The religious war for women's wombs.
In late November of last year, the European Union held its second forum on demography, gathering in Brussels to review a report entitled, “Meeting Social Needs in an Aging Society.” A prior forum, “The Demographic Future of Europe—from Challenge to Opportunity,” had met in 2006, and laid out a long-term commitment to address falling birthrates around the continent, pledging to meet every two years to assess the situation. The EU was almost late to the table. Around the continent, the conversation about falling birthrates had been taking place in earnest for several years, with less optimism and more blame.
Variously called “the baby bust,” “the birth dearth,” “the graying of the continent,” or, in the apocalyptic coinage of some American religious activists, the “demographic winter,” the imminent demise of Europe is a popular prediction.
The argument is that “traditional Europeans” are failing to have enough offspring to keep up their stock, necessitating large-scale immigration from southern, often Muslim, countries, which will supplant traditional European culture: church bells replaced by calls to prayer. This has become a standard right-wing argument in Europe and the United States, launching a series of books since 2001 that predict a coming Muslim onslaught that will displace traditional Western populations, including Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West, George Weigel’s The Cube and the Cathedral, and Melanie Phillips’s Londanistan. Sympathizers foster anti-immigrant neologisms such as Oriana Fallaci’s “Eurabia,” a term that hints at a conspiracy to “Islamicize” Europe and render the continent a Muslim colony. Coupled with cultural tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims from The Netherlands to Switzerland, “demographic winter” is a potent escalation of rhetoric.
In the spring of 2007, that term was brought to Poland by an interdenominational Christian “profamily” group, the World Congress of Families (WCF), an American-led coalition of anti-contraception evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons that gathered three thousand like-minded politicians, activists, and bureaucrats for their third global conference. Their topic was “Europe as a sinking ship,” and their predictions were bleak: Thanks to Europe’s “obstinate antifamily policies,” one speaker declared, “the end of European civilization can be calculated in years.”
But they also had a solution: that Europe embrace a patriarchal family model of breadwinning fathers and submissive, prolific mothers who bear large broods of children in the model of the American “Quiverfull” movement—which draws its name from Psalm 127:3-5, in which children are compared to a quiver full of arrows. In this model, homeschooling mothers eschew contraception and have as many children as God gives them.
In a scaled-back version of this mandate, the WCF urged their European audience to have “Great Families,” with at least three to four children each, in order to stave off the demographic winter. In this way, the WCF proposed, Poland, as a devout exception to Europe’s secularist norm, could “save” the continent “again” by leading a religious, profamily resurgence. The “again” referenced a seventeenth century battle between Poland’s “Holy Army” and the invading Ottoman Empire: an ancient holy war between Christians and Muslims that, WCF organizers implied, was now being replayed in the maternity ward. It seemed a clear message about Europe’s increasingly visible Muslim population: that they were, in the words of one WCF speaker, “too many, and too culturally different from their new countries’ populations to assimilate quickly ... They are contributing to the cultural suicide of these nations as they commit demographic suicide.”
The demographic winter argument is familiar to those who have been watching religiously conservative strategy develop in the past several years: With birthrates falling globally over the last half-century, and in most developed nations falling below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman, the ratio of young to old will shift dramatically and wreak havoc upon existing social security and healthcare systems. The economy at large may also suffer, as the elderly cease spending and a smaller generation of workers is crippled by the taxes needed to support their parents. And the racial tensions mounting due to a growing immigrant population will only increase.
The reasons why it’s occurring is a litany of culture-war complaints: decades of “antifamily” permissiveness such as women working, the “divorce revolution,” the sexual revolution (including cohabitation, gay rights, and the pill), and a selfish secularism that leads to fewer children. This moralistic thread was reinforced by former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who warned in his primary campaign exit speech last February that “Europe is facing a demographic disaster” due to its modernized, secular culture, particularly its “weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for human life, and eroded morality.”
Also that February, the Family First Foundation, a profamily group tied to the World Congress of Families, released a documentary dedicated to the threat of declining birthrates, Demographic Winter: The Decline of the Human Family. In the film, as images of snow flurries blanket the globe, a plague of disappearing bodies illustrates children gone “missing” due to family planning. Conservative scholars, activists and European politicians describe the “catastrophic social and economic consequences” facing the continent: grandparents left untended and alone as intergenerational bonds are shattered; small countries such as Latvia desolated; and a worldwide depression that touches even those countries that don’t succumb to the depopulation threat.
