Dreaming of the 'good old days' - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Sometimes when I listen to right-wing supporters in the U.S. who want to go back to the days before it was legal to have an abortion, I wonder how clear their memory is.

 

I remember the doctors who offered illegal abortions and the women who were injured or even died at the hands of these quacks. I remember the old movies where Bing Crosby starred as a priest in charge of an orphanage filled with children, many of whom were given up for adoption because their families were already too big.

 

It’s hard to remember the days of families, particularly those of Roman Catholic adherents, when there might be a dozen kids in a family in the time before “the pill” prevented pregnancy and abortions were legal.

 

I remember even here in Canada when the late Henry Morgentaler established illegal abortion clinics, challenging the federal and provincial governments to repeal their abortion laws. As a result of his campaign (and the work of organizations such as the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League), the Supreme Court struck down the federal abortion law as unconstitutional in 1988, thereby decriminalizing the procedure.

 

I knew of a doctor who refused to give a prescription for the birth control pill to a couple getting married in the late 1960s because he wanted to be sure he wasn’t promoting premarital hanky-panky by not giving a prescription to the pill too long before the wedding.

 

The pill and permissible abortions, brought a much more open attitude to having sex;  something that men were always seeking and women resisted. We recently watched a humorous TV show set in the 1920s when a middle-aged woman got another woman to approach her husband-to-be to see if he expected to have sex with her after they were married. It was a strange conversation because the subject was sex but nobody would actually use the word.

 

In China, the government’s attempt to control the population by saying couples could only bear one child has worked. As that population reached the child-bearing age population results became evident: population decreased in 2023 by about two million people, more than twice as many as the previous year’s drop of 850,000.

 

At this rate, Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, estimates China’s share of the global population could decline from 22 per cent in 1980 to 11 per cent in 2050 and only four per cent in 2100.

 

It’s taken some time for the effects of the birth control pill and abortions to take effect elsewhere. World population continued to swell. The United Nations’ 2024 report projects the world population to be 8.1 billion in 2024, about 9.6 billion in 2050, and about 10.2 billion in 2100. These levels put a strain on food supply and on climate control.

 

Of course, right-wing advocates of removing birth control don’t worry about nonsense like climate change. They worry that a decline in white American population, plus an increase in immigration will mean white Americans no longer control their own government. The Republican Party, led by Donald Trump, promotes moves to ship recent immigrants, including those who have attained American citizenship, out of the country. Meanwhile, the drive to reduce abortions, and even limit birth control, will return American women of child-bearing age, into baby-bearing citizens.

 

I suspect this view of “the good old days” probably extends to Blacks having the vote. I’m old enough to remember that, even in the 1960s, Black people in the U.S. south found it hard to vote, often having to pass “literacy” tests that were so impossible, no white person could pass them if they were subjected to them. It was the days when Martin Luther King was leading protest marches to win equality for Blacks.

 

Recently, prompted by her inspiring speech at the Democratic National Convention, I pulled Michelle Obama’s autobiography Becoming off the shelf and I’ve been re-reading it. In it she talks about the hateful things that were said about her husband Barack when he successfully ran for President in 2008, and about Michelle as she campaigned for him. Thankfully, American voters were not deterred as Barack Obama was elected, as the first Black President, for two terms.

 

But Americans went abruptly from the first Black President to a vicious bigot when he was succeeded by Donald Trump. In the 2024 election, Trump is opposed by Kamala Harris, who is not only Black, but a woman!

 

The signs are that Harris is ahead, but as in the days of pre-Martin Luther King in the past, Republican politicians in many states are finding ways to make it hard for Blacks and likely Democratic voters to vote. Hopefully we won’t return to the bad old days.