August 28, 2007
Women's Reproductive Choices: Scientific/Historical or Jungian/Hysterical?
The first sentence of the second paragraph from "How to deal with a falling population", (The Economist, 7/26/07), is as follows;
"Overcrowding and a shortage of resources constrain bug populations. The reasons for the growth of the human population may be different, but the pattern may be surprisingly similar."
What a wonderful article, setting the scientific/historical time line for sustainable population growth. It also, of course, sets the hysterical time line when Women Rights' advocates started their misdirected, dare I say, clamoring for change.
Actually, as this article points out, certainly by inference, the change to having fewer children had already occurred and women were fit to be tied because nature was calling to them to react to (not create) such change.
I get special pleasure out of the article because (including writing a play on the subject in 1973) I have held for years that the so-called Women's Liberation movement was quite simply the natural formation of a 'collective unconscious' among women that baby making had been demoted. In effect women did not and were not choosing liberation. Nature had 'liberated' them in order for earth to achieve human population/resource homeostasis.
Consider this quote from the article which reduces the entirety of womens' natural reproductive options and the intellectual underpinnings of the Womens Rights Movement to a few simple choices:
"If women decide to spend their 20s clubbing rather than child-rearing, and their cash on handbags rather than diapers, that's up to them. But the transition to a lower population can be a difficult one........"
Looking back from this perspective, in the now, one wonders what was all the fuss really about?
Disclaimer: I believe passionately that women did not enact the liberation they so passionately espoused. They were liberated, as in less responsibilities and more free time, by the nature mandated necessity to have fewer children. I think a substantial portion of the theory of Womern's Lib is false. The steps called for post-liberation to achieve equality and fairness were and are valid.
Craig Johnson
Labels: collective unconscious, earth's resources, explosion, homeostasis, liberation, population, womens rights