On April 15 at 5:30pm, author Michelle Goldberg will be at the Wallkill River School in Montgomery, to read from and discuss her latest book, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (Penguin Books, 2009). Goldberg, an award-winning journalist and the New York Times-bestselling author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (Norton, 2006), now reveals the complex interplay among women’s reproductive rights or lack thereof and key global issues. In early chapters she describes attempts over the last several decades by interested parties in developed nations to curb exponential population growth in the developing world by targeting women’s wombs, and the steps taken to oppose that by fundamentalist religious groups and the Vatican. Later chapters recount the realities women face in individual countries or cultures today, including serious health challenges and high mortality associated with pregnancy and birth, rampant HIV infection among faithful married women in Africa, genital cutting of millions of girls as a rite of passage and marriage requirement, abortion laws intolerant of exception, arranged marriages and forced pregnancies at a young age in lieu of schooling, and even the problem of international aid meant to improve women’s situations causing unexpected outcomes and backlash. First-person accounts and scores of referenced documents create a stunning, and disturbing, picture of reproductive constraints placed on women around the globe, and build the case that diverse societal woes will not improve until women’s human rights, including those of reproductive freedom, are taken seriously.
I spoke with Goldberg by phone in anticipation of her visit to the Hudson Valley; the following are excerpts from our conversation.
Regarding women’s health issues specifically, what do you consider a top global concern?
Maternal mortality is a big problem. There is no excuse for how little progress we’ve made on maternal mortality globally. There are some countries in sub-Saharan Africa where women have a one-in-five chance or a one-in-six chance of dying during pregnancy, whereas in other more developed countries in the region it’s about one in 23. What’s most disturbing about this maternal mortality crisis is how much it is about politics. There are certainly questions of poverty and resources, but there are also deep political and cultural systems of oppression behind all of these unnecessary deaths. It’s about the devaluation of women throughout their lives.
It starts with the fact that girls are pulled out of school and married off at young ages—12 or 13—and have no say about their sex lives or about using family planning. These young girls, whose bodies are not developed enough for successful deliveries, are giving birth without medical help. Many develop fistula, a tragic endemic condition where the vagina and urethra are torn during delivery, and the girls end up leaking urine and feces all the time, so they are banished from their villages or put in a hut by themselves at the edge of the village. There is also the problem of these girls giving birth to several children very closely spaced together, without time to recover. That’s why, in Ethiopia for instance, you’ll often see women lining up at makeshift clinics for Provera shots [a birth control drug], because their husbands won’t know about the shots.
Another huge contributor to maternal mortality—the second-biggest in some countries—is botched abortions. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, there are high rates of illegal abortions, showing women’s desperation to control their fertility and the system’s failure to help them. Almost everywhere in these regions, abortion is illegal. This cause of mortality could be effectively tackled by changing the law. But abortion laws are getting more restrictive, in concert with the ascendancy of the right wing within governments that are ostensibly west leaning. Just recently, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic passed laws making abortion illegal for any reason, including risk to the health of the mother.
AIDS, which is another global issue you address, has increasingly become a dire situation in ways we might not have foreseen.
Yes, the AIDS pandemic is a major problem that can’t be tackled without women’s rights. In some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, young females are three times more likely than young males to be infected. Part of that is biological—female tissues are more readily injured during intercourse, making virus entry easier. But a huge part of the high incidence in girls is culture and power. A girl doesn’t have the authority to decide when and with whom she has sex, who she’s going to marry, or to demand that her husband be faithful or use a condom. In many places, studies show that the greatest risk factor for women in getting AIDS is being married. I’ve talked to a number of women who were abstinent before they married, and were faithful to their husbands, and now have AIDS. That’s why the conservative policies of abstinence and fidelity are such a cruel joke.
Also, wherever there is tremendous poverty and few economic opportunities for women, some of them are going to turn to sex to survive. That’s why there has to be a focus on changes in women’s status.
You give many examples of how restrictions on women’s reproductive options have been influenced from outside these countries.
A big part of my book is about how reproductive rights have moved into international law, and the increasingly global influence of the religious right in foreign policy by forging alliances in other countries. The Catholic Church has always been antiabortion, but it has become more singular in its antiabortion focus and is working all over the world, sometimes with very sinister bedfellows, and fighting women’s rights at the United Nations. Within individual countries now, too, conservatives are railing against Western or Northern moral chaos being wrought by globalization. For example, Kenya right now has very strict antiabortion laws and high maternal mortality because of it, and is considering tightening its laws even further as it discusses a new constitution. They see this as a way to stand up against the meddling of Americans and the United Nations, to reassert traditional Kenyan values. In truth, abortion bans were not part of traditional Kenyan culture but were imported by the colonial British. But it’s an effective rhetorical strategy, when their national culture is disintegrating around them.
It was clear from the cases you present that making abortions illegal doesn’t stop women from having them.
