"improving" the birth rate

 

IMAGE: ISABELLA CARAPELLA FOR HUFFPOST

Recently I've been reading articles on "improving the birth rate."  See To Improve US birth Rate, Give Parents Money and Time, from The Atlantic and How Do Countries Fight Falling Birth Rate, from BBC News, for example.

Now I know all the arguments, both good and bad... social, economic, and yes, some pretty darn racist ones as well, but it occurs to me that improving the birth rate may not mean an increase in births.  What if (and hear me out on this) improving the birth rate really means decreasing the birth rate? 

So the arguments for increasing has to do with increasing the labor force, increasing caregivers (or Social Security contributors in the US) for seniors, and increasing consumers.  Now, even looking at just that, how many of us think that it's a wonderful thing to be born simply so you can provide labor to earn money to from a company so you can buy their product to keep their businesses running, and/or care for your aging parents or grandparents?   Is that a good motivation to have children?

Now let me go one step further, and break down how this idea, this having children to support our economy and social norms is (a) misogynistic and (b) racist, and how misogyny and racism are tied together when we talk about population control, whether the goal is to increase or decrease the population.

First I want to address a reason people have children which was not addressed above, because it is the most glaringly obvious example both of misogyny and racism.  Not too long ago, the Quiverfull Movement was high on America's radar.  The idea comes from Psalm 127: 3-6

3 Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
4 As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth.
5 Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

The idea is that these "Christian" families are to have as many children as they can... this "be fruitful and multiply" is often tied to faithfulness, and, in some circles, to birthing an army of God for the final days.  Women, of course, exist for one purpose: to give birth to and raise these future soldiers of God.

If you Google "Quiverful Movement", you'll notice something about the photos of these families.  Scroll through page after page of photos, and you will see the common thread: whiteness.  Like a lot of right wing and fundamentalist extremist movements, there is an unhealthy dose of racism.  The same demographic who are boosting the population of what they call "Original Stock" are damning Black and Brown people for having children, regurgitating the Reagan call of the "Welfare Queen" who pops out children to increase benefits, and the tale of the "Anchor Babies", of poor Hispanic asylum seekers. 

It isn't that this group wants to increase the population of the nation, they want to increase the white population of the nation.  

It may seem hard to relate something so blatant with racism and misogyny in the previously cited reasons for increased population, but it's all still there.

In less nice terms, society is asking us to breed drones... support systems for the government and our current dysfunctional social structure.  It's been the historic function of women for centuries:  provide heirs for the upper class in order to pass down wealth through the family line, provide workers so that wealth is supported.  

And how do we do that, when women don't want to have more children?  When they want to have fewer children later in life?   

Well, these articles talk about providing "money and time".  The central concept here is that, if they can afford to have children, and don't have to work, women will choose to have children.  The central concept is, boiling down to the very basic, that women accept and believe it's their function in life to give birth.  

And perhaps it is not, or at least not all women, or perhaps even most women. 

Certainly the women who have been encouraged to (both historically and in our present society) have children are still overwhelmingly white.  Denial of women's reproductive health services has been focused on white women.  Until recently Black, Brown, and Indigenous women were still being sterilized without consent.  Even recently we've learned that Hispanic women in border facilities have been sterilized without consent.  If you want to argue that women's health services are equal across racial lines, you only have to look at the difference in maternal mortality rates to disabuse yourself of that notion. 

Continuing to treat women merely as incubators for future generations of workers and heirs, valuing them simply for their uteruses, is some pretty dystopian and misogynistic stuff... but here we are.  Apparently our society thinks it important to instill in the female population the importance of being breeders over students or scientists or ministers or simply independent human beings.

And remember, all of this is based on the idea that we need more and more consumers and producers to keep our society intact and our economy rolling.

What if that primary assumption is false? 

What if we can roll back the number of people on the planet, and rather than having more people working as "drones" in low paying jobs, sometimes multiple jobs to make ends meet, that we had a fair tax structure that discouraged CEOs from hording money, and instead put money back into industry for fair wages and research and development of new products and processes?  What if instead of having more people spending small amounts of money, we had fewer people who could afford to spend greater amounts of money, live in decent housing, go on family vacations?

Already Gen Z has had enough, and I'm not surprised that they want to buck societal norms in ways we haven't yet before.  Gender roles? Out the window.  Unreasonable wages, hours, and lack of benefits?  Companies are closing their doors because they can't find workers willing to debase themselves like that.

While we're growing and changing our economy post pandemic, it's time to build in more realistic expectations of the people who make up this nation and support this economy, and that includes women and BIPOC.  

We do not need to make more people.  We need to make a better society for the people we have.