annie wrote:
The government has no place saying that it's a woman's obligation to bear children.
In the interest of healthy debate, I would like to know why they do not. After all, the government is given the right to say it is a man's obligation to enter the armed forces, they are given the right to say it is a person's obligation to sell or even give them their property, they are given the right to dictate a citizen's obligations left and right...jury duty, taxes, public service, civil service draft, etc. All of these are, at least supposedly, to ensure the success of the community, whether it be a town, city, county, prefecture, parish, state, province, or country. If a threat to the well-being of a community, in this case, the country, is perceived from the low birth rate, then the government, by the powers they are given, have every right to encourage women to increase the birth rate. Especially as it is simply words at the moment, rather than drafting women to be mothers, or banning birth control, or foribdding abortions, or any legislative powers they could legally take. It is precisely a government's place to say what a person's place is, to ensure the healthy continuation of the community. That is the function of government.
This is not to suggest I agree with the solution being proposed. Living in Japan as I do, I firmly believe that a smaller population is absolutely necessary to Japan's continuation as a viable community. I see the pressures of overpopulation building while the "lubrication" of tradition, which in the past helped alleviate the stress and pressure of living in overcrowded and overpopulated conditions, is slowly wearing thin and fading away. I predict a vast spike in the crime rate, especially violent crime, in 20-30 years if the population does not decrease by a noticable amount. I think the government should be concentrating on making a diminishing population more viable. But my opinion does not change the government's function nor its powers.
Finally, I would like to comment on the statement made referring to women as baby making machines. It was a less than flattering comment, but it is true - technically, the function of a woman's body is to make a baby. So is a man's body; we just do it differently. While his phrasing was insensitive to the emotions involved, suggesting that a woman should ONLY have babies (which I am certain that, as a politician, he would never intentionally state), it should be obvious to anyone that he was simply trying to emphasize that the onus was on the women to make the choice. If you have a hundred women and one man, you can technically have a hundred babies in nine months, assuming that all parties are willing. If you have a hundred men and one woman, you will have only one baby (barring twins) in nine months. With 100 women and 100 men, if more women are willing to have children, more children will be had. If more men are willing to have children, there will still be only as many as there are willing women. Ultimately, control of the population lies in the hands, collectively, of the women of a community. Fortunately, we live in a society, mostly, that is willing to leave the control in the hands of the women. As few as one or two centuries ago, that might not have been true.
Of course, this means that as women seek more and more to find fulfilment outside of a role as a wife and/or mother (which I certainly have no objection to), the population will slowly start to decrease, since having a child is, by nature, more inconvenient to and interferes more with the life of a woman than that of a man. A man can choose to accept the inconvenience of a 9 month pregnancy and caring for a child, but nature does not force this upon him in the same fashion it does upon a woman. So naturally a woman who has chosen a career is far less likely to be willing to have children, at least initially, than one who has chosen a role solely as a mother, as once was most common in Japan. And so we're back at the problem again, and no simple solution is evident, so the government is likely to continue shooting wildly to try to fix it, and will probably often make further such gaffes in how they try to encourage solutions to the problem.
Sean