In fact, countries with the strictest antiabortion laws have the highest abortion rates, because they also don’t do a good job with women’s empowerment and family planning.
So these battles are more about abortion as a symbol of larger social obstacles. In India, abortion laws don’t have to do with expansion of women’s rights, so access to abortion doesn’t cause much of a stir. But elsewhere, I’ve never seen a country where abortion became an issue and wasn’t tied with a change in gender hierarchies.
You help us understand how the dowry tradition in India, in which the family of the bride must present gifts to the husband and his family as a condition of marriage, has led to selectively aborting female fetuses.
For someone like me who is very committed to reproductive choice and women’s rights, India is a moral labyrinth. There is an epidemic of sex-selective abortion because higher value is placed on males; this is happening in several other countries in Asia as well. In India, we also see it not just among the poor, but also among wealthy, educated, urban women who want smaller families, so if they have only one or two children, at least one has to be a boy. Sex-selective abortion is creating a generation with so many more boys than girls, it’s a recipe for all kinds of disaster—social instability, sex trafficking, sexual assault, girls being married off at ever-younger ages. It’s a terrible situation in what it says about rejection of girls.
Feminists in India are very committed to women’s reproductive rights and don’t want to ban abortions, but they also want to end female fetocide. To come out against sex-selective abortion is confounding because it takes the position that some choices are invalid. Some of their rhetoric reminds me of the antiabortion tactics here, like billboards of a female fetus with a knife pointing at it.
Women’s rights activists in India are fighting the underlying issue—the tradition of dowry, which seems to be getting worse as longstanding cultural traditions collide with global capitalism. One woman told me the acceptable dowry in her region includes a TV, washer and dryer, motorcycle, refrigerator, et cetera, and for the upper caste it includes a car. And it’s not just a one-time payment but a steady stream of gifts is expected after the wedding. If the groom’s family is unsatisfied, it can be hell for the bride’s family. There are constantly cases of dowry murders that are called “kitchen accidents,” where the wife is burned to death by the inlaws and husband, so the husband can marry again and get a new dowry.
Given that women carry out the essential role of literally growing the next generation, it’s always baffling to me that women are subjugated in so many cultures. Have you unearthed a sense of how this has come about?
I don’t have an explanation for why misogyny is so common worldwide. My working theory is that in agricultural economies with a lot of land to be cleared, and wealth held within the family, the man who could have the most children to do work and could control the most women had an advantage. So there was an evolutionary advantage to patriarchy in earlier society. A point I’m trying to make in the book is that now patriarchy is maladaptive, and the perpetuation of healthy societies in the modern world is dependent on the liberation of women, so they have the right to complete their education, decide who they are going to marry and when, and how many children to have, and to earn an income.
Sociologists say one of the first things that happens when a traditional culture faces modernization or transformation to an industrial economy is the breakdown in the division between men’s and women’s work. As women begin moving into the workplace, earning money, having more of a say in matters, they make an easy scapegoat when society seems to be disintegrating or changing too fast. Men see putting women back in their place as a way to restore vanished order, hoping to reclaim an often imaginary idyllic world they think existed before all the modernity.
And certainly some women are fighting changes in their social structures too. It was enlightening to learn from your book that some young women today defend their society’s practice of female genital cutting. One woman you spoke to passionately describes why she, as an American-educated woman, chose to return to her tribe for this rite of passage she calls empowering, and resents that others are interfering by trying to get it banned.
In this century, women who go along with the existing order are invested in it—it’s their culture too. But women within these same cultures are fighting for change, often risking their lives as they go against the norms they don’t agree with. That’s true for genital cutting, and that’s why I spoke to women on both sides of the issue.
I want to point out that in years past, in the United States, feminists were often a minority, and only after they won certain victories did everybody else get on board. Now, even the most reactionary conservatives won’t question a woman’s right to vote or to work, but, at the time, those rights were minority positions opposed by many women as well as men.
Women have so little power in many societies, but there has been so much focus on reproductive education for women as a way to solve health or population woes. What about educating men?
My feeling is that men tend to get on board when they see things working for them. There are many stories of men who objected to their wives working but started to see how much money their wives were earning and realized that it was improving their own lives. But certainly everyone who works in this field believes that men need to be partners in family planning, AIDS prevention, and so on. But I also think that men certainly have advantages to being the kind of master in a master-servant relationship. Certainly some men will fight it.
You also highlight some remarkably inspiring efforts by women and organizations that are helping not just women, but also their families and locales. Yet every situation is different and there is so much resistance. Is there any overarching strategy that works?
If there were a single magic bullet, it would be giving women the education and power to control their own bodies. A woman who is educated and literate is far more likely to use family planning, have fewer children, demand medical treatment for her children, send her children to school, and earn some income—which they are more likely to spend on the well-being of their children than are men. There is a lot of research that shows that basic education for women has profound effects on the environment, social stability, and economic development.
This article appears in April 2010.
