Why should the reproductive "right" hate the reproductive "left"?

Life sure is complicated.

While I have blogged about the war on sex, there's a related meme which I hope doesn't turn into a war (although maybe it already is in some circles), and that is the idea that there is some sort of duty for those with good genes to reproduce. I would hesitate to call this a moral duty, for that injects moral judgments into something which involves more than mere morality. We think of sex as involving morality, but reproduction involves more than just sex. Obviously, it does involve sex, but additionally it involves the having or not having of children.

To a great extent, the right to reproduce is therefore inextricably interconnected with the right to have sex, for without the latter the former would be problematic. But if there is a right to reproduce, like other rights it would encompass the right not to reproduce. Similar to the way the right to free exercise of religion includes the right not to be religious at all, even to reject religion and God entirely.

I've noticed that when most people on the left talk about "reproductive rights," the emphasis is more on the right to not have children, so "reproductive rights" don't mean the right to have babies, but often the right to be free from having to have them. The right to contraception, and often the right to have abortion as a backup option -- these are seen as part of the package we call "reproductive rights." While I think the rights of women in, say, China to have children despite government restrictions on reproduction should also be called "reproductive rights," that's not what leftists normally mean by the term. (To be fair, though, I don't doubt that most of them would defend the right of a woman to have a child along with her right not to.)

If there are to be "sides" in the reproductive rights dispute, though, it seems that the conservative side comes down more on the right to reproduce. Unless I am reading them wrong, some conservatives even seem to maintain that there is a duty to reproduce.

A duty to whom, I honestly don't know. Hence I write such posts. I find myself asking whether or not there is an emergent political category that might appropriately be called "the reproductive right."

Oh darn. I actually thought I had come up with something original there, but of course I had not. Like so many times I've had fantasies of originality, it didn't take much Googling for me to discover that the term "the reproductive right" has been coined by others, in this case Nicholas von Hoffman, who characterized them thusly:

The Republicans who get their marching orders from on very high want all women to have babies. This goes deeper than a fear there will not be enough of them to kiss come campaign time. They are driven by a conviction that the earth is underpopulated, an opinion which they share with corporate farm managers, out-sourcers and people looking for inexpensive help in the garden.

Hence the Republicans bounce around putting pin pricks (no pun exactly intended) in condoms, pouring birth control pills down the toilet and generally doing all they can think up to promote fecundity. It hasn't yet occurred to them that the best method is to start a war on the American Dream which is usually taken to mean a comfy life with a house, several cars and the contents of a Costco. American Dreamers don't have children. That's a statistical fact. They are notoriously bad at going forth to multiply.

Often when they do get around to multiplying they're in their fifties and have to buy other people's eggs and rent other people's wombs and it still ends up more American Dream type expenditures than baby production.

Sigh. I hate injecting politics into personal decisions which may very well have been grounded in the same type of thinking that causes people to not to get a dog. I realize that there are environmentally minded Ehrlichian couples out there who earnestly believe they are saving the planet by not having children, but there are also many people who just don't have them because they think children will be destructive of things like careers and leisure time. They may be missing out on much joy, but their motivation is hardly political, and I think it is an error to attempt to politicize it. I say this because if these people have in fact passed their reproductive years, it is too late to persuade them to have children, and any attempt to scold them in a political manner for their selfish, non-reproducing ways can be expected to have political consequences to the detriment of those doing the scolding. Which means that the more the "reproductive right" scolds people for not having done what they can no longer do, the more likely they are to create a newly minted crop of bitter political enemies. Yes, and I do mean bitter. Because, if there's any truth to the argument that these childless people have missed out on one of the great joys of life, then it's reasonable to expect that they might already be naturally bitter. And if they're naturally bitter, and someone comes along gratuitously snarking about what they should have done, they are likely to direct that natural bitterness away from themselves and in the direction of the snarkers.

