Inconceivable!
Is fertility a health issue or a lifestyle choice?
This month a health care refom advisory panel will meet to consider whether contraception should be offered free of charge as a form of preventative medicine, the AP reports. Healthcare reform of course poses many questions concerning how medical services are paid for and delivered. But, as the AP notes, social mores are at the heart of this latest question.
Contraception is a controversial tool for preventing pregnancy, with many religious movements banning it outright. At the heart of the argument against free contraception is that the use of contraception is a lifestyle choice, not a health issue. As the president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center notes, “there are other ways to avoid having children than by ingesting chemicals.”
All other things equal, should the use of contraception be thought of as a health issue or a lifestyle choice? And should it matter for whether it is provided free as a form of preventative care? Read more
It’s a woman’s world –and much more- in Iceland
The BBC reports that the World Economic Forum has found Iceland to be the country with the greatest parity between the genders. Out of curiosity, I decided to take a look at Iceland’s fertility rates to see if gender equality came at the expense of large families. It does not. In fact, according to John Carlin at The Guardian, Iceland simultaneously has Europe’s highest birth, divorce, and female employment rates.
This would probably be a recipe for social disaster in most of the rest of the world. But Iceland has negligible levels of crime, strong family cohesion, and high levels of both subjective happiness and living standards. Is there something we can learn from the Icelandic experience?
The Guardian article gushes with enthusiasm for the Icelandic way. A taboo-free and open-minded culture allows unconventional family arrangements to thrive. The Icelandic approach to relationships, marriage and family is casual and eminently pragmatic. Instead of leading to distress, poverty and broken families, high rates of birth, divorce, and female employment accompany strong, though patchwork, families and hardy children.
Cultures are complicated. They evolve organically over the course of centuries and are sustained under highly specific circumstances. Most fundamentally, to live like Icelanders, people would have to amend time-cherished beliefs about marriage and family. They might also have to reconsider the role of the state in supporting motherhood.
There are certainly things to be said for living “free of cant and prejudice and taboo.” But to overcome basic notions of family values is no simple matter. Unfortunately for those of us who might consider moving, the language is notoriously difficult.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user Gunna used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
The loss of innocence is more than a literary trope
In response to debates over public school library blacklists, the BBC poses the question, “should parents have the power to ban school texts?” The complaints the BBC article addresses are mostly about children’s exposure to sexuality. Some of the books in question are literary classics, though most are staples of pop culture like the Twilight series.
Who is responsible for the development of children, moral and otherwise? A short list of candidates would include parents and community organizations alongside schools. Parents have a great deal of latitude over their children, and can usually choose what activities in the community they engage in. But only the relatively privileged can choose what schools to send their children to, and when questions of sex and morality are concerned there is rarely consensus in the school boards. Someone is bound to be offended.
But in some ways the debate over public school blacklists misses the point. The fact remains that public school libraries are only one of many different ways for children to access information. By hook or by crook children will whet their curiosities. Concerned parents must surely acknowledge the existence of libraries outside of school, bookstores, and the internet.
The issue of public school library blacklists is only a distraction from the more general question of how children should be raised, and whether any one set of preferences should ever prevail against the wishes of some.
-Charles
Image from Flickr user Robert Dumas used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
Guest Post: Living “childfree” and easy
No kidding around
Jonathan Last covers the “childfree” movement in a recent Weekly Standard piece. He writes:
These people differ from the merely “childless” in that they want the world to know that their situation is not an accident. A spinster or an infertile couple might be childless by bad luck. The childfree are childless by choice.
While the size and influence of the “childfree” movement are unclear, considerably more people have embraced the lifestyle in recent years. What values or preferences might be motivating them?
On the self-regarding side, “childfree” couples might argue that they can make a greater contribution to humanity through their work than by bringing a child into the world. The time spent child-rearing could be time spent writing a great novel, performing scientific research, etc. Or they might argue that emotional and physical intimacy with one’s partner is impossible with children. Or they might simply not like being around kids.
Society will be fine without their kids, they might continue, because others gladly have life views that incorporate having children, more than enough, in fact, to continue society’s existence.
It’s possible, strangely, to argue for a “childfree” existence from a more altruistic perspective. Many “childfree” couples believe that the world is experiencing a permanent social and cultural devolution. Thus, it would be wrong to subject a child to such negative conditions.
Last quotes from Better Never to Have Been by David Benatar, a philosophy professor at the University of Cape Town: “The quality of even the best lives is very bad and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people.”
More on marriage
Douthat clarifies his argument
In his New York Times blog, Ross Douthat wrestles with one of the most persuasive critiques of his recent article against gay marriage; the notion that there is no reason to view heterosexual relationships as exceptional or “distinctive” in a way that merits them being prioritized over homosexual relationships.
In responding Douthat argues that:
The interplay of fertility, reproductive impulses and gender differences in heterosexual relationships is, for want of a better word, “thick.” All straight relationships are intimately affected by this interplay in ways that gay relationships are not.
