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Investigative journalist Michelle Goldberg exposes the global war on women's reproductive rights and its disastrous and unreported consequences for the future of global development. Women's rights are often treated as mere appendages to great questions of war, peace, poverty, and economic development. But as networks of religious fundamentalists, feminists, and bureaucrats struggle to remake sexual and childbearing norms worldwide, the battle to control women's bodies has become a high-stakes enterprise, with the United States often supporting the most reactionary forces. Goldberg shows how the emancipation of women has become the key human rights struggle of the 21st century. Empowering women is the key to retarding the progress of AIDS, curbing overpopulation, and helping the third world climb out of poverty, but attempts to improve women's status elicit fierce opposition from conservatives who see women's submission as key to their own national or religious identity.--From publisher description.… (more)
User reviews
If there was one criticism about this book, it was that it jumped around a bit. The opening chapter discusses the abortion ban in Nicaragua, the history that led up to the ban and views from both sides of the debate. Then the author moves into the background of the family planning/population control movement worldwide. For the most part, this is the overarching narrative but Goldberg takes side detours to look at female circumcision, India’s skewed birth ratios, the European birth decline and the AIDs epidemic. However, pretty much everything is interesting and well-researched so I didn’t mind.
The initial push for population control was framed as a national security issue – visions of hordes of angry, poor, non-white people becoming Communists. In the early days, there was broad popular and political support for the initiative. As will be seen throughout the book – resistance arises from the left and the right. Goldberg discusses a number of influential people – the man who developed an easy to use abortion device, Margaret Sanger, John D. Rockefeller III, Reimert Ravenholt – a scientist who eventually gained a political position and aggressively pushed birth control. The flaws in both arguments and approaches are covered – Goldberg notes that Sanger made some racist-sounding arguments to appeal to the right and Ravenholt was a polarizing figure, both for his sometimes sexist behavior and his ignorance to real-world conditions of the women he was trying to help. While many problems in this initial push are noted, Goldberg catches the giddy excitement of the people in it who truly believed they were helping to change the world and had an inventive anything-goes mentality. A movement gradually springs up where women’s rights come to the forefront. This argument is developed through the whole book – when women have more rights and are more valued, they tend to have smaller families and the overall welfare of daughters goes up.
This way of thinking finally becomes enshrined in some of the UN goal statements. Goldberg charts the opposition on both the left and the right. The Catholic Church is a prominent critic of birth control and abortion as might be expected but in the early days, a conference was convened that came out pro-birth control. This position was ignored in the Church hierarchy and that has continued. Arguments on the left focus on the idea that population control is another form of imperialism. Some of these arguments influenced the movement – the feminist ideas of pushing for equality along with providing birth control came out of criticism of the one-size-fits-all, population goals, ends-justifies-means initial mentality.
The author is clearly critical of US administrations that put religious beliefs and conservative ideas of women as only wives and mothers above the realities seen on the ground. She provides evidence of how some of these policies were harmful and unrealistic. I suppose some might complain that she takes cheap shots by describing how the Catholic Church allied with Iran to oppose UN actions or how she describes some of the speakers at their planned pro-family anti-birth control conferences – one who was pretty anti-Semitic, one who supported beating one’s wife (Goldberg notes with a straight face that his apologists said he only suggested doing it as a last resort and not too hard) but I felt that the author had shown the flaws in a number of people on both sides of the argument and she spends more time showing the false basis of this side’s beliefs. While the UN directives don’t affect the lives of Americans, some in other countries have directly appealed to the UN and won their cases. Since the US is the largest donor country, administrations there can have an outsize effect as is clearly shown – America is almost bipolar on the issue, depending which group is in power.
The chapters on issues were also very fascinating and again showed the effects of both local movements and worldwide policies. Goldberg emphasizes that a one size fits all approach like Ravenholt promoted isn’t effective but that Western money, organization and initiatives are important in supporting the local movements. I was familiar with some of the issues she mentions – female circumcision and European declining birth rates – but I did learn a good deal in the chapters.
She discusses beliefs on both sides of the female circumcision movement which I’d heard before but also the development and spread of female circumcision as well as initial European reactions. The author interviewed a woman who had been cut herself and she described the initiation ceremony. Goldberg comes out with a moderate message – shouldn’t be done to children, but if women choose it for themselves, it should be accepted. However, as she notes, there are cultural pressures even for adults. I had read about some of the reasons for the birth decline in Europe as well as the contrast between the French/Scandinavian systems and the Spanish/Italian systems with America as an outlier. The author goes into more detail on the oddities of the American system – she mentions the high teenage birth rate and cheap childcare as reasons for the higher birth rate as well as the instability or flexibility of the job market. She also covers the situation in Germany – I would have thought that would be similar to France/Scandinavia but cultural and policy reasons have it closer to Spain/Italy/Poland. Goldberg occasionally suggests solutions but even she seems to find the Indian sex selection problem intractable. She again provides a detailed, nuanced look at the situation.
Some of the topics she covers include: reproductive rights and access to safe abortions (65,000 - 70,000 women die annually because of botched abortions). She goes into great depth about the history and developments of the global family planning movement (I had no idea that in the 1960s the Catholic church performed an extensive study on birth control and the panel recommended its approval--the recommendation was denied by a very small uber-conservative group of Vatican officials and the reason for denying it had nothing to do with the findings of report, or reason, but had everything to do with power and politics.)
Other chapters cover female genital mutilation (again, more complex an issue than I'd read previously) and infant sex selection in Asia and the ramifications for societies with an unbalanced female-to-male ratio. She also touches on the AIDS epidemic in Africa, which was fascinating but too short. And she talks about a whole pile of other interesting stuff too.
Recommended for: Everyone. This was an informative, enlightening read.
Why I Read This Now: saw it at the bookshop, and as I loved the same author's Kingdom Coming last year, I bought it and read it right away.
I recommend this book to anyone wanting to understand the politics of sex throughout the world.