Charles Coven wrote recently in the Sunday Times of the green dividend to the child benefit cut. Put simply, less benefits will result in fewer children and therefore less consumption and while this is not the aim of the cuts it is unintentionally "greening" the benefits system. While there has been much written about the disproportionate impact on women of benefits cuts, particularly child benefit, the 'population control' debate is remarkably devoid of women. You know, the ones that are having the babies.

The green movement is often, wrongfully, accused of misanthropy. "They care more about trees than people", screech the professional oppositionists. But the obsession with population control by a minority of greens opens them up to very legitimate accusations of authoritarianism, 'classism' (i.e. it's the poor we want to stop having babies) and gender-blindness. It is a paradigm dominated by elite men which spectacularly misses the point and ignores the evidence that actually protecting sexual and reproductive rights and empowering women to control their own fertility results in lower birth rates and importantly, lower death rates.

No one who works in maternal and reproductive health talks of 'population control'. For historical and contemporary reasons it is associated with eugenics, China's one-child policy, forced sterilisation and forced abortion. These morally abhorrent examples might be dismissed as extremes but they are simply the results of a way of thinking about reproduction which is coercive and rejects individual rights as fundamental to public policy.

Respecting, protecting and fulfilling women's sexual and reproductive rights, such as the right to sexual health education, access to contraception and safe and legal abortion, as well as gender equality which enables women to refuse sex and insist on contraception, is what drives down birth rates. An approach that is focused on reducing maternal mortality and morbidity seeks to enable women to decide on the number and spacing of their pregnancies and when they can do that – lo and behold – they have fewer of them.

This is a long-established approach in international public health policy. The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in 1994 was a significant milestone in population and development and produced a Programme of Action that had reproductive rights at its core. It didn't all start in 1994 but built on the international population conferences dating back to the 1970s.

The Programme of Action addresses issues relating to population, the environment and consumption patterns but states categorically that:

"...advancing gender equality and the empowerment of women, and the elimination of all kinds of violence against women, and ensuring women's ability to control their own fertility, are cornerstones of population and development-related programmes."

So why are population control advocates so silent on women's rights?

Charles Coven cites the Big Men of the environmental movement including Sir David Attenborough, Jonathon Porritt, James Lovelock and The Prince of Wales, as proponents of population decline in the UK. He doesn't mention those who work in international healthcare such Dr Gill Greer, head of International Planned Parenthood International, who in a speech to the UN General Assembly earlier this year said:

"When the poorest and most marginalised people are able to access comprehensive family planning services, the impact on their families' lives is even more noticeable. The health benefits are also compelling, particularly in high fertility countries, where investment in family planning can reduce hunger and prevent nearly a third of all maternal and ten percent of child deaths. When children's deaths decrease their parents are likely to choose to have fewer children –if they have the means to do so. Furthermore, meeting the unmet need for voluntary family planning will help to enable many of the world's poorest people and communities to be more resilient as climate change further erodes scarce resources."

Nor is there mention of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia who launched Africa's Women's Health Commission, which calls for healthcare to be based on equity and human rights.

Climate change is undeniably the biggest threat we have to deal with as a global population. Indeed, the impacts of climate change are, and will continue to be, most greatly felt by the world's poor, the majority of whom are women. But the urgency of the situation must not result in authoritarian solutions or debates. Regardless of the moral argument, we lack an evidence base that shows that economic penalties or the marginalisation of women's rights will restrict population growth, in fact quite the opposite.

Population control is the wrong framing of this debate and only serves to further disenfranchise women, socially and economically. Cutting child benefit may or may not reduce the numbers of births in the UK, but it will impact on women's economic status. Give women greater control over their fertility and on a population level they will choose to have fewer pregnancies.

By refusing to analyse the impacts of population control measures on the poor and on women, those environmentalists who advocate population control and financial penalties for those with children, open themselves up to accusations of a callous disregard for the lives of women.

Our end goal is the same – a stabilisation of the global population to allow for truly sustainable development. This cannot be done by ignoring or impoverishing women.

This is a guest post by @naomimc, who can be found on Twitter here.