Reproductive Politics

Chen Guangcheng is the Chinese lawyer and human rights activist who famously managed to escape house arrest and the country of China to land in New York City and a fellowship at New York University to study law. The fact that he is blind (and quite telegenic in his dark sunglasses) made his escape even more remarkable and compelling. The American dream honeymoon is over. He is leaving New York University after a year and he is looking for a new position, and there are conflicting stories as to what happened. What is more clear is that Mr. Chen is struggling to adjust to the polarized atmosphere of American politics and how that polarization is represented by, and intensified by, divisions over reproductive politics. Mr. Chen's story involves reproductive politics because of his activism against forced abortion and government abuses associated with China's one-child policy. Pro-life activists strongly oppose China's one-child policy in itself. They also are outraged by ...

One wing of reproductive politics focuses on the world's human population and the population of specific countries. The things I read about population growth, decline, birth rates, etc., all seem to be weapons in a proxy war over gender roles, contraception, abortion, and family planning. Many people who are pro-life simply care about the sacredness of life or the rights of the unborn or declining  family values. They do not necessarily want more babies, per se . Others, however, are pro-natalist -- they see an active good in more babies being born and increasing the size of the population. They also focus on evils done in the name of population control-- China's one-child policy, for example-- and the unintended consequences of the worldwide family planning movement, such as the use of sex-selective abortions in countries like India. The wing of the pro-life movement that is pro-natalist tends to fight against the conventional wisdom that the size of the world's popul...

Ross Douthat, in his latest  The New York Times  column , offers a fairly balanced view of why birth rates might be declining in the United States (outside of the immigrant population) and what can be done about it. He raises the familiar alarm about the dangers of declining populations, and worries that the United States, normally reliable for having a birth rate at or above replacement level, might start to go the way of countries such as Germany and Japan. We have been buoyed in recent years by the higher birthrates of immigrants, but falling rates in Latin America might spell trouble for us as well. There are problems when a population shrinks, particularly when older people live longer and a society provides expensive healthcare and some kind of taxpayer-funded retirement income to its aging population. That being said, in the United States, the developing problems of Social Security and Medicare are not primarily due to the increasing size of the retirement popula...

It is, according to the Population Research Institute  (PRI), a pro-life organization "which works to end coercive population control, and fight the myth of overpopulation which fuels it." The current president of PRI is Steven W. Mosher , a well-known pro-life activist who cut his teeth exposing and protesting the problems of China's one-child policy, in particular forced abortion. As I pointed out in an earlier post , the idea that there is no population problem is one of the pro-life 'narratives' that crops up all over the place. Here is the first of six videos in a PRI-produced series (for the complete series, visit the video series home page ): So let's look at the major assertions: The population scare prompted the creation of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). Those who support population control are the "haves" trying to wipe out the undesirable "have nots." The world population will peak in a 30 years or so and then start ...