A good argument against gay marriage
Why Ross Douthat fails to deliver
I agree with Luke that Ross Douthat’s argument against gay marriage in the NYT is bad political philosophy. A good argument against gay marriage needs to clarify:
(A) What values gay marriage threatens,
(B) The process by which it threatens those values,
(C) The values protected or promoted by the legalization of gay marriage, and
(D) Why the values gay marriage threatens outweigh those it promotes.
Douthat focuses on the (A) category and completely ignores the other three. He argues that gay marriage threatens the Western ideal of “lifelong heterosexual monogamy as a unique and indispensable estate.”
Citizens by birth?
Republican leaders have reversed course after it was widely reported last week that some top Republicans are reconsidering the 14th Amendment right that guarantees citizenship to those born in the United States. In an Associated Press article, Jeff Sessions of Alabama was quoted detailing his party’s concerns about the amendment with respect to immigration policy:
“I’m not exactly sure what the drafters of the [14th] amendment had in mind, but I doubt it was that somebody could fly in from Brazil and have a child and fly back home with that child, and that child is forever an American citizen…”
Similar comments from other Republican lawmakers have generated controversy, and Republican leadership has since backpedaled. Is challenging birthright citizenship merely partisan and discriminatory, or is it a reasonable idea made indefensible by its controversial nature?
Married with (biological) children
In today’s New York Times Ross Douthat dismisses many of the traditional arguments against gay marriage, but concludes by stating that heterosexual marriage is unique in an important respect.
This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings — a commitment that involves the mutual surrender, arguably, of their reproductive self-interest — as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. It holds up the domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents, as a uniquely admirable approach to child-rearing. And recognizing the difficulty of achieving these goals, it surrounds wedlock with a distinctive set of rituals, sanctions and taboos.
Is this “organic connection between human generations” so essential to the definition of marriage that allowing gay and lesbians to marry will undermine the essence of the institution? The other question is, what about heterosexual couples who cannot have children or would rather adopt? On what grounds do they have more of a right to marriage than a gay couple?
-Luke
Image used under a Creative Commons attribution license from Flickr user Steve Polyak
Father knows best
The Obama administration’s new Fatherhood and Mentoring Initiative
Beginning with a speech on Father’s Day Sunday, Obama launched a new initiative on responsible fatherhood. This was a campaign issue for then-candidate Obama, and remains one of the social issues with which he shares common ground with conservatives, who frequently emphasize the role of responsible parenting and accountable fatherhood in helping to create the conditions for future economic success of low-income children.
In an email from the White House:
My own father left my family when I was two years old. I was raised by a heroic mother and wonderful grandparents who provided the support, discipline and love that helped me get to where I am today, but I still felt the weight of that absence throughout my childhood. It’s something that leaves a hole no government can fill. Studies show that children who grow up without their fathers around are more likely to drop out of high school, go to jail, or become teen fathers themselves.
The government also launched a new website, Fatherhood.gov, which includes tips for being a responsible father.
Ira Stoll, blogging at FutureofCapitalism.com, blasts the site and the Initiative: Read more
WWTD? (What would Tiger do?)
Robert Wright argues in today’s New York Times that “in its own way, the Tiger Woods scandal is as important as Kandahar and the Catholic Church.” Why? He provides a list of reasons, including:
5) Moral sanction matters. Though monogamous marriage may be, on average, the best way to rear children, a lifetime of monogamous fidelity isn’t natural in our species. And extramarital affairs have a way of leading, one way or another, to the dissolution of marriages – not unfailingly, by any means, but with nontrivial frequency. And even when an affair doesn’t end a marriage, it can permanently change the marriage – and child-rearing environment – for the worse.
So we’re stuck with this unfortunate irony: the institution that seems to be, on average, the least bad means of rearing children is an institution that doesn’t naturally sustain itself in the absence of moral sanction – positive sanction for fidelity, negative sanction for infidelity. And negative sanction often involves sounding judgmental – something that, in addition to incurring the wrath of a columnist’s readers, raises genuinely thorny intellectual problems.
This is a pretty instrumental view of morality. Wright is essentially arguing that Tiger’s infidelity vitiates cultural support for monogamous marriage. On his account, that’s bad because monogamous marriage is good for children, but without moral sanction, it’s a difficult institution to preserve.
But why is good childrearing so important? The only answers are really (a) it provides for the best, most successful propagation of our species or (b) it’s something we owe both to our own children and to the next generation in general to help them thrive and succeed.
The first option is one that seems logical, but actually has trouble finding a rational foundation until you get down to some inherent human dignity. And the second option refers to that dignity directly.
But once you’re in the field of human dignity, it’s hard to suppress issues of choice, freedom, etc. that call into question both emphasis on monogamous marriage as a lifestyle and a ethical structure that uses moral injunction to support a cultural practice.
-Sam
Photo by Flickr user Keith Allison used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Share us