A Neglected Down-Side of ’Sixties Feminism
Civitas, 16 March 2010
To mark the centenary of International Women’s Day, BBC Channel 4 is currently broadcasting a series about women made by feminist film-maker Vanessa Engle. The instalment shown yesterday was designed to expose how badly done by, in the opinion of Engle, are those women who, upon becoming mothers, opt to stay-at-home to care for their young off-spring and their bread-winning spouses.
Obsessively interrogating increasingly baffled couples about ever more banal details concerning their domestic arrangements, such as which of them chose the detergent used in their household, Engle only succeeded in revealing not only her crude Philistinism, but also her total lack of imagination as a serious film-maker.
Once again, she showed just why sixties feminism acquired the bad name it rapidly acquired among all people of both sexes with a grain of common sense.
I will illustrate what I mean by drawing attention to one commission and one omission on Engle’s part.
Engle’s commission was the Philistinism that she revealed by her unfeigned incomprehension, when interviewing an Oxford educated mother, who had chosen to give up a promising career to stay at home to raise her children.
‘What was the point of your degree?’ she asked in total bemusement.
In reply, the un-phased interviewee rightly observed that what her education had equipped her to do was to pass on its benefits to her own children, a non-vocational benefit that was wholly lost on Engle.
Much more important is a massive omission of which Engle’s documentary series is guilty. So far as she is concerned, as are kindred spirits like BBC Radio 4 Women’s Hour presenter Jennie Murray, the real continuing crime against women is the unequally large amount of domestic work and housework that falls upon their shoulders by comparison with what falls upon those of men. As Jennie Murray puts it:
‘The really serious stuff is how we balance relationships between men and women.
‘Until we cease to see housework and childcare as women’s work we won’t have true equality. It has to be seen as family work. Until then, employers won’t take women as seriously as men. That’s where the push has to be made.’
That is an opinion that yesterday’s programme showed Engle to share, although she has avowed it explictly elsewhere.
But the assumption that, to enjoy gender equity, men and women have to enjoy complete symmetry in terms of their careers and domestic labour completely overlooks the significance of the gender asymmetry that is cast upon them by biology.
Women have only so many years when they can bear children without significant risk to their health and to that of their progeny.
One major consequence of sixties feminism has been to encourage women to postpone having children until later and later, so that they can first establish their careers. One consequence of their postponing child-bearing has been their ever greater recourse to the use of IVF. This is a method of conception that poses ever greater risk to children and mothers alike the older women are when they receive that form of treatment.
Totally unexplored by the likes of Engle and Jennie Murray has been the human costs — to mothers, children, and tax payer — of the ever greater recourse that women make to IVF as result of feminism having persuaded them of the desirability, if not their right, of being able to combine parenthood and a career, just like men.
Some of that cost has been revealed by a just-published report commissioned by the Twins and Multiple Births Association. Aside from all considerations of increased medical risk, it found that having to raise twins or triplets puts a massive strain upon couples, especially those who already have had one child. It increases their risk of divorce by 17 per cent.
But the downside of multiple births brought about by IVF goes well beyond that. As has been observed:
‘Multiple births… are far more dangerous both to fetuses and mothers. Fetuses may not survive the pregnancy, and if they do, their chances of being born prematurely, with all the attendant risks and costs, are significantly higher than with other births… These health problems may affect premature offspring throughout their lifespans. Multiple births also endanger the mother herself, who stands a much greater chance of suffering complications during birth.’
In 1979, only one in 100 births in the UK was of a twin or triplet. Now, that figure is one in 65 births, an increase entirely due to IVF.
One prime reason ever more children are being born in the UK as a result of IVF is the ever later age that women are waiting until before they try to have children, and the ever greater difficulty they experience in conceiving naturally the older they get.
Because of the known ever greater medical risk to both mothers and children of births of late conceptions, the NHS guidelines on fertility treatment set a cut-of point for free IVF treatment at 39 years, and they strictly limit the number of embryos they implant at any one time to minimise the risk of multiple births.
That policy has led British women over that age and desirous of fertility treatment to seek it abroad privately, where it is both much cheaper and much more reliant on multiple implants to increase success rates, resulting in a much greater incidence of twins and triplets than occurs as a result of such treatment in the UK.
As many as 590 British women seek IVF treatment abroad each year of whom, it has been estimated by Dr Francoise Shenfield of University College Hospital London, more than 60 per cent were aged over 40 at the time of their treatment.
According to another research study, 1 in 4 British women who had had a multiple birth as a result of fertility treatment had received that treatment abroad.
The ultimate cause women today postpone having children until they need IVF treatment has been modern feminism which has made women feel they have a right to everything in life that men do: careers and children.
Mother Nature is not an equal opportunities employer, and that has nothing to do with its having implanted in women a gene that makes them want to do the washing up. There is an important salutary lesson contained in the grim statistics given above that feminists would do well to reflect on before conducting witch-hunts about which spouse does it.
Women cannot have it all without damaging side effects upon innocent third parties.
Why does Engle not choose to dwell on this negative consequence of feminism?
Otherwise, what was the point of her Oxford degree, I feel like asking?