Search Magazine, March/April 2009
In 2007, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his opinion on Gonzales v. Carhart that abortions should be restricted because women might come in time to regret them. Abortion rights activists were incensed by the paternalism of the decision, but as journalist Michelle Goldberg demonstrates in her new book, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World, they shouldn’t have been surprised. Arguments about protecting women from themselves are certainly common these days—with claims abounding about abortion as psychological “exploitation” or as the mark of racist population control—and they’ve been a long time in the making.
The Means of Reproduction takes readers through a fascinating and frank history of population politics that few outsiders know. Recent years have witnessed a sea change in the antiabortion movement’s rhetoric and strategy, such as co-opting liberal language to oppose the “cultural imperialism” of Western feminists. As Goldberg recounts, accusations against family planning advocates as Western dupes have been the foundation of anti-contraception and -abortion movements, informing more than a few cases of jolting repression, such as a Polish mother who lost her eyesight because she wasn’t allowed to end a dangerous pregnancy, or a raped Nicaragua nine-year-old who was told by the country’s religious leaders that her resultant pregnancy was a blessing from God, honoring her with young birth.
The latter situation was the culmination of competing global interests in Latin America, where the antiabortion movement has ballooned and intensified partly due to the influence of its U.S. counterpart and partly as reaction against perceived Western moral laxity. The result, Goldberg has found, is a crackdown on women’s and reproductive rights and a resurgence of patriarchal religion in the name of Latin American self-determination: where “forensic vaginal inspections” to detect abortion are cast as blows against Western empire, and one-time revolutionaries like Daniel Ortega find an American-style piety and demand that former sisters-in-arms turn their attention to birthing, to “replace the fifty thousand martyrs of the revolution.”
These dispatches become a vivid illustration of the larger history of reproductive rights. Seeing those rights as just one concern of women worldwide, but the concern that preconditions all others, Goldberg investigates forced birth in Poland and forced sterilization in China; the lack of contraceptive access in African NGOs and the fraught politics of female genital cutting in Sierra Leone. The picture that emerges from this tour is complicated, in part due to the taint of the population control movement’s coercive past, which lends credence to the “anti-eugenicist” charges of abortion opponents. And until feminist reforms of the population movement, women targeted for contraceptive outreach were “reduced to their wombs”—seen only in terms of their potential, and potentially dangerous, fertility. The unsettling reality is that women’s self-determination was as secondary to the early population control movement as it continues to be to antiabortion activists.
In a heartbreaking and insightful chapter on the rise of sex-selective abortion in India, Goldberg paints a complex picture of a country where feminists lament the ways in which the population control movement “backfired” by making abortion acceptable without changing the widespread devaluation of women. Women’s subordinate roles were left intact throughout India’s process of legalizing abortion, and as a result, there was virtually no antiabortion activism—a fascinating statement about antiabortion motivations in itself. But today, in responding to sex-selective abortion, protesters have begun to slide into strange rhetorical territory in fighting “murder in the womb” and shaming mothers who abort female fetuses. “To confront the issue of sex-selective abortion as a feminist is to see the world much the same way prolifers do, at least for a moment,” writes Goldberg, in one of the book’s fine contemplative moments. “It’s to see some choices as illegitimate.”
Antagonistic ideologies underlie many reproductive-rights battles, with individual rights pitted against communitarian notions. As in the landmark UN battles that Goldberg revisits, the central question is “an existential battle…over how women’s lives should be valued”: as mothers or as individuals.
While the right may be on shaky ground in claiming the mantle of cultural sensitivity, Goldberg points out that the left has been as well: affirming the need to protect both equal rights for women and respect for traditional culture, but failing to acknowledge “that those two goals could be in direct conflict.” In many ways they often are, and Goldberg marks a thorough tally of skirmishes and grievances between women’s rights and multicultural sensitivities that divides both right and left, as well as constituencies within the women’s movement itself. Goldberg rejects the sort of relativism that defends female genital cutting, for example—and to her credit, admits the imperfect but inescapable necessity of making a choice about balancing women’s equality and cultural tradition: “One can see” the pain that undermining tradition can bring communities, she writes, “and still see that solidarity means taking sides.”
The Means of Reproduction is not just a fascinating and refreshingly honest look at the history and forerunners of the modern family planning movement, but also makes a straightforward pitch for a bit of the realpolitik that first brought contraception and abortion access to the wider population outside the West–using modern demographic concerns as motivation to expand women’s rights.
Tying all of these strands together is an extremely ambitious project, but also one overdue. Goldberg champions one ideology, to be sure, but her honesty in weighing past mistakes makes this book—part history part polemic—an indispensable tool for understanding where the global reproductive rights movement came from and where it needs to go.
