The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (2 page)

This is not just a story about abortion, though abortion tends to be a flashpoint. It is, rather, about how great international powers have worked to influence the rights of the world’s women, and how, conversely, women’s rights will ultimately shape the future.

The tale is much bigger than it might at first appear. For decades now the countries of the first world have been exporting family planning to the third world, for reasons that combine humanitarianism and national security realpolitik. With the West’s help, governments worldwide concerned with overpopulation have tried to change the sexual and childbearing norms of their peoples. Feminists have fought, with a surprising if unheralded degree of success, to have reproductive rights recognized in international law. The United States has, depending on who is in charge, worked to bring safe abortion to poor countries, and worked with equal zeal to take it away. Imitating the organizing strategies of their opponents, fundamentalists have joined hands across national borders to stave off challenges to traditional gender hierarchies. And remarkably little of this hugely consequential story is understood by the American public, despite the country’s crucial role in shaping the fate of women all over the planet.

Many of the roots of our current battles lie in the cold war, a time of widespread panic that overpopulation was going to lead to Malthusian doom and revolutionary upheavals. Back then, staunch anticommunists saw the mass diffusion of birth control as a key bulwark against anticapitalist chaos. A huge international family planning infrastructure was erected, and the idea that childbearing should be a matter of choice rather than fate spread throughout the world.

Not surprisingly, some countries saw this as a form of neocolonialism, a critique that has gained ever more salience in recent years, when it’s been supported, ironically, by the American right. Nevertheless, in the second half of the twentieth century, a global consensus began emerging that overpopulation hindered development. As the concern grew, some countries started using coercion to bring down birth rates faster, resulting in outcries from both feminists and religious groups.

At certain points there was considerable hostility between those most concerned about women’s rights and those most worried about overpopulation, groups whose aims now appear deeply intertwined. In the 1970s, though, a group of feminist-minded women who had come up through the ranks of the population-control movement decided to take it over from within. They argued that you couldn’t treat women as mere means to a preferred demographic destiny; their rights and health had to be ends in themselves. If overpopulation was a problem, its root cause lay in women’s subordination, which too often gave them little choice over how many children to have and almost no social value outside of reproduction. Women needed power, not just pills, and population programs could be harnessed to improve their health and status. Employing canny bureaucratic warfare, skillful organizing, and a solidarity that transcended borders, these women worked within emerging systems of global governance that, even today, few outsiders understand. As a result of their efforts, at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, their once marginal views about the universal importance of reproductive rights became the official policy of the United Nations. It was a policy that was supported by every major donor country, including, at the time, the United States.

Religious conservatives in many regions were alarmed by this, and sometimes banded together across sectarian lines in opposition. At one point, as we’ll see, Pope John Paul II even offered to help Libya achieve a rapprochement with Western governments in exchange for standing with the church against reproductive rights at the UN. When George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001, the fundamentalist alliance achieved an unprecedented level of power and influence. The global reproductive rights movement, though, had also grown strong, and found it could survive the defection of the United States, its original patron. Reproductive rights even entered the realm of international law when in several significant cases courts ruled in varied jurisdictions that women who had been denied abortions had had their human rights violated by their own countries.

S
ome of this might sound abstract. Debates in congressional hearings, foundation boardrooms, and international conferences can seem far removed from women’s real lives. On the ground, though, the consequences have often been profound, determining, among other things, whether a woman has access to contraception and, if she needs it, an abortion; whether she can get an education before she starts her family and earn an income after; whether her government penalizes her for having what it deems too many children; and whether her genitals are left intact or ritually circumcised to encourage her chastity.

In reporting on controversies in Latin America, Africa, India, and Europe, I tried to portray women’s stories in all their complexity, without attempting to tie up every ideological loose end. Unlike the brilliant philosopher Martha Nussbaum, I’m not attempting to create a universal framework of women’s rights or to systematically disentangle transcendent values from culturally specific ones. If anything, I’m often trying to show how difficult it is to do just that. Real lives have a way of defying neat political categories, and of refusing to embody pat lessons. Grand plans to remake societies, no matter how well intentioned, usually have unintended effects. Nevertheless, ambitious efforts to improve the health and status of women have at times been quite successful, as have campaigns to roll them back.

Ultimately, one insight that I hope emerges from these stories is that feminists, liberals, and reformers have as much claim to cultural authenticity as conservatives do. To act as if only the most static and rigid parts of a culture are genuine, to treat other societies as less capable of dynamism and progress than we in the West believe ourselves to be, is deeply condescending to the women all around the world who are trying to effect change from within. I’ve been guided by the belief that we should show solidarity with people who aspire to be protected by the same universal human rights guarantees that we enjoy.

In almost every country on earth there are internal struggles over the role of women, fights that pit universalist claims for women’s human rights against cultural relativist arguments for preserving traditional gender relationships. Indeed, women’s rights are perhaps the most visible sign of modernity and thus an obvious bête noir for flourishing fundamentalist movements. In developing nations the situation is further complicated by the influence wielded by international donors, aid agencies, and UN bodies that work to promote reproductive rights, inevitably affecting sexual norms.

