Reducing carbon dioxide emissions has been a solution in search of a problem for decades. It was once supposed to be the answer to global cooling. What it always entails is that high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs for the working class in general and for working-class men in particular must never be created or restored, while travel (and now even meat-eating, for which our teeth are designed) must be re-restricted to the rich, and while development in the poor world must be arrested or reversed. And today, not for the first time, it became bound up with the view that the problem with the world is that there are proles and darkies in it, so that they have to be stopped from breeding.
Everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, should read my friend Ann Farmer’s Prophets and Priests: The Hidden Face of the Birth Control Movement (London: The Saint Austin Press, 2002; ISBN 1 901157 62 8). In addition to its unyielding racism, the war against fertility is, and has always been, the war against the working class, the war against the poor at home and abroad, the war against the electoral base of the Left, the war against the social provisions for which the Left exists, and, above all, the war against women.
Furthermore (this bit is Lindsay, not Farmer - but I’m sure that she would agree with it), the idea of fertility as a medicable condition, requiring powerful drugs or even surgical interventions to prevent a woman’s body from doing exactly what it does naturally, is basically and ultimately the idea that femaleness itself is such a condition, a sort of XX Syndrome. I can think of nothing that is actually more misogynistic than that, although some things are equally so, notably the view that the preborn child is simultaneously insentient and a part of the woman’s body. Is it the whole of a woman’s body that is insentient, or only the parts most directly connected with reproduction?
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If the Catholc Herald boys who run the Telegraph blog are no longer hosting a writer like this, it is time to do something about control of the Catholic Herald.
ReplyDelete8 of the 20 posts on the Telegraph blog have no comments and only Hannan's from 9:15 this morning is in double figures. But this is sitting on here because the Israel Lobby and Damian Thompson's male "friend" who owns the Herald demand it.
ReplyDeleteYou are better off out of it. Football, rugby, motor racing, X Factor, I'm A Celebrity, some Oxford fresher writing about her boyfriends' underpants last week. And no readers.
ReplyDeleteThank God I have finally found a left-wing critique of warmism and anti-natalism. Although the warmists are of course entitled to their recognized religious belief as long as they don't force it on the rest of us. Like people who believe that unborn children are not people. They are entitled to believe it but not to force it on others, including unborn children.
ReplyDeleteAnd thank you, for bringing this thread back on topic.
ReplyDeleteThey couldn't even spell your name correctly.
ReplyDeleteNothing new up over there for three hours now, and no comments on the posts that there are.
I am not putting up any more off-topic comments.
ReplyDeleteFarmer's point about pregnancy being treated as a malign condition is bang on the money. The pathologisation of pregnancy is all the more ludicrous when one considers the maternal mortality rate in Ireland is 1 in 47,600 (source: UNICEF)
ReplyDelete