To illustrate from personal experience, it's a bit like those who lost friends and loved ones to AIDS in the 1980s, only to hear a political chorus of socially conservative voices telling them that their beloved dead loved ones brought it all on themselves, and were asking for it. Putting aside whether this was true (and how many of those who "asked for it" could have known about a fatal disease before its discovery), the reality is that the scolding of people who are grieving and already bitter can backfire and cause them to externalize rather than internalize their grief and bitterness. The result is a self-rationalizing hatred, which of course fuels the culture war.

Anyway, a fascinating law review article that Glenn Reynolds linked yesterday made me wonder about this emerging reproductive war, and forces me to ask which side I am on. The "reproductive right"? Or the "reproductive left"?

In the article ("Body and Soul: Equality, Pregnancy, and the Unitary Right to Abortion") author Jennifer S. Hendricks expresses concerns that this reproductive debate might result in new, eugenics-based restrictions on abortion:

...the combination of (1) poverty and inequality as a justification for abortion and (2) willingness to allow greater regulation when and where women enjoy greater equality is a potentially dangerous mix. Demographic panic in the United States and Europe today is reminiscent of the fears that motivated the criminalization of abortion in the first place. Conservatives have increasingly expressed concern that privileged women are failing to breed, while less privileged women are breeding too much.116 A theory that emphasizes social disadvantage as the primary justification for abortion, and allows for greater regulation when greater sex equality is present, is an invitation to regulate access to abortion in an essentially eugenic fashion. It is not hard to imagine, for example, that abortion decisions could be made by a governmental body under a generous "health" standard that permits or encourages abortion for poor women but rejects abortion requests from healthy women with ample means to support a child.117 In other words, a sunset clause for reproductive rights is a bad idea in any event; even worse if the sunset looks different on the basis of race and class. (Emphasis supplied.)
Damned if that doesn't invoke the specter of fetal death panels!

But the very idea that the "conservative" position (if it is in fact that) is grounded in eugenics fascinates me, if for no other reason than that conservatism is supposed to be diametrically opposed to eugenics. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger is one of the Great Satans of the reproductive right precisely because she was a eugenicist.

But if the conservative position is that the privileged should breed more, does that necessarily mean conservatives also believe the underprivileged should breed less? Or might it be that they just want everyone to breed more, and think that the privileged aren't doing their fair "share"? I honestly don't know.

But let's assume that the goal is to increase the percentage of privileged (meaning well-educated, informed, enlightened, and above all productive) people -- i.e. people with "good" genes. If we also assume that Planned Parenthood and the numerous contraception/abortion advocacy groups are deliberately and disproportionately targeting the poor, can't it be argued that they are doing their part in helping to advance at least part of the conservative agenda? I realize that "conservatism" is now supposed to be so philosophically opposed to abortion that being pro-choice means being a RINO, but is it also opposed to contraception and all family planning? If in fact they want to increase the size of one group vis-a-vis another, should they not support efforts which would assist that goal?

Something does not make sense, at least, not when examined from a purely Machiavellian perspective. What also doesn't make sense is the organized conservative effort to prevent certain forms of reproduction. Artificial insemination and sperm donations are generally frowned on by social conservatives, especially when the women inseminated are lesbians. But again, if the goal is to increase the numbers of people who should be reproducing, well, I don't know what the income levels are of women who seek sperm, but in theory their sperm donors have been genetically pre-screened.

It is well known that Danish sperm is much in demand by virtue of its genetic superiority, and I do not doubt that many a childless couple would pay a premium for it. (Plus, we're supposed to Support the Danes, right?) Isn't the emphasis on good genes what the "reproductive right" would want?

Or am I part of "the reproductive left" merely for posing such questions?

I admit, looking for areas of mutual agreement on such things is a pretty radical, so let's just call this whole thing satire, OK?

MORE: A video I found here (via Glenn Reynolds) might shed some additional light on the problem.


Idiocracy - Opening Sequence - The funniest videos are a click away

Whether the couple in the video is too late for Danish sperm donors, who knows?

posted by Eric on 10.17.09 at 11:03 AM





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Eric,

You are behind the times. For the rich - breeding is now a social statement - a declaration of wealth and privilege. The more babies the stronger the statement.

