"Pronatalism" is a new word I've learned. I used to work in a battered women's shelter, and one of the abuse tactics we learned about there was "reproductive coercion". What that is is a man pressuring and manipulating their partner into having children when she may not want them. The purpose of this, and the purpose of all abuse is to keep the woman from ever being able to leave them. It binds her to him through their shared offspring. It keeps her pregnant and dependent and hopefully never able to get out of the house because her hands are full raising his kids. That's not what pronatalism is, or it's only a tangentally related thing in the big picture. Pronatalism has a slightly different objective. It's like reproductive coercion on an institutionalized scale as a national policy. Its purpose is to out-reproduce the competition or preserve the desired demographic using women as essentially breeding stock to do it.
America has a troubled history in regards to reproductive rights and official policy promoting reproduction. The abortion debate, for example. It's been going on for at least 100 years. It has its roots in eugenics and xenophobia and religious discrimination. The fear then, and indeed now, is that white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant women would be out-reproduced by Catholic immigrants and people of different races and ethnicities. This is in the same historical ballpark as the first pseudo-scientific efforts to classify people by race and back it up with things like cranial measurements and skewed IQ testing to label the people with the preferred heritage as superior and everyone else as inferior depending on how close they were to the preferred group in what mainly amounts to outward appearance. The eugenics movement in America was in full swing, and they were making up scientific-sounding explanations to make it more believable. In large part they succeeded in their ruse. Many people accepted it as scientific fact. They classified human beings as "fit" or "unfit". Either you were fit or you had no right to be alive. People with intellectual or physical disabilities were automatically unfit according to them. Some of the worst horrors of the Holocaust were originally inspired by our racial and eugenics policies and opinions in the US. By the 1930's America already had a policy of involuntary sterilization of people they considered undesirable.
Religion came into it in the form of Protestants vs. Catholics. Catholicism had long had a policy of pronatalism. Many religions did. They encourage their members to "be fruitful and multiply" and have big families. And they did. It wasn't uncommon to see families with 11 thin, ragged children standing next to their worn-out mother. There were a lot of Catholic orphans too. The church didn't care if you could take care of all of those kids. That was your problem. Just so long as they were Catholic and there were a lot of them. Catholicism came the closest of all religions to achieving world domination that way. Protestants tried to follow in their footsteps. Martin Luther himself once said "If [women] become tired or even die, that does not matter. Let them die in childbirth, it's why they are there." Our job as women, according to all religious authorities, is to have children for them so that they can become a majority. Women as people don't come into it. We don't matter, only the children we can produce matter. And the children matter only because they contribute to the church's objectives. This is why religions encourage lots of children and discourage things like birth control and abortion, because their women might do those things and not produce more children for them. The controlling interests in America when it was new were Protestant.
The Puritans are cited as the founders of our country. The official story was that they were fleeing religious intolerance in the old world. They settled in the American colonies and promptly began a campaign of genocide and religious intolerance. Their main problem with religious intolerance in the old world was that their group was not the ruling group. They intended to make themselves the bosses in the new country. Besides, it sounded better for the creation mythology to claim the Puritans as the founding colonists instead of a bunch of planters and transported criminals who got there first and colonized further south in Virginia. Other groups who tried colonizing New England got chased out and persecuted by the Puritans, like the Quakers and Mennonites and at least one colony of freethinkers called Merrymount. The Puritans intended to have a controlling interest in the colonies. Since they couldn't out-reproduce the people around them, being terribly conflicted about sex in general, they waged campaigns against the natives and anybody else who threatened to undo their majority.
Later America started getting more immigrants. The breeding program hadn't worked and the flow of transported convicts dried up after the Revolutionary War because England couldn't keep sending them. If America was to belong to European stock there would have to be more Europeans and we weren't making enough of our own. America started accepting immigrants. Except often they were the wrong kind of immigrants. They were poor people and many of them were Catholic or Jewish or Asian and kind of brown. This would never do. How were the WASP controlling interests going to maintain their demographic hold on the country? This freak-out continued into the 1960's. By about the 1980's most of the immigrants were a generation or two along and assimilated enough to consider themselves "American". Catholics and Protestants put aside most of their differences to oppose abortion and birth control and band together as simply "Christian" and "American" for a common cause. Instead of trying to out-reproduce each other, just try to out-reproduce the non-Christians and people of color and foreigners. Their vision of America was Christian and as close to white as they could get it.
But in the 1960's the birth control pill and contraception came along and the women started making trouble. They started making their own decisions about whether and when to have children. Once liberated from having to take the chance of pregnancy every time they had sex they expected to have equality in things like decision-making (especially in decisions concerning them), and to have the same set of rules for women as for men. They wanted equal access to education and jobs and an equal chance at leadership roles. Now that they had a choice in whether to have children or not, they expected to be treated as human beings and not be defined as only having value in motherhood or virginity. They wanted to be valued for more than just their ability to produce children. In the beginning it was only the WASP women agitating for these things because they were the ones who had the most value demographically according to the controlling interests, their sons and husbands and fathers. As much as anybody hated to admit it, their voices still had some power. Enough that they couldn't be ignored outright when they came together. Not for lack of trying on the part of the men in power at the time. Nor for lack of trying to this day. That said, the founders of feminism and women's liberation weren't really concerned with the equality of all women but only that they themselves achieve a share in their own group's control. They were overwhelmingly white and middle-to-upper class.
