The Bashful Ape

Dr Malcolm Potts

There are 150 chimpanzees in the Gombe National Park, made famous by Jane Goodall's 30 year study of their behaviour. At the last census there were 800,000 people in the Kigoma region of Tanzania containing Gombe, and since then another 200,000 refugees have fled the ethnic fighting in Burundi and Zaire. The contrast in numbers is an interesting one.

I have spent nearly all my professional life working in family planning, mostly in developing countries. I am interested in the reproduction of apes because I find they provide a perspective on our behavior. Like us, chimps have a 28 day menstrual cycle, they give birth at any time of the year, and they space their pregnancies by suppressing ovulation when breastfeeding.

Why then are there a few tens of thousand of chimpanzees in the world, clinging precariously to disappearing fragments of forest, while there are nearly 6 billion people, increasing by one million more births than deaths every 110 hours?

Three things have happened recently to increase human numbers: (1) changing patterns of breastfeeding have eroded the natural spacing of pregnancies; (2) the age of sexual maturity has fallen, exposing young people to the risk of pregnancy; and (3) infant mortality has plummeted.

There is compelling evidence that women all over the world want smaller families. But family planning services are not keeping pace with demand and family planning choices are all too often restricted by conservative medical attitudes and arbitrary social restraints. Why do we make it so difficult for people to plan their families?

Chimpanzees are sexually brazen. Female chimpanzees advertise ovulation with a vivid swelling of the labia. Males proudly display an erect penis in the noonday sun. Copulation takes place in public, in front of other members of the troop. Yet human beings go to great lengths to make love out of sight and hearing of other adults. Neither the woman nor her partner knows when she ovulates. Our sexual shyness seems to be an evolutionary strategy to encourage men to have repeated sex with one partner--the biological basis of falling in love. When a child is born, it is usually that of the woman's partner, and from an evolutionary perspective this behavior makes it worthwhile for the man to invest time and effort feeding and nurturing the child.

The trouble is, we seem all too ready to carry our predisposition to be shy about sex into public policy. There is an urgent need to improve access to family planning. It is an essential and complementary aspect of development. It probably does more than any other single factor to empower women and secure their equality in society. Yet it remains controversial, and of the small fraction of the wealth rich countries give to foreign aid, less than 2 per cent goes to family planning.

Sex is a powerful, natural drive. Couples without realistic access to fertility regulation almost invariably end up with more children than they wished for. As long as family planning is difficult to get, fertility will be high. Whenever several methods of contraception are available and women have access to safe abortion, fertility declines. There are no exceptions.

In Bangladesh and Pakistan in 1975 only one in 10 couples used contraception and the average woman had 7 children. By 1995, half the people in Bangladesh used family planning and the total fertility rate had plummeted to 3.4, while in Pakistan it was stuck at 6.5. What happened? In Bangladesh, there are over 100,000 little shops and kiosks selling condoms and pills, and a network of government centers offering IUDs, contraceptive injections and voluntary sterilization. There are 10,000 providers able to complete a "menstrual regulation" using a small manually- operated syringe to empty the uterus in the early weeks of pregnancy. In Pakistan none of these things are available.

For decades, Quebec and Southern Italy had a higher fertility than the rest of Canada and Italy respectively. People said it was poverty and poor education. Then the laws changed and contraception and safe abortion become truly available. Today, Italy and Quebec have some of the lowest fertility in the world, averaging 1.2 children per family.

When it comes to reproduction, conventional wisdom is often wrong.

• People want many children because infant mortality is high. Wrong. In England and Wales, the birth rate began to fall in the 1870s, but infant mortality only really came down after 1900.
• People want large families so their children can look after them in their old age. Not necessarily true. If you actually trace the flow of resources in a society you often find it is the grandparents who are supporting their grandchildren, not the other way around.
• Fertility will fall only when people are rich and well educated. Not true. In 1960 women in South Korea had 6.0 children and the per capita income was $100. In 1990, after 30 years of excellent family planing, family size was down to 1.7. The fall in the birth rate kick-started the Korean economic miracle. In Cuba, where the economy has gone backwards, but family planning and safe abortion are also realistically available, the change in family size has been virtually identical to that in Korea.

Family planning is what individuals want and it is what the planet needs. Tragically, the apes who still have so much to teach us about why we behave in strange and curious ways may well be driven to extinction by the uncontrolled growth of human numbers--much of which is not intentional but occurs because of our predisposition to be bashful about all things sexual.

Malcolm Potts is Bixby professor of Population and Family Planning at the School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley. His book, Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Evolution of Human Sexuality, with coauthor Roger Short, is being launched by Cambridge University Press in March 1999. It explains human sexuality in terms of how people evolved, and devotes a great deal of attention to the problems facing those who struggle to make family planning readily available. From Pop!ulation Press vol 5, # 2, Jan/Feb 1999.