Pandagon article on reproduction as a positive right.

[grysar]

Pandagon discuesses a book that posits child-bearing as a positive right

"To be clear about it, the liberal view of reproductive rights is that there’s a negative right to conduct your reproductive right free from government interference, which means that you have a right to use birth control, IVF, have a baby, have an abortion, whatever, but the government has no obligation to provide the means for these things. Roberts forwards an interesting argument that reproduction is so critical to basic human dignity that we should have government provide support to make our choices, and without generous welfare, public funding for birth control and abortion, and possibly some government control over IVF, reproductive rights remain something that’s available for a fee and aren’t really rights."

Anyhow, this book finds that there are a whole lot of inducements available to prevent lower-class African American women and/or welfare recipients from having kids. No forced sterilizations anymore, but subsidizing Norplant inserts with no funds available for removal (which is particularly problematic when it causes health problems).

Anyhow, I'm sympathetic to free coverage of birth control for both ideological and practical reasons. Similarly a universal health care system of my devising would probably cover both semi-permanent birth control and methods for removing said control.

However, I don't really buy reproduction as a positive right. I tend to think of positive rights as nigh necessities to living a fulfilling life or indeed living at all. There may be exceptions, monks vowing to do without something, but those exceptions are widely seen as making a great sacrifice. Moreover, even under a more generous welfare state, raising children takes a lot of work. Actively removing hurdles seems at odds with the responsibility being undertaken. This may change at some point in the future, although I'd be surprised if such a future came about anytime soon.

Comments

[lirazel.livejournal.com]

Well, if you take the view that the right to choose is about choice, then yes, there is a right to reproduce--just as there is a right not to reproduce. Otherwise, it's not a choice.

I was fortunate in that my first real social work job was with a church-sponsored anti-poverty agency, founded and run by a lady who was a member of Jim Wallis' Church of The Savior in D.C. (United Community Ministries is still going strong.) One of the things we did is drive poor, expectant mothers to the free health clinic at the county seat for their pre-natal care. The other thing we did is drive poor women who didn't want to be mothers to the other clinic for abortions and prescriptins for birth control. One local church dropped its support for us with great fanfare and publicity; another of the same denomination quietly came forward to take their place.

I was 19. I've waited for a girl younger than I was at an abortion clinic--and sat with a mother younger than I was as she tried to manage her baby. I support their right to choose, and to live with the consequences of free choice.

[grysar.livejournal.com]

Well I support the right to choose, but as a negative right. And I agree, from a rights perspective you can't privilege the right to not be pregnant over the right to be pregnant.

I think going the next step and providing funding is a wise policy step. I'd certainly have no problems with my offerings going to support that sort of program. However, for the moment, I don't see it as an entitlement the same way I see food, shelter, and medical care. (Clothing too, but clothing is pretty easy to deal with relative to the other three).

[korgmeister.livejournal.com]

The moment someone else is obligated to pay for it/provide it, it's no longer a right, it's an entitlement.

I do not believe in the concept of positive rights at all.

[grysar.livejournal.com]

I'm content with using either the word positive right or entitlement. I'll follow up with my defense of entitlement in Rowyn's entry since he's a bit more specific.

[korgmeister.livejournal.com]

I look forward to it.

This vision of positive reproductive rights seems as daft to me and seems to miss the point that freedom isn't free. If actions don't have any costs associated with them, then a valuable metric by which decisions can be made is lost.

Myspace and Livejournal, for instance are examples of taking positive freedoms to freedom of the press. Fandom/slashfic purges aside, for the most part, we can say whatever crazy stuff we want on LJ and it doesn't cost us a thing.

And the result?...99% of it is total bollocks! Because if there's no cost associated with putting whatever we want online, the only cost is our time and effort, which clearly people generally try to minimise.

When there's an actual monetary cost associated with publishing, people normally bother with things like proofreading and editing.

I am by no means a prude, but trying to turn sex and procreation into a harmless recreational activity is an insane goal, at least with today's technology. Sexual revolution or not, we do not control sex and what results from it in any reliable fashion. How can we make safe sex and babies-on-demand a right when that's simply beyond our present technological capacity, regardless of how many tax dollars are thrown at it?

Sex is fun, but comes with a risk of ruining your ruining your health or your finances. But the same can be said about driving cars really fast, or getting addicted to World of Warcraft. Just about everything fun comes with risks and costs and while helping people to make decisions which maximise fun while minimising risk and cost is certainly a good thing, people who want the government to absorb the risk and cost just don't make sense to me.

