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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Women's education, and contraceptives are the main factors, so the most effective policies are not going to be evenhanded. The former leads to the latter, so I would consider it upstream. It's glib, but educating girls is a form of genocide.

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

Killing members of the group;

Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

As we know that educating women reduces birthrates (We found that women's attainment of lower secondary education is key to accelerating fertility decline; In a nutshell, data show that the higher the level of a woman’s educational attainment, the fewer children she is likely to bear.), and is in fact intended to decrease birthrates. This is usually seen as a good thing, but I wanted to address the weasel word of 'intended' in advance. There are plenty of people and groups trying to reduce birthrates around the world, and their two primary tools are educating girls and distributing contraceptives. These groups are genocidal by definition.

This explains the suggestions you found distasteful. You can try to incentivize women to have children all you want, but it's more effective to simply not educate them as children and deny contraceptives as adults. It's the rule of holes: if you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, first stop digging.

You seem to have missed the first sentence in your quotation. For any of these actions to constitute genocide, they must be done "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such".

The "people and groups trying to reduce birthrates around the world" are not trying to destroy any national, ethnic, racial or religious group; they are trying to improve the groups' standards of living. And yes, having half the population reduced to the status of illiterate baby-making machines does tend to decrease a country's standard of living.

So in short: you find the premise of the question inherently flawed, and if given the option to implement a policy but with the requirement that it be even-handed, would have absolutely none to suggest?

Yes, the premise is flawed, since treating women and men as equivalent when it comes to reproduction is an aesthetic choice more than a necessary one. They are neither equivalent nor interchangeable when it comes to reproduction, so an even-handed requirement is applying restrictions to preclude the most effective actions. That leaves you with ineffective actions, of course, which seems to be by design. I could have complied with the letter, if not spirit, of your question by simply suggesting we ban contraceptives for women and men, but that would have been dishonest, and I'd rather get to the heart of the matter rather than play word games. "The law, in its majestic equality, equally forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread," as the quote goes.

When men can give birth and women can impregnate them, then equally applied laws will make sense and appropriate. Until then, we are left with the ugly truth that women control reproduction, and that when they control themselves they choose not to reproduce. When they are educated and have the tools available, fertility rates plummet. I don't see a way to untangle this knot, so I say cut it or leave it be and make peace with that decision.

But we see that, eg, religious women who are highly educated still have more kids. So there are clearly some things that can at least ameliorate the trend.

(I'm also not entirely convinced the problem is education qua education and not the incredibly delayed entry into adulthood. What I see a lot of is women feeling like they are finally "ready"/at a socially acceptable stage to have kids, and then starting to have kids - ie, wanting to reproduce - and continuing to want to have kids, but running out of time to have more of them. This is entirely anecdotal, of course, but I see this pattern incredibly frequently, where women describe badly wanting N+1 kids where N is the current number they have, and they'll iterate on this until eventually they have to give up on it because they're too old, their husband is opposed, etc. That's not "women don't want kids", its "women make decisions, especially when young, that aren't conducive to having more kids, and end up bearing the consequence via having fewer kids than they would have otherwise chosen to have")

Anyway. It's not as if we need to get back to fifties level reproduction, nudging things upwards a bit would already help.

(Actually, in that vein, what are the differences between low fertility and extremely low fertility countries? Are there any trends there?)

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