By Carol Downer
The pro-natalist population controllers say they’re concerned about our health, and they charge that hormonal contraceptives are dangerous to our health, therefore we should stop taking them and have more babies; the other side says they’re concerned about our health, and they present the facts that show that the benefits of hormonal contraceptives outweigh the risk, so it’s prudent to use them to prevent unwanted pregnancy. Who’s “facts” do we believe?
Who’s checking the fact checkers, especially when they check up on jingoistic statements that we want to see proven wrong. When a pro-natalist Zimbabwean official tells his countrywomen “to multiply” in order for Zimbabwe to be a “superpower” and warns that birth control can cause cancer, we can see that he’s trying to exploit women’s fears. But, we must be equally wary when those of the “anti-natalist persuasion” rush to allay our fears. When the facts start flying about what’s best for women’s bodies, those of us who want to control our reproduction without governmental interference have to carefully analyze this ideologically-driven debate.
In the article, “Zimbabwe Registrar’s Claim that Contraception Causes Cancer is Misleading and Alarmist”, Africa Check cites two main claims by Zimbabwe Official Tobaiwa Mudede in his speech at an Africa Day celebration in Harare on May 25. They ignore his first assertion that the promotion of birth control is a ploy by western nations to retard population growth in Africa.
They contact WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and their check reveals his facts are right. IARC confirms that there can be a link between the use of oral and injectable hormonal contraceptives and particular types of cancer, increasing the risk in some cases and lowering it in others. Dr. Elvira Singh of IARC gives their overview of the various risk factors for cancer in taking the Pill or the Shot; she concludes that Mudede’s comments are “alarmist”. Dr. Singh’s support of the Pill and the Shot shows her complacency about the dangers of the Pill or the Shot, given that there a number of other equally effective but far safer barrier methods equally available. She only compares the danger of the Pill or the Shot to doing nothing at all to prevent pregnancy. Birth has dangers so the Pill and the Shot compare well with that.
Abby Johnston of Bustle.com’s article, a shortened version of Africa Check’s, sums up WHO’s position as “the benefit far exceeds the risks” with contraceptive use, and mis-quotes Africa Check in saying that “the higher the birth rate in a country, the higher the maternal mortality rate”. Fact? The UN only said the dangers of having more children could result in increased mortality rate. Johnston reveals her true concern, “Access and education on birth control is particularly important in areas facing overpopulation.” She presumably means Africa. African women, just as much as other women, need to have an unbiased comparison of all methods of birth control; www.birth-control-comparison.info
Methinks that the reason that Africa Check didn’t check the facts concerning Mudede’s allegation that there are those in the West that push birth control because they fear population growth in Africa, is because it is also based on fact. Some people confuse the feminist demand that we have control over our reproduction with the anti-natalist drive to reduce those populations they believe are excessive. These anti-natalist forces, usually wealthy families, use their money and influence to support national and international policies to push birth control as the primary way to attack poverty and environmental degradation. They use the rhetoric of women’s liberation, but their foundations and university-funded projects push oral and injectable hormonal contraception, no matter how harmful these methods may be.
Unfortunately, the anti-natalists have been wildly successful so far in keeping a low profile, framing their proposals as giving women “choice”. But, as a start to understanding the controversy between these two sides, there is an excellent book out that gives us a road map to the christian patriarchy movement and a description and history of national and international pro-natalist trends. I urge supporters of women’s reproductive rights to read my review of “Quiverfull” by Kathryn Joyce, a contributing reporter for Nation Magazine. I think it is important for us to face the growing pro-natalist movement in the United States, the popular base for the right-wing politicians who are closing down abortion clinics.
Showing posts with label Pro-Natalist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pro-Natalist. Show all posts
Friday, June 27, 2014
Friday, June 13, 2014
Kathryn Joyce’s Quiverfull, road map of the Christian Patriarchy Movement
By Carol Downer
I recommend that you leave the frothy page-turner at home when you do your summer reading. Instead, read Quiverfull by Kathryn Joyce--every single word of every single page, with my comments about Joyce’s antinatalist bias in mind, as though your reproductive freedom depends upon it, because it may. Joyce (a contributing writer for Nation Magazine) does an excellent job of reporting the self-labeled Christian Patriarchy Movement, a counter-culture which lives the values of sixteenth-century Calvinism, where the father is the spiritual and earthly leader of the family.
