A 29-year-old Chinese woman, it was reported in The Times, is to undergo surgery to remove 23 needles from her body. Doctors believe the needles may have been embedded under her skin by her grandparents when she was a child, so that she might die and a baby boy might take her place.

A sad little story in its own right, but also an acute illustration of the hidden horrors inflicted when a nation tries to control its population size. Women bear the brunt. When uneducated and illiterate populations are restricted in their fecundity, it is always the females who suffer, whether through infanticide or torture. Because population control policies are the best excuse yet invented for misogynism, it will always be little girls who are murdered, neglected, abandoned and put into slavery, while their more cherished brothers flourish.

That’s a given, and it is one of the terrible realities that faces anyone who addresses overpopulation – as we must all now do, in the wake of last week’s call to arms by the United Nations environmental audit.

But it is time, perhaps, for feminists to acknowledge that population control is a counter-intuitive thing: that some realities are less terrible than they might seem. Simplistically, sure, the act of enforcing small families can encourage male domination (in China, as a result of the one-child policy, the number of men outnumber women by 60 million). It also represents disempowerment; a removal of women’s basic right to choose how many children they wish. Some hypocrites we would be, wouldn’t we, to support abortion in the West as an inalienable element of a woman’s right to control her own body, and yet simultaneously remove choice from other women?

And yet, and yet. I think we must also acknowledge that our perspective is distorted. We view the situation through ultra-liberal, idealistic eyes. The brutal fact is that most women in the developed world don’t get to exercise much, if any, choice the way things are. They are kept pregnant: by men, by culture, by lack of education. When they do have a choice, as in the former Soviet Union, they grab anything they can get as a form of contraception – in that case state abortion.

And incidentally, what’s worse? Stopping women getting pregnant, as the Chinese do, or allowing them to get pregnant and then have a routine abortion, as happens in Russia? Or being pregnant all the time and watching baby after baby die? Personally, if we’re talking choice, I’d go for number one.

Unquestionably these are troubled times for the planet. Forget about global warming: it’s a secondary issue. The UN’s fourth Global Environment Outlook says that world population has risen almost 34 per cent in 20 years, from 5 billion in 1987 to 6.7 billion today. It is predicted to reach 8 to 9 billion by 2050 and 9 to 10 billion by the end of the century. Which is, quite simply, both terrifying and unsustainable – hence the start of a debate about overpopulation that is inevitably bound to offend and break some of our liberal shibboleths. But it is time to be frank. This is a problem that transcends race, gender, culture, religion and liberal nicety.

Funnily enough, I think the path with the least landmines to tackling the problem is gender. We don’t have to get into all that religious and cultural imperialism stuff, although you might permit me – please! – to have one dig at the Catholic aid charities that pretend to be saving Africa while refusing the use of condoms. One of the first things the global community could do is rescue an overpopulated, Aids-ridden continent in the hands of the Roman Catholic Church and the closed mind of Thabo Mbeki.

We can argue, quite lucidly, that population control equates not only to liberation for billions of women who spend their lives shackled by perpetual pregnancy but, even more portentously, that it represents liberation for the whole of the human race from starvation and disaster. It’s what women choose when they have neither the wealth nor the power to control their fertility in other ways, and to argue otherwise is to do so from a position of phoney idealism.

The irony should not be lost on any of us that the main preoccupation for women in the West is their failure to get pregnant, and the most important problem for women everywhere else is their failure to be able to prevent pregnancy.

It is time for creative thinking, by women for women. I rather admire the Chinese. They recognised a huge problem and did something about it: it was dreadfully crude, but it has prevented the births of 400 million people. After nearly 30 years of it, Chinese women, who are increasingly working, now say the rules facilitate their more Westernised life. Recently, in a refinement of the policy, China has turned away from coercion to financial incentives to encourage people in rural areas to have fewer children. Parents with one child, or two girls, will get an annual payment equivalent to a fifth of a farmer’s income.

Surely it wouldn’t take too much effort to design some kind of similar global incentive scheme for the world’s most populous nations – with all the proper safeguards, of course, and done with willing participation? I rather warm to the idea of Global NonBaby Awards (GNBA), paid annually if you have remained pregnancy-free, and available to women of every race, religion and skin colour in the world.

Once Western governments realised their survival was at stake and they couldn’t afford not to fund the GNBA they would find the money (who knows, it might even stop them fighting pointless wars). A special GNBA global population task force could administer it, with free contraception to back it up. Payments would be made to both individual women and to governments, which would have the felicitous effect of controlling population, giving women choice, and lifting them out of poverty.

Which, unless I am very much mistaken, is where feminism came in in the first place.

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