The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (36 page)

Europe, Willetts concluded, needs more babies. Several knees jerked in response. “It does seem extraordinary, the Conservative party urging people to have more sex,” a spokeswoman for the Family Planning Association told
The Guardian
. “It is men who are delaying becoming parents too, and no amount of exhortation by the Conservative party will change these trends.”
¹⁴

But Willetts, a man once nicknamed “Two Brains” for his analytical brilliance, wasn’t joining his conservative confreres abroad in urging women back to the realm of
Kinder, Kirche, Küche
. Quite the opposite. “The evidence from Italy, and indeed Spain, is that a traditional family structure now leads to very low birth rates,” he concluded. In fact, he continued, “[a] brief tour of birth rates in four European countries helps demonstrate what modern family policy must be about. It has nothing to do with enforcing traditional roles on women. Feminism is the new natalism. In most of Europe women still aspire to having two children but in Italy and Germany it is very difficult to combine this with women’s other aspirations.”
¹⁵

It is almost too elegant. The solution for overpopulation lay in giving women more control over their fertility and their lives. The solution to rapid population decline is exactly the same. To the extent that low birthrates are a threat to national identity and economic vitality, they constitute one of the best arguments yet for governments to finally take women’s needs seriously.

Apparently, though, few governments will do that until they’ve exhausted every other option, no matter how farcical. The governor of the Russian province of Ulyanovsk responded to a national campaign to raise the fertility rate by giving couples a day off from work to have sex, with prizes, including refrigerators, washing machines, and a jeep, for those who gave birth exactly nine months later, on the country’s independence day.
¹⁶
(One reporter found that as a result some women took labor-inducing drugs or had cesareans on the appointed day, overwhelming maternity wards and endangering their health.)
¹⁷

In Singapore, where fertility rates have fallen below 1.3 children per woman, a branch of the government has set up an official matchmaking unit that runs dances, wine tastings, and cruises. Additionally, reported the
New York Times
, “the agency acts as a lonely hearts adviser, with an online counselor named Dr. Love and a menu of boy-meets-girl suggestions on its Web site,
www.lovebyte.org.sg
.” Singapore’s government-friendly
Straits Times
newspaper has done its part to encourage procreation, printing tips for having sex in the backseat of a car, including directions to secluded places to park.
¹⁸

Less amusing has been the backlash against reproductive rights in countries like Poland. Abortion, freely available during communist times, was severely restricted in 1993. The influence of the Catholic Church, so important during Poland’s struggle against the Soviet Union, was the main reason for the change. Still, demographic fears play an important part in the country’s fierce antiabortion rhetoric. “Here in Poland this low birth rate is not discussed in a broader context. It is used as an argument against abortion,” said Joanna Senyszyn, a pro-choice MP and vice chair of Poland’s Democratic Left Alliance. Poles, she said, want to know “Who’s going to work so we can have pensions?”

A
s a combination of religion and fear about national identity pushed Poland rightward, it inevitably collided with European institutions over issues of reproductive and gay rights. Not surprisingly, Polish conservatives were apoplectic in March 2007 when the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favor of Alicja Tysiąc, a Polish woman who sought redress after being denied an abortion she needed to save her eyesight. The state’s treatment of Tysiąc, the court ruled, violated the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, a treaty that all members of the Council of Europe are party to, and it ordered the Polish government to pay her €25,000 (about $35,000).

Tysiąc, a mother of two, was already suffering severe myopia when she found herself pregnant for the third time in 2000. Her first two pregnancies had been difficult—both had been delivered by cesarean—and this time three separate ophthalmologists told her that if she brought a baby to term, she risked going blind.

She consulted a general practitioner, who issued a certificate saying that the pregnancy constituted a threat to her health. In addition to the danger to her eyesight, there was the risk, given her previous cesareans, of a rupture of the uterus. But when Tysiąc went to her local, state-run hospital, a gynecologist there, after examining her “visually and for a period of less than five minutes,” according to the Court of Human Rights opinion, voided her certificate. At the end of the appointment, the Court said, the doctor “told the applicant that she could even have eight children if they were delivered by caesarean section.”
¹⁹

Such a response was not unusual. Under the 1993 law, abortion is supposed to be permitted in cases of rape, threats to the life or health of the mother, or severe fetal abnormalities. “In practice, however, it takes nearly a miracle for women to access legal abortion,” wrote Wanda Nowicka, director of the Polish Federation for Women and Family Planning, the country’s leading reproductive rights NGO. Only 150 legal abortions are performed every year.
²⁰

With an unemployed, “generally irresponsible” husband, Tysiąc said she couldn’t have afforded an underground abortion, which would have cost five thousand zloty—more than two thousand dollars. So she went through with the pregnancy and, as predicted, lost almost all her vision. On September 13, 2001, an official disability panel found that Tysiąc now “needed constant care and assistance in her everyday life.” She filed a criminal complaint against the gynecologist who had denied her an abortion, but despite her appeals it went nowhere. So, with the help of Polish human rights lawyers, she turned to Europe.

The European Court of Human Rights didn’t rule in the Tysiąc case that countries must legalize abortion, but it did say a woman’s rights are violated if she’s denied access to an abortion that is legal under her country’s own laws. The Polish system, said the court, “created for the applicant a situation of prolonged uncertainty. As a result, the applicant suffered severe distress and anguish when contemplating the possible negative consequences of her pregnancy and upcoming delivery for her health.”
²¹

Around the world reproductive rights advocates hailed the precedent, while in Warsaw, three thousand protesters waving the national flag gathered at a church near the Polish parliament. “A nation that kills its children won’t survive!” read one banner. “Let the unborn see our Homeland,” said another.
²²
Poland appealed the ruling, but in September 2007, the court rejected the appeal. The right vowed to press forward with an attempt at a constitutional amendment banning abortion.

