The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (38 page)

A
merican women can scarcely dream of such supports. In the United States, the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act was hailed as a major accomplishment because it required some employers to grant women twelve weeks of
unpaid
leave. And yet women in the United States have the highest fertility rates in the developed world. On the surface, then, America seems like an exception to everything scholars say about the links between progressive societies and higher fertility. Along with Ireland, where fertility is also near replacement, it suggests that social traditionalism is still important in keeping birthrates high. In some ways that’s true. But it’s not that simple, because in the United States women’s rights, despite appearances, probably play a role as well.

American fertility rates hit a low of 1.7 in 1976 but have risen steadily since then, and in 2006 the United States surpassed replacement fertility for the first time in twenty-five years.
⁴⁹
Population-wise, America has one indisputable advantage over Europe—immigration. Part of America’s increase is due to Hispanics, who have more children—an average of 2.9 per woman—than either whites or African Americans. Without Mexican immigrants, Peter McDonald told me, American fertility rates would be more like 1.8 or 1.9. (By comparison, France’s Muslim immigrants add less than a tenth of a percentage point to that country’s total fertility rate, McDonald said.)

Even without the influence of immigrants, though, birthrates in the United States are very high for a developed country. People on the right are quick to attribute American fecundity to religion, and they are partly correct. Utah, after all, has the highest birthrate in the United States.
⁵⁰
As demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote, “The main explanation for the U.S.-Europe fertility gap may lie not in material factors but in the seemingly ephemeral realm of values, ideals, attitudes and outlook.... It is not hard to imagine how the religiosity gap between America and Europe translates into a fertility gap.”
⁵¹

Religion may translate into increased fertility in another way as well. America has the dubious advantage of exceptionally high teen pregnancy rates—four times as many as in France or Sweden, representing a tenth of all births.
⁵²
This may well be connected to the absence of sex education and reliable contraceptive access in many American schools. Few countries would want to emulate this part of the American experience, no matter how envious they are of the country’s healthy birthrate.

For now, discussion about the connection between religiosity and fertility is largely interesting conjecture. As Eberstadt acknowledged,

[T]here are virtually no official national data for the United States that would permit a rigorous testing of the hypothesis that America’s religiosity is directly related to its childbearing. Attempts to connect those two factors on the basis of broad, aggregate observations and trends run the risks of committing what statisticians call the “ecological fallacy”—mistakenly associating two unrelated phenomena for want of examining relationships at the individual level. For the time being, at least, this proposition must remain a speculation.
⁵³

Even if Eberstadt’s speculation is true—and it may well be—it doesn’t provide an answer to Europe’s demographic dilemma. Setting up Scandinavian-style social welfare systems may be difficult and expensive, but forcing wholesale religious revival on secular populations would surely be even more so. (Nor would it necessarily encourage childbearing. In 2008, the total fertility rate in theocratic Iran was 1.71, despite President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s stated desire for more people.)
⁵⁴

Besides, the entire United States cannot be defined by the values of social conservatives, despite their dominance during Republican administrations. America, after all, is a country of hyperbolic extremes. The United States is
both
very pious
and
very untraditional. Religious conservatives have more influence in America than they do in any highly developed rich country, and yet women’s rights are, by many measures, incredibly advanced. The United States is the country of Adrienne Germain
and
Allan Carlson, the nation that brought safe abortion to much of the world and the one that tried to take it away. Feminism and fundamentalism have risen in tandem and exported themselves around the world in similar ways. The reasons for America’s demographic exceptionalism are complicated, but in the end they almost certainly incorporate both phenomena.

Seen from some angles, after all, American women have more in common with Swedish and French women than with Italians or Germans. Female employment rates in the United States are, comparatively, quite high—65.6 percent, well above the 56.1 percent average for developed countries. Only four nations—Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland—have more children under three in day care.
⁵⁵
Nor are Americans uniquely child-centered. According to the National Marriage Project, “In a cross-national comparison of industrialized nations, the United States ranked virtually at the top in the percentage disagreeing with this statement: ‘the main purpose of marriage is having children.’ ”
⁵⁶
Despite the influence the American antiabortion movement has had abroad, and its ever present activism at home, abortion laws in the United States remain among the world’s most liberal.

Meanwhile, the labor market in the United States is actually one of the least gender-segregated in the world—far more so than in Sweden, where women are concentrated in the public sector. Oddly enough, it turns out that the extreme volatility of American-style hypercapitalism has certain benefits for women, because it works to neutralize the advantages men in other countries accrue by being able to work without interruption. “Ironically, women are advantaged by men’s job insecurity, at least in the sense that a woman’s career interruptions for childbearing are relatively less disadvantageous.... Her job insecurity becomes less of a liability when everyone is insecure,” wrote Rosenbluth, Light, and Schrag. In fact, they argue that because job continuity is less important in the United States, “[H]aving children is less damaging to a woman’s career in America than it would be in Germany or Sweden.”
⁵⁷

While the United States has no public provision of day care, middle-class working women in America can rely on a large pool of poorly paid immigrants to watch their kids. According to Rosenbluth et al., “The wage differentials among women allow wealthier women to benefit from cheap household and child care labor supplied by poorer women, thus subsidizing the fertility among middle-class and affluent women.”
⁵⁸
The free market does, in a much more haphazard, unfair, and anxiety-provoking way, what the state does in Scandinavia and France. Unlike Europe, America does offer support for the notion that religiosity and birthrates are positively linked. But for all its aggressive conservatism, it
also
conforms to the rule that in developed countries higher fertility goes hand in hand with freedom for women. Disentangling the two is difficult; in all likelihood, in America’s heterogeneous population, different factors affect different groups of women.

