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.