The religious orthodoxy at the heart of the Demographic Winter message has been disappeared as summarily as the children vanishing in frame after frame of the film—hidden in profamily data bites. Only here and there, the ghost of orthodox theology reappears: blaming “who we have become increasingly in these post-modern times,” and delivering the ultimatum that, unless society returns to the fertile family model, “certain kinds of human beings,” just like the “sterile pagan nobility” of the fading Roman empire, “are on their way to extinction.”
So argues Harry S. Dent, Jr., an economist who specializes in “demographic-based economic forecasting” and who predicts that the West will follow Japan’s aging population bust.
“No part of the world stays dominant forever,” says Dent. “Rome was great, but now, Italy, it’s doing well, but is nowhere near ruling the world.” Another speaker, David Popenoe of the National Marriage Project, summarizes the moral in the movie’s closing line, “Maybe the time of Western civilization has come and now we’re going into a retreat.”
The application of these arguments to reproductive rights follows neatly, as when British demographer Andrew Pollard declared to a 2006 U.S. anti-birth control conference, “Contraception Is Not the Answer,” that low fertility led to immigration, which led to countries “growing our own bombers.”
And in the small but influential Quiverfull movement, Nancy Campbell, editor of the “biblical womanhood” magazine Above Rubies, makes a common secondary appeal for the necessity of large families. “When godly people stop having children, we are wasting the godly seed. So today, we are facing a very, very serious threat: the threat of Islam.” Think of Osama bin Laden, Campbell says, projecting out from his fifty-two siblings to potentially thousands of like-minded kin. “So you see what happens when the Christian church refuses to have children. That starts filling the earth.” This is not just scripture talking, she says, but common sense. “It’s God’s eternal law, but it’s logical. You can’t be the greatest nation on earth if you’re going to become smaller and smaller.”
The notion of a birth dearth isn’t new, and the supposed menace hasn’t always been Muslims. In 1987, The New Republic reported on early claims, including those made by future WCF leader Allan Carlson, of a depopulation crisis on the horizon due to childless yuppies. Back then, the threat was the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries, thought to be “breeding like rabbits.” Closer to home, in 2006, Missouri state representative Edgar G.H. Emery led a sixteen-member panel in declaring that illegal immigration—in this case, from Mexico—was due to abortion. “You don’t have to think too long,” he said. “If you kill 44 million of your potential workers, it’s not too surprising that we would be desperate for workers.”
Increasingly, arguments like Emery’s, and WCF-style solutions—such as the blunt declaration of WCF speaker Steve Mosher, head of the anti-contraception organization, Population Research Institute: “I want to see more Poles!”—have made their way to the mainstream. They’re echoed in various calls for more Russians, or more Italians, and have been backed up by both religious and political authority. The last two popes have entered into the population debate, with John Paul II pronouncing a “crisis of births” in 2002 and Benedict XVI remarking on the “tragedy” of childless European couples and canonizing an Italian mother of twelve. In the realm of national policy, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi offered a “baby bonus” of around $1,000 to parents who had a second child, and Russia, which has a history of pronatalist policies, upped the offer with several birth initiatives for its citizens, including an award of nearly $9,000 to families who produce a second child and a stipend for women who leave work to become stay-at-home moms. One Russian province even held a Day of Conception in 2007, when residents got time off work to “conceive a patriot” for the country, and vie for prizes such as refrigerators and cars if they delivered, so to speak, nine months later.
There are pointedly nativist motivations underlying these campaigns, say Elizabeth Krause, an anthropologist and author of A Crisis of Births: Population Politics and Family-Making in Italy. In Italy, politicians and priests demanded more babies to form a “Christian dike against the Muslim invasion of Italy,” and the racial preferences behind Berlusconi’s “baby bonus” came into embarrassing relief when immigrant parents were accidentally sent checks for their offspring and then asked to return the money.
But if the troubling racial and ethnic motivations of such national procreation campaigns are often downplayed, the implications for women—that pronatalism requires them to dedicate their lives and wombs to demographic battle—are virtually ignored.
“The shadow of Fascism still hovers over demographic science,” Krause says, and it lends a chilling factor to “moralizing” language that pathologizes the childless as sick or, in Italy, as anorexics refusing to eat. Indeed, when Pope John Paul II raised his demographic concerns to the Italian Parliament, it was unprecedented since Fascist years, evoking a painful social memory of Mussolini’s fertility project, which attacked bachelors, rewarded mothers of many children, criminalized abortion, and banned contraception.
