In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

The War Over Women’s Bodies

Jill

I want to write a longer post about this, but unfortunately time does not permit. So, a question: Why are progressive publications buying into the right-wing xenophobic frame on birth rates?

That story argues that babies are the new weapons of war — that military supremacy doesn’t do it. And it begins with the example of Kosovo:

The Serb/Albanian conflict offers damn near perfect lab conditions to prove my case that birth rate trumps military prowess these days, because the Serbs always beat the Albanians in battle, yet they’ve lost their homeland, Kosovo. Here again, we can blame Woodrow Wilson and his talk about “rights.” In places where tribes hate each other, a tribe that outbreeds its rival will become the majority, even if it can’t fight. So, after generations of skulking at home making babies, letting the Serbs do the fighting, the Albanians finally became the majority in Kosovo and therefore the official “good guys,” being oppressed by the official “bad guys,” the Serbs. At least that’s the way the nave American Wilsonian types like Clinton saw it. So when the Serbs fought back against an Albanian rebellion in Kosovo, and dared to beat the Albanians, Clinton decided to bomb the Serbs into letting go of Kosovo, the ancient heartland of a Christian nation that had spent its blood holding off the Turks for hundreds of years.

The Kosovo Albanians proved that military skill doesn’t matter, because they tried and failed to conquer Kosovo the old-fashioned way: armed rebellion by the Kosovo Liberation Army. It was a wipeout: local Serb militias, a bunch of tired middle-aged part-timers and cops, crushed the KLA. What happened next is a beautiful illustration of the way losers win these days: the Albanians took the bodies of KLA men who’d been killed in battle, stripped all weapons and ammo from them, and showed them to gullible Western reporters as victims of a Serb “massacre.” It was a massacre, all right, but only because the KLA couldn’t fight worth a damn. Alive and armed, they were a joke; dead and disarmed, they helped win Kosovo by making their side the “victims,” which led directly to U.S. military intervention.

To win the way the Albanians won in Kosovo, you need to make a lot of babies. It’s that simple. And to see how it works, you have to drop the namby-pamby liberal idea that people only have babies out of “love.” In lots of places on this planet, baby-making is a form of weapons production.

…yeah.

I’m not going to get into the historical revisionism there, but I will point to this ridiculous quote:

Ah, birth rate — funny how it’s become such a taboo subject for both Left and Right. The Lefties wouldn’t dream of telling third-world people to limit their baby-making, and most right wingers can’t bring themselves to endorse birth control even if it could slow the destruction of their own countries.

That gets to the heart of the problem: The author is concerned that “third-world” women having babies will challenge Western hegemony and white supremacy. That, to him, is terrifying.

Read the whole article if you want to get increasingly irritated. And it you really feel like throwing something, check out the comments. My favorite one is about how we should forcibly sterilize all women after their second child.

A lot of commenters, not surprisingly, fell back on environmentalist arguments when promoting limiting the birth rate. And I am all for women choosing to limit the number of children they have out of concern for the environment. But that’s if they choose. Women have more or fewer children for all kinds of reasons; ain’t nothing wrong with factoring in environmental issues. While I recognize that more people means more strain on the environment, our massive consumption problems are far more pressing than choosing to have three kids instead of two. Americans are some of the most wasteful people in the planet. I’d be a lot more comfortable spending our time and money on things like better public transportation and sustainable energy resources than on scolding women for their choices (or forcing them into particular choices). I’d rather create a system where women had more options, not fewer — because as experience has shown, when women have the option of controlling the number and spacing of their children, they do. And when Americans — often wealthier Americans — are consuming far more than their share of the world’s resources, I don’t have much patience for Chicken Little cries that we’re being “out-bred” by women in developing countries. I have even less patience for men who are primarily worried about challenges to a system of white male supremacy, and want to use women’s bodies as means of producing (or cutting off production of) arrows for their war.

I also don’t have much patience for women’s bodies being used as the battleground for all of this. Yes, there are valid environmental concerns. But pinning the responsibility — and the burden — on women is a mistake. Women’s bodies are already the locus for too many cultural, religious and political battles. Progressives shouldn’t be adding to that.

