And both groups, it is believed, are excellent candidates for social engineering. And meanwhile call their young male counterparts barbarians, whether they live in the US inner city or Robert Kaplan's African anarchy. Lock the boys and men in prison. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for people having access to safe, voluntary, and affordable birth control and abortion services as part of, not a substitute for, comprehensive health services.
Reproductive rights are a vital part of a human rights agenda.
I also support many of the reforms outlined at Cairo, though most are yet to be realized. But I believe that once and for all support for reproductive rights needs to be divorced from the neo-Malthusian agenda, which not only distorts the delivery of family planning services, but wider social policies. Except for the women's movement, the American left has remained much too silent on this issue. On Columbus Day in 1992 progressives here and in Latin America joined together to say that 500 years of colonialism and imperialism were enough. This year 'Day of 6 Billion' would be a good date to strip Malthus of all his trendy trappings and put him back in his grave where he belongs.