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.

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.)

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?