23 thoughts on The War Over Women’s Bodies

  1. “And I am all for women choosing to limit the number of children they have out of concern for the environment. But that’s if they choose. Women have more or fewer children for all kinds of reasons; ain’t nothing wrong with factoring in environmental issues.”

    Women in patriarchal countries don’t “choose” to have ten children and be worn out from childbirth and child rearing by age 40. Oh, they may prefer to have large numbers of children because given the extremely narrow range of choices open to them, having many children is the best path to a limited amount of power within the oppressive family structures they have to cope with. But it’s well-established that the best way to lower birth rates in poor countries is to make schooling for girls compulsory and to enforce it. Education gives girls real choices and when they have real choices, in general they don’t choose to have large families.

    So – high birth rates in patriarchal societies depends on keeping girls ignorant and subservient. And societies with ignorant and subservient girls grow faster in numbers than egalitarian societies.

    This is a real problem in democracies, as Europeans are finding out. In the US, there are only a few pockets of these types of patriarchal closed societies – ultra-orthodox Jews and Amish, mainly. And their numbers are small enough that we can treat them as curiosities. But in many European countries there are now large, unassimilable Muslim closed societies that oppress their women and girls and have high birth rates. What is a democratic, egalitarian society supposed to do when it contains a large minority organized in a closed society that rejects both democracy and egalitarianism?

  2. Women in patriarchal countries don’t “choose” to have ten children and be worn out from childbirth and child rearing by age 40.

    …did I say that they did?

    My point is that getting to choose to not have children for the environment is a big privilege. It should not be a requirement. And as I said in the post:

    I’d rather create a system where women had more options, not fewer — because as experience has shown, when women have the option of controlling the number and spacing of their children, they do.

  3. First of all, the greatest threat to U.S. hegemony is U.S. hegemony. Let’s make that clear from the start.

    And like Jill, I reject the idea of women’s bodies being an appropriate battleground for politics or for the environment. Third world men and women could have thirty children, and they would still impact the environment less than the 2.1 kids I might have in the U.S., because of shockingly excessive first world consumption. We want to dictate how many kids women on the other side of the planet are having but find any requests for us to alter our lifestyles slightly to be completely extreme and out of the question…

  4. I would hesitate to draw any broad conclusions about progressive publications from this one article, because feminist issues aside, it’s a dumb article.

    Maybe I was just brainwashed by CNN, but I have a hard time seeing the recent Balkan wars as the story of poor Serbia being victimized by Western imperialism, especially when this POV is argued by someone using phrases like “after generations of skulking at home making babies, letting the Serbs do the fighting…” and “Kosovo, the ancient heartland of a Christian nation that had spent its blood holding off the Turks for hundreds of years”.

    And anyone who describes the Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jews as “Zionist” doesn’t know jack about Israeli politics, and until I see strong evidence to the contrary I’m going to assume they don’t know jack about any other country’s politics, either. That was the point where I pretty much stopped reading.

  5. But in many European countries there are now large, unassimilable Muslim closed societies that oppress their women and girls and have high birth rates.

    What evidence do you have for this? For the UK, birth rates for Pakistani and Bangladeshi mothers (average 4.7 and 3.9 children in 2001) are high, but falling, from elsewhere in the world they are similar to UK-born women. (Statistics here. And certainly the Muslims round here (small multi-cultural town in Southern England) are not in closed unassimilable societies, but sharing schools, socialising etc with all the other races. There is a lot of rubbish being talked (in the US and elsewhere) about ‘Eurabia’ and European ‘Dhimmitude’ that just doesn’t reflect reality.

  6. If you’re after environmentalist arguments, George Monbiot thinks the whole issue is irrelevant: rising human populations will probably level off soon and aren’t a real threat except to people with very strange beliefs indeed.

    Bloix, Jill – if you’re on the subject, it’s worth noting that not having many children is also often not a choice; a recent survey in Britain found that the average woman wanted one more child than she had (whether she had 2, 1, or none). Being coerced by a lack of money, time and faith in society into not childbearing is another form of forced control over women’s fertility.