[grysar.livejournal.com]

Sex side first. I don't see how procreation could ever really be a recreational activity, hence my not seeing it as an entitlement. (I'm assuming you're seeing sex and recreation as a negative right. Lemme know if you're wrong on that).

However, from the practical policy point of view, I think throwing money at the birth control side makes sense. I think it's safe to say that the amount of money people have available for birth control is not a primary or even a secondary limitation on the amount of sex they have. So the moral hazard problem here is relatively small. By comparison, the potential savings of preventing unwanted pregnancies are much higher. So I'd argue birth control is a good investment for society, even if it isn't a moral necessity.

[korgmeister.livejournal.com]

Well sure. But that's doing something because it makes good economic sense. That's not the same thing as a positive right.

And well, I've seen some people who do seem to think of having kids as a recreational activity/lifestyle accessory. And an awful damn lot 'em in this country love the hell out of IVF. If they want a baby so badly, they can pay for it themselves, just like I'd have to pay for a vasectomy myself.

[grysar.livejournal.com]

::nods:: And as I said, I don't see it making the grade as a positive right.

The original source material was conflicted about IVF. Essentially the writer's view was why IVF when you can adopt. Which is true enough, although I'm not going to condemn people for wanting the same choices as the average person.

But yeah, I don't consider IVF a funding priority either for positive right or economic reasons.

[korgmeister.livejournal.com]

Oh God! I've misread/strawmanned you again. How embarassing!

Anyway, I look forward to a blog post in favour of positive rights.

[grysar.livejournal.com]

No worries. I was trying to prompt argument on both sides since I'm somewhat hesitant to really try for debate in the Pandagon comment thread for now.

Anyways, scan down. I did it as a comment in response to Rowyn. If there's enough attention I might do it as a separate post (although trying to get some work done may mitigate against that).

Pandagon commenters, like all political blog commenters, are friendly and open minded.

[korgmeister.livejournal.com]

Yeah. See, I could try to engage in debate at Pandagon.

Or I could just cut out the middleman and tar & feather myself.

Re: Pandagon commenters, like all political blog commenters, are friendly and open minded.

[grysar.livejournal.com]

Heh heh. Very appropriate icon.

Re: Pandagon commenters, like all political blog commenters, are friendly and open minded.

[korgmeister.livejournal.com]

It's my all-purpose sarcasm/snark icon (at least when used in comments).

[grysar.livejournal.com]

As for your first point. I'd say 90%, not 99%, but basically true enough.

However, so what? There's no real loss here. I mean if there was a right to an audience and we had to read that crap, that would be a problem. In fact, as soon as people get audience share they'll probably be more attentive to what they write. This doesn't mean quality will necessarily go up. They might give scantily clad pictures instead. But they will probably give the people what they want.

Anyways, as I say to Rowyn, I do favor cost transparency. All food/medical care/shelter is not created equal. However, when consumers are driven by necessity they will have to find ways to use the resources they are given access to in order to meet their basic needs. I'm not really worried about people at a soup kitchen deciding to load up exclusively on ketchup. Their stomachs will strongly mandate against that option.

In the larger sense, I do think that your Myspace/LJ option does hold to a degree. At our level of prosperity, a minimal level of food/shelter/clothing are not that much harder to provide than server space. This is why even the most free market of the developed countries, such as the U.S., don't really have absolute poverty ($1 a day or less purchasing power parity). I consider our lack of absolute poverty an excellent thing.

[korgmeister.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think it's one of the most awesome things about America.

I think I made a slightly bad analogy with regards to the Livejournal thing. The main point I wanted to make is that sex isn't safe and we can't make it that way, no matter how much people want it to be or believe it should be. (Yes, it's David Hume's is/ought problem yet again.)

It's not even a concern that people would start boning whoever the hell they want with merry abandon. It's just the fact that consequence-free sex is just not a sane thing to strive for at this point in history. Maybe in 30-50 years time. But right now it's as daft as asking for a light bulb in every house only 20 years after the carbon-filament light bulb was invented. The technology is still expensive and immature.

Many people fail to realise that just because a thing can be done with technology, does not mean the technology is mature enough to be used widely. To go with the food/shelter/clothing thing, the mass-production techniques which made cheap and ubiquitous food and shelter have been with us for more than a century. But the point is it's taken this long for them to mature to the point where they can operate as well as they do.

Contraception is still a new and immature technology and not enough people appreciate this. Just because a technology is widespread and commercialised does not mean it is mature. It just means they've become economically viable to mass-produce and safe enough to be used outside of a tightly controlled experimental environment. Computers are widespread but they are a hellaciously immature technology.

