Written 9:29 PM Sep 1, 1994 by igc:twn in icpd:twn.features ---------- "Women's rights & Reproduction(Pt1)" ---------- WOMEN'S RIGHTS REDUCED TO REPRODUCTION ISSUE The conflict between Western state systems and the Church over the population issue has distorted women's rights and reduced the issue to one of reproduction and abortion. (First of a two-part article) By Vandana Shiva Third World Network Features >From 5 to 13 September, governments of the world will meet in Cairo for a Population and Development Conference. While they will be largely discussing policies for the rapid spread of technologies to control of women's fertility, women's voice is already being silenced. Two delegations are already influencing the terms of the debate and negotiations. For foreign policy and state department officials of the US, the Population Conference is a make-it-or-break-it event to push population control as a security issue. For the Vatican, the headquarters of the Catholic Church (also called the Holy See), the US population control is an example of `demographic imperialism'. The current conflict between Western patriarchal institutions - the super state system controlled by the US Government, and the Church - is pushing out the concerns of women and polarising the discourse into the categories of `pro-choice' and `pro-life' that have fuelled the abortion wars in the US. There are multiple levels of reductionism and distortion involved in these categories. `Pro-choice' language reduces the larger issue of well-being of women to reproduction, and then it reduces reproduction to abortion. This reductionism has emerged from the peculiar history of reproductive politics of the US. A century ago, when the mole medical establishment wanted to take control over childbirth, it used the criminalisation of abortion to enter the domain hitherto controlled by female health experts and practitioners. The first attack on abortion in America did not come from the general public or from the churches. The first anti-abortion activity came from doctors. Abortion was a central element in the efforts of physicians to control their profession and stop their `patients' from going to midwives, homeopaths, and folk healers. Between 1821 and 1841, 10 states in the US passed laws regulating abortion as part of their first laws regulating medicine. By mid-century, the doctors had made abortion a public issue. By the late 1860s they had the Protestant Church rally behind them. In 1869, the Catholic Church which till then had been silent on the issue joined the campaign to outlaw abortion. By 1900, abortion decisions were handed over, by law, to `scientifically trained' physicians. The laws declared that doctors would decide who would abort and when. A personal or religious decision had become a medical one. The church followed the medical establishment in this outlawing of abortion. It is because of this history of criminalisation that the Roe vs Wade decision became such an important victory for the women's movement in US. The inertia of this history and the role of the church in these matters also fuels the so- called `pro-life' movement, which has positioned itself as defending the life of the foetus from the actions of the mother. Abortion is too complex an issue to be reduced to this crude polarity. Neither the `pro-choice' nor the `pro-life' label fully reflects the politics of the most dominant representation of these movements. The `pro-choice' movement of the US fails in respecting the choice of Third World women in matters of economic survival, on having children and in saying `no' to hazardous contraceptives. It has been adequately proven that poor people without economic security are forced to have more children. To force them to have few children or no children, without changing the socio-economic conditions of their life that make it rational for them to have more children is not a politics of choice; it is a politics of coercion. Similarly, to push hazardous contraceptives on Third World women against their will also does not reflect a politics of choice. The pro-life movement is also not fully pro-life beyond the foetus because it fails in respecting the life of women and doctors. The recent shooting of Dr John Bayord Britton and his armed escort, retired Air Force Officer James Basett, by Paul Hill, a former Presbyterian pastor and `pro-life' activist, brought out the anti-life aspect of the pro-life movement once again. Abortion has quite clearly become a life-and-death issue in the US because of this violence, and it is understandable that abortion should be the most important aspect of the politics of reproduction of the American women's movement. However, it is not appropriate to only view Cairo through the lens of the abortion wars taking place in the US. Population control is also `something like a war' as Deepa Dhanraj and Abha Bhaiya have documented in the film with the same name. It is also something like a war if one goes by US foreign policy and defence approach to the population issue. -- Third World Network Features - ends - About the writer: Vandana Shiva is a leading environmental scientist in India and the author of Staying Alive and many other books and articles on issues related to resources, the environment and women. When reproducing this feature, please credit Third World Network Features and (if applicable) the cooperating magazine or agency involved in the article, and give the byline. Please send us cuttings. Published by Third World Network 228, Macalister Road, 10400 Penang, Malaysia. Email: twn@igc.apc.org; Phone: (+604)2293511; Fax: (+604)364505. Written 9:32 PM Sep 1, 1994 by igc:twn in icpd:twn.features ---------- "Popul'tion Control&Ind. rights(Pt2)" ---------- POPULATION CONTROL A DENIAL OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS Population control, which is basically a denial of the right of the individual to freely and responsibly choose to have or not have children, is made to appear as a `free choice' in the marketplace of contraceptives. (Second of a two-part article) By Vandana Shiva Third World Network Features According to US policy, population control activities are a security issue. A summary of the Department of Defence perspective on the effects of worldwide population trends for America's ability to influence events abroad was published in 1989 in the Washington Quarterly, a journal of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). The report stated: `As difficult and uncertain as the task may be, policy makers and strategic