What good is a trophy wife if she can't give you trophy babies?

From 2007:

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2007/08/trophy-kids-competitive-birthing/

M. Simon   ·  October 17, 2009 11:45 AM

I'm just reacting to what I read. I'm not sure that conservatives are complaining about the super-rich failing to breed, so much as the "double income no kids" crowd. When I used to sell real estate, they were called "DINKIEs."

Who should care and why they should care is more interesting than whether I should care, because after all it's a future I will not see.

Now, the left wants me to care about global warming, and some people on the right think I should care about whether I have kids because the genes of the wrong people will "beat" my genes if I don't. Both of these concerns are intended to make me worry about a future I will never see.

Perhaps it is callused and insensitive of me to not care about the alleged future world of my non-children, and while I might be wrong, I think people should just do what they want with their lives. They can heed the lectures about future climatic or genetic consequences. Or not.

But I also support the right to smoke, screw, and take drugs.

Eric Scheie   ·  October 17, 2009 12:35 PM

I wish I could find it, but there is a memo by a Democratic staffer that stated, to the effect, that the poor needed access to abortion because they reproduced too much. This came out last year during the campaign.

The thing is, in all my 40 odd years of being involved, I have never heard a social Conservative supporting such an opinion in the context presented in the blog. Whenever I have, it has been my own Liberal blood kin.


"Conservatives have increasingly expressed concern that privileged women are failing to breed, while less privileged women are breeding too much."

I have heard such concern, but there is some context missing here, and it has little to do with abortion and "reproductive rights" but with the the fear that the birth rate will fall below the 2.1 necessary to sustain the population. And it should be noted that the privilege, in this context, is being an American and not a member of a social class.

sparkey   ·  October 17, 2009 02:19 PM

No actual conservative seems to believe the weird "conservative" stuff above, but the "whom" of

A duty to whom, I honestly don't know.

is, if anyone, Darwin.

Mutation itself is (approximately) random, and "good" mutations (the ones that add up over time to "evolution") are selected, sexually or otherwise, from the pool of all extant mutations. What's "good" isn't knowable without its having arrived and been selected for; the only way to know is to mutate and see.

That's why eugenics is Darwin-defiant. Only more mutations can make more "good" mutations. Stopping any amount of "bad" ones stops an unknowable amount of unknowably "good" ones.

So pro-breeding conservatives are pro-evolution, anti-breeders are anti-evolution, and they're all confused, so it's confusing.

guy on internet   ·  October 17, 2009 03:20 PM

...And following on to "internet guy" above, that's also why genetic engineering is anti-evolution: it presumes to understand what will and won't be adaptive. Who could have predicted, after all, that causing the female of h. sapiens more traumatic and disproportionately fatal births would be adaptive for the species? Or that having human infants be born way too early to do anything useful about taking care of themselves would be? Those are extreme examples - but if I could choose my husband's hazel eyes for all three of my kids over my blue ones (in fact we got two out of three blues on our rolls of the genetic dice), because I like hazel eyes better, who's to say what adaptations (or what currently unknown, or even currently unneeded but someday adaptive, utility of known adaptations) we might've sacrificed?

In my limited world, conservatives want EVERYone to have as big a family as they can support. Children are seen as a social good. It's readily understood, even among the neckless proletarian conservative horde (proud member, right here - though my neck is one of my better features), that too-early reproduction, and reproduction under bad circumstances such as the inability to support a child, are not great - but the anti-abortion crowd (proud member, again, right here, though I'm not willing to go the extra mile and try to get abortion delegitimized) believes that once a child is conceived, it's a lesser evil to bring that child out of the womb and into the world than to keep it from being born.

Jamie   ·  October 17, 2009 03:35 PM

If Danish sperm is in such demand then Rodgers and Hammerstein were right: There is nothing like a Dane.

Joseph Hertzlinger   ·  October 17, 2009 10:31 PM

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