The Global Sociology Blog

Let me say this upfront, Nicholas Kristof is annoying (especially when he talks about American politics), but who else in the mainstream press, pays more attention to what goes on in the periphery and strongly advocates for what is commonsense when it comes to women and reproductive rights? That’s right, no one.

Case in point, today’s column blasting yet another piece of compulsory motherhood from the Bush administration.

"The Bush administration this month is quietly cutting off birth control supplies to some of the world’s poorest women in Africa.

Thus the paradox of a “pro-life” administration adopting a policy whose result will be tens of thousands of additional abortions each year — along with more women dying in childbirth. (…)

The latest bout of reproductive-health madness came in the last couple of weeks when the U.S. Agency for International Development ordered six African countries to ensure that no U.S.-financed condoms, birth control pills, I.U.D.’s or other contraceptives are furnished to Marie Stopes International, a British-based aid group that operates clinics in poor countries.

The Bush administration says it took this action because Marie Stopes International works with the U.N. Population Fund in China. President Bush has cut all financing for the population fund on the — false — basis that it supports China’s family-planning program.

It’s true that China’s one-child policy sometimes includes forced abortion, and when traveling in rural China, I still come across peasants whose homes have been knocked down as punishment for an unauthorized child. But the U.N. fund has been the most powerful force in moderating China’s policy, and a State Department team itself found no evidence of any U.N. involvement in the coercion.

Mr. Bush’s defunding of the U.N. Population Fund — backed by Senator McCain — has persisted since 2002. What is new is the extension of that policy to a leading private family-planning organization like Marie Stopes International.

“The irony and hypocrisy of it is that this is a bone to the self-described ‘pro-life’ movement, but it will result in deaths to women who just want to space their births,” said Dana Hovig, the chief executive of Marie Stopes International. The organization estimates that the result will be at least 157,000 additional unwanted pregnancies per year, leading to 62,000 additional abortions and 660 women dying in childbirth.

That may overstate the impact. Kent Hill, an official of the U.S. aid agency, insists that there will be no increase in pregnancies because the American contraceptives will simply be routed to other aid groups in Africa.

That will work to some degree in big cities. But it’s a fantasy in rural Africa. Over the years, I’ve dropped in on a half-dozen Marie Stopes clinics, and in rural areas there’s typically nothing else for many miles around. Women in the villages simply have no other source of family planning.

“This nearsighted maneuver will have direct and dire consequences,” a group of prominent public health experts in America declared in an open letter, adding that the action “will translate almost immediately into increased maternal death and disability.”"

[Link added] And frankly, it makes zero difference that these zealots are genuinely outraged by what goes on in China. Either they’re idiots for not thinking through the consequences of the policies they advocate, or they hypocrites, or both. Their motivations are irrelevant, the consequences of these policies for the women of the periphery are what matters.

As Kristof concludes his column,

"In some parts of Africa, a woman now has a 1-in-10 risk of dying in childbirth. The idea that U.S. policy may increase that toll is infuriating."

Yes, it is. But it’s ok because it allows the Bush administration to score a few political points on the backs of the poorest women in the world who have no means of fighting back (which is the point). It is one of the functions of the poor and the most vulnerable categories of people (and, of course, women are always in that category) that Herbert Gans described: we can use them for a variety of purposes, including as shock absorbers of externalities of conservative and reactionary policies.

I would add that the global context allows to promote policies that might be unacceptable here but can be imposed upon a category of people without having to pay a political price (because who’s going to notice the appalling consequences of these policies and these women cannot fight back). At the same time, the promoters of these policies will be able to go to the forced pregnancy lobby and claim credit for doing their bidding. It’s a win-win situation.

When the victims are invisible and silent, enacting collective punishment get all the easier. And violence by political decree or public policy is structural violence, but violence nonetheless. In the global risk society, it means the capacity to force certain categories of people to face risks they could otherwise avoid.