Mara Hvistendahl, author of Unnatural Selection, has been making the rounds in the media drawing out some of the shocking and under-appreciated consequences of sex-selective abortion around the world (we’ve talked about her here and here), but all the while assuring readers that the catastrophic problems she’s describing have nothing to do with abortion per se, only with its application.
Be that as it may, her latest piece in Foreign Policy points out what pro-life groups have been saying for over thirty years: that Western reproductive ideology funded, fueled, and enabled abortion around the globe as a means of population control.
Then I looked into it, and discovered that what I thought were right-wing conspiracy theories about the nexus of Western feminism and population control actually had some, if very distant and entirely historical, basis in truth. As it turns out, Western advisors and researchers, and Western money, were among the forces that contributed to a serious reduction in the number of women and girls in the developing world. And today feminist and reproductive-rights groups are still reeling from that legacy.
Those “very distant and entirely historical” connections turn out to be intimate and recent, as she argues in the paragraphs that follow. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, panic over the coming population explosion resulted in a major campaign by Western intellectuals and NGOs to stem the tide of babies with which the third world seemed poised to drown the planet. In the late 1960s,
Steven Polgar, [Planned Parenthood]‘s head of research, went public with the notion that sex selection was an effective population control method. Taking the podium before an audience of scholars and policymakers at a conference sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), Polgar “urged,” according to the meeting’s minutes, “that sociologists stimulate biologists to find a method of sex determination, since some parents have additional children in order to get one of specified sex.”
Paul Ehrlich, author of the infamous Population Bomb, argued directly that “if a simple method could be found to guarantee that first-born children were males, then population control problems in many areas would be somewhat eased.”
Much of the argumentation was from men, but
a handful of women got on board as well. In 1978, former ambassador and former U.S. Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce wrote an article for the Washington Star in which she clamored for the development of a “manchild pill” — a drug a woman could take before sex to ensure any children that resulted would be male.
Much of the West’s fancy intellectual posturing became policy in other nations around the globe, leading to some shocking excesses that helped cement the practice of sex-selective abortion. In South Korea, for instance,
by the 1970s, recalls gynecologist Cho Young-youl, who was a medical student at the time, “there were agents going around the countryside to small towns and bringing women into the [mobile] clinics. That counted toward their pay. They brought the women regardless of whether they were pregnant.” Non-pregnant women were sterilized. A pregnant woman met a worse fate, Cho says: “The agent would have her abort and then undergo tubal ligation.” [...] By 1977, they determined, doctors in Seoul were performing 2.75 abortions for every birth — the highest documented abortion rate in human history. Were it not for this history, Korean sociologist Heeran Chun recently told me, “I don’t think sex-selective abortion would have become so popular.”
In China in the early 1980s, party officials openly spoke of ensuring that the populace would meet “new birth quotas through forced abortions.” That proved not to be empty rhetoric.
After decades of connection to chilling practices like forced sterilization and open encouragement of sex-selective abortion, Hvistendahl rightly points out that NGOs and UN groups now find themselves in a terrible bind, unable to provide legitimate health-care services because of their long legacy of promoting a strict doctrine of sola abortio for all the third world’s problems.
Hvistendahl herself proves that sex-selective abortion and abortion-as-population-control became a reality in the non-Western world because of the consistent efforts of the Western academy and Western NGOs throughout the 1950-1980s. If those connections are “very distant and entirely historical,” I’m curious what her definition of a close connection would be.
Hvistendahl remains totally committed to women’s abortion rights, in the face of all her evidence about how the immediate past history of the abortion movement has led us to this scenario. As for the future, she puts all of her eggs in one basket: “a new wave of feminist bureaucrats who are keen on ensuring reproductive rights, and [who] no longer finance global population control.” I hope she’s right to do so, because, as she says, “Indian public health activist George, indeed, says waiting to act is no longer an option: If the world does ‘not see ten years ahead to where we’re headed, we’re lost.’”
July 5th, 2011 | 12:37 pm
[...] “…But There’s Nothing Wrong with Abortion”: Mara Hvistendahl, author of Unnatural Selection, has been making the rounds in the media drawing out some of the shocking and under-appreciated consequences of sex-selective abortion around the world (we’ve talked about her here and here), but all the while assuring readers that the catastrophic problems she’s describing have nothing to do with abortion per se, only with its application. [...]
July 5th, 2011 | 1:02 pm
Has anyone ever contemplated what kind of a world will result when a significant majority of the population are young men with no martital prospects? What is a “surplus” of young men good for? Does the word “war” come to mind?