Through her interviews and participant observation, Joyce found that Quiverfull families model themselves on the white settler families of pre-Revolutionary English colonies in North America whose economy was based on forcibly exploiting the natural resources of the indigenous people, the slave trade and slave labor.
You will get a glimpse of how women in this movement see the shortcomings of our feminist movement, and you may be uncomfortable with how well the shoe fits. Hopefully, rather than dismissing these womens’ criticisms, you’ll ask whether our feminist movement has stayed true to its goals of liberating ourselves, and if present-day mores have improved women’s lives or created a more equal society.
Reading Joyce’s description of the movement in the first 12 chapters prepares you to understand Chapters 13 through 18. Starting with “Trust and Obey” and “Blessed Arrows”, Joyce gradually introduces the reader to the foundational beliefs underlying pronatalism, “the policy or practice of encouraging the bearing of children, especially government support of a higher birthrate.”
Chapters 15, 16 and 17, “The Natural Family”, “Return to Patriarchy” and “Godly Seeds” digs a little deeper into history and politics, presenting an excellent review of nationalists’ and nativists’ use of social policy to advance national interests through tax policies favoring large families, and their use of strategies, such as homeschooling, home businesses and home-based churches to spread the ideology and the theology of patriarchy. Denying racism, the Christian Patriarchy Movement, seeks to “be fruitful and multiply” to increase white Christians, but at the same time accepts converts to Christianity and recommends that white Christians adopt children of color.
Studying these chapters provides the basis to understand Chapter 18, “Demographic Winter”, the blockbuster centerpiece of Joyce’s book. The various strands of history, politics, and religion are pulled together to showcase the Christian Patriarchy Movement’s vision of the death of Western Civilization unless the United States and Europe start producing enough babies to the replace the old and dying. And, they have the cold, hard demographic facts to back them up. It’s being called, “the baby bust,” “the birth dearth”, “the graying of the continent”. Joyce attributes this to a “race panic” as low fertility among white couples coincides with an increasingly visible immigrant population across Europe.
As one reads this book, one begins to conjecture that perhaps the current race of State legislators to pass TRAP laws (Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers), and the increasingly reluctance of the Supreme Court to rule regulations that raise barriers to women seeking abortion as unconstitutional is this fear of “demographic winter”. Joyce seems to be implying that this is “just a prelude for a new cold war, a ‘clash of civilizations’ to be fought through women’s bodies, with the maternity ward as battleground.”
So, Joyce has done a brilliant job of observing, describing, quoting and analyzing the pro-natalist underpinning of the Christian Patriarchy Movement, and she has educated her readers about all the dry-as-dust pronatalist tax policies and the demographic realities internationally. We will be wise to understand the gravity of her message; pronatalists are determined to encourage the Western world to make more babies, therefore they respect women’s reproductive rights only as long as those rights are to have as many babies as possible.
BUT, we feminists will never start to effectively fight this battle to control our own sexuality and reproduction if we forget that there are two sides to this battle. It is not the right-wing versus the feminist and their liberal friends. It is the right-wing pronatalists versus the wealthy and influential anti-natalists. These are the families, such as Bill and Melinda Gates, the Rockefellers and Warren Buffet, and other capitalist friends who have no more regard for a woman’s freedom to control her body, than the right-wing, pronatalist Koch Brothers, et al. They just favor a different way of solving social problems, such as global warming and poverty. They believe that these problems are caused by too many people. They don’t put their efforts toward changing consumption patterns, having a more equitable distribution of the wealth and allowing the occupants of the land, rather than corporations, to use resources to benefit their own people. They are doing everything possible to discourage women from reproducing. They’re against “teen pregnancy”. They’re for any social trend that reduces women’s fertility: gay and transgender lifestyles, women going to college and having careers, later marriage, and the use of contraception such as the Pill, abortion, and sterilization. (The Christian patriarchal right opposes each of these social trends). There is a anti-natalist equivalent policy to those pronatalist policy listed in the book.
And, for every bombastic quote of a pro-natalist leader, such as Yasir Arafat’s “the womb of the Arab woman is my best weapon” can be matched with a quote from an antinatalist, such as Paul Ehrlich, who wrote the “Population Bomb”.
I hope I’ve encouraged people to read the book. It’s time that feminists who oppose policies that control women’s reproduction, whether it be employed by the pronatalists or the antinatalists start developing our own strategies, independent of the anti-natalist-controlled “pro-choice” movement.
