago to take over their lands, to give just one example. They just had more babies that survived to adulthood. (One theory is that falciparum malaria, to which the Bantu had acquired immunity, awarded them the advantage over the nomadic tribes, which didn't.) Today, people descended from the Bantu dominate southern Africa, with the sparse descendants of...