Richard – Population Matters-USA

“Instead of speaking of a shortage of supply we could just as truly say that there is a longage of demand.”

Biologist Garrett Hardin

Our rain and snow come from the sky, however much of the water gets up there by transpiration from plants and trees. So many people appreciate Colorado that they move here, causing the built space (housed, roads etc.) displaces fields and trees. Therefore, there is less water making it up to the sky to form clouds.

However, that’s probably a minor reason for the 25+ year drought affecting western North America. This dearth of water isn’t only the worst drought of this century; it is the worst drought in 1200 years! No wonder it is called a megadrought. Furthermore, it’s not just affecting southwestern Colorado, but much of western North America and has expanded to cover much of the US.

Yes, there are periodic climatic variations that cause dry years, then wet years. El niño/la niña is one such variation, but it has been overwhelmed by another factor—climate heating.

Climate chaos has already caused many weird weather patterns in southwest Colorado this year. First we had summer in March, then we experienced winter in April. However, one thing is constant—it has been dry. In early March of this year the snowpack was at historic lows. Then record high temperatures later that month melted much of the snow that remained. If you look west to the La Plata Mountains, their silver plate has been worn off.

How much of this drought is due to climate chaos? Scientists have estimated that about half is anthropogenic. An article published in 2020 found that 46% of the megadrought could be accounted for by climactic heating. It has become hotter since then, so perhaps more than half is due to anthropogenic heating. My understanding is that the other half is due to the normal variation in precipitation.

There is less water is coming from the sky and less water on the surface—which is how a drought is usually defined. What about under the ground? There the water supply is hidden and more difficult to measure, of course. However, we know that some aquifers have been almost sucked dry. The Ogallala aquifer, for instance, has been tapped by so many wells for crop irrigation that in some places the water level has dropped 300 feet!

Satellite measurements have shown that the Earth’s surface has fallen many feet in areas such as southern Florida, largely because the underground water has been removed. Although we think of the Amazon as being the ultimate of wetness and high humidity, some trees are suffering from dryness, leading to overheating and their death. Amazonia has been called “the lungs of the Earth”, but if the drought worsens, those lungs may stop breathing.

The term “water crisis” has been used so often that readers are jaded. Furthermore, a “crisis” implies resolution is possible, but in some areas the drought is so severe that resolution seems impossible. Thus, a new term has been coined for these dire situations, “water bankruptcy”. It is defined as: “…human-water systems whose water use persistently exceeds hydrological carrying capacity [so] damages are irreparable….” Examples include parts of Mexico, Egypt and India.

Human activities have decreased precipitation, especially in the North American Southwest. In addition, excess numbers of people have exceeded the carrying capacity of fresh water supplies. One group of humanity is causing this drought by using fossil fuels, and another group of humanity is suffering from water bankruptcy. Fewer people would help with both problems.

From: Changing Fertility Patterns of
Three Generations of Navajo Women

“Coercive Sterilizations: Between 1973 and 1976, an estimated 3,406 sterilization procedures were performed on Native American women in four Indian Health Service (IHS) locations” —Google Artificial Intelligence

Most doctors are ethical and wouldn’t sterilize women without informed consent. However, the claim of sterilization without permission has caused me to look more closely at articles that claim this is the case.

My concern is sparked by a patient, Magdalena, when I was in general practice. She had gone to a gynecologist because she had severe pelvic pain. He recommended surgery.

“You won’t perform a hysterectomy, will you?” she had asked before surgery.

“No”, he had replied. She told me that when she woke up from the anesthesia, she found out that her uterus, tubes and ovaries had all been taken out because of serious infection. She was young and didn’t have children. She was heartbroken.

A recent issue of The Durango Herald carried the headline “Study sought into forced sterilization”. This article originally appeared in “New Mexico In Depth”, under the title “New Mexico Senate calls for a study of forced sterilization”.

I need to preface my remarks by writing that I know that women have been sterilized without their consent. This was true in China, Peru and our Southeast. The term “Mississippi appendectomy” has been used by Black women who were told that they needed to have their appendix removed, but they had their tubes tied instead. In my 40 years of practice, the only tubal ligation I encountered without the patient’s consent was unusual. The victim was of the dominant group—she was White. Her tubes had been tied without her knowledge at the time of a cesarean in Texas.

Most women who have been sterilized against their will belong to minority groups. That is the concern of an article that recently appeared in the Durango Herald. An accompanying image has this quote: “Indian Health Service records show that 3,406 sterilization procedures were performed on female Indians in the Aberdeen, Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, and Phoenix areas during the fiscal years 1973-76.”

Is this a low, normal or high rate of sterilization? It should be compared to sterilization rates in the USA as a whole. Also, how many of these surgeries were done without proper informed consent?

In looking at the original document, it turns out that only 3,001 of the procedures were done on women of childbearing age; the rest must have been hysterectomies done on older women. Furthermore, an unknown number of those 3,001 procedures would have been hysterectomies, done for reasons other than sterilization.

1975 is the only year for which I could find good numbers to compare IHS female sterilization rates with the rest of the USA. In 1975, one in 30 Indian woman was sterilized; the comparable number of US women is one in 69. The rates of tubal ligation and hysterectomy combined for Indian women was about double that of the general population.

So it seems correct that more Native women were sterilized than non-Native women. Were these coerced surgeries? The report states:

“We found no evidence of IHS sterilizing Indians without a patient consent form on file, although we did find several weaknesses in complying with HEW’s sterilization regulations.” [HEW was the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare]

It is impossible to determine if surgeries that happened 50 years ago were coerced or not. However, I was amazed at the findings of a doctoral thesis from the University of New Mexico titled “Changing Fertility Patterns of Three Generations of Navajo Women”. Dr. Joanne McCloskey found that a small sample of Native women had a rapid decrease in family size, as shown in the attached chart. I wondered if McCloskey detected any sign of coercion among the small number of women she interviewed. I searched her thesis and the book she wrote based on her interviews, but cannot find any indication of women having felt coerced to use contraception or be sterilized.

The grandmothers in McCloskey’s study didn’t use contraception or abortion, but the young mothers used both. All the grandmothers were traditional Diné (Navajo), while the young mothers were more acculturated to western society. They were more educated and many of them had jobs.

It is possible that some of the women who were sterilized by IHS doctors didn’t understand that they wouldn’t be able to bear children after surgery. Perhaps they didn’t understand English well, or perhaps the doctors didn’t explain the surgery well. However, the available evidence does not support the Google AI statement. Furthermore, careful reading of the original document is more reassuring than the newspaper article. Finally, the current standards for informed consent require much more care than a half century ago.

PS: After writing this essay, I realized that I had made a mistake. The “Young Mothers” were all under 30 years old and still of childbearing age when this doctoral thesis was written. Thus, they may have had more children. Although the same is true for the Midlife Mothers group, it would be less so.

Although the groups are not directly comparable, it is interesting to see the marked decrease in number of live births that this group of women experienced.