  7. magistra – I think that’s a peculiarly British panic that exists simply because the birth rate among white British women is so low. In Britain, the only families I know who have as many as 4 children are either very religious (Islam or Catholicism), very rural or both. In the USA, four children isn’t nearly so uncommon. People wail ‘this is different from the norm, HOW DARE YOU?’ at different levels in different places.

    Did you read LiberalConspiracy on the ‘no-go areas’ panic? No reality indeed.

  8. This really annoyed me when it became an issue in Australia with the last government. Peter Costello (the treasurer!) told people to have three babies, “one for mum, one for dad and one for the country”. Of course, this means white, middle or upper class babies, preferably in cities – there’s a higher birthrate for first-generation immigrant women, rural women, poor women and Aboriginal women, but that’s the wrong kind of baby. They then gave a “baby bonus”, a no-strings-attached payment of $3000 per child. I think it’s quite appropriate to reduce the financial stress on families at a particularly stressful time in their lives, but then there was a great Conservative outcry at women doing things like buying a TV or *gasp* maybe even booze and cigarettes! (There was in fact a problem with young and/or poor women being bullied out of their money by family members, but that’s not what the outcry was about).

  9. If the author is so keen on babies, let him give birth to some.

    Seriously, with “Progressives” like this, who needs the right wing?

  10. “The author is concerned that “third-world” women having babies will challenge Western hegemony and white supremacy. That, to him, is terrifying.”

    I think you’ve got that wrong. His whole point is that this – unless there are sharp ethnic divisions – this won’t happen because immigants assimilate:

    “… I mean, your second-grade class photo might be two-thirds Hispanic — but those Hispanic faces would have absorbed a whole born-again American world picture that actually comes from the Scots-Irish who settled the American south hundreds of years ago.”

    “…you’re likely to be surprised to see your “weak” American or European culture win out, slowly, un-gloriously but surely, and you may live long enough to see a whole new crop of pols who look like they just came from Karachi or Kinshasa until you turn the sound on and hear them ranting about how we need to get rid of all these damn immigrants.”

    He’s certainly right about his examples. Kosovo wouldn’t have independence if it had a low Albanian birth rate and Serb majority. And it’s certainly a political issue in placed with sharp ethnic divisions like Israel/Palestine and NI.

  11. our massive consumption problems are far more pressing than choosing to have three kids instead of two. Americans are some of the most wasteful people in the planet. I’d be a lot more comfortable spending our time and money on things like better public transportation and sustainable energy resources than on scolding women for their choices (or forcing them into particular choices).

    Oh HELL yes! Jill, I fucking love you.

    For real, I don’t discount the environmental damage newborns humans are going to do. I honestly don’t. It’s totally cool if people want to limit their children for environmental reasons. But forcing and pressurising women (and it is overwhelmingly women – like another commenter said, most women want more children than they have, and it’s male partners who often say nay) to stop reproducing? Fucked. Up.

    Let’s tax the shit out of the wasteful First World. Let’s subsidise public transport (or just CREATE a freakin public transport system!). Let’s make recycling mandatory, and get medieval on fossil fuels. ALL these are steps we should be taking before we go NEAR controlling women’s wombs.

  12. Agree about legislation regarding women’s bodies. Good call. I think the author is a conservative in various ways, though writing for a progressive publication.

    I think governmental control of women’s reproduction is despicable.

    Thene — I am not sure about “Being coerced by a lack of money, time and faith in society into not childbearing is another form of forced control over women’s fertility.” Yes, the income gap is unfair and should not be the basis of any kind of regulation regarding reproduction. But most families do decide about children based on economics. We did. Financial planning isn’t always coercion. Similarly with time and faith in society. Those are personal decisions made via women’s (and men’s) agency. Reality, which is sometimes brutally unfair, is the culprit. I think “coercion” is the wrong word to describe most scenarios involving using economics/time/faith in society to determine # of children.

    Re Dinogirl’s comment in #11, that male partners should not have any say. I see where you are coming from. But I ultimately think it’s a shared decision. I wanted, at one point, two children; I have one. I’ve been pregnant four times, three were non-accidental, and two of them were miscarriages. Coercion? No, ultimately just being in a partnership.

