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Michelle Goldberg, author of a recent book on reproductive rights "The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World," has an article in the LA Times that summarises the complex arguments made in her book. Both address the conundrum that the world faces twin crises in its demographic future: soaring birth rates globally, with the great majority being amongst the poorest members of the poorest countries, and plummeting birth rates in several leading developed countries, notably Italy, Japan, Spain and Russia. It may seem crazy to assert at first that both problems are the result of women's lack of reproductive and economic freedom, but the arguments are pretty strong. This book is in my Wish List .
Here's an excerpt from the article:
Some social conservatives are using the threat of rapid First World population decline to argue for restrictions on women's rights. But that gets it precisely backward. In developing countries, lower social status for women is associated with higher fertility, but once societies become highly industrialized and women taste a certain amount of freedom, the reverse is true.
Fertility is reaching dangerously low levels in countries where social attitudes and institutions haven't caught up with women's desire to combine work and family. When faced with men who are unwilling to share domestic burdens, inflexible workplaces and day-care shortages, many women respond by having fewer children or forgoing motherhood altogether.
Sharon Lerner's article in The Nation, Post-'Roe' Postcard, is about the current state of abortion services in Mississippi, a state that has all but outlawed abortion. And don't you know, it has the country's highest levels of child-poverty and an infant mortality rate that is double the national average.
On the eve of tomorrow's huge pro-choice march in Washington, Jeanne of Body and Soul and Kevin of Lean Left both address the subject of Nigerian cardinal Arinze's ill-considered remark about denying communion to pro-choice Catholic politicians (e.g. Kerry). Jeanne has some good things to say about an idea I like (she is quoting Ono Ekeh in the National Catholic Reporter): the idea that Catholics (or other nominally pro-life believers) who are liberal politically take a "demand-side" position on reducing the number of abortions. As Jeanne says, this is far less cynical than the usual "I am politically pro-choice but find abortion morally repugnant" line that a lot of religious liberals take. "Supply-side" conservative abortion opponents seek to reduce abortions by making them illegal, of course, but the "demand-side" approach says to offer women more choices - it often comes down to money, which is the leading cause women cite for why they chose an abortion. And of course, this approach also addresses the horrendous hypocrisy of the official Republican position, that the right to life begins at conception and stops at birth.
In the comments to Jeanne's post there are more interesting points raised about collateral issues. One cites Sursum Coda, the blog of a Catholic political moderate:
"I’ve offered the following thought experiment before: imagine that there was a mysterious disease that caused more than one million women a year—most of them low-income and many of them women of color—to spontaneously miscarry halfway through their first trimester. Would we not see this as a national tragedy worthy of public attention? Would we not expect the Democratic Party, the historic defender of the health and welfare of working class people, to offer some solutions?"
My response to that is - what, you mean like the way they fell all over themselves to find a solution to AIDS in the 80s and 90s? I think this guy is just a little naive. However, the prize for naivete must go to Supreme Court Justice Kennedy, here cited in another comment in Body and Soul, in an opinion in Casey v. Planned Parenthood:
""Our law affords constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing, and education." Does it indeed? I have to say, as a mother who raised two children under the laws of the US of A, that was never my experience. And it is less true today in some states, as this horrifying article in the Guardian illustrates:
"In the name of foetal rights, women across the US have been dragged bleeding from hospitals into prison cells hours after giving birth, charged with homicide following stillbirths, pinned to hospital beds and forced to have Caesareans against their will, or had their babies removed at birth after a single positive test for alcohol or drugs. Since the mid-70s around 300 women have been arrested for these transgressions, and 30 states now have foetal homicide laws."
All of which is a good reason to go to Washington tomorrow. I salute you and thank you if you will be there.
I have a philosophical theory that has been in development for about three decades. It's nothing new, really, the only added value I can claim is, perhaps, emphasis, and a few original applications or examples. The nugget of the theory is : ignorance causes more suffering than malice. Yeah, that's not very original, it sounds sort of Buddhist, but I came to this belief by a route entirely independent of Eastern systems (in fact, within the context of pious but humanist Christianity.) There is a corollary : the main cause of ignorance is the learned tendency towards binary thought patterns. That sounds a bit more technical. Other names for binary thought patterns : black-and-white, either-or, (false or not) dichotomy or "diabolical reasoning." This last one is courtesy M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Travelled, etc.) and stems from a day-long lecture of his that I attended in the mid-1980s, posing as the wife of my Methodist pastor. (Yes, it is an interesting story but I don't have time to go into it here.)
I was reminded of this line of thought when I read this very good commentary about the GM food controversy by Nick Cohen. Not necessarily conscious of following my philosophy but essentially guided by its spirit, I find myself without a side to be on in the GM controversy, just as I have been in the US abortion-rights controversy for many years before.
I like to think of myself as a believer in reason, of a sort of 17th or 18th century type, to be sure. Because it appears to me that sometime in the 20th century, reason, in the popular sense, became irreversibly polluted by diabolical thinking. Now, I happen to believe that genetic modification, after appropriate testing, might be OK in the case of golden rice. I would even eat it myself, not that I need it, being in no danger of nutritional deficiency. But I believe that no amount of testing (not that there has ever been any) will make Monsanto's Round-up Ready soybean, or a terminator gene in any food crop, ethical. By the same token, as a pro-choice partisan in 1970s and 1980s America, I was not allowed to say that late-term abortions do have harmful psychological effects on many who have them. And in the matter of training doctors to perform abortions, there were only two allowable positions: pro-choice - all doctors should be forced to be trained, regardless of their beliefs (and of course training means performing abortions as a student); or pro-life - student doctors will be discouraged from taking the optional training in abortion by the handy and effective means of death threats (which is just one of the many ironies implicit in these people calling themselves "pro-life").
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