July 5th, 2011 | 1:25 pm
What does “a new wave of feminist bureaucrats who are keen on ensuring reproductive rights, and [who] no longer finance global population control” even mean? Does she say? A bunch of women who believe that every woman should be able to have an abortion if they want to, but that no one should be forced to have an abortion for any reason, and at any rate killing girls isn’t a good reason? I guess that is a nice thought… but so far, there haven’t been any such people. The people (men and women both) in charge of exporting “abortion as healthcare” to the third world all believe that poor countries would be better off with fewer people in them, and the best way to have fewer people is to talk women into aborting their children. It is hypocritical of them to object to these women (or the men who often make them get abortions) picking one sex over another when deciding to kill their babies. If killing babies is good, it shouldn’t matter which babies are killed. And if it matters then, well, perhaps killing babies isn’t good.
July 5th, 2011 | 1:27 pm
“a major campaign by Western intellectuals and NGOs to stem the tide of babies with which the third world seemed poised to drown the planet. ”
Not just the third world, yes? The birth rate in Catholic and black “ghettoes” in the U.S. also frightened the intellectual class, resulting in the targeted subversion of Christian morals in these communities.
July 5th, 2011 | 1:44 pm
Is she really counting on “a new wave of feminist bureaucrats . . .”? Talk about having blind faith in governance by technocrats.
“And today feminist and reproductive-rights groups are still reeling from that legacy.”
What does she mean, “reeling from”? Many of those groups, Planned Parenthood in particular, were part of the population control and eugenics bandwagon from the beginning. Perhaps now that she has ventured into the distant past of the 1950′s through the 1970′s, she might be willing to go further back in time and read what Margaret Sanger wrote on those topics. Perhaps someone could send Ms. Hvistendahl a copy of “Pivot of Civilization”.
I want to give her credit for her research and writing about the issue of sex selection abortion, but I find her sudden discovery that the links between abortion, population control and eugenics were not just “right wing conspiracy theories” to be exasperating. This is not a new topic for investigative and scholarly writers. Had she bothered to look, she could probably have found one or more books on the subject at her public library, none of them written by salivating right wing bogeymen.
I suppose the further she goes into this topic, the more she will feel the need to brandish her feminist credentials and project as much of the blame as possible on the all purpose trope of patriarchal misogyny. The hardest place for any of us to look is in the mirror.
Oh well, no messenger is perfect, so be it.
July 5th, 2011 | 1:54 pm
Gabriel, that quote is off:
“Nowadays, of course, UNFPA and Planned Parenthood are led by a new wave of feminist bureaucrats who are keen on ensuring reproductive rights, and they no longer finance global population control.”
To make it clear who she puts her trust in.
Rather than rehash old arguments, I wish these organizations would take a stand against the idea of population control, period. The idea isn’t just in places like China; the idea that there are too many people keep coming up again and again.
July 5th, 2011 | 5:21 pm
Like abortion, gender selection is morally wrong.
“‘When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him; but if it is a daughter, she shall live.’ But the midwives feared God, and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live.” ~ Exodus 1:16-17
July 5th, 2011 | 7:36 pm
they’ve been doing it for years…US money to IPPF and other pro abort/pro contraception groups that helped with abortions.
And using the UN conferences to issue decrees, and USAid to governments to pressure small governments.
Right now, the Philippine gov’t got a big US grant to help the poor, and the understanding is that the president will push thru the “Reproductive health” bill, against the opposition of Catholics and Muslims. To make it worse, we now have western “sex ed” in our schools.
This is to pressure the poor who use gov’t clinics to stop having babies: I mean, you can get condoms in the grocery store (right next to the batteries and chewing gum), so it’s not about Birth control per se…and many churches (e.g. Episcopal) that have US links are backing the bill, and that allows the gov’t to use this for propaganda.
And waiting in the wings: Gay rights. The state dept not only arranged Lady Gaga to go to the gay rights parade in Rome (To diss the pope?) but had a gay rights party in US embassy in Pakistan, that made a lot of locals angry.
US tax dollars at work…
July 5th, 2011 | 8:02 pm
Rather than rehash old arguments, I wish these organizations would take a stand against the idea of population control, period. The idea isn’t just in places like China; the idea that there are too many people keep coming up again and again.
A visit to China or India might clarify why this idea comes up so often, particularly to Indian and Chinese people.
July 6th, 2011 | 12:26 am
CD, but places like NYC have similar population densities. A lot of this has little to do with the number of people, and a lot to do with the failure of good governance.
The sad truth is that we could solve a lot of this, but people really dont care. I can see why global warming people are frustrated, even though im not sure I can agree: its similar. No one wants to look at the problem in any but the easiest ways.
