Catholics and Contraception

I have been lagging with my posts lately, due to other commitments, so I am kind of forcing myself to write something. It seems like the contraception debate has been the biggest hot button issue lately, and while I have already written a bit about this, I may as well address it again.

I have argued that religious institutions can be a force for great good as well as harm. The Catholic Church has its share of blemishes, but in parts of the Third World, particularly in Latin America, it has been a significant champion of the poor and oppressed. Its anti-birth control stance has actually allowed the Church to fight against eugenicist projects (see discussion here about eugenics and contraception), among other things. So I think it is unfair to unequivocally condemn the Catholic Church for this stance.

In the case at hand (requiring coverage of contraception), however, I don’t know if contraception is really the issue. At first blush, it seems like the Catholic Church is being kind of silly. Hormonal birth control has medical uses entirely independent of contraception, to the extent that the name “birth control pills” is a misnomer. [On a side note, I don’t entirely understand the Catholic Church’s position on birth control. If the reasoning is that sex should only be for reproduction and not for recreation, then why is the “rhythm method” acceptable? It is a (fairly ineffective) means of having sex without conceiving. It seems there is some inconsistency there. But I digress.]

I came across an article, which I am too lazy to find again and link to, written by a Catholic who argued that what is at stake is the nature of liberal society itself. This gets to the heart of the issue. The legislation requiring coverage of contraceptives, and the maelstrom surrounding it, demonstrates once again the tenuousness of boundaries created between “politics” and “religion.” (See my previous discussion here.) It is liberal/secular doctrine that religion should be confined to the private life of the individual, leaving the public sphere free for a non-religious civil society. Of course, this set-up was historically buttressed by defining religion as a set of beliefs, and therefore a matter of individual conscious rather than public morality.

The creation of categories and boundaries is always strategic, and never conforms exactly to reality. Thus “religion” and “politics” as we know them do not exist in reality. What we actually have are competing systems of morality/interpretation/practice. Catholics and other religious voices are correct when they insist that legally confining religion to the individual conscious is, in fact, a victory for liberal/secular society. When they say that their religion is more than a set of beliefs – also a code of morality, a set of real practices, and a mode of organizing society – they are being truthful.

For this reason, when I watch the debates, I don’t really “feel” anything at all or “choose sides” (aside from noting the nonsensicalness of the Catholic Church’s outrage in this particular case). I just sit back and watch another instance of the inherent conflict built into the modern social structure.

**I want to add an addendum to this post that I actually wrote a number of days ago.  I don't know if the terrain has shifted or I am kind of out of touch with the national conversation, but it has recently come to my attention that the terms of debate now include the claim, advanced by conservative pundits of all Christian stripes, that this bill would, in effect, be forcing citizens to pay for women to have sex.  Once again, side-stepping the urge for an immediate emotional reaction and outrage at the lack of logic employed, one must question why they are reacting in this way.  I propose it arises from the capitalist framework for understanding health, in which health is always seen as an individual problem and a matter of personal responsibility.  People should not be spared the consequences of their decision to have sex.

Population and Contraception Part 2

A friend of mine brought the following article from National Geographic to my attention.  The article, along with my friend's proposition that capitalism/industrialization itself may reduce birth rates because of the increased costs associated with each child, provides a good alternative to the view that other (non-white) people in world have more kids because they cannot plan their lives as rationally as white people do.  People are responsive to their social/economic environment, almost always in adaptive ways.

"Population" is a Code Word for "Eugenics"

Apparently the world's population has reached or will soon reach 7 billion people. Concern about the world's population and its growth has a long history, and it is very much intertwined with eugenics movements, to the extent that the two concerns cannot be considered as independent matters.

A CNN headline today read: "7 Billion Reasons to Empower Women." The article was about contraception. This was about as unsurprising to me as the sun rising, for the reason that contraception is also deeply interlinked with the eugenics/population control movement.

[For some interesting reading, you can consult:
Sex, Race & Science:  Eugenics in the Deep South by Edward Larson
Killing the Black Body:  Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty by Dorothy Roberts
Building a Better Race:  Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom by Wendy Kline
Reproducing Empire:  Race, Sex, Science & U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico by Laura Briggs]

Fears about unfettered population growth were deliberately created and exploited in an attempt to legitimize efforts at reproductive control. (There actually is no ironclad reason to believe that population growth is a threat.) And, as much as white feminists might protest, curbing reproduction has had far less to do with "empowering women" than it has with reducing the number of people of color on this planet.

Margaret Sanger, the feminist icon who most famously championed birth control as a means of "empowering women," was also an avowed eugenicist who supported the involuntary imposition of birth control on women of color.

In fact, women of color in the U.S. and abroad have been subject to all sorts of infringements upon their rights (reproductive and otherwise) in the name of "women's empowerment." For example, Puerto Rican women were used against their will and/or knowledge to test new birth control methods with uncomfortable, potentially dangerous, side effects.

For many women of color, reproductive rights means the ability to reproduce if they want to.

One of many things that bothers me about CNN's headline ("7 Billion Reasons to Empower Women") is that, grammatically, women are the subjects who are acted upon by someone else.  Some other agent is empowering them. (I am pretty sure women can empower themselves.)  More specifically, though, it appears to be a call for the "developed" (in this case read:  white) world, including white feminists, to empower all those other women in the world (who are apparently too stupid to know how to take care of themselves and their families). Shockingly, women of color are just as capable of empowering themselves, without the benevolent aid of white women. Furthermore, it is an even bigger and more dangerous mistake to suppose that contraception equals empowerment. For a majority of women in the world this is not the case. In fact, the refusal of contraception itself could be seen as an act of empowerment.

Could we allow women around the world to empower themselves by letting them use their reproductive capacities as they wish? (And we, of course, would view it as "letting them," because we always have ultimate power.)

One may argue that even if population growth and contraception were initially associated with eugenics movements, that does not mean they aren't relevant concerns that might validly be considered independent of eugenics today. Surely eugenics is an outdated topic.

Unfortunately, eugenics is not outdated. The ideas have persisted and the acts have continued, albeit with less fanfare. (Only recently I linked to an article about a not-too-long-ago victim of eugenics in the United States.) It is a mistake to think that eugenics is a concern of the past. More importantly, population growth and contraception can't be considered independently of eugenics. The terms and principles were born within a eugencist framework and are eugenicist through and through. The very idea that the human population can be managed through technically advised control of reproduction? That is eugenics, by definition.

Moreover, pretending that population/contraception concerns can be separated from eugenics allows people to continue eugenicist projects under more benign guises. For example, the Ford Foundation can employ rhetoric about population control that is divorced from eugenics - even more, implement real projects, affecting masses of people around the world, based on this rhetoric - so that they can claim that their prime concern is actually "economic development" in the Third World. But it is not too difficult to pull back the mask and reveal the clearly racist bent of the Ford Foundation in general, across all of its projects.

To suggest that population/contraception can be considered independently of eugenics is in many ways to claim that racism does not exist anymore.

Eugenics

It only took a week or two after my posts on evolution and racism and evolution and gender to see eugenics pop up in the news.  As you can see from this article, the problem of eugenics is real and it is still present.  Thus, the fact that eugenics derives from an evolutionary framework to understanding race underscores the point that the concept of "evolution" must be treated with care.  Science must not be viewed as a neutral enterprise.