When thinking about birth control, television ownership is probably not one of the first things to come to mind. However, in India, it seems to be working.
India, whose population is steadily creeping towards 1.5 billion, will probably steal China’s spot as the world’s most populated nation within the next decade, according to scientist and writer Fred Pearce. The country makes up only 2.41% of the world’s land, but over 18% of the world’s population. In developing countries, women often give birth to many children for various reasons, from the benefits of having extra hands around to help the family, to cultural reasons, to lack of birth control options.
Yet, according to Stanford geographer Martin Lewis, “within a generation, Indian women have halved the number of children they bear, and the numbers keep falling.” As of 2015, Indian women only averaged 2.5 children each, as compared to the US’s 2.1.
In a world whose population is growing too quickly for our ecosystems, natural resources, and economy to handle, demographers are constantly looking for ways to encourage mothers in developing countries to have fewer kids. After seeing birth rates drop in certain regions of India, Lewis set out to compare these regions to the others. As may be expected, a women’s level of education, economic wealth and urbanization were correlated with lower birth rates. However, one interesting factor that correlated as well as, or better than the others, was TV ownership.
Game shows, soap operas and reality TV are a window to the outside world for sheltered rural women. Watching urban Indian women have successful careers, handle their own money and take control of their lives through having less children teaches women that there is more to achieve in life than raising a large family.
In fact, years before Lewis conducted his research, economists from UCLA and The University of Chicago carried out interviews with women in rural India and found evidence that watching commercial cable and satellite TV empowered them. After watching soap operas, where the viewers become very attached to the characters, women felt more self-determined and less accepting of domestic violence. The researchers found that the TV’s impact on “gender attitudes, social advancement, and fertility rates was equivalent to the impact of an extra five years of female education.”
In the late 1970’s, the average Mexican woman had over five children, leading to poverty in many areas. The vice president of the national TV network, Miguel Sabido, created a telenovela Acompáñame (“Accompany Me”) portraying the hardships of a woman growing up in a large family in a poor, unsafe city. In order to find better opportunities as an adult, she chooses to limit her family size. At the end of each episode, there was an epilogue that shared family-planning advice. Although many find such propaganda-ridden media unsettling, according to the Mexican National Family Planning Program, “half a million women enrolled at family planning clinics while the soap was on, and contraceptive sales rose 23 percent in a year.” Similar pro-small family TV shows have been successfully implemented in Jamaica, Brazil and Kenya.
In 2015, the United Nations’ statisticians bumped up their estimates of population increase in this century. They believe that our world, currently the home to 7.5 billion people, will hold nearly 11 billion by 2100. With roughly three new babies being born every single second, scientists worry that this pattern is not sustainable. The UN believes that in Africa, birth rates are only going to increase, as many regions are stuck in a poverty trap, where parents have more children in order to create more helping hands to combat the poverty they’re suffering from, thus only creating more poverty. Africa, a continent of well over a billion people, only has around 50 million TV sets, and satellite dishes are hard to find outside the south.
There are still signs of hope. Although our population is growing, its growth rate is decreasing. John Wilmoth, head of the United Nations Population Division, noted that “fertility levels have fallen substantially in most regions, far beyond what most observers expected 50 years ago.”
As ridiculous as it may sound that a television could work to save the world, the logic is quite simple. Empowered women know the possibilities of what they can accomplish besides being a mother, and sometimes a little push from the badass woman from your favorite soap opera is all it takes.
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