And immature technologies are unreliable. (They're often unsafe, too)

[grysar.livejournal.com]

I do agree that sex isn't yet safe. I have a friend who said that before you have sex, you need to be prepared to either have an abortion or have a kid. I think she has a definite point in that regard.

That said, I think making sex safer is a worthwhile goal. Things like the HPV vaccination, condoms, and the like can result in vast improvements if not absolute safety.

And, on the emotional level, I'm not sure sex will ever really be safe for most people. And I'm okay with that.

I'd say sex might be kind of analogous to driving in the technology maturity level. Cars are definitely one of the biggest threats to the health of people in the developed world. However, walking-busing-only education is a silly way to address the problem. :p

[korgmeister.livejournal.com]

True, but that's more of a "You Americans really need to resolve the cultural baggage resulting from your Puritan heritage" things, more than anything else.

[grysar.livejournal.com]

Pretty much.

[rowyn2001.livejournal.com]

I agree with korg here. When you think about the basic human rights on the founding of the American tradition (life, liberty, and property; later, pursuit of happiness, though I think early on, owning property made you pretty happy. :P), nothing says the government is going to give it to you. They merely have to provide an avenue in which it's achieveable. And need to protect you from other people's attempts to take it away.

But no one is taking anything away by not offering it for free. People tend not to appreciate things they don't have to pay for. If anything, the welfare question makes it sticky. Either you're supporting someone for raising a child or you're supporting someone to end it. Some would say it's legislating morality, but then the money is expected in either circumstance. And the more you fund it from somewhere else, the less the quality of service gets, because funding will invariably get cut the more people that push for it.

[grysar.livejournal.com]

You got it backwards. Pursuit of happiness was first, in the Declaration. The Constitution was a conservative document and put in property.

The fundamental question you're missing is do property rights trump the right to life. If they do, then we get your philosophy, keeping someone from getting an apple you own is more important than letting that person have access to any food at all. Going entirely the other way is also problematic. Going back to Locke, without private property there's no incentive to invest in productivity. However, a simple balance is available. Everyone pays a marginal fee by taxation to make sure that everyone is entitled to not starve.

Now, as far as I know there weren't prevalent soup kitchens and such in colonial America. However, in colonial America, there was a frontier (a frontier stolen from Native Americans, but that's a different issue). Anyone who wanted to could go there to make a living. It was dangerous admittedly, but the option was there. Nowadays if you go to the wilderness to hunt and gather the local park ranger will probably object (obviously there are still areas you can hunt and gather, but such activities tend to be for recreation and not subsistence).

As for people not appreciating things they don't pay for, I somehow grew up appreciating food, particularly when I'm not hungry. Amazingly, I grew up with this appreciation even though my parents fed me. Admittedly, Dad would grouse if I went for too expensive of an item at a restaurant, but if you think any food bank or food stamp system just hands out lobster or the like you're dreaming. So cost transparency still matters, but cost transparency is compatible with entitlements. The issue is a bit trickier on the public housing front, but to keep things simple I'll just call for a positive right to homeless shelters (with rules of conduct) rather than public housing.

As for the cost issue. First, basic necessities are preventative measures. They can be a hell of a lot cheaper than the problems that come up later. Second, economics of scale can save money (http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/07/perfect-vs-the-.html). Note that France's universal health care system costs a lower percentage of their GDP than ours does. (Canada and England cost much less than ours, but there's more service trade-offs there.) Our share is among the highest in the developed world and still rapidly escalating. Admittedly, we could probably save some money by not giving life-saving emergency care to those that can't pay. Although for public health reasons everyone can agree on that does mean more money to the morgues.

Anyhow, the big problem with welfare states isn't people feeling entitled. Seniors are our most entitled group and they're not going around stealing apples from people. The problem with welfare states can be large populations of idle young men. Educated idle young men can be particularly dangerous as they can go revolutionary or terrorist. (Concession: the most recent Brit conspirators are an exception. They were doctors. Fortunately they proved to be pretty crappy terrorists). By making the basic necessities a non-life-or-death situation, fewer people are forced to accept any job they can find regardless of affronts to their health or dignity. However, I favor tying any welfare above the absolute poverty level to work. Earned Income Tax Credit, required attendance training programs, unemployment/loss of income insurance, what have you. The welfare reform bill of the 90s did have some good elements in that regard. However, the specifics are a policy issue and not a positive rights one.