Reading the opening lines of the Heritage Foundation Report – Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years – I was struck by a deja vue. Not just because the Report warms over the usual right-wing attacks on the 20th Century including reproductive rights, women’s rights and sexual rights, but some of the language about the rights of children were oddly reminiscent of statements made by my grandmother 100 years ago. I suspect the authors of this report were totally ignorant of this, so it’s worth a reminder.
The opening paragraph of the Report states: The first (truth) is that all children have a right to the affection and protection of the man and woman who created them. The second is that the ideal environment in which to exercise this right is in a loving and stable home with their married biological parents.
In 1926, my grandmother wrote an article for Holland’s Magazine entitled “Passports for Babies.” As reported by the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, “Sanger fantasizes about parents being subjected to an interview by a prospective baby. The demanding child inquires whether the parents have paid for their last baby, how many other children they have, and whether or not the parents can supply a happy home, proper food, a sunny nursery, and love and affection. Summarizing the prospective parents’ responses, the baby exclaims: ‘Five children already? Two dark rooms in the slums? No! Thank you! I don’t care to be born at all if I cannot be well born. Good-bye!’”
God forbid that the Heritage Foundation would ever quote Margaret Sanger in support of its thesis, but their arguments are oddly similar … as far as they go.
The Heritage Foundation chastizes much of modernity, global population trends, real world economic factors and the resulting changing social, cultural and mating environment where human reproductive strategies have been adapted for success. These adaptations include: more female education, fewer and later marriages, and fewer children.
Women are decried as selfish: the opening paragraph of the Report continues: In contrast, the default in American culture today is to put the desires of adults over the needs of children. Children are too often called to sacrifice what is due to them—the presence of their mom and dad under the same roof for the entirety of their childhood.
The body of the Report goes on to cite the Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence who were, quite literally, fathers: Fifty-four of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence married and had a total of 337 children among them—an average of six each.
Available figures indicate that the average American woman in 1800 had over 7 children (there are no figures for 1776), so the Signers were apparently on the low side of the average (perhaps they weren’t finished, or rather their wives weren’t, having children).
The Report somehow fails to cite what the Declaration of Independence actually said: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness.”
Alas, we all know that the Founding Fathers didn’t “Remember the Ladies,” but not even the authors of the Heritage Report could bring themselves to assert that women have no right to Life, Liberty and Pursuit of happiness. Nor did the Framers talk of any children’s rights.
For me and my grandmother, Women’s Rights and Feminism are included in the right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. My grandmother said, “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”
She added: “A woman’s body belongs to herself alone. It is her body. It does not belong to the Church. It does not belong to the United States of America or to any other government on the face of the Earth. The first step toward getting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for any woman the serve decision whether or not she shall become a mother. Enforced motherhood is the most complete denial of a woman’s right to life and liberty.”
The Heritage Report fails to analyze why a declining birthrate is a worldwide phenomenon, including in so-called first world countries, and I would include Russia and China in them, in addition to Europe, Latin America and Asia. Much of the world now has a TFR less than 2.1, which is the replacement rate. The US is no outlier.
Contrary to the Heritage Report attacks on the lack of morality and the alleged disfavoring of religion in the US as drivers of reduced birthrates, smaller families also occurs in countries with a strong state religion and strict sexual morality and with no or little “Feminism”. For instance, Iran has 1.7, about the same as ours.
Fertility rates have been falling in some countries since the 18th Century – long before modern birth control or abortion, before “Feminism” and “Gender”, before the sexual revolution (there are arguments that the sexual revolution began with the advent of the automobile, not the Pill), before welfare and before internet pornography and dating. Analysts have looked at such factors as: the Industrial Revolution, medical advances for child survival, costs of raising a child – all this before much female education and women’s entry into the modern workforce and feminism.
Single motherhood proliferates worldwide but varies from culture to culture. It is higher than the United States in many countries in Western Europe and Scandinavia and in Latin America; it is far lower in East Asian countries.
Wailing about smaller families is often a disguise about exactly who is having smaller families and who larger. In many countries there is concern with immigrants having a higher birth rate than those native born. This Great Replacement argument occurs not only in the United States, but in other western countries as well, hence Reports like the Heritage’s calling in coded language for greater native birthrates.
The Heritage Foundation’s call for a Manhattan Project for babies uses an unfortunate metaphor – the population bomb was an inept metaphor used in the early 1970s for what was thought to be unbridled population growth. It seems that the Heritage Foundation wants unbridled baby growth.
There are the expected attacks on Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and its welfare programs and on the Pill and the sexual revolution and feminism and gender. The ideal country in the Heritage view for a Baby Boom is Israel, which is quite different from the US and the rest of the Western World with its religiosity, uniform language and culture, not to mention a history of real and immediate threats from its neighbors. The authors fail to mention that Israel has available sex ed, birth control and abortion. Nor did it mention that Israel allegedly once gave long-acting birth control to immigrant Ethiopian Jews without their consent.
Some of the Heritage solutions for the US: a large family tax credit, home childcare tax credit, reducing education levels and establishing church-societal marital boot camps, discouraging on-line dating, promoting family education in schools, making divorce harder (they do not realize that doing so is a disincentive to marriage), and mandating a day of rest, i.e. Blue laws (I am writing this on Super Bowl Sunday) and reducing welfare and head start programs. The list goes on and on.
In contrast to the research cited in the Heritage Report about the single parent homes destroying children, the Annie E Casey Foundation, which has decades of research on the family, states: “Compared to kids in married-parent households, children in single-parent families are more likely to experience poor outcomes. Research indicates that these differences in child well-being tend to be small, though, and can disappear when adjusting for key factors like poverty. While the research is complex, sometimes contradictory and evolving, mounting evidence indicates that underlying factors — such as strong and stable relationships, parental mental health, socioeconomic status and access to resources — have a greater impact on child success than does family structure itself.
Children thrive when they have safe, stable and nurturing environments and relationships, and these conditions and connections can exist in any type of family.”
There has been much discussion of our modern mating system, if it can be called that. In the modern economy, with modern contraception, women are getting the education they need to survive and thrive on their own without relying on a husband. They have their children when they are ready and when their children have the best chance of survival and thriving. The Report calling for women to get less education and to be stay at home moms flies in the face of that reality. That genie isn’t going back in the bottle.
What to do about men deserves more serious addressing than the Report does. The American male is not in great shape physically or educationally. My grandmother noted that during World War I 56% of American men were found unfit for military service. A recent study by the Defense Department found 77% of men unfit for service. Is it stricter guidelines or declining male health? Men attend college less then women. Antisocial behaviors are exhibited more by men than women. They are of declining marriageable material; hence women aren’t marrying them.
The Report’s proposals for family formation are targeted to benefit taxpayers, not those who don’t earn enough to pay taxes. The incentives are for the relatively well-to-do not the poor. Childbearing is to be encouraged for those who have, not those who have not.
Finally, one of the drivers of infertility is undiagnosed sexually transmitted infections. The more well-to-do get reproductive health care from private physicians or clinics. The less well-to-do from Planned Parenthood. And what has the current administration done? Defunded Planned Parenthood, thereby leading to more undiagnosed STDs and thus infertility among the less well off, as well as more unintended pregnancies and more abortion, legal or illegal (illegal abortions can increase infertility).
Eugenics by any other name.
Alexander Sanger 