Over at Dervish, in the entry We're Outbreeding Them, Umm Yasmin talks about how in Australia some are arguing in favor of limiting access to the abortion pill RU486 on the grounds that the non-Muslim ("white"?) birth rates are already low, and that if current trends continue, Islam will be the dominant religion in Australia in 50 years or so.
The whole discussion reminds me of the old Last Poets piece called The Pill (included below) which raises some related issues. The border between birth/population control and genocide can sometimes be unclear. In certain contexts, there is a slippery-slope from saying "There are too many people" to saying "There are too many of those kind of people".
This also reminds me of some conversations I had a year ago with a Catholic friend of mine (who I actually have recently bumped into again) on birth control. "Obviously" the Catholic position on artificial methods of birth control (absolute prohibition) is different from the usual Muslim position (sterilization and other permanent methods are prohibited, but most other methods are ok). But if you also throw in the Orthodox Jewish position (Adam was commanded to "be fruitful and multiply" so male contraceptives are prohibited) it seems like, in spite of their differences, we can loosely say that these three "traditional" religions have an ethos where having children is prized and at least some forms of birth control are discouraged. (Although I would argue that if we look at the most orthodox forms of each religion, Islam is the most liberal... permitting most forms of birth control and giving limited approval of abortion)
For example, the hadith: "Get married and multiply (have children), because I will be proud of you, in front of other nations on the Day of Judgment"
The Pill
Are you aware of the pill?
Its basic design is to kill
The fertile womb
becomes a tomb
for a new child unborn still.
I say are you aware of the brute
Whose job is to wither the fruit?
They'll cause us to fall
our history and all
by cuttin' us off at the root
They say "We'll stunt Africa's growth.
And Asia has too many folks.
Too large is the mouth
in the Latin South
We'll aid 'em by cuttin' their throats."
"No, we must approach as a friend
and do our job from within.
Let's feed 'em the pill
that's made up to kill
and make their beginning their end."
So poor folks of the world, be aware.
For their evil design is laid bare.
Watch out for the hag
with the little black bag
Marked "Birth Control: Peace Corps and CARE"
It's part of a game that they play.
And it's designed to make poor people pay.
It's part of a lie
to help you to die
while they cart your resources away.
I say conspiracy is in the air
To control the children that you bear.
Control of the land
is a part of the plan
as your kind grows increasingly rare.
It's a truth to be understood
through at first it may appear good.
But it's a menace to health
and to lineal wealth,
Since you can't reproduce when you should.
And in this respect I am told
it is better to use self-control.
For the future and truth
belong to the youth,
since you cannot prevent growing old.
So make sure that your reasoning's sound
before taking that potion down.
For it would be a shame
to come into fame
for being the last one around.
The issue can get complicated. Just between you and me, I'm not really suggesting that family planning is some genocidal plot. I'm just saying that the important thing is to make sure that people are empowered with information and resources so that they can make their own choices. And this should be done in a genuinely balanced way. In a modern Western context, reproductive freedom is often framed as the right to NOT have children. But if the issue is REALLY about choice, then we also have to acknowledge the right TO have children as well.
Sunni Path (Hanafi): Is contraception permissible?
From Al-Balagh is the article Overpopulation: Myths, Facts, and Politics which I'm not sure if I'm endorsing but questions the concept of overpopulation.
Past Grenada entries:
the men will look like the women... relates the Last Poets to Islamic attitudes on transgenderism. And race and sex discusses an interesting link between feminism and white supremacist movements and also brings up (Planned Parenthood founder) Margaret Sanger's connection to the eugenics movement.
5 comments:
Thanks for stopping by. It actually is more a spoken word piece with instruments and chanting in the background...
but yeah, there is definitely anger there.
I guess another I've been thinking about this issue... something I've heard for a very long time is that the world hunger problem is more about resource allocation than anything else. That the earth actually does produce enough food for everyone, but the real problem is that it is not going to the right places.
But what I would get at is the way overpopulation is even framed...
The assumption is that the economic system is but and so there are too many people.
But almost equivalentley you could say the people are fine, but they aren't being served by the system.
ok, so I'm not supposed to be commenting, i'm supposed to be writing a paper, but I just had to comment on this!!! ;-)
The poem sounds like it was written in the seventies some time--during that time, there actually WAS a lot of genocidal attacks against people of color through the wombs of women--for example, in some tribes in the U.S., every single woman of child bearing age was sterilized without receiving any type of informed consent.
