August 15, 2005

White Women Need to Have Babies
by Lorraine Berry

I'm not sure what to make of this article. I suppose I'm writing about it in order to start a discussion. Because, in reality, it doesn't seem to be in praise of female sexuality. It seems, rather, to be in praise of female reproductive capabiliites. And while sexuality and reproduction overlap, they're hardly synonymous.

It's time someone praised and defended reckless teenage girls and young women who behave badly, dress provocatively, engage in risky sex, and get pregnant. They are the normal ones. The rest of us are the deviants. They are behaving in the most natural way. The rest of us are mutants.

There is nothing wrong with pelvic display, push-up bras, Gosford miniskirts, spray-on jeans, low-cut tops, bare legs, bare arms, bare ankles, G-strings or even buttock cleavage, providing the displayer is young enough to get away with it. A woman's body is at its fertility peak between the ages of 17 and 23. So when young women advertise or flaunt their sexuality they are being driven by a force far stronger than the Judeo-Christian ethic. They are driven by the power of peak fertility and a million years of evolutionary biology. Nature has programmed them for pregnancy, genetic diversity and keeping the species going. A big job.

According to Mr. Sheehan, the problem is not teen pregnancy. It's "suppressed pregnancy." That is, it's the waiting until women are in their 30s and 40s to have babies that's the problem. And what's the culprit? Materialism. Materialism tells us to delay child-bearing because we need to finish our educations, buy our big houses, big cars, establish ourselves, before we start having babies. And that's against nature. Because, if it was up to biology, women would start getting pregnant way before they turn 25.

Sheehan thinks that women bear the brunt of culture's discomfort with sexuality.

Sexually active teenage girls, and sexually promiscuous women of any age, carry the greatest social burden of judgements, punishments, restrictions and risks because we haven't got the child-care equation right. These women are just doing their job. They are real, while the rest of the equation is artificial. Society is the collective weight of traditions, conventions, laws, habits, fears, tribes, taboos and technologies, permeated by a Judeo-Christian ethic dominated by men and designed to curb female sexual power. Our norms are also dominated by the ideology of materialism that is moving women further and further towards unnatural behaviour, pressuring them to have babies later rather than sooner.

That's terrific. I agree wholeheartedly. The problem is not women's expressions of sexual health that are the problem. It's this culture's obsession with controlling female sexuality and accumulation of wealth (which, according to Levi-Strauss and Irigaray are not unrelated). These all appear to be good arguments.

And then, Sheehan's argument takes one of those scary turns where I'm left scratching my head and thinking, "what the fuck?"

You see. What's really bothering Sheehan is not the condemnation of female sexuality. It's that white Australian women are not breeding early enough.

Children are the most important asset in our culture, so society should be structured around this central reality. Instead, we are structuring society around consumerism - a treadmill of bigger homes, more possessions, more holidays, more glamour - for which we run the risk of becoming impoverished. When the pattern of peak reproduction at peak fertility is broken, as it is now, women are forced by economic circumstances or social pressure to postpone pregnancy. Collective fertility inevitably falls, usually below replacement level. Societies such as Australia's and most in Western Europe now depend on imported fertility. Immigrants.

And so we're back to this argument again. White women are delaying child-bearing. And who has stepped into the breach? Immigrants. Code word for non-Western European women. And suddenly, an article that has been included on the Common Dreams web site starts reading like something from pro-natalist Nazi Germany.

Why can't we make the argument that if women want to start their families when nature thinks it's the best time, the system can't be changed to accommodate these young mothers? Why does race have to show up in these arguments? Why does it have to be yet another hand-wringing exercise about white women not having babies? Why?

A long aside:

It's not like I haven't heard this argument before. Years ago, I attended a talk by a German scholar who talked about women in education in Germany. (This was right after reunification.) One of her points was that it was recognized that women are intended to have babies in their 20s--not in their late 30s and 40s--and, as a consequence, there was tons of support provided to young women to make it possible economically for them to have babies earlier rather than later.

At the time, I was 27, pregnant with my first child, and in graduate school. And I remember thinking, "Fabulous." Because, truth was, being pregnant in graduate school was difficult. It was perfectly okay for male graduate students to impregnate their non-graduate student spouses--that was expected--but female students who got pregnant in the middle of their graduate studies were considered to be "less serious" than other women. (I wound up in an Ivy League grad program, and I practically hid my later pregnancy while I was there.)

So, I'm supportive of women's choices to have babies or not have babies. That's why I'm pro-choice. But I am not going to get into bed with those who argue that we should support young women having babies because it will increase the white population. That's just fucked up.

Posted by in Bio-Power, Body, Childcare, Culture, Family, Gender, Journalism, Motherhood, Prejudice, Racism, Reproductive Rights, Sexual Politics, W T F
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