Carey Roberts
Paradise lost: the bitter pill of global feminism
By Carey Roberts
Most persons are aware of China's one-child policy. But few fully understand the indelible mark this human rights travesty has left on the soul of the Chinese people.
Recently professor Jing-Bao Nie of New Zealand published a remarkably candid appraisal of this policy, which represents the most ambitious demographic experiment ever conducted in human history.
China's Birth Control Program through Feminist Lenses catalogs in chilling detail how the Chinese population-control agenda coerced hundreds of millions of women to use birth control, compelled over one-quarter of the adult female population to obtain an abortion, and ensured the forced sterilization of 37% of all married women.
The current toll is 200 million unborn babies, and counting. This moral calamity is compounded by sex-selective abortion, a widespread practice that has created a deficit of 40 million baby girls, giving rise to an impending demographic time-bomb.
Ironically, this modern-day eugenics program was sold to an unsuspecting Chinese citizenry as a tool to "liberate" and "empower" women. "No words can describe the physical pain and emotional suffering" that arise from such policies, Dr. Nie concludes.
Feminists have long been obsessed with the "problem" of child-bearing and child-rearing, viewing such activities as a baleful obstacle to female fulfillment. (As a father of three, I can state unequivocably that child-raising has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. But then, I'm not a feminist.)
Feminists are so consumed with the issue to the point of advancing totalitarian policies. In 1974, feminist matriarch Simone de Beauvoir advocated this final solution: "No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children...Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one."
Government-mandated population control and proscriptions on stay-at-home motherhood are abhorrent to women. But that didn't stop the feminist Left from seizing on an even more radical solution: excise the traditional family. Former Ms. Magazine editor Robin Morgan made no attempt to disguise her movement's extreme agenda: "We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage."
But Morgan faced the same hurdle as the Chinese one-birth propagandists: How are we going to sell such a loopy scheme to women?
To answer that question, Morgan and other feminist theorists turned to the proto-revolutionary Karl Marx himself. "What is the present family based on?", Marx rhetorically asked in his 1848 Communist Manifesto. He answered, "The bourgeoisie sees in his wife nothing but an instrument of production."
By relying on a Marxist class analysis, feminists transmogrified men from dedicated providers and protectors into bourgeois oppressors, fingering proletariat women as their unwitting victims.
Robin Morgan led a decades-long campaign to revile men. "I feel that man-hating is an honorable and viable political act," she once expounded.
Eventually, a range of epithets became synonymous with the male persona: patriarchal knuckle-dragger, male chauvinist pig, deadbeat dad, wife-beater, and more. Men who objected to these put-downs were derided as humorless wusses or insensitive to the needs of women.
Some of these stereotypes, inaccurate as they were, made their way into laws such as the Violence Against Women Act. Multi-billion dollar bureaucracies such as the Office of Child Support Enforcement were erected, based on the unfounded presumption that dads are fundamentally irresponsible and would seek to escape the financial obligations to their children.
Men eventually discovered that vague renditions of domestic violence such as "annoyance" or "apprehension" provided the basis for legal actions that eventually stripped them of their homes, their families, and their assets. No wonder millions of men vow they will never wed.
Speaking at a Mexico City conference last year, Arie Hoekman of the United Nations Population Fund fervently embraced the news of family break-down. Hoekman boasted to the group,"we are in the presence of a weakening of the patriarchal structure [and] the rise of new values centered in the recognition of fundamental human rights."
Throughout history, the family has been the most cherished and protective social institution for women. And this is what the feminist Left seeks to revamp, forcing women away from their children and onto the public dole.
As Charles Dickens presciently penned in A Tale of Two Cities, "Every revolution eventually turns on itself."
© Carey Roberts
December 28, 2010
Most persons are aware of China's one-child policy. But few fully understand the indelible mark this human rights travesty has left on the soul of the Chinese people.
Recently professor Jing-Bao Nie of New Zealand published a remarkably candid appraisal of this policy, which represents the most ambitious demographic experiment ever conducted in human history.
China's Birth Control Program through Feminist Lenses catalogs in chilling detail how the Chinese population-control agenda coerced hundreds of millions of women to use birth control, compelled over one-quarter of the adult female population to obtain an abortion, and ensured the forced sterilization of 37% of all married women.
The current toll is 200 million unborn babies, and counting. This moral calamity is compounded by sex-selective abortion, a widespread practice that has created a deficit of 40 million baby girls, giving rise to an impending demographic time-bomb.
Ironically, this modern-day eugenics program was sold to an unsuspecting Chinese citizenry as a tool to "liberate" and "empower" women. "No words can describe the physical pain and emotional suffering" that arise from such policies, Dr. Nie concludes.
Feminists have long been obsessed with the "problem" of child-bearing and child-rearing, viewing such activities as a baleful obstacle to female fulfillment. (As a father of three, I can state unequivocably that child-raising has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. But then, I'm not a feminist.)
Feminists are so consumed with the issue to the point of advancing totalitarian policies. In 1974, feminist matriarch Simone de Beauvoir advocated this final solution: "No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children...Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one."
Government-mandated population control and proscriptions on stay-at-home motherhood are abhorrent to women. But that didn't stop the feminist Left from seizing on an even more radical solution: excise the traditional family. Former Ms. Magazine editor Robin Morgan made no attempt to disguise her movement's extreme agenda: "We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage."
But Morgan faced the same hurdle as the Chinese one-birth propagandists: How are we going to sell such a loopy scheme to women?
To answer that question, Morgan and other feminist theorists turned to the proto-revolutionary Karl Marx himself. "What is the present family based on?", Marx rhetorically asked in his 1848 Communist Manifesto. He answered, "The bourgeoisie sees in his wife nothing but an instrument of production."
By relying on a Marxist class analysis, feminists transmogrified men from dedicated providers and protectors into bourgeois oppressors, fingering proletariat women as their unwitting victims.
Robin Morgan led a decades-long campaign to revile men. "I feel that man-hating is an honorable and viable political act," she once expounded.
Eventually, a range of epithets became synonymous with the male persona: patriarchal knuckle-dragger, male chauvinist pig, deadbeat dad, wife-beater, and more. Men who objected to these put-downs were derided as humorless wusses or insensitive to the needs of women.
Some of these stereotypes, inaccurate as they were, made their way into laws such as the Violence Against Women Act. Multi-billion dollar bureaucracies such as the Office of Child Support Enforcement were erected, based on the unfounded presumption that dads are fundamentally irresponsible and would seek to escape the financial obligations to their children.
Men eventually discovered that vague renditions of domestic violence such as "annoyance" or "apprehension" provided the basis for legal actions that eventually stripped them of their homes, their families, and their assets. No wonder millions of men vow they will never wed.
Speaking at a Mexico City conference last year, Arie Hoekman of the United Nations Population Fund fervently embraced the news of family break-down. Hoekman boasted to the group,"we are in the presence of a weakening of the patriarchal structure [and] the rise of new values centered in the recognition of fundamental human rights."
Throughout history, the family has been the most cherished and protective social institution for women. And this is what the feminist Left seeks to revamp, forcing women away from their children and onto the public dole.
As Charles Dickens presciently penned in A Tale of Two Cities, "Every revolution eventually turns on itself."
© Carey Roberts
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