There was also a huge attack against the women of Puerto Rico (i think they were sterilized through unsafe, untested birth control--they acted as guinea pigs for drug companies if I remember correctly, and they too, were not given any type of informed consent.
Latina and black women (not sure about asian women) were also targeted through welfare reform measures--get sterilized or don't get any welfare check.
It was actually the U.S.'s stated policy to prevent "over population"--and of course, "over population" meant those dirty people of color who are giving birth to drunks and milking the system and growing up in ghettos.
These declassified documents *specifically* target people of color for their poverty. So there was absolutly a government endorsed eugenics program in place all the way up through the mid 80's or so.
After that, because of organizing and activism by women of color around the subject, they were able to largely limit overt government policies of the seventies(they had informed consent written into law and got a hold of all those government documents and made them public).
But today this is still happening--just to different groups of women. Whereas overt racist targeting of sterilization used to be against your average woman of color, now it is largely the "fringe" women like prisoners, undocumented women, women outside of the U.S. (by drug companies), drug addicts (institutionalized for treatment), disabled women and those institutionalized for mental issues.
Of course, poor women are still being targeted through welfare programs--you can 'get sterilized for free!!!' and Native/Indigenous women are under especially intense pressure--they are still being overtly targeted simply because they carry the future tribal members in their wombs--and future tribal members means one more generation that government structures can't grab that land!! oh and women who lived in occupied lands are also targeted but in a different way--for example I heard a speach by rabab abdullahdi (i know I slaughtered her name...) in which she discussed the fact that women of palestine who have been in protests in which the Israeli government shot gases at the group to "disperse" them have had unusually high rates of miscarriages and abnormal births...
So to get back to the poem--yes, the song is addressing very real issues of the seventies--and unfortunatly, very real issues of today as well. It's just that now, because the government isn't overtly targeting middle class women of color, sterilization practices have largely fallen off the radar of less groups like NOW or Feminist Majority. (note: both of these organizations are largely white upper middle class feminist organizations)
now. back to academics!!
;-)
ok, so I posted the above comment in a fit of excitement--now I need to go back and clarify!!
when I said "these declassified documents" i realize that I didn't explain what those are--there was actually a bunch of documents that government officials were passing around amongst themselves in the seventies--in which they stated specifically that "sterilization should be encouraged" in populations that lived in poverty etc etc because boo hoo, nobody should have to live like those slum living people do. Oh, and they also specifically stated that brown countries were the biggest threat to U.S. security (think all the revolutionary movements outside the U.S. going on at the time) and that the best way to deal with that threat was through sterilization practices.
finally, this sentence:
have largely fallen off the radar of less groups like NOW or Feminist Majority.
should have stated
have largely fallen off the radar of less RADICAL groups like NOW or Feminist Majority.
Good luck with your paper...
Also, the reason why I thought female feedback would be good is that writing the piece made me feel like I was defending a very reactionary position.
I have very mixed feelings about this topic. A lot of Israeli citizens are worried about this topic because Palestinians will definitely outnumber them within our lifetime unless some sort of large scale change is made in the birthrates of both groups. I think that this fact may work to the advantage of the Palestinian people. It certainly helped slaves in the American south when the ratio of "white" Americans to Africans changed.
I see this as a question of values. The decrease in "white" birth-rates is usually attributed to the correlation between poverty and number of children. I don't think that correlation matters as much to people of color or people of certain religions.
It makes sense to me. If you're "white", then you have good reasons to see economic success as a reachable goal. Perhaps, I should say that you have more reasons to believe that than most "blacks" have. If you're not white and you've already come to see that the economic cards are stacked against you in the world we live in, then it would make sense to seek success in other ways. "Brown" power often comes in the form of numbers. Who is going to take care of me when I get old if I don't have a retirement fund to live off of after I can no longer work? If I have one child, she/he might not be able to afford to care for me by her/himself. Two children might be able split the responsibility and costs better and three might be able to do it with ease. It might not be the best thing to rely on but when all of your options are bad, then you simply do what you can. Coming from an extremely big family, I can say that once you get to eight or ten kids another one or two won't make much of a difference when it comes to feeding, clothing, and caring for them. However, it may mean the difference between getting good care in your old age and being homeless with no one to call on for help.
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