Michelle Goldberg

Author and journalist Michelle Goldberg.

(Michelle Goldberg)

This week, Afghanistan is expected to sign into law a provision that would legalize marital rape and require women to obtain permission from husbands or fathers to work, attend school, or even visit the doctor. This is the kind of legislation that Michelle Goldberg thinks will not only damage the rights of women internationally, but contribute to increased poverty in countries around the world. In her new book, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, Goldberg argues that improving women’s rights might be both the key to ending global poverty and, counter-intuitively, the key to raising birth rates in countries that are at risk of a demographic implosion.

A former writer for Salon, Goldberg has also written for other Rolling Stone, The New York Observer, New York, In These Times, The New Republic online, The UK Guardian, The Utne Reader, Newsday and other newspapers. She is also the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism.

Campus Progress caught up with Goldberg to discuss what changes in the global reproductive rights movement might mean for political battles today.

Campus Progress: What motivated you to write a book about global health and reproductive rights around the world?

Michelle Goldberg: One of the tricky things about this book, but also one of the reasons that I wanted to write it, is that when I’ve been telling people I’m writing or have written a book about the global battle for reproductive rights, so many people have had no idea what I’m talking about, including people who are really well educated, people who are very much aware of the feminist debate. Many people think of this as a kind of domestic American issue, although in fact the ramifications are so much greater abroad than they are here. There is a whole world of people hashing out these issues about sex, reproduction, family planning, and population control, but they speak in such an impenetrable, bureaucratic patois that it doesn’t break through into the mainstream discussion. I just felt like all of these issues were so fascinating and it actually kind of amazed me that no one had ever written an accessible book about this stuff.

How do you get those people to see women’s health as a priority in the debate about foreign policy and global poverty?

The book goes back to the Cold War and talks about this time that’s kind of very, very distant from our memory and our discussion, when you had all these staunch cold warriors who were terrified that overpopulation was going to lead the third world to go communist. We needed to inundate poor countries with contraceptives and run these massive social marketing campaigns to convince people that they wanted smaller family sizes. It was really one of the biggest social engineering campaigns that has ever been undertaken. It saw women’s emancipation at best a nice side effect, certainly not the point.

Eventually, the women’s movement succeeded. If you take care of the reproductive health needs of women, if you give them choices about the kinds of families they want to have and the kind of lives they want to live, all of these other seemingly unrelated social problems (not just social but environmental and geopolitical problems) have an amazing way of falling into place. All of things are connected. It potentially creates a kind of greater constituency for women’s rights around the world than exists right now. Women’s rights don’t create disorder; they actually are kind of the antidote to certain kinds of disorder.

In the book you talk about how countries like Sweden and France that have family-friendly policies actually have higher birth rates than countries that don’t give women support for child care.

Immigration [in the United States] has a much bigger effect on our birth rate than say immigration in France does simply because there are so many more immigrants here as a percentage of the population. Putting the United States aside for a minute, it’s the places where reproduction is totally put onto the shoulders of women—those are the places where you see what I call the “birth strike.” Where women are essentially saying these roles are incompatible. The birth rate is higher in the places where societies have figured out ways to make women’s various roles compatible. Other countries, where they are trying to restrict those choices or force women to choose career or family, as opposed to both, face real dangers to their ability to continue into the future because their birth rates are falling so precipitously.

Your book addresses issues from abortion access abroad to sex selective abortion in Asia to what is known as female genital mutilation. How do global-health advocates sort through all these different issues? How do they prioritize them and address them in a comprehensive way without letting one drown out the other?

You have a kind of veritable industry—and I actually don’t mean that pejoratively because a lot of these people are really talented and devoted—but you do have kind of an AIDS industrial complex in a way, just thousands and thousands of people, NGOs, conferences, the Gates foundation, and projects devoted to malaria and tuberculosis. In terms of how you prioritize it, I’m not positive that there is any one hierarchy. It’s a decentralized world of people clamoring to get attention for the little pieces of this giant set of interlocking problems that they work on.

So it’s a bad thing?

Not necessarily. I think it’s a bad thing only in as much as there is eliberate duplication and parallel systems. It’s a bad thing that American policy separated out HIV/AIDS money from women’s health and reproductive health money and infrastructure when it would have just made so much more sense to combine them into one stronger, interdependent system.

How do you negotiate dominant cultural values in other parts of the world when many liberals want to be respectful of other cultures?

Sometimes I would bring up these issues with women in Uganda or Northern India or Kenya, very educated women, who are aware of how does this relate to neocolonialism and stuff like that. Often women on the ground are kind of not very interested in whether or not in these kinds of arguments about cultural imperialism. They were just saying, “We’re suffering and this needs to stop.” I guess I don’t have that much respect for cultural authority in general. I don’t have that much respect for it here and so I have an instinctive sympathy with people who don’t have that much respect for it in their own countries.

Kay Steiger is an associate editor at Campus Progress.

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