SexCult: Population Control and Self-Censorship

Once upon a time I was a pop culture columnist for a family-friendly newspaper at which my comic flare for sexual innuendo went over like steak tartare at a vegan buffet. My G-rated subjects didn’t call for a lot of blue humor anyway, but once in a while I’d come up with wording I was surprised to find was deemed just a tick too racy, like the time I was told that using “crotch rocket” to describe Dr. House’s motorcycle probably wouldn’t fly.

After a while I started being hyper-aware of potentially problematic terms or gags and removing them myself and shared this new habit with an editor friend. “Don’t start self-censoring,” he said, warning that not only is it uncool to start screwing with your original voice, but also that I might end up censoring things that would fly. If you don’t give people a chance to get offended you never find out that they might not be.

That advice came back to me when I read a recent New York Times story about the Center for Biological diversity breaking the environmental community’s silence on population control and also about environmental organizations shying away from that subject because they’re “wary of the bruising politics of reproductive health.” Jose Miguel of the United Nations Population Fund says in the piece that “We see reluctance and fear to deal with this issue,” and reporter Mireya Navarro writes that “groups contacted for this article generally declined to discuss the issue or did not return calls.”

With the world having just hailed it’s seven billionth person, it can’t be news to anyone that there’s a mad amount of people in the world, and in fact, it seems like all seven billion of them are all at the whatever traffic light I’m stuck at. Whether people want to discuss birth control because it will ease the burden on Mother Earth or because they won’t fit into their prom dress if they get pregnant, it doesn’t really matter to me, as long as they feel free to talk. Contraception isn’t a thing that should be kept under wraps. Penises are.

Navarro writes that “the Center for Biological diversity is breaking the taboo,” with things like giving out condoms packaged that read “Wrap with care, save a polar bear.” On the other hand, she quotes Carl Pope of the Sierra Club on reasons for “keeping a low profile on the issue”.

“Look at Planned Parenthood,” he said; recalling the group’s bruising battle with Republican lawmakers over federal financing last spring. “There’s a huge atmosphere of intimidation. The moment you say ‘family planning,’ immediately somebody pulls out abortion.”

So? That’s an opportunity to open a conversation, not close it, i.e., yes, look at what happened to Planned Parenthood and what a disgrace it was for powerful people to treat women’s health care like a criminal enterprise. It’s also an opportunity to remind people that abortion isn’t family planning but it’s an important option to have when family planning fails, isn’t used, isn’t taught, isn’t available or is out of financial reach.

That last one should be helped by the Department of Health and Human Services’ decision making it mandatory for health insurance plans to cover birth control as of next August. No matter how healthy and helpful, though, some people are naturally against it. Presidential hopeful (well, he thinks he is) Rick Santorum recently vowed to fight federally funded contraception saying, “that no other president had previously discussed ‘the dangers of contraception’ and that ‘sex is supposed to be within marriage’ and ‘special’”.

I do not believe in the god of Christians, but if Rick Santorum ever becomes Our Guide to the World of Sex, I will start praying to anyone who’ll listen.

And if you think a god graced human beings with the intelligence to control their own fertility — the only species I know of that can — why wouldn’t that god want us to use it? That would be like giving someone a high-end flatscreen HDTV with free cable for life and come over only to find they never hooked it up and prefer to entertain themselves by knocking over ant hills in the backyard. Hurt and insulted wouldn’t begin to cover it.

I know some environmental organizations might worry about offending donors with potentially controversial subject matter. The NY Times story says reasons population control has become taboo since the 70’s (when I remember it being a much-discussed issue) include “China’s coercive one-child policy and a rise in social conservatism in the United States, combined with the country’s aversion to anything perceived as restricting individual freedoms, be it the right to bear arms or children.”

Seriously. Thinking that population control be considered as an environmental issue is the same mandating a child-per-family limit is not a conclusion a rational person would leap to that quickly. I know we are sadly getting used to irrationality, but by self-censoring on social issues that are appropriate to at least discuss we don’t give the rational people a chance to hear, deliberate and decide about. If extremists can get us to silence ourselves, we might as well dig up some Wite-Out and take it to the first amendment, because the fight is already over.

If you’re too young to remember what Wite-Out, it’s a term from back in the days of newspapers. It means “delete.”