Control of Fertility, Sexuality

[Dover]

Friday, Oct. 3, 2003. Page XII

Global Eye -- Body Blow

By Chris Floyd

The defining issue of modernity is control of women's fertility. It is this question -- more than religion, politics, economics or the "clash of civilizations" -- that forms the deepest dividing line in the world today. It is a line that cuts through every nation, every people, from the highest level of organized society down to, in many cases, the divided minds and emotions of individual men and women.

Control of fertility -- and its active principle, sexuality -- has always been an organizing principle of human society, of course, but modernity has presented the world with a revolutionary concept that overthrows millennia of received wisdom and tradition: namely, that an individual woman should control her own fertility. This notion destabilizes state structures and religious dogmas; it uproots cultural mores whose origins reach back to prehistoric times. It is a profoundly disturbing development in the life of humankind.

Little wonder, then, that anxieties over fertility and sexuality are the chief engines driving the frenzied and increasingly violent fundamentalist movements now sweeping through the world. It is here that extremists of every stripe make common cause against modernity. Almost every other aspect of "the modern" -- science and technology, high finance, industrialization, etc. -- has been absorbed, in one form or another, by the most "traditionalist" societies. But what today's fundamentalists -- from Osama bin Laden to George W. Bush to Pope John Paul II, from the American-backed warlords of Afghanistan to the anti-American mullahs of Iran -- cannot accept, at any cost, is the freedom of a woman's body.

This frenzy, this primitive fear -- understandable perhaps in the face of such a wrenching upheaval -- does not in itself make a fundamentalist an evil person. But it can -- and does -- lead them into evil: sometimes blindly, in ignorance and panic; but sometimes knowingly, with eyes wide open, a willing embrace of primitive emotions to serve selfish and cynical ends.

And so: Last month, George W. Bush quietly cut off funding for a highly praised AIDS program for refugees from Africa and Asia. Why? Obviously, to keep his helots on the Christian Right frothing with passion to do battle for him in 2004. He has already given them control of U.S. social policy, particularly in international negotiations, where they routinely form alliances with Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and other repressive states to derail treaties on women's rights.

But what was his public reason? Bush says he gutted the program because one member of the nonprofit consortium running the project is also working with a UN program that was falsely accused of colluding with China's policy of forced abortions. That charge was investigated not once but twice by Bush's own State Department, as well as by the UN, and was shown each time to be completely untrue. The only "evidence" produced to support the slander was an allegation that in a single office in a rural Chinese province a few years ago, the desk of a UN official touched the desk of a Chinese Health Ministry official. That's it. The truth, of course, is that the UN program, and all the nonprofit organizations associated with it, are trying to end China's forced abortions...>> MORE

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2003/10/03/120.html

[DuctapeFatwa]

1. Depopulating Africa will help generate revenues for US companies

It will also expedite achieving the regime's military strategies in the region.

[realFedUp]

2. "Women's issue" that actually should be on the front burner

Women's issues or those listed as them and which
are actually economic questions in reality, always
get pushed to the side by this testosteronic (is
that a word?) administration.