A lot of people believe that the religious right's opposition to abortion stems from a desire, rather than to save fetuses, to control women. My view would be that they're essentially right: I happened across an interesting article today entitled
The debate over 'deliberate childlessness'. Here's a little teaser:
"No Kidding" members are more likely to talk about pets, travel or other common interests. Kids rarely come up as a topic of conversation. "People think we sit around and talk about how we hate kids, but we almost never mention kids," Traci explained. No wonder.
Another woman in the Atlanta group explained, "You focus those motherly feelings elsewhere. For us, our dogs get all that love." That worldview is sick, but more and more common.
Christians must recognize that this rebellion against parenthood represents nothing less than an absolute revolt against God's design.
Oh yeah. There's more.
The article starts out looking pretty benign, then about halfway through unloads gems like this one:
The Scripture does not even envision married couples who choose not to have children. The shocking reality is that some Christians have bought into this lifestyle and claim childlessness as a legitimate option. The rise of modern contraceptives has made this technologically possible. But the fact remains that though childlessness may be made possible by the contraceptive revolution, it remains a form of rebellion against God's design and order.
Couples are not given the option of chosen childlessness in the biblical revelation. To the contrary, we are commanded to receive children with joy as God's gifts, and to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We are to find many of our deepest joys and satisfactions in the raising of children within the context of the family. Those who reject children want to have the joys of sex and marital companionship without the responsibilities of parenthood. They rely on others to produce and sustain the generations to come.
Hmm, isn't that interesting. Finally, at the end, we come to the nut of it:
The church should insist that the biblical formula calls for adulthood to mean marriage and marriage to mean children. This reminds us of our responsibility to raise boys to be husbands and fathers and girls to be wives and mothers. God's glory is seen in this, for the family is a critical arena where the glory of God is either displayed or denied. It is just as simple as that.
Women: barefoot and pregnant.
It's easy to see here that the author of the piece is interested in preserving social norms that were based on farm-based, country life. The reason behind the decreasing birth rate in this country (and indeed in most all western countries) is simply urbanization. More people living closer together, with more opportunities to increase your status as an individual, increase the opportunity cost of having children. Thus, fewer children.
One interesting subtext is racial, and reflects the fear a certain portion of the population has about living in a country where the brown people are a majority. The only population groups whose birthrates are increasing in this country are immigrants; for an explicit example, you can look back to when state legislatures were considering outright bans on contraception. Because contraceptives were consumed mostly by the more affluent (and white) citizens, many racist legislators argued in favor of the bans as an attempt to force whites to procreate, maintaining their majority.
Anyway, enough by me. That's what the comments are for.