http://tibettruth.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/the-un-concerned-sisterhood/

I don’t remember ruling out forcing vasectomies on, shall we say… overly reproductive men. That also seems like a viable solution; and almost as unnecessary and invasive a surgical procedure as we’re discussing.

Right, because a vasectomy is totally in the same ballpark as a third trimester abortion. Women have ID&Es on their lunchbreak! Just some lidocaine and a snip of the hemostats and ta-da! 26 weeks of pregnancy never even happened!

[Wasn't Matt banned?]

*sputters*

[and for the record, no I do not support forcible vasectomies either.]

No. Because “avoiding” a problem means the problem hasn’t occurred yet, and if it hasn’t occurred yet, you should try less draconian, but tried-and-true, strategies.

Only if the population explosion has *already* happened can you control reproduction, ethically. And it is still ethically wrong to abort wanted pregnancies, even then, *and* to place a disproportionate burden of pop.control on women. Last I checked, women cannot knock themselves up.

An iron clad policy of vasectomizing every man who has had two children would be both more merciful than forcing abortions (quite aside from the emotional impact of forced abortion, it is much easier to vasectomize a man than to sterilize a woman), and would bring enormous social pressures to bear on women that would prevent them from becoming pregnant again even if they did *nothing* legally to prevent it. Specifically, if a man is vasectomized and his wife gets pregnant… she will quietly get an abortion as soon as she finds out, without telling him, otherwise he will think she cheated on him.

Sure, some women might go through the male population as serial moms, dating men who have not had their quota of kids, getting pregnant, and thus having multiple children legally. But the whole *problem* with China is that women mostly do not have the freedom to do that. If women had the freedom to raise five kids by themselves, each with a different father, being freely sexual with any man they choose… Chinese women wouldn’t be aborting their baby girls or abandoning them in orphanages, and most likely, the majority of Chinese women wouldn’t be having more than 1 or 2 kids. When women have the freedom to make a life as a single mother with a minimum of stigma, with their children cared for, then women also have the freedom to choose not to be mothers at all, and a lot of women will take that choice if they can.

Now, morally I don’t like restricting men any better than I like restricting women, so in an ideal world, either you restrict neither and rely on incentives to get people to do what you want, or you restrict both. What makes *no* sense is restricting women but not men. The operation to vasectomize a man is easy, more reversible than tying a woman’s tubes, has fewer complications, is cheaper than long-term birth control, doesn’t cause the death of a wanted baby, doesn’t force major physical surgery or hormonal shifts on anyone, and once he’s vasectomized you can count on the sexism of the society and the patriarchal nature of it and male jealousy to keep the woman he’s partnered with from having more kids than he can father. Restricting women, but not men, is not based on a model of effective pop. control; it’s based on a model of punishing women for being able to have babies.

So here’s my opinion: when your population explosion is already running away with itself to a dangerous extent, *then* you may implement population control techniques, but you should do so in a way that seeks to be fair, egalitarian, safe for people, and effective, so prevention of pregnancy is *still* better than forced abortion. You may not implement pop. control techniques *before* the explosion happens… in the 1960′s everyone thought we were headed for a population explosion too, and then the second and third waves of feminism happened, and now American right-wingers whine about demographic winter and the coming extinction of the Europeans.