planners in this country have little choice in the coming decades but to pay serious attention to population trends, their causes and their effects. Already the United States has embarked on an era of constrained resources. It thus becomes more important than ever to do those things that will provide more bang for every buck spent on national security. Policy makers must anticipate events and conditions before they occur. They must employ all the instruments of statecraft at their disposal (development assistance and population planning every bit as much as new weapon systems).' The Clinton administration is focussing on the environment, population and women's rights as driving forces for its foreign policy in a new global politics. Third World populations need to be controlled because the natural resources they use must be freed up for the growth of US corporations. As a National Security Study says, growing populations will create growing domestic needs. As a result `.....concessions to foreign companies are likely to be expropriated or subjected to arbitrary interaction. Whether through government action, labour conflicts, sabotage, or civil disturbance, the smooth flow of needed materials will be jeopardised... the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad especially from less developed countries. That fact gives the US enhanced interest in the political, economic and social stability of the supplying countries.' What this imperialistic view on the relationship between re sources and population growth does not perceive is that population growth is triggered by appropriation of resources from the common people. Such appropriation which is necessary for diverting resources from people to corporate investment in free trade regimes also fuels social and political instability and unrest, as the Zapatista uprising in Mexico highlighted on New Year's day, 1994. Thus while the objective of US foreign policy might be stabilisation, the consequence is actually destabilisation. At a deeper level, the urge to control the resources and populations of the Third World comes from fear. There is a fear of the hordes taking over, guided by the realisation that by the year 2010, 80% of the world's population will reside in the Third World. The CSIS report finds that because the types of conflicts likely to predominate in the years ahead are manpower-intensive regional conflicts, developing states may indeed accrue added power and influence. Paul Kennedy in Preparing for the Twenty First Century explains that the current demographic strategy of the North reflects the belief that `as in a Darwinian struggle, the faster growing species will encroach upon, and eventually overwhelm, a population with static or declining numbers'. Demographic imperialism thus arises out of a sense of demographic marginalisation. However, by couching this policy in the language of `choice', a North/South conflict over natural resources is projected as an issue of women's rights. As a recently declassified National Security Study states: `The US can help minimise charges of an imperialist motivation behind its support of population activities by repeatedly asserting that such support derives from a concern with the right of the individual to determine freely and responsibly their number and spacing of children.' This is where the language of `choice' fits in. It makes population control, which is basically a denial of the right of the individual to freely and responsibly choose to have or not have children, appear as free choice in the marketplace of contraceptives. However, poor Third World women who are the targets of population control programmes are not `free consumers'. Coercion rather than choice characterises their situation in population control programmes, which are becoming a major component of international aid packages. Due to popular resistance to population control, governments call it `family planning' and the World Bank disguises it as `Safe Motherhood' even though the contraceptives pushed through these programmes are not very safe for women. The World Bank has emerged as a major funder of population control. During 1969-79 it only spent $278 million on population programmes. In 1987, the then President promised this would rise to $500 million in 1990. In 1993 it had already shot up to $1.3 billion. Preston has now promised to raise it further to an annual basis of $2.5 billion by 1995. Population control policies emerging from Washington DC, from both US foreign policy and from World Bank policy, are not giving Third World women a chance to present their perspectives on issues that are so central to their lives and their health. The rallying cry of `All against the Holy See' detracts from the economic issues of structural adjustment and unfair trade, and non-sustainable resource use. It also fails to recognise that Catholic fundamentalism is not the fundamentalism most women have to deal with in the Third World. While the Vatican might be right in calling these policies `demographic imperialism', the Church cannot be treated as the best protector of women's interest and well-being in matters of health and reproduction in the Third World, both because it is an irrelevent institution for a large majority of our people, and because it is a patriarchal institution for women who belong to the Christian religion. The most important challenge in Cairo will be to transcend the politics of Washington DC and the Holy See, and put Third World women at the centre of the `population' discourse -- as subjects, determining their lives and health not as objects of state, or super state policies or as pawns in conflicts between the patriarchies of religion and the patriarchy of the super state systems and the demographic establishment. It is only in transcending patriarchal polarisations that women will be able to set an agenda for economic and social justice, environmental sustainability, and women's right to health. -- Third World Network Features - ends - About the writer: Vandana Shiva is a leading environmental scientist in India and the author of Staying Alive and many other books and articles on issues related to resources, the environment and women. When reproducing this feature, please credit Third World Network Features and (if applicable) the cooperating magazine or agency involved in the article, and give the byline. Please send us cuttings. Published by Third World Network 228, Macalister Road, 10400 Penang, Malaysia. Email: twn@igc.apc.org; Phone: (+604)2293511; Fax: (+604)364505.