Hekmati's experience is typical of young Iranians, who are finding themselves increasingly priced out of the marriage market. During the tenure of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, real estate prices have soared across the country, but especially in Tehran, where they have risen as much as 150%. Economists have blamed the spike on Ahmadinejad's disastrous economic policies. The President flooded the economy with capital through a loan scheme, cut interest rates 2% and embarked on huge state construction projects that drove up the price of building materials. Those changes prompted many investors to move out of the stock market and the banking system and into real estate, which was considered a safer bet. Apartment prices in the capital more than doubled between 2006 and 2008. (See pictures of health care in Iran.)
The real estate boom was a disaster for middle-income Iranians, particularly young men seeking marriage partners. And many of those who have married and moved in with in-laws are finding that inflation is eating away at their savings, meaning it will take years, rather than months, to get their own place. The resulting strains are breaking up existing marriages - this past winter, local media reported that a leading cause of Iran's high divorce rate is the husband's inability to establish an independent household. Many others are concluding that marriage is best avoided altogether. (See the Top 10 Ahmadinejad-isms.)
Ahmadinejad's government response to the crisis included a plan, unveiled in November 2008 by the National Youth Organization, called "semi-independent marriage." It proposed that young people who cannot afford to marry and move into their own place legally marry but continue living apart in their parents' homes. The announcement prompted swift outrage. Online news sites ran stories in which women angrily denounced the scheme, arguing that it afforded men a legal and pious route to easy sex while offering women nothing by way of security or social respect. The government hastily dropped the plan.
As Iranians head to the polls on Friday, Ahmadinejad faces the prospect that the very same broad discontent with the economy that propelled him to victory in 2005 could now help unseat him. Samira, a 27-year-old who works in advertising, recently became engaged and is among the millions of young Iranians who are eyeing the candidates through the lens of their own marital concerns. "Ahmadinejad promised he would bring housing prices down, but that didn't happen at all," she says. If left to their own salaries, she explains, she and her fiancÉ will never be able to afford their own place. That's a key reason they're voting for Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leading reformist candidate, who has made the economy the center of his platform. Like many young Iranians, they hope a new President will make marriage a possibility once more.
It's striking how obvious the logic of what I call Affordable Family Formation is to Iranians, while the vast majority of social analysts in the U.S. remain oblivious to the obvious.
Different social norms mask the situation somewhat in the U.S. Here, high housing prices tend to discourage child-bearing merely among the prudent but not among the imprudent (as satirized in the opening scene of "Idiocracy.") As I reported in VDARE.com: "From 2005 to 2007, the number of babies born in the United States to married women declined 0.3 percent. In contrast, the number born to unmarried women grew 12.3 percent."
P.S. Obviousl
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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52 comments:
Another potential issue concerning AFF in Muslim socities is the Bride Price, the amount you have to pay to the bride's family for permission to marry. This institution arises from the chronic lack of marriageable women in Muslim countries due to polygamy.
I wonder if there has been any growth in the rate of polygamy in Iran due to its increased Islamization, and if so, if the bride price has risen.
BTW, I have read that in China the bride price has risen. The lack of marriageable women there, of course, is due not to polygamy, but to the ramifications of the one-child policy, which had many baby girls aborted. Could China too have an AFF crisis?
No wonder Iran's birthrate has fallen like a rock.
Philip Longman of the New America Foundation explains that, "Under the grip of a militant, Islamic clerisy, Iran has a current fertility rate of under 1.9 children per woman, which is lower than the United States."
http://media.longnow.org/seminars/salt-0200408-longman/salt-0200408-longman.pdf
see graph on page 18
"Economists have blamed the spike on Ahmadinejad's disastrous economic policies. The President flooded the economy with capital through a loan scheme, cut interest rates 2% and embarked on huge state construction projects that drove up the price of building materials."
Sounds like another country...
No thanks. We're Americans. We have rights. We'll just fornicate, masturbate, abort, drown our sorrows, etc. etc., thank you very much.
"It's striking how obvious the logic of what I call Affordable Family Formation is to Iranians..."
It's also striking how you censored my comment when I brought up your Affordable Family Formation in a certain country during the evilestest time in the world.
There is no such thing as a bride price as described above. The dowry in islamic societies does not go to the family-it goes to the wife herself who keeps it for herself in the event of a divorce.
Polygamy is practiced by very few Muslim men, and there is no shortage of marriageable women because females always naturally outnumber men in pretty much every country in the world except China and some parts of India where female fetuses are aborted.
Bride price or dowry is given to the girls family in China and some societies in Africa.
Having said that, dowries do discourage marriage in a lot of muslim countries because lots of men cannot afford the required dowry amount the women demand. As a result, there are a lot of unmarried wealthy and middle class women in -saudi Arabia for example- because no one can afford to marry them. To get around this problem, Saudi men are marrying non-Saudi arab women from countries such as Egypt since their dowry requirements are less.
