Politics of reproduction
Talking about having kids or not having kids often leads people to expose their asses. When I say that I don’t want to have kids, sometimes middle/upper-class/smart/liberal people tell me that I have a duty to have kids or else the uneducated/prejudiced/unintelligent/conservative/poor masses will outbreed us all!
On the other hand, I occasionally see news article about how there are too many Asians at X Bastion of White Privilege. In other words, I shouldn’t have kids because they’ll outperform white kids and steal the university seats and jobs that they are entitled to.
Here’s a cluebus: kids are not footsoldiers in a demographic war, no matter what side you’re on. To suggest that they are shows deep prejudices about the “right sort of people” that you ought to reexamine. See also: eugenics. Furthermore, it should not be stated or implied that the most important contribution that women can make for the advancement of society is give birth to and raise children. It is insulting and sexist and devalues the contributions that women themselves can make to society.*
I don’t want to have kids, therefore, you shouldn’t want me to have kids, either. What I do want is a stronger social safety net; affordable contraception and health care; better public education; and gender equality so that men can’t coerce women into pregnancy (more info on reproductive coercion); women faced with unwanted pregnancies have genuinely feasible options available to them; and kids can get good educations regardless of their class.
*ETA: This statement is not about mai’a's post “ain’t i a mama” at Feministe; I made this post a few hours before I read that one.
Ouyang Dan said,
2010 August 4 at 6:01 PM
I think that is one of the most even statements I’ve seen (outside of my own brain).
I hate how we can’t have the discussion about reproduction because it seems to crumble down into a fight, one side insisting that children are the most important thing women can do, and the other loudly proclaiming that giving any right to children must be forcing reproducing on them. It gets heated and we lose the place for the nuanced middle ground.
That place is where we see that women who don’t wish to have children should be supported, because that is their right, and that women who do have them may not have done so by free choice, and that we should support them too, because they, and their children are human beings.
You have a great view on this, from what I see, and I love it when I feel like someone finally sees the middle of this discussion in Women’s Rights spaces.
I also like how you break this down into the racial perspective, too, which gets wildly overlooked. It even gets over looked beyond a white/black perspective. Hardly anyone looks at the Asian, Indigenous, or even sometimes Latin@ angles, because the approach this from a mainly N. American perspective.
Now that I’ve rambled on in your house, I will leave it at that. I hope it came off as the compliment it was intended to be!