N
one of these systems are perfect. The French and Scandinavian systems are expensive—public day care accounts for 2 percent of Sweden’s GDP.
⁵⁹
When recession came to Sweden in the 1990s, family support had to be cut. “Even though the resulting levels were still generous by international standards, families with children experienced a considerable reduction in their standard of living,” wrote Swedish researcher Britta Hoem. Unemployment rose rapidly, hitting women especially hard because of cuts in the public sector, where many women worked. More and more young people decided to stay in school, postponing childbearing. Just as fertility had increased with female employment, the two fell in tandem. After hitting 2.1 in the early nineties, the fertility rate declined to 1.5 in 1997, though it soon edged back up.
⁶⁰
One could draw two diametrically opposite conclusions from this. The dip in birthrates could challenge the notion that the Swedish model offers a sustainable solution to Europe’s demographic crisis. But because the drop was tied so closely to government policy, it also reaffirms the link between generous help for working families and the perpetuation of society.

In the future the costs of population aging are likely to mean that there will be even less money available to fund the kind of social supports that encourage higher fertility in France and northern Europe. It’s a catch-22. Governments need to invest in programs that will help women combine work and children, and thus ensure a steady supply of new citizens. The systematic failure to do so is creating intractable problems that will eventually make such investment almost impossible. The window for governments to act is closing.

The drawbacks of America’s laissez-faire family policy are equally clear. The United States is one of only four countries in the world that doesn’t guarantee paid leave for mothers in any segment of the workforce, the others being Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland.
⁶¹
More than a fifth of American children live in poverty, the highest rate in the developed world. (Compare that to Nordic countries like Sweden, where less than 5 percent of children live below the poverty line.)
⁶²
American conservatives are proud that their country produces so much human capital but are oddly content to throw much of it away.

To point out that American women are relatively successful in combining work and family is not to defend everything about the system in which they do so. No doubt economic compulsion, not empowerment, is what ties many American mothers to the workplace. Women in the United States do their jobs and raise their children in the face of tremendous challenges, and many people fall through the cracks—far more than most civilized countries would tolerate. A slightly higher birthrate certainly isn’t a justification for America’s inequities or a sign of national moral superiority.

But it is advantageous, and it is being deployed as rhetorical ammunition by one side in an international culture war in which motherhood is understood as the key to national and spiritual survival. There is a real danger that as countries become increasingly desperate for babies, women will find their life options curtailed in the face of a desperate, coercive pronatalism. That’s why it’s so important to remember that right now there’s a single common denominator among rich countries with healthy fertility rates, and that is women’s liberty. Contrary to Pat Buchanan, Mark Steyn, and the rest of them, all reveling in visions of a godless Europe finding its comeuppance in depopulation, feminism doesn’t portend the death of the West. It is the West’s best hope.

CONCLUSION:
SEX AND CHAOS

T
here is one thing that unites cultural conservatives throughout the world, a critique that joins Protestant fundamentalists, Islamists, Hindu Nationalists, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and ultramontane Catholics. All view women’s equality and self-possession as unnatural, a violation of the established order.

Yet in one society after another we can see the
absence
of women’s rights creating existential dangers. Overpopulation, with all its pernicious consequences for human development and environmental sustainability; under-population, and its threat of economic decline and cultural stasis; sex ratio imbalances, which may someday threaten the security of Asia; even the AIDS pandemic tormenting Africa—all are tied up with gender inequality, and none can be addressed successfully without increasing women’s freedom. Women’s rights must not be treated as trivial adjuncts to great questions of war and peace, poverty and development. What’s at stake are not lifestyles but lives.

For much of the world in the not too recent past, large families equaled group survival. There was land to be subdued and worked by those with enough children to do so, and rewards accrued to those who could harness women’s fertility. Subsistence and defense often depended on physical strength. Male dominance might have made evolutionary sense, even if individual women suffered because of it. The year 2008, though, was a fulcrum in history. It marked the first time that more than half the human population lived in cities.
¹
Humanity’s future is urban, crowded. In such societies large families are more likely to contribute to poverty than to wealth. Everyone fares best when parents can make bigger investments in fewer children, something best accomplished when women are educated and in control of their own bodies. In our new world, patriarchy isn’t only unjust. It is maladaptive.

T
he HIV/AIDS pandemic has been the most deadly demonstration of this yet. A detailed exploration of the disease, and its effect on Africa and the world, is well beyond the scope of this book. But in the story of the struggles over biology, culture, and politics being waged on the turf of women’s bodies, it also can’t be ignored. All the forces at work in the global battle over reproductive rights are also at play with HIV/AIDS. The most important lesson of the great cold war expansion of family planning was that real change has to begin by giving women more power, not just better prophylactic technology. Exactly the same lesson applies to HIV/AIDS in Africa, though it has been consistently overlooked.