There are three things that are the cause for late marriage and the resulting low fertility rate in Iran and many Arab countries:
1. The dowry that urban high and middle income women demand
2. High cost of housing. A man is expected to have a fully furnished home for his wife BEFORE he can marry her.
3. Very high wedding expenses (believe it or not) because any self-respecting couple have to have a large and lavish weddings to include members of their typically large extended families.
Steve, are you not forgetting something?
Polygamy!
Which affects the "price" of available women by allowing a few powerful men to collect most of the women. For example, Mohammed bin Laden, Osama's father, had 22 wives. He'd get tired of one, divorce her (by saying it three times) and give her (after she'd borne him at least one kid) to a subordinate higher or lower in the food chain based on how well she'd pleased him.
Thus the subordinate had the discarded sex toy of the great man, and the great man's spawn who he both hated and feared. This happened to bin Laden at age 9, it's a recipe for "Big Man or Die" syndrome, no wonder Muslim nations produce Big Men by the truckload but relatively few Sam Waltons (patient empire builders who work cooperatively).
Logman is incorrect, last time I checked Iranian TFR was 1.7, substantially lower, according to the CIA World Fact Book.
Anon is also incorrect, polygamy is indeed quite common in Muslim populations, fully 33% of men in the Arabian peninsula are estimated to be outside hope of marriage due to polygamy, and the hierarchical, tribal, layered wealth based on birth and control of armed tribesman guarantees polygamy flourishes. Polygamy is a big issue in Britain, where it's increasingly common among Muslims and eligible for Welfare. Something the BNP made an issue of in the election where they won two MEP seats.
But Steve the real issue in Iran is not what the people want but who assembles the biggest tribe and faction related militia network. Khameni has been the power behind the throne since Khomeni's death, Rafsanjani hopes to challenge him, but Ahmadinejad has the continued support of the rural poor who get massive subsidies to survive.
In pure power-patronage terms, Ahmadinejad's play, take from the urban middle classes to give to the more numerous rural poor (or rural origin urban poor) seems a winner demographically and has been successfully replicated by Chavez and Morales. The Middle class in any case makes poor street fighters and for most nations outside the Western sphere politics is settled on the street and through violence.
Christopher said...
No thanks. We're Americans. We have rights. We'll just fornicate, masturbate, abort, drown our sorrows, etc. etc., thank you very much.
And shoot our tyrannical leaders. No, wait, that was Romania in 1989.
You'd think the Ayatollahs would have remembered that something similar happened in the 1970s under the Shah, bringing them to power. The Shah, following the welfare and Keynesian policies his American advisers told him, blew billions on a high-tax Social Security-type retirement system run on Ross Perot's computers, a vast Autobahn-type highway system, other social welfare goodies, and a state-of-the-art military equipped with American arms (which would have defeated Iraq, except Reagan-Bush-Rumsfeld switched to backing Saddam).
The centralization and social upheaval made an opening for Ayatollah Khomeini, whose base was the middle class that paid the bills and saw its influence over local power structures taken over by the Shah's bureaucrats.
When the Ayatollah Khomeini took over in 1979, they dumped the Shah's anti-natalist policy and encouraged a high birth rate, especially to replace the hundreds of thousands killed in the Iran-Iraq War. But according to an Iranian immigrant to the U.S. I knew a decade ago, around 1989 the policy was reversed and the regime instituted what was called a "One Is Best" policy to discourage births.
This article confirms that Iran has had an anti-natalist policy for 20 years: http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update4ss_printable.htm
No thanks. We're Americans. We have rights. We'll just fornicate, masturbate, abort, drown our sorrows, etc. etc., thank you very much.
This is correct. Americans don't even date any more. They hang out in large packs and exchange genital handshakes. I weep for my daughter.
I'm surprised you haven't noted your AFF theory in connection with President Obama's hard line on Israeli settlements in the West Bank. I assume the primary need for such settlements is family formation in otherwise land scarce Israel. If that is correct, Obama's hard line effectively puts Israel on the road to slow demographic extinction.
What's the Muslim position on abortion? I assume it is "pro life," correct?
Isn't our Half Blood Prince rumored to be a bit weak on women's "right to choose"?
Iranians don't masturbate? Maybe that's why they are building all those missiles.
polygamy is indeed quite common in Muslim populations, fully 33% of men in the Arabian peninsula a
LOL! The Arabian Peninsula is a small fraction of the global Muslim population. What goes on there is not a reflection of Muslim values, rather it is a reflection of Arabian Peninsula values when financed by massive oil profits.
Kudos to the Iranian mullahs for keeping their country's birthrate low!
The chances of any American publication's reporting on Iran being factual are exactly zero. Iran -> bad. That's how far any reasoning at Time would go.
According to the Wikipedia, in 2008 Iran's birth rate was 16.89, its death rate was 5.69 and its population growth rate was 0.792%.
Generally, reporting from a foreign country gives the view of people like the reporter -- well-educated urbanites. So, don't necessarily take this article as representative of broad opinion within Iran.
