I kind of said this already
October 7, 2009
Pro-choice activist Jennie Bristow of spiked writes in Population reduction: a war on women’s bodies that
There is now great sensitivity surrounding explicit population-control programmes that have been used by governments in the developed world, and imposed on countries in the developing world. Today there is little sympathy within the West for continuing population control programmes such as China’s One-Child Policy, which is being relaxed in some districts of China. However, it would be naïve to assume from this that birth control today is always promoted positively, with the only considerations being women’s rights and bodily autonomy. Old arguments about why women’s personal reproductive decisions should be made to fit with broader social objectives can be recycled in new forms, and this requires continued vigilance from those working to promote the cause of genuine reproductive choice.
…[P]ro-choice advocates have fought their arguments on the basis that the woman should be absolutely at the centre of reproductive decision-making. It is a woman who must bear a child, and in our society it is usually she who will have the practical, emotional and financial responsibility for raising that child. To attempt to displace the woman from this decision by encouraging her to regulate her fertility in line with the abstract demands of ‘the environment’ implicitly pushes the woman to a more marginal, negotiable and ultimately vulnerable position in the decision-making process.
I have written previously that population control under the guise of environmentalism will be used to destroy women and children. What is really naïve, though, is the notion that birth control was today or ever “promoted positively, with the only consideration being women’s rights and bodily autonomy.” Many men have welcomed birth control because it has relieved them of responsibility, while mainstream feminists rarely think of “reproductive choice” as anything other than choosing to prevent or terminate pregnancies. (This is why they are often deafeningly silent on the subject of maternal and infant health, for instance.) Since the feminists have embraced collectivism, anything that might hold back the professional advancement of one woman is seen as damaging the “movement” as a whole.
Now, of course, fertile women will be seen as damaging not just to the feminist movement, but the environment as well. I predict that women will be as sexualized as ever, if not more so, but the pressure to have fewer children will only ramp up. From observing the mixed reactions to the 30-year-old Polanski case, for instance, it becomes apparent that even 13-year-old children don’t get to say no, especially to powerful older men. So to save the environment, enable rapists, and boost the pharmaceutical companies’ bottom line, we should probably just start all girls on mandatory birth control upon reaching adolescence. (Hey, they did it with Gardasil!) Everyone wins!
I’m sure the above sounds cynical, but I truly would not be surprised if mandatory birth control for girls is proposed within the next decade. I’m sure there are people who want to propose it right now. And, lo and behold, a Google search for “mandatory birth control” yields, among many other gems, the Facebook page awkwardly entitled “The Planet Being Saved By Mandatory Birth Control. We’re doomed, y’all!
[UPDATE]: As I mention in the comments, I think I was wrong to allege that feminists are “deafeningly silent” on maternal and infant health. For instance, Pushed: the painful truth about childbirth and modern maternity care, which challenges the rise of obstetric intervention, was written by a feminist and former editor of Ms. magazine. I think these texts are nonetheless relatively rare in the feminist/gender studies canon.
October 8, 2009 at 12:26 pm
A lot of people have a pretty naive view of the history of birth control. I suspect that’s partly because the dark side of it is closely interwoven with the eugenicist and racist views that were embraced by many on the Left in the first half of the 20th century, but which are now considered an embarrassment best not brought up. The fact that people with what modern liberals regard as admirably progressive and enlightened views on sexuality were sometimes the same thinkers who wanted to forcibly sterilize people who were disabled or poor has gone mostly down the memory hole.
“This is why they are often deafeningly silent on the subject of maternal and infant health, for instance.”
I wasn’t aware of this, though given the attitudes of many feminists towards mothers and family life I shouldn’t be surprised. I wonder if there’s a class or cultural element to it, since most Americans associate women with many children with the working class, rural populations, or Roman Catholic white ethnics. A lot of the liberal revulsion towards Sarah Palin seemed to involve the idea that it was contemptibly low-class, retrograde, and hillbillyish for her to have five children, for instance.
October 8, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Thanks for the comment, John. Your summary of the history of birth control sounds about right to me. There is still a widespread willingness to ignore the data showing that African-American, poor, young, and other marginalized women exercise the “right” to birth control and abortion out of proportion to their numbers, and that these are also the groups that people usually want to target for mandatory birth control.
Alleging that feminists are “deafeningly silent” on maternal and infant health is a good reminder that I should wait until a rant is cold before publishing it. I can find many examples of feminist concern for the health of mothers and children. However, it seems that there is a disproportionate emphasis on sex education, birth control, etc. in feminist press. While these topics are certainly important, there seems to be comparatively little attention paid to, say, the relatively high maternal mortality rate in the U.S., the increasing medicalization of childbirth, and other topics that should be of concern to women’s rights advocates.
October 8, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Also, yes, it seems that it has become increasingly acceptable to look down on prolific, non-professional women. I doubt there are many Catholic women with broods of six on the board of the Feminist Majority Foundation.
As for Sarah Palin, since she and establishment feminists alike seem to share goals such as troop escalation in Afghanistan, liberals have to focus on relative trivialities to maintain the illusion that they are different and superior. One way to do this is to say outright that she is heartless for killing wolves from planes. The other is to imply that she is also heartless for failing to terminate a child who would be born with Down’s Syndrome. Actually, I hear complaints about the wolf thing more often than I hear about her children, which really does give you an idea of where mainstream political priorities lie.