Back to pronatalism. With the decision of Roe vs. Wade in 1973, abortion was declared legal. The basis for this decision was the 14th amendment to the US constitution. The amendment guarantees equal protection under the law, which is to say that the law cannot discriminate and have one set of laws for one group of citizens and another set for others. Abortion laws only affected women, so according to the 14th amendment they were unconstitutional. The 14th amendment was passed in the aftermath of the Civil War to protect the rights of the people newly emancipated from slavery. The Jim Crow laws that came after were in direct opposition to this amendment's promise of equal protection under the law. This constitutional amendment is one of the most contentious for those seeking to maintain demographic control because it not only blocks laws restricting reproductive rights for women but it guarantees that anyone born in the US is a citizen. To a pronatalist, that amendment is a poison pill, because it opens the door to them becoming a demographic minority and losing control. It allows women to make their own reproductive choices and it allows immigrant stock to have the same citizenship rights and privileges and protections that they do. They feel it makes it too attractive for immigrants to come and have children who get to vote, in short. And they might not vote how they want them to, in their interest. It's why they want it repealed.
This is also why the US has such repressive laws concerning reproductive rights and contraception. It's why we don't have comprehensive sex education and why we have a weird obsession with virginity and purity. The "purity" concept exists to discourage the right sort of young woman from indiscriminately reproducing with unsanctioned partners. All of these things are geared toward one objective. They want us pregnant, especially if you're white and Protestant, but ideally they want us to get pregnant with partners who are consistent with their controlling demographic. This was the impetus behind the earlier "miscegenation" laws as well. It screwed up the demographics. If women just had sex with whoever they wanted and could prevent or end pregnancies that supported the demographic majority, control over the country would be lost. If we knew enough about our bodies and how they worked, we'd figure out how to do those things ourselves. "Abstinence-only" sex education is cynical in the sense that they know it doesn't work at preventing unwanted pregnancies. They know that hormones and natural curiosity will kick in and the young women will either marry early to get what amounts to official permission to have sex with the expectation that she produce children or they will have sex anyway and get pregnant out of wedlock. Good girls wait and do what is expected of them. They become mothers, because that's the road to approval and being in the good books of both religion and society. Step outside of those bounds and probably she'll get her children taken away from her and put with someone more "suitable" to be raised, aka good Christians. If they can't have their own, at least they can raise somebody else's to have the correct demographic values. Because the struggle for control over our bodies is the struggle for control over demographics. The WASP ruling majority is terrified that they'll lose control and all of the privilege they have accrued.
If you want to understand why America is trying to restrict things like immigration and reproductive rights and voting rights, the answer is demographics. The ruling demographic is terrified that they'll be outnumbered by people who won't vote in their interest. People who won't support a power structure in which they have no say. I suspect they're afraid too that once they become the minority that they'll be treated in the way they treated everybody else for all of previous history.
I'll close with some examples illustrating pronatalism. The photo above is of Romanian orphans. They were the result of Ceausescu's pronatalist policies when he was dictator. He restricted abortion and birth control and decreed that Romanians should have families with four or five children. It resulted in a lot of unwanted children and children whose parents couldn't afford to care for them. The orphanages filled up. Another example of pronatalism from the religious side is the Quiverfull movement in America. They believe that they are breeding an army of Christian soldiers in preparation for the second coming. They also believe that God himself ordered them to be fruitful and multiply and furthermore that there is no need to educate their children because the end of the world was coming, so all they had to know was some carefully selected theology. As a result, they generally home-school with the justification that public schools don't teach their agenda, or in other words there isn't enough religion in public school to satisfy them. For there to be enough religion in school to satisfy them, the entire curriculum would have to be Christian. Again, demographics. The usual excuse is "identity", in the sense that if they lose their majority their country will lose its identity. It ignores all of history and the ways in which regional identity was formed through demographic change in the first place. It's like King Canute trying to order the tide not to come in. It's an exercise in futility, but it claims a lot of victims in the process, like the Romanian orphans for just one example.
It's quite the tapestry, but with a little historical context and reading it comes together as a long-term strategy to maintain the controlling demographic. And this is not to say that America is the only country which has done this. Nearly every country and religion has tried to do the same for millennia. There are many still doing it, either by stick or by carrot in the form of offering incentives for reproduction. It's always to protect the controlling interest of the demographic in power. Women are being used to do this whether we are actually willing or not. It reduces our value to our capacity for reproduction.
No comments:
Post a Comment