Why do the governments intervene sexual and reproductive behaviours?

....(con't) Beyond Choice by Alexander Sanger

The governments throughout history have enacted laws and policies attempting to promote marriage, to restrict sexual activity to marriage for purposes of procreation, and in general to promote public morality. In addition to laws against contraception and abortion, there have been laws prohibiting adultery, fornication, rape, non-procreative sex, homosexuality and incest.

Why should governments intervene in some sexual and reproductive behaviors and decisions and not others?

Many societies now and in the past have believed that a large and growing population was necessary to attain their national objectives, in military, political, economic and social aspects. Today some societies believe that, on the contrary, a large and growing population will prevent them from attaining whatever their national goals might be. Citizens don’t necessarily cooperate with their nation’s demographic plans.

Though reproductive choices and decisions are personal, too often nations fear, sometime quite correctly, that individual sexual and reproductive behaviors in the aggregate can threaten the biological, social, economic, and political order. For these reason governments often do not leave sexual and reproductive matter entirely to the discretion of their individual citizens.

There is not always a clear line of cause and effect between a particular sexual practice or reproductive decision on the one hand and its ramification to the public on the other. Nonetheless, governments often intervene extensively into the sexual and reproductive lives of their citizens with only a hazy understanding of the actual biological or social consequences of their laws.

The governments do have legitimate interest in the sexual and reproductive lives of their citizens because governments were established in part to help their people survive and reproductive safely and successfully. While some nations encourage childbearing, others view excessive population growth as a threat to national economic growth and stability.

Most extreme cases are such as China’s “one child national policy” and in Romania, banning both contraception and abortion in 1980s.

In China, family planning and national policy effectively reduced population growth, however, was not without unintended consequences, such as female infanticides, in-balance sex ratio, health hazards exposed to couples and problems in elderly care and related social welfare.

In Romania, banning contraception and abortion did in the short run effectively increased childbearing but left with more women suffered from illegal abortion and demands with childcare.

The coercion measures in controlling population often have brought damaging consequences at the expense of women and children.

Book reading "Beyond Choice"

This book, by Alexander Sanger, touches many contemporary issues regarding the reproduction choices, technologies and government polices on trying to intervene the reproduction behaviour of its citizen. A well written and very informative book. Here I quote some of discussions found in this book.


The dangers that reproductive technologies pose

While the introduction of new reproductive technologies may initially expand women's and men's reproductive options, it does not always lead to an expansion of reproductive rights.

Technological advances in controlling or advancing reproduction throw off the balance of power in the batter of the sexes in their fight for control of reproduction.

From many historical examples, the lesson to be learned is that no reproductive technology will be permitted by society unless an ethical and moral framework is laid down for its use and unless both men and women benefit from its use.

A few important questions need to be answered, do reproductive technologies lead to bad individual choices that collectively lead to bad results for society? does the harm caused by reproductive technologies outweigh their benefit? if so ,then must these technologies, and by extension reproductive freedom be curtailed?

The unintended consequences of new reproductive technologies force us to examine the impacts, if any, of collective use of such technologies to society.

Genetic Engineering

Genetic screening can detect whether or not an embryo carries a defective gene and the parents can choose to have the child, have an abortion and try again. Genetic screening at the beginning of a pregnancy offers the hope of a healthy child to those who might not otherwise have a chance to have one. But genetic technology can do more. The rapid scientific progress being made that would give the ability to eliminate, add, or manipulate certain genes in an embryo via genetic engineering.

That means genetic technologies on the one hand may increase the health and wantedness of children, thereby increasing their chance of survival, but they may also be doing harm to these same individuals and society at large. We don't know what every gene does and which genes do more than one things, and manipulate a gene can lead unintended consequences to the child. The danger of eugenics are present when we permit genetic engineering.

Whether parents are motivated by a desire to give their children the best start in life, by a desire for perfection, or by a inclination to see their children as a reflection of themselves, some will use whatever technology permits with little thought as to the consequences to society.

(Today's BBC news, The US Senates unanimously passed the bill against discrimination on employment based on personal genetic details.)

Government policy on fertility rate

While some governments see the overpopulated population pose the threats on economic slow down and social instability, many others see low fertility rate, especially below the replacement level is detrimental to the nation's future.

However, scientists around world have doubted about the effectiveness of either pro-natal or anti-natal policy.

China as one of most distinctive examples of using coercive method to reduce birth rate.It has adapted "one child" policy since later 70s.

As we saw in China, when family size declines, the law of unintended consequences kicks in. Sex-selected abortion, even though it is illegal, and a resulting skewed sex ratio.

Other western countries, like French, Canada are adapting pro natal policies in hoping to booster up the declined fertility rate.

Prof Amy Ong Tsui noted, "One should not overemphasize the role of supply-oriented policies and programs in recent fertility declines and disregard the forces that raise demand for those public goods and services." The factors that increase demand for family planning and the lead families to want to limit their size, include, female education, an increase in non physical sectors of the economy, and more food availability. The academic consensus is that women's education, economic development, and family planning programs all contribute to fertility decline.

Is it too expensive for a nation to purchase its own descendant?

In many developed countries, governments adopt non compulsory incentive polices such as directly subsidize childbirth through cash bonuses and tax deducted benefits, or subsidize the childcare and education, housing benefit etc. Since these types of policies only encourage a certain outcome rather than require one, they will have uncertain effectiveness.

