While I am solidly prolife with regard to abortion, I have never been opposed to birth control as such. But it is one thing to believe, as I do, that individuals should have access to a wide range of birth control technologies, and another to form judgments about the effects of such technologies across whole societies. The dramatic decline in births per woman has had very unfortunate consequences for places like South Dakota, and poses similarly serious demographic problems for Europe and Japan. These societies all have lavish retirement policies, but those policies depend upon younger workers funding them. The supply of the latter is drying up rapidly. I do not know what to do about this, but it seems worth noting.
China represents a rather different problem, one that may be of concern not only for her government and her neighbors but for the rest of the world. In The New Republic, Mara Hvistendahl has an article entitled "No Country for Young Men." In China, two powerful forces have amplified each other: one is the one child policy, brutally enforced by party officials all over the country, and the other is the strong preference for male children. The result of this has been that millions of China's daughters were never allowed to celebrate their first birthday. You might suppose that the world's feminists would find something wrong with that, and maybe they have. I have not noticed it. It may be that feminists are largely incapable of seeing anything wrong with birth control, however it is employed.
But there is a much more serious problem coming to term in China. Hvistendahl begins with the enormous popularity of war games among China's young men. Then she points out what this might mean:
The macho violence spurting forth through outlets like war games is a growing trend in Chinese society--and China's one-child policy, in effect since 1979, is partly responsible. The country's three decades of iron-fisted population planning coincided with a binge in sex-selective abortions (Chinese traditionally favor sons, who carry on the family line) and a rise, even as the country developed, in female infant mortality. After almost 30 years of the policy, China now has the largest gender imbalance in the world, with 37 million more men than women and almost 20 percent more newborn boys than girls nationwide.
By the time these newborns reach puberty, war games may seem like a quaint relic. In the 2020s, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Zheng Zhenzhen, estimates in a People's Daily interview that 10 percent of Chinese men will be unable to find wives, which could have a huge impact on Chinese society. Historian David Courtwright suggests in Violent Land that sexually segregated societies in the United States--frontier towns flush with unmarried men, immigrant ghettos in early twentieth-century cities, mining camps--are behind our propensity toward violence. The immigrants and westward migrants who shaped early America, Courtwright says, were largely young single men, who are-- today as well as then--disproportionately responsible for drug abuse, looting, vandalism, and violent crime. A long-term study of Vietnam veterans in 1998 may explain exactly why: The subjects' testosterone levels, which are linked to aggression and violence, dropped when they married and increased when they divorced. Eternally single men, by extension, maintain high levels of testosterone--a recipe for violent civil unrest.
The most dangerous animal on the planet is a human male, between the ages of about 15 and 35, who is unmarried. The United States experienced a dramatic rise in criminal violence in the 1960's, when young men born in the post war baby boom began to come of age. But of course there was no gender disparity. A lot of young men avoided violence and dysfunction by finding wives, and the subpopulations that suffered most were those in which marriage had all but collapsed as a cultural force.
China has been relentlessly building a demographic time bomb. Millions of young men without any hope of marriage is about a frightening a prospect as I can imagine. And there is no obvious way to defuse this bomb. Even if China drops the policy, or somehow corrects the gender bias in its implementation, the demographic bulge is arriving.
It's possible, of course, that the explosion will be contained internally. But the force of it could be enough to destabilize China, which is enough to destabilize the region. Another possibility is that Beijing will find itself forced to direct the blast outward, giving it an outlet in regional wars. Welcome to the twenty-first century.
I accept birth control generally as an individual right, but I am not enthusiastic about it. Those who are have never been willing or able to consider that it might have very unfortunate consequences for the societies that make it widely available. Events might be about to force that issue.
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