I kind of said this already

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.

The War at Home

According to The Telegraph, the fourth casualty of the fighter jet crash in Miramar, San Diego, has recently been found: a two-month-old Korean infant. Forgive my cynicism, but the story of Asian women and children civilians wiped out by an American war plane is beginning to sound a little too familiar to this amateur historian:

Toddler found dead is fourth member of family wiped out by ‘Top Gun’ jet crash in San Diego suburb (ht Anthony Gregory of Strike the Root)

The death toll from the crash of a fighter jet into a residential street in California has risen to four after a toddler’s body was found. 

Three generations of the same family – a grandmother, a mother, and two small children  – all died in the house in San Diego that took the brunt of the impact.

Miraculously the ‘Top Gun’ pilot escaped by ejecting moments before his fighter FA-18D Hornet exploded into a fireball.

The four victims have been named as Young Mi Yoon, who was in her mid-30s, her two-month-old daughter, Rachel, her 15-month-old Grace Yoon and her mother, Suk Im Kim.

When we talk of war and supporting our troops, it is easy to think only of the presumably willing combatants. And though their sacrifices and suffering may indeed prove enormous, they are not the only players: in every war, or even in the buildup of a military, there are casualties of women and children and the elderly of both sexes, who never signed up to risk the horrors that befell them. Homeboy here, the “Top Gun” pilot, was only on a “training exercise,” not an invasion of the homeland. For all purposes the loss of life here is the same: what does it matter to this bereaved family that the crash was an accident, not an act of war? Soon enough the pilot would probably have been sent overseas to kill combatants and perhaps take out a few, or more than a few, civilians in the process. (The latter unintentionally, of course.) With president-elect Obama’s stated plans to step up the “surge” in Afghanistan, and his rather muted intentions to leave Iraq (probably only to shuffle those vets over to the surge), this very same pilot could soon be playing out the same carnage overseas, but under even less scrutiny.

There are consequences to militarization. Some are overt and easily seen, as with this particular tragedy, but others are easier to miss. Even the pettiest soldier draws his wages from the state. In other words, he is paid with taxes forcibly extracted from the labor of you and me. You work not only to support you and yours, but to rehearse and equip legions of men and women for organized killing. And there will be “mistakes” and “accidents” and “collateral damage,” mostly “over there” where it doesn’t matter much to the average Joe iPod, but occasionally here at home as well. You will suffer the insidious social effects of a culture that inexplicably glorifies lockstep conformity in the service of mass murder, because it is carried out in pretty uniforms and with awe-inspiring weaponry and aircraft. And a lucky few will find three generations of family crushed beneath one of those aircraft, in a nation superficially at peace. (Again, not on purpose, LOL!)

To relieve all this gloomy condemnation of the military, however, here is a comment from the Telegraph article that puts the blame where it really belongs:

I am a native San Diegan. Miramar was built out in the middle of nowhere. As many have pointed out here if you want to blame someone for this tragedy then point your fingers at the greedy developers and the planning commissions that allowed it.

Oh, right: the people who wanted houses, and the developers willing to satisfy their demands, are at fault. I wonder if we can similarly blame the Iraqis for their troubles: they had the temerity to build residences in a land that Saddam Hussein would eventually gain control of, and that later would be invaded by the United States. I can kind of picture Hillary Clinton trying to pull that one off. Please, folks, refrain from building in areas sure to be ridden with strife, like Baghdad or coastal Californian cities. You can’t blame the U.S. military for wandering into them with falling planes.

I fear that, at best, the crash will only cause Americans to question their military’s “efficiency,” a topic Arthur Silber has discussed at length. Our military is to be a well-oiled murdering machine; its purpose is never questioned, only its more egregious blundering:

Ah, yes: “efficiency,” which also goes by the term, “competence” — the beloved goals of every monstrous regime in history. But this should not come as news, either. For several years, I have repeatedly made the point that the Democrats have no objection to endless U.S. interventions or to wars of aggression, nor are they repulsed in the smallest degree by unjustified slaughter. The Democrats only want U.S. murders to be managed “well” and accomplished “competently.” For empires, “neatness” is a great virtue. Bloodstains on the plush carpets of the corridors of power are distressingly unpleasant, don’t you know.

Now there are bloodstains here at home in sunny San Diego, and I am sure that Democrats and Republicans alike will scramble to blame the developers, underfunding (!) (the plane was twenty years old, somebody’s bound to say it), or anything else they can think of for this startling display of inefficiency—anything but question the military undertaking itself.

New website: Climate Debate Daily

Arts & Letters Daily has started a new website (as of January 2008) devoted to the global warming debate:  Climate Debate Daily.  That’s right, it’s not called “The Global Warming Consensus.”  Sorry folks, that’s another website!

I am very pleased to see a website devoted to give-and-take on the issue.  My own position is that of a skeptic, but I’m also in the “So what?” camp.  As in:  so what if global warming were caused by human activity?  Because if there is global warming, and if it is caused by human activity, and if the only solution is to de-industrialize the Western nations and prevent the undeveloped nations from industrializing, the cure is worse than the disease.

To put this in a feminist libertarian perspective, women, while still disadvantaged in many respects, generally enjoy the highest status in developed nations such as the United States.  In lesser-developed nations, women do the dirty work like hauling water and inhaling wood smoke fumes, and–oh yeah!–they’re treated like chattel or worse!  In other words, comfortable First Worlders with their shiny Priuses and Macbooks who denounce global warming are effectively telling the rest of the world to stop developing, thereby condemning literally billions of women to second-class (or last-class) status.

I am not categorically stating that West Is Best, but when I peruse statistics* on female genital mutilation, mass child prostitution and dowry killings, a case for the more developed nations becomes apparent, at least to me.

*On a daily basis, usually over breakfast.