Men, sex, and parenthood in an overpopulating world.

• Author: Sachs, Aaron
• Position: Population control programs and male fertility rates

Because women bear the primary responsibility for childrearing and family life in every country, they are also presumed to bear the primary responsibility for excess population growth. But family planning is unlikely to succeed--and population is unlikely to stabilize--until men share fully in those responsibilities.

In almost all mammalian species, the male lives the life of a philanderer. From pandas to pumas, mammalian fathers tend to abandon their mate right after conception, leaving to the mother the entire burden of childrearing. The very classification "mammal" refers to a mother's independent capacity to nurse her babies: it's always the female bear that people see feeding, training, and protecting the cubs.

But human males are different. From the beginning, they have tended to stay with their mates and their children, and today many anthropologists and biologists believe that men's participation in the family played a critical role in the evolution of homo sapiens' most distinctive features, especially our capacity for psychosocial development. The children of very few other species, over the millennia, have been lucky enough to receive the attention of two caring adults. Unfortunately, as human culture continues to evolve, more and more men are breaking with tradition and shirking their childrearing responsibilities. And the world's women and children are bearing the costs of this neglect. According to Judith Bruce, a senior associate at the Population Council in New York, the amount of time contributed by mothers to childcare is commonly seven times greater than that contributed by fathers, and the mothers' share only seems to be increasing. While important social revolutions in the industrialized world have begun to free women from an imposed dependence on men, some husbands and fathers are using this broadening of women's opportunities as an excuse to contribute less time and money to their families. By 1980, for instance, American men aged 20 to 49 were spending almost 50 percent less time living with their young children than they were in 1960. In less developed countries, even when there is a long tradition of male financial contributions to the family, men often abandon their wives and children because of increasing economic pressures: fewer and fewer are able to succeed as breadwinners. A recent Chilean study of low-income adolescent couples and their first-born children found that, by the children's sixth birthday, 42 percent of the fathers were providing no child support whatsoever. Male sexual behavior, too, puts a strain on society: besides the indirect stresses caused by men's failure to avoid fathering children they might not be able to support later, their higher fertility levels contribute disproportionately to population growth. Because men stay fertile much longer than women do, and because they tend to be more promiscuous, the average man, by the end of his lifetime, is responsible for more children than the average woman. In the 18th century, a Moroccan emperor had reportedly fathered more than 1,000 children by the time he turned 50. Though childrearing is becoming more expensive and parents are finding themselves with fewer resources to pass on to their children (whether in the form of cash or land), many men have continued to have large families. In some sub-Saharan African countries, the average man wants to have more than 10 children, in part because large families serve as cultural symbols of a man's virility and wealth. Consequently, under male-dominated social systems that tend not to hold fathers accountable for the well-being of their children, the women of the Third World are increasingly finding themselves doing hard labor for food as well as walking several miles every day for water and fuelwood--all with babies on their backs or at their breasts.

Society has long expected women to take ultimate responsibility for the duties of raising a family. Currently in the United States, fathers head only one of every 40 single-parent households: men just aren't expected to juggle childcare and a job. Single women often end up simply raising their children by themselves, whether or not they have access to resources. In all parts of the world, both women and children would no doubt be better off if women faced fewer barriers to economic independence--and if men fulfilled their familial obligations. According to a recent study in Barbados, of 333 fathers with eight-year-old children, only 22 percent were still living with their child, and the children of the fathers who stayed were doing significantly better in school than all the others. And in the Chilean study, children's diets and nutrition levels tended to be much healthier when their fathers were living at home. Men's failure to embrace their familial responsibilities begins with a failure to acknowledge that families get started through sex. A growing body of sociological research suggests that a family's eventual size and welfare depend largely on how the father and mother interact in bed--that men who are attentive to their partner's concerns tend later to be attentive to their family's concerns. Unfortunately, many men continue to see sex not as a shared experience but as their prerogative, as simply an opportunity to fulfill their desires. When interviewed by the demographer Alex Chika Ezeh, men in Ghana explained bluntly that their large families reflected, most of all, their desire to assert their culturally sanctioned sexual dominance over their wives. "The woman has no right to choose the number |of children~ she prefers," said one man, "since it is you, the man, who decides when to have sex with her." Over the past decade, then, many advocates for women's and children's welfare have turned to family planning as a way of addressing men's irresponsibility. And many family planning organizations, in turn, have recognized a need to supplement their efforts to provide women with safe, appropriate contraception with efforts to educate men. In the mid-1980s, for instance, the poster campaigns of many national-level affiliates of the International Planned Parenthood Association (IPPF) targeted men's sexual attitudes quite explicitly...