David’s Reviews > Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility > Status Update

'Subsidising childbirth does not work as a pro-natal measure because governments can seldom afford to do it at a high enough level to attract any but the unemployed and nobody wants the children of the unemployed. Most people do not refuse to go home and bear children because there is no money in it, but because there is little satisfaction in it, and governments cannot provide that.'

When Greer's good, she's great.

It is indeed a sinister astigmatism that can affect men of science so that looking hard at suffering mankind they see not the frustration of genetic potential but deficiency in the genetic potential itself.

Everybody who has ever lived under the yoke of Family has at some time longed to escape from it: the most passionate hatreds have been hatched within it as well as the most enduring love. But Family is a slow-growing thing, its roots sunk in a time beyond the individual's remembrance. Where the doctrine of instang gratification is preached it must wither.

The killing of a new-born child is deeply repugnant to modern sensibility, or is thought to be. We assume that we have this reverence for human life because our moral sensibility is more elevated, whereas we simply lack the concept of a collective good to be served by our difficult choices in such matters.

The contraceptive pill is available in Italy only as a treatment for menstrual disorders, and produced by a firm in which the Vatican is a major shareholder; those with wit to invent the right story for the doctors may use it as a contraceptive. It is probable that the function of the stem pessary was just as open a secret.

The chip on Greer's shoulder is proving that non-Western societies didn't languish in an anti-scientific vacuum when it came to fertility and motherhood. Practices survive because they came with their own benefits, regardless of whether the receivers could explain them. Lindy. Overcorrects — "the west only has disembedded scientific rationality, the rest embedded superstitions that simply wórk".

The rich Caucasians of the developed world are the most mobile people ever known on earth; we have already given more than we shall ever get in the way of exterminating disease. Whether it is half-treated in the American ghetto or untreated as among the Maria Gonds, gonorrhoea has been an agent of genocide.