One study by Prof Junsen Zhang of childbearing trends in Canada has an interesting aspect. From 1921 to 1988, there were three separate incentives in Canada- a personal tax exemption for a child, a child tax credit, and family allowances for each child. The study shows that these incentives had positive and significant effects on birthrates, but the the elasticities of fertility seem to be rather small. The three transfer tax benefits for each women of reproductive age totaled $389 annually in 1988. At the time the cost of raising a child to age 18 was probably in the neighborhood of $100,000 not to mention the time, effort, and other costs incurred. Prof Zhang estimated that three programs would have to be increase over five times, to $1,982 annually, to bring the fertility rate up to 2.1, the replacement rate,from its then level of 1.7.

Interestingly, this latter dollar amount approximated the amount of the transfer tax subsidies to childbearing in various western European countries, including France.

(too be continued)

Another review on "Opt out"

By Deborah Siege*

"Stone lets her subjects -- mothers in their 30s and 40s who "time out" from professional careers -- describe their trajectories in unstructured interviews, giving voice to a group we have heard much about but have not heard. She lambastes the media for sensationalizing our so-called mass exodus -- which, in truth, is not so massive and reflects neither a sea-change in values among feminism's daughters nor the modernization of the feminine mystique.

"Opting Out?" fills a void -- virtually no real research has been done before on women leaving careers -- and it's the question mark in the title that propels the book. Stone looks at who these women are who leave and head home (whether permanently or temporarily), why they walk away from years of training and accomplishment to take on "full-time" motherhood, and what happens after they do. She looks at the implications of their leaving for the workplaces they leave behind, and the impact their decisions have on other women -- female coworkers and, especially, younger women embarking on careers. Loaded with facts and real data, the introduction alone is worth the price of the book.

She found that the women she interviewed quit as a last resort, and for reasons of work, not family. She calls their decision is "a kind of silent strike" and describes their failed efforts to re-invent the workplace in their image: "These women had alternative visions of how to work and be a mother, yet their attempts to maintain their careers on terms other than full-time plus were penalized, not applauded; it was quitting that earned them kudos." Stone emphasizes that these women's stories are not over, that most are still in the process of re-invention -- but leaves us wondering, how will the next chapter unfold?

Anyone acquainted with the research knows that younger women and girls aspire to professional achievement. It's made headline news. As a recent New York Times story and books like Courtney Martin's Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters make perfectly clear, Millennial strivers are ambitious to the point of extremes. Daughters of a half-finished revolution, this generation (as well as my own) lives suspended between the expectation of a world ready to open its arms to us and the reality of a world not yet fully transformed. Books like Stone's have the potential to rally without blaming, and incite without fear. Let's hope it finds its audience -- working women present and future pondering their limited options and the workplaces that, drained of such women's talent, should have no choice but to change and offer us alternatives to heading home"

* Deborah Siege, PhD, is the author of the forthcoming book, "Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Girls Gone Wild" (June 12, 2007, Palgrave), and co-editor of the new anthology "Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo." She is a Fellow at the Woodhull Institute and writes about women, sex, feminism, and contemporary families for magazines and on her blog, Girl with Pen (www.girlwithpen.blogspot.com). For more information about Deborah's books and projects, visit her web site at www.deborahsiegel.net.*

Opt out: Why women really quite careers and head home?

By Pamela Stone.

High-achieving professional women who've headed home to care for their children full-time have been the subject of recent media frenzy, but my scholarly interest in them predated their media moment. My interest was piqued when, through participant observation (otherwise known as life), I discoveredin the school hallways, on the soccer fields, and during all the down time of motherhoodthat a lot of the women I knew in my suburban hometown as ¨just moms〃 had once led very different lives. These lives included degrees from top schools and prestigious careers as lawyers, doctors, executives, editors, and the like. As high-flying professionals, these women enjoyed advantages and a level of support unavailable to most working women both at home and on the job. Moreover, their track records attested to past ambition and significant work commitment. Why, then, were they leaving their careers behind? The obligatory literature search yielded few answers. This particular group of women, having exited the labor force, appeared to have gone missing.

I undertook a two-part study to try to address this research gap: first, to better understand the larger contours of this phenomenon and second, to shed light on the circumstances that led women to take this step. My analysis of labor force trends using CPS data going back several decades revealed that, media messages to the contrary, there is no ¨opt-out〃 revolution. Nonetheless, the media attention wasn't going away (if anything, it was increasing), and case studies suggested that leading firms and professions were experiencing retention problems among their rising female stars. This led me to carry out an in-depth, qualitative study of 54 high-achieving women living in several major cities across the U.S. who fit the profile of the media depiction (white, married women with outstanding educational credentials who had formerly worked as professionals or executives but were now full-time mothers). Results from this study correct another media misperception: I found that workplace pushes play an equal and arguably stronger role in women's decisions to quit than family pulls, and that what looked like a ¨choice〃 (and, indeed, was understood as such by women themselves) was often far from it.
With much-appreciated support from the Sloan Foundation's program on The Workplace, Workforce and Working Families, directed by Kathleen Christensen, I completed this study and wrote my book based on it, entitled Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home (University of California Press, 2007). The book documents the double-bind faced by women in the ¨gilded cages〃 of elite professions and the existence of a significant ¨choice gap.〃 In it, I explore not only women's reasons for interrupting (and in some cases terminating) once-flourishing careers, but also their re-invention as at-home mothers and their re-direction away from their former careers, many in favor of historically female professions such as teaching. I discuss the policy implications of my results and present case studies of firms that have been especially responsive to the needs of high-achieving women professionals in the current economic and organizational climate.

An article based on the study, which focuses on reasons behind women's decisions to quit their jobs (with Meg Lovejoy, Brandeis University), appeared in the November, 2004 issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
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