Through her interviews and participant observation, Joyce found that Quiverfull families model themselves on the white settler families of pre-Revolutionary English colonies in North America whose economy was based on forcibly exploiting the natural resources of the indigenous people, the slave trade and slave labor.
You will get a glimpse of how women in this movement see the shortcomings of our feminist movement, and you may be uncomfortable with how well the shoe fits. Hopefully, rather than dismissing these womens’ criticisms, you’ll ask whether our feminist movement has stayed true to its goals of liberating ourselves, and if present-day mores have improved women’s lives or created a more equal society.
Reading Joyce’s description of the movement in the first 12 chapters prepares you to understand Chapters 13 through 18. Starting with “Trust and Obey” and “Blessed Arrows”, Joyce gradually introduces the reader to the foundational beliefs underlying pronatalism, “the policy or practice of encouraging the bearing of children, especially government support of a higher birthrate.”
Chapters 15, 16 and 17, “The Natural Family”, “Return to Patriarchy” and “Godly Seeds” digs a little deeper into history and politics, presenting an excellent review of nationalists’ and nativists’ use of social policy to advance national interests through tax policies favoring large families, and their use of strategies, such as homeschooling, home businesses and home-based churches to spread the ideology and the theology of patriarchy. Denying racism, the Christian Patriarchy Movement, seeks to “be fruitful and multiply” to increase white Christians, but at the same time accepts converts to Christianity and recommends that white Christians adopt children of color.
Studying these chapters provides the basis to understand Chapter 18, “Demographic Winter”, the blockbuster centerpiece of Joyce’s book. The various strands of history, politics, and religion are pulled together to showcase the Christian Patriarchy Movement’s vision of the death of Western Civilization unless the United States and Europe start producing enough babies to the replace the old and dying. And, they have the cold, hard demographic facts to back them up. It’s being called, “the baby bust,” “the birth dearth”, “the graying of the continent”. Joyce attributes this to a “race panic” as low fertility among white couples coincides with an increasingly visible immigrant population across Europe.
As one reads this book, one begins to conjecture that perhaps the current race of State legislators to pass TRAP laws (Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers), and the increasingly reluctance of the Supreme Court to rule regulations that raise barriers to women seeking abortion as unconstitutional is this fear of “demographic winter”. Joyce seems to be implying that this is “just a prelude for a new cold war, a ‘clash of civilizations’ to be fought through women’s bodies, with the maternity ward as battleground.”
So, Joyce has done a brilliant job of observing, describing, quoting and analyzing the pro-natalist underpinning of the Christian Patriarchy Movement, and she has educated her readers about all the dry-as-dust pronatalist tax policies and the demographic realities internationally. We will be wise to understand the gravity of her message; pronatalists are determined to encourage the Western world to make more babies, therefore they respect women’s reproductive rights only as long as those rights are to have as many babies as possible.
BUT, we feminists will never start to effectively fight this battle to control our own sexuality and reproduction if we forget that there are two sides to this battle. It is not the right-wing versus the feminist and their liberal friends. It is the right-wing pronatalists versus the wealthy and influential anti-natalists. These are the families, such as Bill and Melinda Gates, the Rockefellers and Warren Buffet, and other capitalist friends who have no more regard for a woman’s freedom to control her body, than the right-wing, pronatalist Koch Brothers, et al. They just favor a different way of solving social problems, such as global warming and poverty. They believe that these problems are caused by too many people. They don’t put their efforts toward changing consumption patterns, having a more equitable distribution of the wealth and allowing the occupants of the land, rather than corporations, to use resources to benefit their own people. They are doing everything possible to discourage women from reproducing. They’re against “teen pregnancy”. They’re for any social trend that reduces women’s fertility: gay and transgender lifestyles, women going to college and having careers, later marriage, and the use of contraception such as the Pill, abortion, and sterilization. (The Christian patriarchal right opposes each of these social trends). There is a anti-natalist equivalent policy to those pronatalist policy listed in the book.
And, for every bombastic quote of a pro-natalist leader, such as Yasir Arafat’s “the womb of the Arab woman is my best weapon” can be matched with a quote from an antinatalist, such as Paul Ehrlich, who wrote the “Population Bomb”.
I hope I’ve encouraged people to read the book. It’s time that feminists who oppose policies that control women’s reproduction, whether it be employed by the pronatalists or the antinatalists start developing our own strategies, independent of the anti-natalist-controlled “pro-choice” movement.
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