Pronatalism is its own belief system

Lately I've been spending some of my spare time talking to fundamentalists about gay rights. I'm really struggling to understand, because I just don't get how a committed and respectful sexual relationship between two people can be a threat to society. And, given what I know of Christ and his life, I really don't understand how anyone could call this attitude towards gay people a Christian belief.

Over the last couple of weeks, with the help of a presentation from Larry Nelson about the stigma associated with early and unexpected infertility, I've realized that this set of beliefs is actually a belief system in its own right, and that it has a name: Pronatalism.

Here's how Wikipedia currently defines pronatalism (or, as they call it, natalism):

Natalism (also called pronatalism or the pro-birth position) is a belief that promotes human reproduction. The term is taken from the Latin adjective form for "birth", natalis. Natalism promotes child-bearing and glories parenthood. It typically advocates policies such as limiting access to abortion and contraception, as well as creating financial and social incentives for the population to reproduce.

I've always had trouble with the position of the Catholic Church (my faith of origin - I became a Quaker by convincement in my late 20's) on women's rights, as manifested by various pronatalist stances on contraception and abortion, as well as others.

What's also interesting is what wikipedia has to say about nativism, which brings in a lot of attitudes against immigration.

So, I've come to the following conclusions:

1. Stigma against homosexuality is part of a larger belief system that stigmatizes single women, couples who choose not to have children (the Childless by Choice community), and women who practice contraception or who choose to have abortions rather than carrying a child to term.
2. Pronatalist beliefs made historical sense in small communities who needed to maintain their identity and their population numbers in order to persist. Moreover, in a social evolutionary sense, this belief system was probably associated with group persistence, and so has become overrepresented.
3. Pronatalism makes little sense in a world with 8 billion people and counting, where overpopulation and resource overutilization and climate change are posing enormous risks and challenges to peace now and in the future.
4. Pronatalism is a strongly felt moral position. But it is not a Christian position (or a Moslem position, or a Jewish position). It is its own belief system.

Oddly enough, this is also helping me to feel a lot more comfortable calling myself a Christian.

Interdisciplinarity I

Recently, I attended a workshop on "Intersectionality in Women's Health Research" at Simon Fraser University. It was terrifically stimulating for me, and part of that stimulation is a reframing of my entire way of being in the world.

In some ways, intersectionality is a fancy name for a simple concept. But it has important connotations and context that seem very powerful. And it seems important for me to figure out exactly what I mean by that, why it is so exciting and stimulating, and where I can go from here.

Intersectionality arose as a way of describing the experiences of black women activists, who found that their experiences and challenges were not being met within the women's movement, nor within black activist groups. They describe being dually penalized, and describe the ways in which both marginal (I use it in the statistical sense) movements (women, black) failed to include them and left them feeling that they had no political options that spoke to their needs. So, fundamentally, intersectionality has been a concept that allows people in multiply-marginalized roles to articulate their unmet needs, and to take political action to have those needs included in the wider discourse.

What was exciting for me?

• Complexity as a legitimate topic
• Transdisciplinarity embraced as a powerful research paradigm - a way across/outside of the research silo model of academic organization
• A model for transdisciplinary work that is built on mutual respect and a delight in the ways in which each contributor's expertise can inform the collective understanding
• Resonance with my mathematical modelling history, particularly an intriguing book I read while working for Carl Walters as an undergraduate student in 1985. The book was a set theoretical framework for understanding how natural systems work, and included some very interesting ideas about actors in a complex system, with ways to address features of each actor, and a relation (like a filter) that described how each actor was seen by other actors in the system. So, our observation process will recognize some (but not all) aspects of A and B, but A and B may see one another in entirely different ways. The theory was helpful to me in that it suggested ways in which apparent random processes might actually be driven by incomplete observation processes.
• Where I then went with this is to think about identity- self-identity, identity by others, feedback from others, feedback from groups, systemic recognition (and failure to recognize) identities, and the role of activism and policy work in retuning systemic understanding of individuals to redress implicit and explicit processes by which individuals are seen and categorized.
• Out of this has come some interesting ideas about integrity, the costs of not having integrity, and the ways in which living in a congruent environment facilitates integrity, while living in a fragmented environment makes it much harder.
  
• My math-geek self was also challenged by the fact that both of the introductory speakers (Rita Dhamoon, Ange-Marie Hancock) were struggling to find a representation to visualize what they were describing.

One opening that I believe this may represent is for those of us who find our expertise is excluded from acceptable discourse because we are positioned within biomedicine. Just as class may act through gender, and gender may act through class (Gita Sen, public evening lecture), both may act through physiological mechanisms. If you understand those mechanisms, you can ask more interesting questions, and ask them in ways that are enriching and helpful for policy.

I would like to write more fully on many of these topics, but this is a useful start.