I
n 1984, the brash, flamboyant feminist Germaine Greer published
Sex & Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility
, which is, among other things, a broadside against the ethnocentrism of the international family planning movement and a fetishization of traditional village life. “The majority of the world’s women have not simply been entrapped into motherhood: in societies which have not undergone demographic transition, where children are a priceless resource, the role of mother is not a marginal one but central to social life and organization,” Greer wrote.
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This is absolutely correct, and it is the reason feminists once fought population controllers who ignored women’s own hopes and desires.

Nevertheless, women everywhere do try, sometimes desperately, to limit their fertility, a fact borne out by their frequent recourse to abortion. In hymning traditional social arrangements, Greer moved so far to the left that she circled around to the right, treating every society but her own as a harmonious, homogenous system that could only be distorted by the malign influence of Western liberalism. Written at a time when she was herself struggling with infertility, Greer charged family planners with spreading the antichild ethos of a selfish, materialistic, and maladaptive modernity. Further, she defended the chador, extolled chastity over artificial contraception, and posited patriarchal peasant society as preferable to individualistic consumer capitalism. “One of the most insidious forms of pollution is the destruction of the integrity of one’s culture by that of another, dominant, outsider group,” she wrote, “and it is under such conditions of cultural resistance that adherence to cultural standards of purity becomes most important; it is part of taking the line of most resistance, whether to lipstick, Coca-Cola, opium, or oral contraceptives.”
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As an observation, this is true enough; it’s part of the reason that, for example, some humiliated Muslims have taken refuge in a medieval fundamentalism. Greer, however, wasn’t just describing such cultural resistance; she was endorsing it. There was no place in her analysis for women who dissented from conservative forces in their own societies, women who longed for the freedoms she blithely dismissed. Writing about women taking up the veil after the 1979 Iranian revolution, she assumed that they had all done so willingly, as a sign of “liberation through self-discipline.” Male domination is bad, she allowed, but the patriarchal family is preferable to the atomism of the “consumer economy.” Wrote Greer, “To have rejected patriarchal authority within and without the self, however desirable in itself, is to have become vulnerable to much more insidious and degrading forms of control.”
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Greer made a common error of the disillusioned Western radical, projecting onto other cultures all the authentic virtues she wished were in her own. In thinking about the situation of women in vastly different contexts, there are a number of dangers. One is assuming that Western ways are self-evidently superior and that all women would choose them, if only they could. But another is assuming that women in other cultures are so different from us that situations we would find intolerable—bearing child after child into grinding poverty; being utterly at the mercy of fathers, husbands, and brothers; having one’s clitoris sliced off with a razor—do not also cause them great pain. The search for human commonality among vastly diverse people is tricky and elusive, but it is callous to surrender to relativism when so many women are clearly suffering.

For people living in the world’s rich developed countries, it can be hard to grasp just how terribly women are treated in much of the world. Sexism and violence exist everywhere, but political correctness or condescending romanticism about exotic others should not obscure the fact that women in the third world often have it much, much worse.

In large parts of Asia girls are given less food and medical care than boys from infancy. Throughout Asia and Africa they are significantly less likely than boys to be enrolled in school. More than a third of girls worldwide are married off before they reach adulthood, often to much older men. Early pregnancy taxes their bodies; girls under fifteen are five times more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than women in their twenties.
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Obscenely high rates of maternal mortality are a global scandal, taking more than half a million women each year, 99 percent of them in the developing world. One in twenty-six women in Africa will die of pregnancy-related causes.
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In many countries women have no rights to their husband’s property, and should they be widowed, they can be either thrown out of their homes or inherited by their husband’s brother. The lack of power that women have over their own bodies is directly responsible for the feminization of the AIDS epidemic, which in Africa is killing far more women than men. In 2004, when Ugandan feminists tried to pass a bill that would, among other things, ban spousal rape, men reacted with outrage. A member of the Ugandan parliament’s legal affairs committee said the bill should address women’s denial of sex, arguing, “Refusing to have sex is the most violent thing a spouse can do.”
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There are many parts of the world where domestic violence is the rule, not the exception: Seventy-one percent of women in one rural Ethiopian province, 69 percent in one rural province in Peru, and 62 percent in a province in Bangladesh say they’ve been abused by a partner.
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Writing about women’s rights globally can be complicated for an American, since it can seem both condescending and like an alibi for imperialism. There is, after all, a long history of Western colonialists justifying themselves by promising to liberate benighted native women. In 1927, an American journalist named Katherine Mayo wrote a best-selling book called
Mother India
about the degraded position of females in that country. India’s ills, she argued, had nothing to do with British rule and everything to do with child marriage and the oppression of women, which led sickly, ignorant mothers to raise devitalized, sexually perverse children. “The whole pyramid of the Hindu’s woes,” she wrote, “material and spiritual... rests upon a rock-bottom physical base. This base is, simply, his manner of getting into the world and his sex-life thenceforward.”
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At a time of mounting Indian nationalism she argued that the sexual organization of Indian society made self-rule impossible.

Mayo’s book became a sensation in both England and the United States—there was a Broadway play based on it about a twelve-year-old Indian girl married off to an old man—while Indians so reviled it that some demanded it be banned.
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Wrote one Indian historian, “Even today, few books—apart, perhaps, from Salman Rushdie’s
Satanic Verses
(1989)—can match the scale of the international controversy generated by
Mother India
.”
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