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world, industrialized nations and have been imposed largely without input from the women who are most directly affected: the poor women of the third world. Contraceptive research has involved technologies designed by scientists, mostly male, in the well-protected northern nations, but they are almost exclusively technologies to be used by the female and are tested, often with grossly inadequate consent, on the "needy" women of the poorer southern nations. They have been imposed by using lies, bribes, pressures, and sometimes outright coercion to achieve population-reduction goals. Furthermore, these feminist critics point out, population-control programs have paid little or no attention to women's subordinate situations in patriarchal societies, their precarious economic circumstances, their lack of education and familiarity with modern medicine, their compromised nutritional status, and their desperate need of other health care. Individual "acceptors" are identified as the foci of population-control efforts, and whole populations are identified as "targets." To be sure, they recognize, some population-control programs have also treated men in problematic ways (the most notorious example has been India's offer of a free transistor radio to men who would have vasectomies), but it has been women, especially poor, uneducated women, who have been the primary targets. As one feminist manifesto succinctly put it, population policy is "racist, sexist, and classist, imposing the values of those who are privileged on those who are not. And, this critique continues, these programs have committed a conceptual injustice too: they have blamed these women for unrestrained, "excess" fertility, as if problems of global population, growth as well as resulting problems of environmental degradation and immigration patterns, were exclusively their fault. To be sure, these are the views of the most radical of the feminist critics, and there are many more moderate voices. But I address this extreme form of the feminist objection here for three reasons: it is politically powerful; it has more than a grain of truth in it, inasmuch as there have been numerous abuses; and it will be the hardest form of the feminist argument for the conjecture I want to explore with you here to meet. If we could put ...5... |
