Why Howard hates sole mothers and lesbians
BY LISA MACDONALD
When Prime Minister John Howard announced on August 2 that the federal government would move to allow states to outlaw single women's and lesbians' access to in vitro fertilisation (IVF), he was at great pains to emphasise that this was neither discrimination nor an attack on women's right to reproductive choice. Rather, he claimed, it was an assertion of "the fundamental right of a child within our society to have a reasonable expectation ... of the care and affection of both a mother and a father".
With these carefully chosen words Howard appealed to the widespread idea — that children are better off with two parents, even if this is not always possible — in order to undermine another widely supported idea: that women have a right not to be discriminated against.
The Howard government's family policy since it was elected in 1996 shows that his trumpeting of the rights of the child is utterly fake. If Howard and his colleagues were genuinely concerned about children's right to a healthy, happy upbringing, they would not have cut welfare and social services funding, or facilitated real wage cuts, or be privatising education and health care or undermining the Family Court. And they would have acknowledged governmental responsibility for the stolen generations of Aboriginal children.
Howard's new-found concern for children's rights is cover for his old concern: to roll back as rapidly as possible public acceptance of ideas and rights which undermine the dominance of the "married with children" form of family.
Public spending
To strengthen the nuclear family, Howard has a lot of work to do. Since the end of World War II, the marriage rate in Australia has been steadily decreasing. And although fewer people are getting married, there has been a steady increase in the number of divorces, most of them initiated by women.
A growing proportion of women are having fewer children, later in life, or are not having children at all, and they're doing this in order to spend less time at home, outside the labour market.
These trends, which are occurring in all developed countries, pose a growing problem for the capitalist class, which has always relied on the family to cover the bulk of the costs and labour involved in generating and regenerating the work force. With more women having to spend more time in waged work because they do not live in a nuclear family, there is more pressure on the state to provide many of the services that women have traditionally provided unpaid at home (child-care, aged care, health care and so on).
Since more public spending on social services means less on subsidising corporate profits, a major plank in the neo-liberal economic program being implemented around the world today is to drastically reduce spending on public services and push as much as possible of that service provision onto individuals within the "private" domain of the family home. But after decades of an expanding welfare system, moves to erode it meet resistance, even if only at the ballot box.
Young people quite rightly object to being forced to live with their parents beyond the age of 16 simply because there are no jobs. Grandparents object to being rendered unpaid carers of yet another generation because their children can't get community care for their children. Women object to having to leave the work force because they can no longer get good quality care for their aged or disabled relatives.
Certainly, the government can take initiatives like Howard's "national families strategy", announced in June 1999, which allocates $16.5 million to relationship support services, including a trial of marriage preparation courses for 2000 engaged couples. But such measures are just tinkering around the edges; they're constantly undermined by women's unwillingness to give up the real gains — legal, economic and social — that they have made over the last 30 years.
Those gains include majority acceptance of the idea that women are entitled to equality at home and at work, so Howard and Co. cannot insist that women return to economic dependence, physical isolation and reproductive slavery without paying a big political price. First they have to build support for traditional gender roles and relations.
The government is approaching this task from a number of angles.
It is using the "men's rights" movement as a battering ram against feminist ideas: last September, it approved two $50,000 grants over two years to the Lone Fathers Association to develop a peak body to advocate for "fathers' rights". At the same time, it is targeting more vulnerable women for legislative and economic attack: migrants, sole mothers, lesbians, women on welfare, etc.
Sole mothers
At the top of Howard's target list are sole mothers. The government's punitive approach to women with dependent children who leave their marriage has become very clear. Over the last 18 months it has undermined the Family Court, encouraged the questioning of no-fault divorce, reduced maintenance payments, cut funding to legal aid, lowered the children's age cut-off point for the sole parent pension, eroded after-school and vacation child-care services, and, just last week, decided to inflict "mutual obligation" conditions on all recipients of sole parent payments.
