The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (26 page)

N
o outsider could ever create the kind of change Pareyio has, but Pareyio couldn’t have had such a profound impact without outside help. That, ultimately, is what the anti-FGM movement—and the global reproductive rights movement more broadly—is about. To support people like Pareyio—as well as those fighting to implement the Maputo Protocol or struggling against draconian abortion bans or the terrible iniquities of sharia law—is to reject relativism. It is to believe that other cultures, like our own, can change in necessary ways without being destroyed.

For those understandably skeptical of Western interventions in the poor world, that might look like imperialism. Liberals have many reasons to sympathize with people struggling to hold on to their ways of life in the face of the hegemonic steamroller of globalization. But they have even more reason to sympathize with people who are fighting for individual rights in societies that demand subsuming such rights to tradition and myths about sexual purity. After all, even if relativists like Shweder truss them up in fashionable third-worldism, such demands are the very essence of reactionary conservatism. That’s true whether they are made by the Vatican, an imam, or a tribal hierarchy. When some people are willing to risk their lives to escape tradition, it’s hard to see the difference between culture and tyranny.

Save for a few corners of Scandinavia, there is no society on earth that does not discriminate against women, and no place where such discrimination is not ardently defended
by
some women, who usually see it as a respectful, safeguarding recognition of difference. Women’s rights, then, will always, at one time or another, conflict with culture. The loss of the status quo, of ancient ways of doing things, is genuinely painful for some. One can see that and still see that solidarity means taking sides.

CHAPTER 6:
THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE CULTURE WARS

A
s NATO bombs fell on Kosovo in 1999, around 850,000 people, the vast majority of them ethnic Albanians, fled into Albania and Macedonia. Serb soldiers were on the rampage, and Kosovar Albanian women were being raped systematically, some for days on end. Such rapes, wrote Human Rights Watch, “were not rare and isolated acts committed by individual Serbian or Yugoslav forces, but rather were used deliberately as an instrument to terrorize the civilian population, extort money from families, and push people to flee their homes. Rape furthered the goal of forcing ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.”
¹

When people are driven from their homes, their most immediate needs are, obviously, food, shelter, and emergency medical care. As Merle Goldberg and Harvey Karman always knew, though, reproductive health needs can be acute, especially when sexual violence is prevalent and people are displaced for many months. One of the UNFPA’s mandates is providing for the reproductive health—including safe childbirth—of refugee populations. So after the war the UNFPA sent several experts to review the situation and see what needed to be done.

One of them, Manuel Carballo, the coordinator of the International Centre for Migration and Health, reported back on the need to make plans for dealing with pregnant refugees. “Ensuring healthy pregnancies and safe deliveries among women in camps and ‘on the road’ is already a major challenge and supplies and equipment in this domain are already called for,” he wrote.
²
Another UNFPA consultant, a psychologist specializing in sexual violence and trauma, investigated the particular needs of rape victims. Among her conclusions: “It is assumed that many women who have become pregnant as a result of sexual violence will seek to terminate their pregnancy. Abortion is legal in Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and in Albania, where it is legal up to 12 weeks, and up to 22 weeks in cases of pregnancy as a result of rape. As per the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development, any provision of abortion should be safe and post abortion counseling should be offered promptly.” Emergency contraception was legal in Albania and, she wrote, it “should be a part of any medical response to women who have been victims of sexual violence, as an option for these women.”
³

Thus, the UNFPA provided safe delivery kits—including soap, razor blades, and plastic sheeting—as well as emergency contraceptives, manual vacuum aspirators, condoms, underwear, and sanitary pads. Manual vacuum aspirators can, of course, be used to perform abortions, but they’re also necessary for treating incomplete miscarriages and complications from unsafe abortions. What the UNFPA was doing was standard practice and would have gotten little notice had the antiabortion activist Austin Ruse not shown up.

