Greer on Population Control

Germaine Greer is an eminent British Feminist well-known for her book The Female Eunuch and her televised debates with William F. Buckley, as well as her editorial contributions to various publications.

Ms. Greer spoke to a chapel-full of listeners, mostly women, in Cleveland on the CWRU campus on November 10. The subject was "Overpopulation".

She began with descriptions of several of her experiences in "third world" nations very personal realizations about the supposed over-population of countries less technological than the U.S. She stresses that she did not visit these countries to tell the women something, but rather to listen to them. Who deals with the issue of expanding population to keep it in a direct balance with the food available to these people? Greer suggests that it is the women who in courageous and excruciatingly painful acts totally separate from the male society give us our historical data. Greer maintains that it is an underground which must be recognized and respected in order for us to understand the actual meaning of the world's population situation.

She described some of the village methods of birth control in the world. In the South Seas, women submit themselves to gruesome and mortally dangerous methods of abortion in order to maintain the delicate balance between the population of the island and what the land is able to support. The women of Bangla-Desh who were raped by the Bengali men invading their land had to give themselves abortions or else destroy the fabric of their family lives when they returned to their husbands. It had to be as if nothing had happened to violate the husbands' control over their women. In India it happens that when there is little food, the girl children often die of starvation while their biologically weaker brothers live on. In Italy, the most common method of birth control is coitus interruptus practiced by men. But when it fails, the women must procure abortions, illegally and dangerously performed by the local midwives, or run the risk of being deserted by enraged husbands. Greer reveals the burden that so many women carry that of believing that theirs is the worst case, that they are the only criminals. That they are forced by terror, guilt and shame to do appalling things to themselves

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Welfare Abortions

Attorneys for the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio (ACLU) at Columbus recently won the test case challenging Ohio's refusal to pay for physician-approved elective abortions for welfare recipients.

The suit was brought on behalf of Rachel Roe (a pseudonym), a 17-year-old welfare recipient living in her father's four room household with seven brothers and sisters; she is eight weeks pregnant, already has a child, is unemployed, and wants to have an abortion but she cannot afford it; her father concurs in his daughter's decision to have an abortion but he likewise cannot afford the expense.

Other plaintiffs included: NOW, representing the interests of women; Doctors Robert H. Schwartz, Eduard Eichner, and K. E. Hoffman, all of whom are Cleveland obstetricians and gynecologists; the Women's Center, Inc., (of Cincinnati) and Preterm, Inc. (of Cleveland), out-patient facilities in which licensed physicians perform first-trimester, abortions.

Named as defendants in the suit are State Auditor Joseph T. Ferguson and State Welfare Director Charles W. Bates.

The suit charged that Ferguson had refused to permit state and federal Medicaid funds to be used to pay for elective abortions even though state Welfare Department regulations say that physicians' services and related hospital costs will be payable for elective abortions for all eligible recipients. The pleadings alleged that Ferguson had nullified the existing public policy of the state and federal governments which permits the physicians' reimbursement for elective abortions, and he had violated both the Constitutional rights of welfare recipients to "due process and equal protection" of the laws and the rights of doctors "to practice medicine according to best professional judgment and established medical standards."

In addition the suit sought to invalidate one section [5101.55(c)] of the State's new abortion law. That section to be administered by Bates would bar the state from paying for

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elective abortions for welfare recipients.

At a news conference in Columbus, ACLU Executive Director Benson A. Wolman and NOW State Legislative Coordinator Betty Carroll said that the action of the State officials is an "unwarranted discrimination against poor women in our society." They said that Ferguson "has set himself up above the Constitution and laws," and the legislature and Governor "have joined in to deprive welfare recipients of their Constitutional rights to privacy and equal protection of the laws."

The litigation asked the U.S. District Court to issue declaratory judgments that Ferguson's present and continuing refusal to make payments for elective abortions and the similar new section of state law violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and also Title XIX of the Social Security Act.

Ferguson failed to comply with the court ruling until he was threatened with contempt. On November 8 he was ordered to pay even though the case is pending appeal.

and to take the blame as well. And all for someone else.

Greer points out that only in lands where in-

dividuals are robbed of autonomy women reproduce to their biological maximum. "The question of abortion as a chosen method of birth control brings us directly to the question of women being able to regulate their sex lives. Very often abortions are required precisely because women haven't had the chance to regulate their sex lives. Because the matter has been taken out of their hands, as in the case of the Italian women, and in many of the Muslim countries, where coitus interruptus was the method preached by the prophet." And she goes on, "What is happening now is that instead of approaching the population problem as this problem, as the problem of women struggling to keep their dignity and to control their lives, we are approaching it from the point of view of population, and we're saying to women who have always lacked self-hood that they are never to attain it because we are going to dictate their behavior from another angle. That they are still to be the suffering servants of the race... the matrix of population and never to be people."

Yet even in "civilized" nations, we find great majorities of women using methods of birth control without the knowledge of their husbands or each other. During the 1930's in Britain, the sharp decline in birth rate has been explained by Greer and several probing individuals as the use of an illegal device (called the Higginson syringe) which is again very painful and even dangerous to the woman. Greer suggests that this is yet another attempt by women to "regulate their sex lives" and to make the choice of whether or not to have children. "The responsibility of an individual's fertility is up to that individual and no one else." It is facism that "is the abrogation of another man or woman's rights to decide any question of ethics. And that includes their right to be creative in the way they decide to attack that problem [overpopulation]."

Greer did not seem to offer any cut and polished solution to whatever population problems there are throughout the world. Rather, she stressed the consciousness of the ecology of each human life, of all cultures . . . and warns us of "elaborate hypocrisies that are going to be in play for the rest of our lives because the population politic is here to stay and we will find it maneuvered in every conceivable way according to the wishes of states. What you won't find it maneuvered according to is the wishes of the people."

page 3 What She Wants/ January 1975