Howard is focusing on sole mothers because they are living proof that marriage need not be "'til death us do part", that women can survive and raise children without a husband, and that children can grow into capable and well-adjusted adults with just one parent.
As well as challenging capitalist family ideology, sole mothers cost the state money that it would rather not spend on the working class. Furthermore, the right of sole mothers to receive welfare assistance is a public acknowledgment that society should take some responsibility for child rearing, an acknowledgment that the rulers want reversed.
The fact that around one marriage in three ends in divorce, and therefore that sole parenthood is experienced by a significant proportion of people at some time, means that governments have to be careful about how they attack sole parents. When the Howard government withdrew its $50,000 annual grant to the National Council for Single Women and their Children last September, for example, public protest forced it to reinstate the funding almost immediately.
So, rather than launch a direct attack on sole mothers, Howard invokes children's "right" to be brought up by a couple. It sounds so reasonable: it is obviously more difficult — financially, physically and emotionally — for one adult rather than two to raise a child. It's a question of having someone to share the responsibility and workload.
But in your run-of-the-mill two-parent family, the load is far from being shared equally. One of the two parents — the mother — shoulders most of the burden.
It's not really about the number of parents. If it were, why stop at two? Why not have three parents, or five? The more parents, the more love, care and financial support the child/ren would receive. But collective parenting is absolutely not part of Howard's agenda.
Gender roles
The assertion of children's "right" to have two parents is really about children being raised within heterosexual marriages that provide them with unambiguous gender role models and expectations.
Boys learn that men's mission in life is to work as hard as possible for the boss to provide as well as possible for their economic dependents (wife and children). Girls learn that women's double shift of waged work and unpaid cooking, cleaning, nursing and counselling is the price of romantic love and motherhood. And they all learn to be heterosexual and to want to get married and raise children of their own.
Divorce, sole parenting and especially homosexual relationships are anathema to this self-perpetuating system of social conformity and control.
And it's not just the employers who benefit from the gender-divided family. Men, too, have a vested interest in the "married with children" set-up: it provides them with cheap housekeeping, sexual services and child-care.
So, when the men's rights activists squeal, "If lesbians and unmarried women are allowed to have babies whenever they want, fathers will become irrelevant and men will lose their role in society", they are picking up on a truth: disconnecting conception and child-rearing from marriage does undermine the main pillar of men's privileged position vis-a-vis women in capitalist society.
Howard's intention to exclude lesbians from access to fertility services is shaped by the same aims: to exclude all unmarried women from the possibility of rearing children and to actively discourage all social relations that undermine the ideology and practice of nuclear family life.
The homophobic argument that children need a male and a female parent makes sense only in a society which requires conformity to rigidly defined different norms of behaviour for each sex. Without such norms, the traditional family could not function.
No conscience vote
Whether or not the government gets this particular change to the Sex Discrimination Act through parliament, we can be sure that it won't be the last attempt to weaken laws that protect women's right to economic and social equality.
At this point in the neo-liberal backlash, lesbians and sole mothers are the softest targets. But once they've been dealt with, full-time working mothers, women who return to work too soon after the birth of a child, women who refuse to give up their jobs to look after sick relatives, all will be in the conservatives' gun sights.
How successful they are at picking us off will depend in part on the response of the feminist, gay and lesbian, and workers' movements to this attack. The Sex Discrimination Act may not be the strongest of safeguards against gender discrimination (its effectiveness being largely dependent on the willingness and ability of women's agencies and trade unions to enforce it), but as a partial barrier to the bosses' and governments' efforts to push women back into domestic slavery, it must be defended against all attacks.
Women's reproductive rights are just that: rights to be exercised by individual women according to their own needs and desires. They are not matters of personal conscience for others. The opposition parties must not allow a conscience vote on this issue: they must stop Howard's anti-feminist, anti-women, anti-choice vision from becoming law.