During the late summer of 1999 the Population Research Institute, a right-wing Catholic group dedicated to fighting international family planning, sent Ruse on an eight-day fact-finding tour of Albania. “The concern was that the refugee women were being coerced into sterilizations and even abortions,” he wrote in an article titled “UN Pro-life Lobbying: Full Contact Sport,” published in the antiabortion journal
Human Life Review
.
⁴
Ruse admitted he didn’t find what he was looking for. “In the eight days I was there, I discovered only one case that could be considered an abuse,” he wrote. “A peasant woman in Vlora had been given an abortion at the government’s regional hospital and not been told of the negative medical consequences to her. As to bribes with food and medicine, I saw none.”
⁵
Nevertheless, with no evidence at all, he asserted that the UNFPA was working with Milošević to ethnically cleanse the Kosovars. “UNFPA was only too happy to assist the Serbs with the demography question,” Ruse wrote. “UNFPA had long been charged with cutting human-rights corners in cozying up to oppressive regimes like China’s and Peru’s. And here it was clearly aiding Milošević in his desire for fewer Kosovars.”
⁶

Ruse spread this slander among the Kosovars he encountered and among sympathetic right-wing pundits at home. At the time Niek Biegman was Holland’s NATO representative, and he learned what Ruse was doing while visiting Dutch troops in the field. Such rumormongering, he said, was “criminally irresponsible.” Had the traumatized Kosovars believed that the UNFPA had been complicit in Milošević’s genocide, Biegman said, “they might have killed the UNFPA people.”
⁷

Back in the United States Ruse got the conservative media to pick up the story. “Now that NATO troops have ended ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, there’s reason to fear that the United Nations Population Fund will do what the Serbs failed to: pacify the region by reducing the Albanian population,” columnist Rod Dreher wrote in the
New York Post
. His sources were Ruse and Steven Mosher, head of the Population Research Institute.
⁸
The story made the rounds of the Catholic press, forcing the UNFPA to defend itself, even though doing so kept the invented “controversy” alive.

R
use was part of an aggressive new kind of global right-wing movement. As the 1990s progressed, religious conservatives were learning from the success of the international women’s movement and, in many ways, imitating it. Like Goldberg and Karman in Bangladesh, they started taking direct action on the ground. Like Germain and Dunlop, they organized coalitions of sympathetic groups worldwide that could work at the grassroots, national, and international levels. They formed NGOs, had international conferences, and made their way onto country delegations for United Nations meetings. They eventually would find unprecedented influence in the administration of George W. Bush, which shared Ruse’s cavalier attitude toward the truth.

American-style culture wars became ever more globalized. The American right had long demonized groups working toward social progress—whether on race, poverty, women’s equality, or gay rights—as deracinated elites out to destroy the values of the salt-of-the-earth majority. Now a group of conservatives, mostly based in the United States, sought to take this critique international and to mobilize traditionalists throughout the world against global feminism. They presented themselves as opponents of cultural colonialism even when, after 2000, they were supported by the government of the world’s only superpower.

When women’s groups first started organizing within the United Nations, their primary opponents were governments like the Vatican and Iran. The American antiabortion movement had stayed on the sidelines, pressuring U.S. politicians but otherwise ignoring the mechanics of the UN process. That’s not surprising: Right-wing religious movements in the United States, especially Protestant ones, have typically hated and feared the United Nations, often seeing it as the seat of a satanic plot against Christianity. (In the
Left Behind
books, Tim LaHaye’s hugely popular series of evangelical end-times thrillers, the anti-Christ is the UN’s abortion-promoting, peace-promising secretary-general. In the video-game version of the books, players form Christian militias to battle demonic global “peacekeepers” on the streets of New York City.)

Catholics don’t generally share this eschatological aversion. Pope John Paul II may have loathed the reproductive rights agenda at the United Nations, but he was a passionate supporter of the UN itself, and saw international law as crucial to world peace. There is, though, a millenarian, conspiracy-minded strain in American Catholicism—particularly in the radical antiabortion movement—that has much in common with the broader Christian right. It imagines secret societies engaged in a plot to crush the faithful under the boot of a godless one-world government. As the 1990s ended and the new millennium began, this strain would be increasingly visible on the global stage.