  15. Octo – on the one hand, there’s sound financial planning, which is necessary. On the other hand, there’s the discrimination against pregnant women and mothers (and not fathers) that accounts for the bulk of the gender pay gap, which is not.

  16. Dobrica Cosic Former Serbian President “We lie to deceive ourselves, to console others; we lie for mercy, we lie to fight fear, to encourage ourselves, to hide our and somebody else’s misery. We lie for love and honesty. We lie because of freedom. Lying ie is the trait of our patriotism and the proof of our innate smartness. We lie creatively, imaginatively, inventively.”

    Six pivotal themes in Serbian propaganda are

    1. Victimization, in which Serbs were constructed as collective victims first of the NDH, then of Tito’s Yugoslavia, and more specifically of Croats, Albanians, Bosnians, and other non-Serbs.

    2. Dehumanization of designated ‘others’, in which Croats were depicted as ‘genocidal’ and as ‘Ustaše’, Bosnians were portrayed as ‘fanatical fundamentalists’, and Albanians were represented as not fully human. These processes of dehumanization effectively removed these designated ‘others’ from the moral field, sanctifying their murder or expulsion.

    3. Belittlement, in which Serbia’s enemies were represented as
    beneath contempt.

    4. Conspiracy, in which Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, the Vatican,
    Germany, Austria, and sometimes also the Bosnians as well as the U.S. and other foreign states, were seen as united in a conspiracy to break up the SFRY and hurt Serbia. In this way, the Belgrade regime’s obstinate disregard for the fundamental standards of international law was dressed up as heroic defiance of an anti-Serb conspiracy.

    5. Entitlement, in which the Serbs were constructed as ‘entitled’ to create a Greater
    Serbian state to which parts of Croatia and Bosnia would be attached, under the motto,’ All Serbs should live in one state.’

    6. Superhuman powers and divine sanction. The Serbs were told that they were, in some sense, “super”. They were the best fighters on the planet, they could stand up to the entire world, and they were sanctioned by God himself, because of Tsar Lazar and the fact that Lazar had chosen the heavenly kingdom. Moreover, since Lazar had chosen the heavenly kingdom, the Serbs, encouraged to view themselves as Lazar’s heirs, were entitled to the earthly kingdom which Lazar had repudiated, as their patrimony.

    Serbian society began to stray down the path to war more or less unwittingly.
    Already in the years 1981—86, long before the other republics experienced anything
    like a ‘national awakening’, Serbia (and here one may include Kosovo too) was
    already sliding into a syndrome in which myths, threats, the allure of victory, and
    belligerent rhetoric filled the public discourse, giving Serbs a sense of common
    destiny but also separating them, psychologically, from the other peoples of socialist
    Yugoslavia. That this was an unhealthy state of collective mind is clear from the
    prominence of the themes of victimization, conspiracy, national entitlement, and
    divine sanction of the Serbian national project, as well as from the insistent campaigns of dehumanization, demonization, and belittlement of Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians, as well as other peoples and states, which began at this time. This syndrome, in an individual, would be considered psychotic; to the extent that it permeated much of Serbian society, perhaps especially in the countryside, one may speak of Serbia having been sucked into a kind of collective psychosis. And to the extent that Serbian war propaganda aimed at reinforcing and stimulating this state of mind, we may say that it aimed at inculcating and reinforcing neurotic and
    psychotic syndromes in Serbian society. This psychosis had its cultic saints – portraitsof Miloševiæ and Chetnik leader Draža Mihailoviæ were often displayed alongside those of saints canonized by the Church – had its bards (such as Simonida Stankoviæ and Ceca Ražnjatoviæ), and even had its official music – “turbo-folk”, a pop mixtureof folk-ethnic style with a rhythmic pounding beat. Moreover, this psychosis could even transport those infected to a state of consciousness which they mistook for a better world. Miloševi, for example, arriving dramatically at Kosovo polje in a helicopter on 28 June 1989, told those gathered for the six hundredth anniversary of Serbia’s mythic confrontation with its national destiny, that in that
    the – century battle, Serbia had defended not just herself but all of European culture and civilization. Fine oratory might even be called the elixir of national psychosis.

  17. This really annoyed me when it became an issue in Australia with the last government. Peter Costello (the treasurer!) told people to have three babies, “one for mum, one for dad and one for the country”. Of course, this means white, middle or upper class babies, preferably in cities – there’s a higher birthrate for first-generation immigrant women, rural women, poor women and Aboriginal women, but that’s the wrong kind of baby. They then gave a “baby bonus”, a no-strings-attached payment of $3000 per child. I think it’s quite appropriate to reduce the financial stress on families at a particularly stressful time in their lives, but then there was a great Conservative outcry at women doing things like buying a TV or *gasp* maybe even booze and cigarettes! (There was in fact a problem with young and/or poor women being bullied out of their money by family members, but that’s not what the outcry was about).

    Over here in Austria it’s the same. The government is trying to get the “right” kinds of people to reproduce but because our women have the oppertunity to study and get a high paying job their interest in having a large family is near non existant. So the government tries to make motherhood more appealing by giving people money and generally making motherhood worth it. Too bad it’s not the white austrians who are swayed though. It’s the 2nd and 3rd Generation immigrants whose children have obtained citizenship and therefore can get the benefits. Of course the government cant be picky and say: “No, you can’t have it. Your not a real austrian!”

  18. Octogalore – I think you’ll need to revisit what I said, as I never suggested male partners shouldn’t have a say in limiting children. I said they pull the plug more often, which is true.

  19. Dinogirl, sorry if I misinterpreted. I read “But forcing and pressurising women (and it is overwhelmingly women – like another commenter said, most women want more children than they have, and it’s male partners who often say nay) to stop reproducing?” to suggest that male partners applying pressure to female partners to limit children is problematic. Because both play a role (hopefully) in parenting and economics, while I fully agree that a fetus is the sole province of the woman, whether to have more kids in the first place should be a joint decision. If you weren’t contesting that, I misread.

  20. The environment has a carrying capacity, and as we alter our environment, we alter k. The problem is, nobody really knows what k is for humans. But I see no reason to tempt fate either by having a zillion babies or by continuing to be so wasteful.

  21. But I see no reason to tempt fate either by having a zillion babies or by continuing to be so wasteful.

    The problem is that there really isn’t much individuals can do to change the situation. It’s social change that’s called for, but the usual suspects prefer exhorting individuals to make choices that will somehow act as a substitute.

  22. But in many European countries there are now large, unassimilable Muslim closed societies that oppress their women and girls and have high birth rates. What is a democratic, egalitarian society supposed to do when it contains a large minority organized in a closed society that rejects both democracy and egalitarianism?

    Bloix, you said it yourself: enforce education for girls.

    Laws that demand the education of both sexes, laws against arranged marriages, laws against honor killing, and *strict* enforcement of those laws. Also, strict enforcement of laws against domestic violence in general. Since the only thing that works to stop groups that oppress their women from having a higher birth rate than groups that don’t is to make the groups that oppress their women stop doing it, societies that try to have sexual equality as a standard which contain large closed minorities that oppress women *must* step in to smack down the woman-oppressing behavior.

    But it must be done across the board. In Europe, it may be enclaves of Muslims, but in America it’s enclaves of fundamentalist Christians or cultists. And they must be treated equally. You can’t say that Muslims can’t be allowed to oppress women but Christians can; *both* need the smackdown.

    Now, often this gets into bullshit about wearing veils. Wearing a veil might be a personal choice. There should never be a law against wearing a veil. However, you can make laws saying it can never be compulsory to wear a veil except in a religious institution itself, to prevent local businesspeople from refusing to serve women who are not in veils. Really, though, the focus has to not be on crap like veils but on making sure that women are allowed to make free informed choices. If your free informed choice is to stay at home and have ten kids, fine, but your parents had better have made sure you got an education and not forced you to get married and your husband had better not be raping or beating you to make you have ten kids and your family had better not have threatened that if you divorce said husband and take said ten kids they will kill you. Women can freely choose to live “traditional” lives but it *must* be free choice. Most will freely choose not to.

  23. Octo, we’re on the same page :). The phrase in parentheses was there to draw attention to the fact that this is primarily a women’s issue – they feel the pressure more strongly, is what I was getting at.

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