July 7th, 2011 | 9:36 pm
A visit to the countries that are being targeted would reveal what we already know; that is, the people being targeted by our country are dark and poor. The same thing is happening within our country. More Planned Parenthood abortion clinics can be found in poor black neighborhoods than anywhere else. Margaret Sanger (the founder of PP) believed that blacks and the poor were “human weeds” that needed to be eradicated. Read the history of PP in the book Killer Angel by George Grant. Sanger embraced Hitler’s views on race (even though she was from a large poor Irish family).
My own sister who worked for the Population Council (which is notorious for leading the way in planned abortion campaigns in 3rd world countries) said that it is all right for the “right” kind of people to have more than one child.
July 9th, 2011 | 12:05 am
I’m not sure how abortion is wrong. I’m not comfortable telling a woman what she can and can’t do with her body, the morality issues fly through the roof. Because if you apply this to abortion, you have to apply it to everything else.
Smoking, alcohol , responsible for the deaths of thousands of people annually. What is worse, abortion or these products?
There many other situations like this that indirectly involve the killing of people.
So you can’t draw the line at abortion and simply say that since it has some flaky history because then you would have to look at religions such as christianity, which in the past has been responsible and exists today because of wars that have involved the killing of thousands of people over a vast amount of time in the name of it. Does this mean that all christians living today are killers and murderers and condemn people in the name of their religion? The same religious people who are in the political systems with the power to tell you what you can and can’t do with your body.
There are many gray areas here and you can’t single out one issue just because it involves a human life which also psychologically as a human being automatically makes you emotional about the topic/situation, because there are many issues that involve human life directly or indirectly.
We’re pushing 7 billion people on the Earth as I type this out and I would hope we figure out a way to stop our population growth. Then again, that’s in the realm of telling someone what they can or can’t do. I think we do need to look at overpopulation issue though.
From my argument above, I would say abortion is fine. It would seem morally irresponsible for society and themselves to NOT allow people to have abortions.
Also, it’s called climate change, not global warming it happens on both ends of the spectrum.
July 17th, 2011 | 8:47 am
@Ryan: While smoking, alcohol, etc. can indirectly harm a person, abortion directly kills. While a woman can decide what she wants to do with herself, she has no right to decide whether her child should live or not. If we can justify the killing of an innocent baby by her own mother…than we can justify all forms of murder.
July 17th, 2011 | 2:49 pm
Ryan…”we” have already recognized that smoking affects bodies other than that of the smoker and acted upon that knowledge by imposing restrictions on when and where a person can smoke so as not to impinge on the the rights of those who MIGHT suffer the side-effects of second hand smoke. But , come to think of it–you’re right–we protect coworkers and others, but have no restrictions on smoking at home and possibly hurting children. Funny children can have access to legal abortion but no protection from abortion (or even second hand smoke). Talk about inconsistent and illogical!!! It fits with feminists arguing for the right of a woman to abort her daughter because she already has one and wants a son.
July 17th, 2011 | 3:44 pm
Ryan,
Climate change is real but is not new. What’s new is these modern day facists trying to use this normal cycle of climate change that has existed since the beginning of time to convince others that human beings are responsible for these changes (they are not) and thus we must implement their self serving and anti-life policies. Don’t fall for such garbage. You have been brain washed.
July 18th, 2011 | 7:11 am
All human souls are made to be able to feel God’s presence. All are capable to have a give and take conversation with God Himself. He works with our free will, our personal preferences, and we maneuver this life together. As any parent does, and should. Those areas have wiggle room. Some areas don’t. Same with any child, we have guidelines. Running into the road is never o.k. for a child, I don’t care how much they want to. We, as grown ups have to see some guidelines too. Gray areas are “wiggle-room” areas. Not all areas are gray, some are black and white. Afterall, we need black and white to even make gray. The women (and men) already decided what to do with bodies. And now this baby is here. Just wait less than a mere year, and see this amazing miracle, a symbol of love between a man and a woman, that has a soul and will accomplish so many unbelievable feats while stealing your heart in such a short time. If the two people who made such a wonderful creature, with the help of God, can’t see this beautiful prospect, then, I would hope that they can give this baby to someone who desperately wants the chance to see this potential unfold. The fallen angels are very jealous of our ability to reproduce. They are helping to make humans throw this gift in God’s face. Please have a conversation with God about this, remember to wait and listen for an answer. If you do not hear one then that means He wants to show you something. Keep your eyes ready, He will give you plenty of signs and you will see many things until you laugh and say, “I get it! I know what You are telling me!” Thru these conversations you will know what is Truth, i.e. black and white.
July 19th, 2011 | 7:02 am
[...] . . .But There’s Nothing Wrong with Abortion – Gabriel Torretta, Frst Thngs/Frst Thghts [...]
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