In the wake of Cairo and Beijing, various American religious-right groups began to realize that whatever their feelings about the world body, by ignoring the UN they were ceding powerful political ground. Thus a number of zealous antiabortion activists began focusing on international institutions, learning the byways of a system they despised. Unlike the older, Vatican-led conservative coalition, they weren’t content to play defense against feminist initiatives at the United Nations. They went on the offense, working wherever they could to try to roll back reproductive rights both nationally and internationally.

A
crucial figure in this process was Father Paul Marx, a Catholic priest from the Midwest known for his anti-Semitic rhetoric. Marx was a longtime advocate of natural family planning, which he taught all over the world, founding the
International Review of Natural Family Planning
in 1976. Perhaps due to his international experience, his antiabortion activism always transcended U.S. borders. “Contraception-sterlization-abortion is a worldwide plague that has already engulfed more than two-thirds of mankind, and I am convinced it will spread through the rest,” he wrote in a 1984 newsletter.
⁹

In 1981, Marx founded Human Life International—the organization Rafael Cabrera represents in Managua—in Washington, D.C. “From the hub of the political world I shall launch forth to devote two or three months a year to spreading the prolife/pro-family gospel, mostly in the underdeveloped areas that I know so well from having visited 51 countries,” he wrote. “In Asia, Africa and Latin America, I shall introduce prolife/pro-family literature and audiovisual aids, planting or nourishing the natural family planning (NFP) movement.”
¹⁰

Marx claimed absolutely fealty to the pope, yet he routinely ignored papal injunctions against anti-Semitism, giving frequent vent to his obsession with the link between Jews and abortion. “A famous genetics professor in Paris told me that the leaders of the abortion movement in France were Jewish. I saw one, a Jewish female liar, do her thing on behalf of abortion at the World Population Conference in Bucharest,” he wrote in 1977.
¹¹
He sounded the same theme a decade later: “If you have read my book
The Death Peddlers
, notice how many Jews helped lead the infamous 1971 abortion-planning meeting in Los Angeles, which I exposed; some 40 percent of the speakers were Jewish. Also, note the large number of abortionists (consult the Yellow Pages) and pro-abortion medical professors who are Jewish.”
¹²

Muslims were reviled as well, although the threat they posed was of a different sort. Marx worried endlessly that they were outbreeding Christians, especially in Europe, a fear that’s increasingly heard on the right today. “Dr. Emmanuel Tremblay, a French scientist, has calculated that if current trends hold, France will be largely a Moslem country by 2035 (thank you, contraception-sterilization-abortion),” he wrote.
¹³
(Tremblay is the leader of France’s largest anti-abortion group, Laissez-les vivre.)

In the United States, Human Life International consistently has been intertwined with the most extreme elements of the American antiabortion movement. Its spokesman, Don Treshman, once praised the sniper-style shooting of a Vancouver abortion provider as a “superb tactic.” Hours after Michael Griffin murdered a Florida gynecologist, Treshman started raising money for the killer’s family.
¹⁴

Human Life International’s rhetorical radicalism made it hard for the group to work effectively on Capitol Hill or in global forums, so in the late 1990s the group created two spin-off organizations. The first was the Population Research Institute, a branch of HLI that became a separate outfit in 1996. The split, HLI explained in a press release, was “to enable [PRI] to operate more effectively in the secular world, out from under the mantle of a Catholic pro-life organization. As the parent organization, Human Life International has continued to provide the overwhelming majority of funding to the Population Research Institute.... To date, HLI has invested well over $1,000,000 in starting PRI.”
¹⁵
As its name suggests, the Population Research Institute is mainly concerned with population policies and organizations, especially the UNFPA. Despite its attempt to pass as a legitimate research group, its scientific veneer is terribly thin: According to a fund-raising letter, its goal is to “drive the final nail into the coffin of U.N. Population Fund abortionists.”