The message of current pronatalist arguments, that women are the source of population problems, may be less extreme, argues Krause, but it is still deeply worrisome. Calls for Italian women to begin having three or four children “erases the trauma of peasant women who’ve historically borne large families in crushing poverty.” It also labels women’s decisions to limit their families a disease in need of a cure. “To state that women’s interests are at odds with those of babies is to stake out a moral ground on which women’s primary role is as a biological reproducer for the nation—much as it was during the Fascist years.” Then, women’s pregnancies were described in terms of duty to the nation. “They were reproducing the state. There was nothing fertile about it.”
Elzbieta Korolczuk, a scholar at the Graduate School for Social Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences, describes reproductive-right trends in Poland, where both abortion and family planning are under harsh attack by the right-wing government that hosted the WCF, in similar terms. “Specifically, the [abortion] debate asks whether letting women decide to perform an abortion or not is in contradiction with the interests of the Polish family and nation, and if women who have abortions ‘betray’ Poland, since they do not want to reproduce it. Thus, women’s bodies are treated as a ‘national boundary’ and women are subjected to the supervision of the state as family members, namely, as actual and potential mothers.”
The level of demographic anxiety that demographic winter arguments hope to inculcate has been a way of life in Israel for decades, for at least as long as demographer and political consultant Arnon Soffer has been warning Israel about its shifting population balance. Soffer, nicknamed “Arnon the Arab Counter,” predicted in the 1980s that Arabs would outnumber Jews by 2010. His reputed statement that the “Palestinian womb is a biological weapon” was picked up both by Israeli leaders and by Yasser Arafat, who transformed it into his now famous proclamation that “the womb of the Palestinian woman” was his greatest weapon.
The issue has only gained urgency since then, and in 2002, the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs reconvened the defunct Israel Council for Demography with dozens of public figures, lawyers, scientists, and three of the country’s leading OB-GYNs, to encourage Jewish women to have more children and discourage intermarriage and abortion. (A critic writing in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz at the time wryly asked, “Does this remind you of anything?”) Just this November, when the Palestinian Authority placed ads in Israeli newspapers in support of the 2002 Arab League peace initiative, conservative Israelis replied that today the initiative, which includes the right of return for a vastly-expanded Palestinian population, “would be Israel’s demographic death-knell.”
Such political discussions are backed up by religious ideology and practice; as the American Quiverfull movement lives the purist vision of the profamily movement, so too does Israel’s growing movement of ultra-orthodox families numbering up to eighteen children or more.
In 2006, Ahuva Klachkin, a forty-four-year-old mother to eighteen, was given funeral and eulogy honors equivalent to those given prominent citizens or rabbis, transforming the mother into a near-saint for her abundant fertility. Klachkin, explained Ha’aretz reporter Tamar Rotem, was just one mother among many who are raising not traditionally-large families, but families that eclipse Hasidic tradition: well-over the twelve-child mark and continuing to have children into their late forties in what one midwife called “a social obsession to get pregnant.” Large families are highly honored in the ultra-orthodox community, with some claiming every baby born as a “blow to Hitler.” But others are motivated by a more contemporary threat—the sense that Muslim women within and without Israel’s borders are having more children than are Jewish Israelis.
“The womb is seen as a weapon of demographic warfare,” says a doctor here referred to by the pseudonym Dr. Singer. Singer, who works in a woman’s clinic in Israel that serves mostly religious women, wished to remain anonymous for the security of her clinic in a deeply orthodox community that vehemently disapproves of dissent. Yasser Arafat’s bombastic declaration is widely quoted there, as a reminder of the necessity of large families, though she sees a self-interested motivation as well: “to be fruitful and multiply may lead to political power in Israeli government and as a religious and nationalistic movement.”
Below such grand schemes, though, the effects on the health of these mothers, and on their families, often living in poverty, can be tragic; lives of quiet scarcity and unceasing labor, housework and births. The ultra-orthodox women of various Orthodox sects that Dr. Singer treats bear families that regularly range between five and fourteen children. While the women’s husbands study in Yeshiva all day long, the mothers stay at home, “doing everything—laundry, housework, kids.”
Women marry into this lifestyle very young, often having two or three children by the time they are twenty-two, and subsequently become grandparents while they’re still in the thick of child-raising themselves. There’s a joke about various denominations in Israel, Dr. Singer tells me: at Reform weddings, the rabbi is pregnant; at Conservative weddings, the bride is pregnant; and at Orthodox weddings, the mother-in-law is pregnant. It’s a light-hearted take on what, from the inside, is often a crushing life of toil, as with one of Dr. Singer’s patients, a woman in her fifties with nine children of her own and twenty-five grandchildren she is expected to help raise.
