Baby Baby

Another Quiverfull dude and his brood came up over on Twisty lately -- that famous picture of the family where they are all dressed alike and it's like seventeen little blond pups and they're all wearing blue and the girls all have long hair and the boys all have Nazi haircuts? You know the one.

Anyway, I was thinking of how if the Pro-Choice issue is raised in my class, the guys rant about the EEEEvils of Abortion, and some pretty little Pentacostal is certain to declare that the most dangerous place in America right now is inside a woman's womb!

But if I frame the question so that the choice in question shifts to birth control -- if I mention that those who oppose choice also are beginning to oppose access to birth control -- hah! The field shifts then. You should see how fast.

People might be ambivalent about abortion. They might let three or four hard right voices take over the debate about abortion. No one is ambivalent about their birth control. You're gone to pry their birth control out of their cold dead hands, dudes.

Here's Katha Pollit with a (sort of) related essay:

In the modern world, the traditional ways of producing large families--early marriage, lack of sex ed and birth control, religious propaganda, community pressure, denial of education and jobs to women--don't work so well, especially when combined with the high cost of living that prevails in many developed countries. Even in comparatively conservative countries like Greece (1.3), young women are going to college, working and postponing marriage, as young men have been doing for years. Faced with the choice between career and kids, a lot of women seem to be voting with their wombs. As Lerner notes, the countries with the most rigidly patriarchal families and the most sexist workplaces are the ones with the lowest birthrates.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070402/pollitt

She notes elsewhere in the essay that the U.S. has a birthrate of 2.0. We're only growing as a nation due to immigration. Which some might see as a bad thing -- but she doesn't, and neither do I. What -- six billion ain't enough?