The same day the ruling was handed down, the European Parliament opened an inquiry into whether League of Polish Families head Giertych had violated EU antidiscrimination rules by proposing a law banning any mention of homosexuality in Poland’s schools.
²³
The polarization between Poland’s right and Europe’s mainstream led conservatives abroad to celebrate the country as a beacon of decency in a sea of decadence, and to project their own fantasies about Europe’s demographic decline onto the standoff.

Restricting abortion, though, has done nothing to raise Poland’s birthrate, which has been on a fairly sustained decline since the end of communism. With unemployment high and protections for working women poor, would-be mothers are understandably hesitant. The BBC quoted a thirty-four-year-old mother of twin baby boys who had postponed childbearing as long as she felt she could. She’d married late, waiting until she found a husband who would treat her as an equal. “I didn’t want to be like my parents from the countryside,” she said. “They work together in the fields and when they come back home my father just sits down and says, ‘Wife, where’s my dinner?’ ... I wanted my relationship to be based on partnership.” Once wed, she was nervous about taking time off from work. “My friend came back from maternity leave and she was immediately sacked, allegedly because she hadn’t instructed her replacement well enough before she took leave,” she said. “I’ll look for a job again when my children are old enough but I’m very pessimistic.”
²⁴

I
f conservatives have dominated the public discussion over population decline—despite the wrongness of their prescriptions—it may be because liberals and feminists have shied away from the issue.
^g
Anxiety that European women aren’t having enough babies seems objectionable, tainted by antifeminism, evoking fears of a brown planet. What could be more reactionary than the injunction to women to breed for the good of the nation? Pronatalism, after all, has at least as strong an association with eugenics as does population control, from Theodore Roosevelt’s fulminations that the two-child family would lead to “race suicide” to Hitler’s Aryan breeding schemes. (One of the many things that Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia had in common was that both bestowed medals on mothers of large families.)

Attempts to raise birthrates have sometimes been brutally coercive. Obsessed with spurring population growth, Romanian autocrat Nicolae Ceauşescu instituted one of the most draconian pronatalist regimes in history in 1966, which he ramped up in the mid-1980s. Abortion was criminalized, miscarriages were investigated, steep taxes were levied on childless people, and girls and women were subjected to monthly gynecological exams to identify and monitor pregnancies. “[T]he fetus is the socialist property of the whole society,” he said. “Giving birth is a patriotic duty.... Those who refuse to have children are deserters, escaping the law of natural continuity.” By the time Ceauşescu was overthrown, Romania had the highest maternal mortality rate of any country in Europe, and 87 percent of its maternal deaths were caused by unsafe abortion. One of the first things the new government did was lift the country’s ban on importing contraceptives. A few days later abortion was legalized.
²⁵

Given this history, fear of demographic decline can seem tied up with ugly forms of nationalism. The world, after all, is not running out of people. According to UN estimates there will be more than nine billion human beings on the planet in 2050, an increase equivalent to the total size of the world population in 1950.
²⁶
Most of these people will be born in less developed parts of the world—precisely those areas least able to absorb them. Liberals tend to recognize that as a problem. How, then, to speak simultaneously of overpopulation and under-population without lapsing into racism? As John Bongaarts, vice president of the Population Council, points out, European governments have invested heavily in family planning and population programs overseas. That makes it extremely awkward for them to worry publicly that their own birthrates are too low.

With fertility in the developing countries falling below replacement, one obvious answer to the disequilibrium is migration. In a better world than ours one could leave it at that. The truth is, though, that people and cultures are not interchangeable. There is a limit to how many foreigners any country can absorb without provoking a backlash from citizens who feel their own identities threatened. Ironically, as Willetts has argued, countries with stagnating population growth are precisely the ones that feel too threatened to let in lots of newcomers. “A country with a low birth rate is failing to produce sufficient people to carry its culture forward into the future,” he wrote. “Consequently, many low-birth countries are resistant to migration for fear of the different cultures brought by immigrants. By contrast, countries with high birth rates are ones that have confidence about their future. For them migration is less of a threat. So countries with high birth rates might be those with high rates of migration as well.”
²⁷

Besides, the number of immigrants needed to make up the shortfall in the birthrates of some European countries would be unfeasible in any society, no matter how confident. According to Willetts, “Germany would need to attract 188 million migrants, or 80 per cent of its total population by 2050, to maintain the current ratio between workers and pensioners.”
²⁸
Germany almost certainly will not do this and will thus grow both smaller and older, though how small and how old will depend on its success in turning fertility rates around.

A
lready throughout Europe, worries about low native birthrates are entwined with apprehension about growing blocs of unassimilated Muslims. In countries throughout the continent, Muslim immigrants live in isolated enclaves, alienated from the culture around them and its liberal values. In this respect the conservative analysis is not wrong, just exaggerated. Several European countries are indeed facing existential crises as they try to cope with expanding Muslim populations, while Islamic triumphalists predict demographic conquest. “We’re the ones who will change you,” Mullah Krekar, an Iraqi refugee who has lived in Norway since the early 1990s, told the Norwegian newspaper
Dagbladet
. “Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes.... Every western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries [is] producing 3.5 children. By 2050, 30 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim.”
²⁹
(Like right-wing Westerners warning of European doom, Krekar’s numbers were, as we’ll see shortly, exaggerated.)