“They’re workhorses,” says Dr. Singer. “Their lives, looking from the outside, look like a form of slavery, never-ending. Sometimes I’m incredibly admiring of their stamina, what they’re able to do day after day, after so many children.” Elder daughters pick up a great deal of household responsibilities early on in life, while their mothers recover from pregnancies or, in the case of Klachkin, die young.
Part of the upsurge in large families is economic, the outcome of government-sponsored fertility bonuses of the sort Europe is now considering, with stipends increasing after a family has four children. But more generally, Dr. Singer says, “there’s a tremendous pressure to have lots and lots of babies.” While the total Israeli fertility rate hasn’t changed much over the years, broken down by population, it’s clear that ultra-orthodox families have increased dramatically, largely because women continue having children longer and later into life.
The result of these prolonged decades of domestic and maternal toil, Dr. Singer says, is high rates of depression among women and epidemic self-neglect. “They become very much de-selved,” she says, forgoing necessary medical care on the advice of their rabbis, many of whom insert themselves into women’s health in destructive ways: sometimes counseling them against fertility-disrupting treatments, but most often withholding dispensations that allow couples to sidestep the ultra-orthodox ban on contraception, which proscribes men “spilling their seed.” Rabbis who take an extremist stance on the ban on contraception, and the view of children as unconditional blessings, have even taken it upon themselves to dispense fertility drugs to couples hoping to conceive. In Singer’s eyes, this is an outrage for its potential to increase the risk of multiple births, which have much higher rates of complications for the mother’s health.
“It’s a good example of the abuse of the ignorance of young women, who have no clue, who have no means of giving informed consent,” Dr. Singer says, explaining that the young wives often have little medical knowledge of sex and reproduction beyond pre-marriage bridal classes. What they do understand is the expectation of their community. “If you don’t have a baby within your first year of marriage,” Dr. Singer says, “people start to talk. Women get so very pressured that they will often approach a physician at the age of twenty-one if they’re not pregnant within six months of marriage.” In such a situation, Dr. Singer treated a twenty-two-year-old woman who hadn’t gotten pregnant within the first three months of her marriage, and so went to her rabbi for a blessing to get ovulation-inducing drugs, and shortly conceived twins: a blessing in the eyes of the community, but medically, more dangerous for the mother.
In a very real sense, in these communities, women are always seen as “pre-pregnant” or potentially pregnant, to recall both Korolczuk’s characterization of the Polish attitude towards women and the troubling language of policy-writers at the U.S. Center for Disease Control, which made the controversial 2006 declaration that all women of child-bearing age should be treated as though they might soon become pregnant. And, Singer continues, the glorification of mothers of many children, and the community sense that pregnant women are fulfilling their highest role, leads to women scarcely able to articulate that they wish to stop having children.
“They won’t even let themselves say the words, ‘I don’t want any more children,’ but will rather say, ‘I’ll bear as many children as God gives me,’” even as they tell Dr. Singer that they’re exhausted. Some couples, hoping to build a case to cease having children with their rabbi’s blessing, come to Dr. Singer with hypothetical arguments they can pass on to rabbis who often tell couples they need to “keep going” as long as their fertility allows. “‘Isn’t it true,’ they ask, ‘that pregnancy could worsen this condition?’” Dr. Singer will nod. “I always say yes. ‘Absolutely, pregnancy will make this worse.’ Sometimes you can just tell the way the look at you, they want you to say, ‘You need to stop having children.’ There are times they feel out of control, and that’s the hardest part, that you have to go against the whole culture.”
The women Dr. Singer describes live in a community with distinct religious traditions and norms, but their lives give an illustration of the stresses and social pressure put upon women in communities where extremely patriarchal, pronatalist theology, and nationalistic demographic concerns, become the norm. But one of the great ironies of recent fertility trends is that pronatalist campaigns threatening demographic catastrophe rarely seem to work at increasing birthrates—though they do succeed ably in repressing women’s reproductive and civil rights. “Forcing women into childbirth doesn’t work, but smashes families,” says Catholics for Choice president Jon O’Brien.
What has worked better seems to be the opposite approach, as the Berlin Institute for Population and Development found in a study released this November, just as the EU met for their demographic forum. As the continent ages, the study found, finding ways to keep women in jobs through support systems like high quality childcare and day schools—amenities that enable women to balance work and family—will be crucial to keeping the fertility rates at closer to the replacement level, as has been shown in progressive countries like France and Norway that dwarf the fertility rates of the more traditionalist Italy and Poland. Where religious authorities, such as the Catholic Church, have “tried to keep the values of traditional families alive,” said Reiner Klingholz, director of the Berlin Institute, “birth rates have collapsed.”
Kathryn Joyce is author of the forthcoming Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, Mother Jones, The Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and other publications.
