LizaHadiz

“We are containers, it's only the insides of our bodies that are important.” (The Handmaid’s Tale)

That's a quote from The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood published in 1985, many of you may be familiar with.

Dystopian novels tend to intensify reality—the inequality, oppression, or violence of what the future could hold. It is fictional but not purely detached from reality. Women’s reproductive capacity has been a recurring theme in dystopian tales of a dark world where women are enslaved to breed children for a despotic society.

This is not too far-fetched. If we look back a few decades ago women’s womb was part of political campaign of the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy to “encourage” women to procreate a specified race. In 1930s Germany, through the Lebensborn program, facilities were established for Aryan women to breed with SS soldiers for the sacred goal of achieving a pure Aryan state. In Mussolini’s Italy, giving birth was biological labor arranged with the efficiency and mass production akin to manufacturing factories to produce a new generation that will strengthen the military. In both regimes, women were awarded medals based on the number of children they produced, which was their act of servitude to the state.

Decades after the Second World War, along with industrialization, many countries experienced an economic boom after consistently implementing a strict population control policy. China’s one-child policy is one of the extreme examples of how population control is implemented at the cost of women’s reproductive rights, where coerced abortion, sterilization, and contraception took place. During the course of this policy, infanticide and femicide were also common practice. Just as during the rule of the fascist regimes, women’s body became a tool to achieve the goal of the state.

Women of ethnic minorities have also been the target of population control. To limit an ethnic population, minority women experienced coerced contraception without their consent. This happened to the Inuit people of Greenland, where in the 1960s, Inuit women and adolescent girls had IUD inserted into their bodies without their knowledge. Another case was the women of the Roma minority of socialist Czechoslovakia who experienced forced sterilization, first reported in the late 1970s.

Then there are cases of rape used as a weapon of war, executed for the purpose of ethnic cleansing. Such a case occurred in former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, where women of the Bosniak ethnic group were systematically raped. In conflict situations, men have also been victims of sexual violence, but war crimes and genocide are gendered. Such as in cases where women are impregnated as a war strategy, mothers and the children will serve as a representation and reminder of how their identity, community, and nation have been torn down.

In the 21st century we are haunted by population decline and for some nations, the fear of the extinction of an ethnicity. Several countries in Asia and Europe are facing a significant drop in fertility rate. A number of policies to raise fertility rates are also targeted at men, nevertheless, pressure is on women because they are the ones that can make it happen. Various government policies in the form of allowances for newborns, parental leave, and availability of daycare centers have not led to much change. Women and also men, such as in Japan, China, and South Korea, for a number of economic and cultural reasons are not eager to have children.

The reasons include the high costs of raising children, lack of affordable quality childcare, and women’s double and even triple burden because caring roles, including housework, are culturally still the main responsibility of women even with women’s high participation in the labor force. Data have shown that globally women spend more hours than men in unpaid carework. According to The World’s Women 2020: Trends and Statistics, “on an average day, women globally spend about three times as many hours on unpaid domestic and care work as men (4.2 hours compared to 1.7).”

Meanwhile, according to experts, continued low fertility rate—under 2.1, the number of children needed to be born to a woman in their reproductive years—will result in an irrecoverable condition. This means an aging society and a collapsed pension system due to scarce labor. Solving population decline is complex, there are economic issues, cultural issues, and the issue of a nation’s identity. The fear of ethnic replacement or even extinction justifies the opposition to immigration and the need for the native population to bear children. So in other words, attempts to maintain existing class structure (inequity) and ethnic preservation contribute to the continued population decline some countries are facing.

The year 2020 saw a global decline of democracy, which is part of a global trend of democratic decline and rising authoritarianism of the last 30 years (Freedom House, 2021). As scholars today are talking about the rise of fascist or authoritarian governments, it raises the question of how population decline will be addressed in the near future, particularly considering that women in countries with continued low fertility rate are refusing to have the required number of children. Will abortion and voluntary sterilization be less available to some women and perhaps only available to those who are marginalized? Will this lead to a history of state-condoned sexual violence repeating itself? When all policies fail, will this lead to a dystopian future where women’s bodies are treated as mere containers to achieve the goals of the state or, worst of all, wombs at the mercy of draconian laws?

-Some Thoughts from the Cappuccino Girl- 2023

You might be interested to read: Fertility and the Labor of Care

Read about modern political strongmen: Political Strongmen and the Crisis of Democracy

Image: Katie M. Berggren via Pinterest

#population #gender #reproductiverights #dystopia

Sources

Barrett, Claire (2021) ‘Building the “Master Race”: Nazi Women Were Awarded Medals to Bear Children.’ Historynet.com https://www.historynet.com/building-the-master-race-nazi-women-were-awarded-medals-to-bear-children/ [31 December 2023]

HistoryExtra (2020) The Woman Who Gave Birth for Hitler https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/woman-birth-hitler-lebensborn-aryan-child-hildegard-trutz-germany/ [31 December 2022].

Morgan, Melissa (2021) ‘Understanding the Global Rise of Authoritarianism.’ Stanford https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/understanding-global-rise-authoritarianism [31 December 2023]

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2020) The World’s Women 2020: Trends and Statistics https://www.un.org/en/desa/world%E2%80%99s-women-2020#:~:text=On%20an%20average%20day%2C%20women%20globally%20spend%20about,times%20as%20much%20as%20men%20on%20these%20activities [31 December 2023].

Wills, Matthew (2022) ‘Mussolini’s Motherhood Factories.’ Jstor Daily https://daily.jstor.org/mussolinis-motherhood-factories/ [12 April 2022].