Bioethics, healthcare policy, and related issues.
It could be almost any news story from the developing world, and any of many from the rest of the world, but this one will do:
Afghanistan’s President, Hamid Karzai, has signed a law which “legalises” rape, women’s groups and the United Nations warn. Critics claim the president helped rush the bill through parliament in a bid to appease Islamic fundamentalists ahead of elections in August.
In a massive blow for women’s rights, the new Shia Family Law negates the need for sexual consent between married couples, tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman’s right to leave the home, according to UN papers seen by The Independent. . . .
The most controversial parts of the law deal explicitly with sexual relations. Article 132 requires women to obey their husband’s sexual demands and stipulates that a man can expect to have sex with his wife at least “once every four nights” when travelling, unless they are ill. The law also gives men preferential inheritance rights, easier access to divorce, and priority in court. . . .Even the law’s sponsors admit Mr Karzai rushed it through to win their votes. Ustad Mohammad Akbari, a prominent Shia political leader, said: “It’s electioneering. Most of the Hazara people are unhappy with Mr Karzai.”
The fault in this case lies squarely with the Afghani men, of course. (British officials, rushing to the defense of women, have “raised concerns at a senior level”. Thank God!) But it’s worth noting that this government is America’s “ally” – in the sense that if we don’t acquiesce in their doing these things, and pay them a lot of money besides, they’ll . . . be even less cooperative against Al Qaeda. One might also note that this sort of thing is once more on the rise in Iraq, where women had once had full legal equality under Sadam, now that de facto separatist governments under religious extremists have been established, with American approval, in parts of the country.
It has to be acknowledged how disastrous the situation has always been for women in most of the world, and how little leverage the nascent democracy movements in the most backward countries are. Except in places like Iraq and Iran, where modernist governments have been fully or partially replaced by theocracies, it’s not clear that, however horrendous conditions are, things are getting much worse for women, even in the worst countries. In a practical sense, the new Afghan law may not change anything, since the practices in question are widespread there anyway. The fact that there is even a tiny amount of freedom for women in the capital city is a – very depressing – step forward.
But those facts, inescapbable as they are, do not tell the real story. What’s most galling is not that conditions for women are so bad, but that that is regarded as a negligible problem. Women’s rights, and women’s freedom, are simply not issues worth caring about, to virtually any government or any influential group of (male) people.
We’ll go to war over oil, land, religion, vaguely-articulated political and economic beliefs, other countries’ refusals to do our bidding, or a soccer match. We’ll claim as justification for our wars other people’s freedom to vote for the candidates we approve, be Christian whether they want to or not, and buy American consumer goods. The one thing we’ll never fight for, or even claim as justification for fighting, is women’s freedom to live their own lives. It’s simply not an issue. The idea that we should invade Iraq to establish a quasi-democracy in some parts of the country while igniting an indigenous religious war and all but completely destroying the country’s economy and material infrastructure is somehow not seen as ludicrous. The idea that we would invade Afghanistan – or refrain from invading Afghanistan – because it’s women are subject to widespread, organized rape and open murder – legally – now that is seen as ludicrous. The idea that we would threaten preemptive nuclear war with Iran because they might someday have one warhead to our current 10,000 is not absurd; the idea that we would threaten any serious engagement of Iran because the women of that country have virtually no legal rights and are subject to arbitrary imprisonment, rape, abuse, and murder by the religious police, is beyond absurd – it is unthinkable.
The idea that women’s rights and women’s freedom is an issue that commands our involvement – that it is one of the things we must pursue and protect, among the many things we accept as justification for our adventures and misadventures around the globe – that it would constitute any kind of reason at all for any kind of action at all, let alone aggressive engagement or sacrifice on our part – is quit obviously a joke. Of all the places we’ve invaded, bombed, or threatened over the past few decades – Nicaragua, Grenada, North Korea, Panama, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Russia, and on and on and on . . . – and usually on the most ridiculous pretenses (Reagan invaded Grenada because they were building a runway, which he then continued building after occupying the island), in which of these is it even imaginable that the same things could have been done because the women of that country did not have full equality, or even basic rights?
Women’s interests are negligible. Whatever misery, oppression, or lack of freedom motivates political concern, in the US or anywhere else, it is not women’s misery or oppression that provides that motivation. The US courted Afghanistan for decades without any overt action on the basis of the grinding, indescribable misery and abuse of the women of that country, and we continue to tolerate those same conditions while occupying that country and propping up its government. But that occupation was prompted – on little notice and with little debate – by the fleeting presence there of a small group of terrorists we still haven’t managed to locate. That minor military problem was sufficient justification for occupying and remaking the country; the horrific abuse of its female population for all time up to that moment was not such a motivation, and its continuation during our presence there is not motivation for any proportional expenditure of energy on their behalf. Women are not a reason for doing anything, in Afghanistan, though smaller groups of people who catch our male leaders’ attentions are more than enough reason. The US invaded Iraq, twice, on the pretext of its supposed military ambitions; in the process we eliminated the freedom for women that existed there at the time, and returned them to the insecurities of religious politics, and for many of them outright partriarcal theocracy. The oppression of a small percentage of its population who were political opponents of its leader was justification for destroying that country and its government; that that government was the only source of liberty for more than half its population – the female half – was not justification for not doing so. Women simply didn’t count, in that equation. And they never do.
Until women count – until women in and of themselves are a reason for doing anything – until the oppression and misery of women is seen as human oppression and human misery, the sort of thing we say we care about and act on – there will be no progress. And until we powerful nations, nations who shake the world and make and unmake governments and laws and wars, do what we do because women matter at least as much as oil, or land, or religion, or markets, or men, women will not count where it counts.
Just once, I wish we could have a debate over an important political issue that wasn’t entirely shaped and determined by sheer stupidity and ignorance from the right wing. Today will not be that day.
The winger blogs are all a-twitter over a story noting that the Omnibus Budget bill that was (finally) just passed contains a provision – known as the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, which the religious wingers have stuck in every budget since 1996 – prohibiting federal funding for research “in which human embryos are created, destroyed, discarded, or knowingly be subjected to risk of injury or death”. Setting some kind of a record for intellectual incompetence, the right-wing CNSNews mis-reported this as “Obama Signs Law Banning Federal Embryo Research Two Days After Signing Executive Order to OK It” – which, in one single sentence, misrepresents the event (he did not sign a law on embryo research, he signed the budget bill, which contained one small amemendment addressing embryonic research among its reported 3,500 pages of text and appendices), false as to fact (his executive order did not address embryo research), and completely wrong in its implication (the budget amendment does not undo the research policy Obama announced, as this headline implies). Despite this falsity and confusion, the event is viewed as some sort of humiliation for, or hypocrisy by, President Obama, since he had made a point of repealing the Bush ban on stem-cell research funding just two days before signing the budget with its unrelated embryo-research amendment. Much chortling and back-slapping is now underway, among people who know nothing about the issue and are apparently too dumb to read.
Yuval Levin was a staff manager of the Bush-era “President’s Council on Bioethics”, a body widely derided for its almost comically right-wing leanings and gross intellectual malfeasance. Today he steps in it trying to say something all clever and sophisticated about the new authorization for stem-cell research. I got as far as the second paragraph before the crankery blew me away:
