Disturbing history of African women being sterilized, overlooked in botched marketing strategy!

BY SIMONE J. SMITH

A few weeks ago, members of the community in Vancouver began to notice ads, and billboards popping up around the city with some very bold statements that left some people feeling very uneasy.

One billboard ad had a half-naked man and woman lying down together, indicating that “Conservation begins at contraception.”

There was another ad that included a photo of an adorable African infant and a message that read, “The most loving gift you can give your first child is to not have another.”

Since then, the ads have been removed, due to the backlash that the organization received from members of the African community. World Population Balance has come out with a response to the ads, which I am going to share with you today.

I hope that the board members of World Population Balance have an opportunity to read this article. Their rebuttal was well thought out, and you can tell that their PR team is on point. One thing they did not do is address the history of sterilization, and other atrocities that have been waged on members of the African community. Let’s take a look at what this organization had to say first.

Our Intentions Were Misconstrued; We Could Have Done Better

World Population Balance is a U.S. based 501(c) 3 non-profit organization founded in 1992 to help the world solve our overpopulation crisis. Their programs are said to be designed to alert, educate and inspire action. Their claim is that because of overpopulation:

• We are ravaging wildlife populations
• We are consuming non-renewable resources – fossil fuels, minerals, and metals – at an enormous rate
• We are rapidly disrupting the relatively stable climate that human civilization and all other species have experienced for thousands of years, through our greenhouse gas emissions
• We are creating massive amounts of waste and pollution
• We are increasing a wide range of social problems: resource conflicts and wars; refugee migration; overcrowding and traffic congestion; dilution of representative democracy; increasing bureaucratic complexity and loss of personal freedoms; higher food, energy, and housing costs; and rising youth unemployment

They strongly feel that if all countries followed the lead of countries with the lowest fertility rates – including Taiwan, Poland, South Korea, Japan and Italy – we could reach a global population of less than 4 billion by 2100!

In their press rebuttal, they admit that the ad made it too easy for someone to get the wrong impression about their message and intentions. They apologized for creating an ad that could too easily be misconstrued, and removed it and similar ads from the campaign.

They claim that the wanted to include everyone in the conversation, this is why they used an African child in one of the ads. Unfortunately, they recognize that it allowed some to form the wrong impression that the campaign was “targeting” people of colour to have fewer children, ignoring the rest of the population.

“Our mistake became apparent when we heard from quite a few people accusing the campaign of being racist. We’re glad people are standing up for our black brothers and sisters. We stand with them. But there is nothing racist about an effort to ensure everyone around the world has access to good information so they can make informed, well-considered family size decisions.”

I’m sorry, but clearly the marketing and PR team need to do more historical research before they go ahead and create ads. You see, this is the thing; apologizing and taking down the ads does not change the fact that more thought could have been put into this marketing strategy.

Let us start with the fact that there is a disturbing history of forced sterilization of African women around the world. As far back as slavery days, different policies and practices have been put in place to control the African populations.

For those who are not familiar with Eugenics, it is a movement that is aimed at improving the genetic composition of the human race. Its origins trace back to Sir Francis Galton, who believed that the British were superior in the world because of their genetic make up. Eugenics promotes the upholding of what is seen as ‘positive traits’ by giving incentives to suitable couples to have kids and procreate. It also meant that traits that were not seen as suitable were terminated.

Eugenics resulted into laws being created in America that would be used to sterilize the unwanted members of the society. What is considered unwanted you ask? The list included: feebleminded persons, epileptics, insane persons, and immigrants, who were referred to as the socially inadequate.

This type of behaviour has played out all over the world, just appearing in different forms. November 2012, there are a group of HIV-positive women in Kenya who have launched a series of lawsuits in five countries after they were sterilized against their will following their childbirth.

There were cases when women were told by government-sponsored health facilities that sterilization was mandatory for HIV-positive women. Others were threatened that treatments for their HIV would be withdrawn if they were not sterilized.

In 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting exposed the fact that there were dozens of female inmates in California that had been illegal sterilized.

Black women have also long been the targets of population control, and have been disproportionately affected by sterilization abuse.

Stories like these are a salient reminders that sterilization, and discussions of population control can be a sensitive topic with a large group of Africans, both on the continent, and in the diaspora.

I hope that in the future World Population Balance, and organizations that are advocates of population control, take the time to see how their marketing may affect members of the global community.