Still, it's noteworthy how much more lucid about the economic facts of life this article from Iran is than the vast majority of American writing that touches on similar topics.
Does anybody know what percentage of all marriages in Iran are polygamous? I would guess it's down in the single digits (and practically zero for the kind of well-educated urbanites featured in this article), but I can't find a source.
Polygamy is extremely expensive in a society in the Jealousy Belt where husbands want to guard access to their wives because they invest a lot in their children. In tropical "female farming" cultures, where women do most of the work, polygamy is cheaper and thus more common.
"The President flooded the economy with capital through a loan scheme, cut interest rates 2% and embarked on huge state construction projects that drove up the price of building materials. Those changes prompted many investors to move out of the stock market and the banking system and into real estate, which was considered a safer bet."
I'v seen this peculiar market distortion somewhere else, mmmm....lemme think about it...
"According to the Wikipedia, in 2008 Iran's birth rate was 16.89, its death rate was 5.69 and its population growth rate was 0.792%."
Yeah, what is confusing is birthrate vs. fertility rate.
Birthrate is usually per thousand women in a given year. Fertility is total children per woman.
20-30 years after a big baby boom, there are lots of women of childbearing age, yet not many elderly. That is why there are more births than deaths. However if the current fertility rate continues, in 30-50 years the trend will reverse as the large birth cohort dies off and a smaller later birth cohort has few children.
"Isn't our Half Blood Prince rumored to be a bit weak on women's "right to choose"?"
Not Obama.
He was the only Senator to speak against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. It requires a baby to be given medical attention if it is born alive even if it was aborted. Mostly applies to very late term abortions. A nurse in an Illinois hospital was shocked to find a tiny premie baby in the dirty linen closet left to die.
Her name was Jill Stanek. She has a blog.
jillstanek.com
And the downside to this is what? Any policy that lowers the fertility rate of a low IQ country is a good thing. You can count on that.
Hey, another way that Iran's like New Jersey!
An AP article from last year says polygamy is "rare" in Iran.
Currently, a man has to get his first wife's permission to marry a second wife. How often is THAT gonna happen?! ;-)
Polygamy bill provokes controversy in Iran.
A bill that would allow men in Iran to take additional wives without the consent of their first wife has generated so much controversy that parliament had to postpone a vote for more debate.
Polygamy is not practiced in mainstream Iranian society, but the government of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has pursued amendments to a landmark women's rights bill to allow multiple marriages, as it seeks to enshrine elements of Islamic law into the country's legal system.
The Family Protection Bill was drawn up by the judiciary with the intention of allowing women to serve as judges for the first time since the 1979 Islamic revolution. As initially drawn up, it would also impose prison sentences for men who marry girls before they have reached legal age.
But the government's push to add articles allowing multiple marriages raised so much ire from women's rights groups and the judiciary that a vote in parliament had to be postponed Tuesday.
Another government amendment that drew objections from the judiciary is an article that would introduce a tax on the money grooms pay to wives upon marriage under Islamic law. Opponents say the government should not be allowed to get its hands on that money.
Under Iran's Islamic law, a man can have up to four wives with the consent of his first wife or wives. But the practice is frowned upon by most Iranians.
snip
Steve asks for statistics and I (sort of) provide. testing99/Whiskey brought up polygamy at one of my posts, so I found one stat that said 1-3% of marriages are polygynous, and then divided up attitudes by country in the World Values Survey. Razib did a follow-up post comparing Muslims and non-Muslims in the same country. Bottom line: Africans are the most pro-polygyny, other nationalities (including Iranians) are less so.
When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard “having children” as a question of pro’s and con’s, the great turning-point has come. For nature knows nothing of pro and con.
—Spengler, The Decline of the West
Only 1-3% of Muslim marriages are polygamous? So what the hell has Testing been ranting about all this time?
HBD Books
He was the only Senator to speak against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act ... Her name was Jill Stanek. She has a blog.
And she admitted she was lying.
link
As a general rule, anyone who is strongly anti-abortion is not a reliable source on anything.
Anon sed:
There are three things that are the cause for late marriage.. in Iran and many Arab countries:
1. The dowry..
2. High cost of housing..
3. Very high wedding expenses..
Sorry for the lengthy quote, but I found myself thinking that this also happens in the West. Except that in typically post-Christian fashion we are stealing things from under the carpet since everybody wants all this security but also sex NOW.
1. The dowry: Western equivalent is the Harvard degree so sought after by women. Women will jump into bed if they know there's money down the road.
2. High cost of housing: Look at the nonsense that NYT economics reporter went through.
3. Very high wedding expenses: Nothing new here. Most people I know croaked under the cost. Isn't the cost a status symbol in itself. of course by the time they "marry", most have been shacking up for years already.
The stuff t99 rants about has more to do with these economics than outright ill-intent on the part of women. I bet that greedy businessmen also have a hand in this in that they try to mint aspects of the marriage market and thus drive up prices. Marriage even plays a role in real-estate.
The new prez. of South Africa, whom the MSM has suddenly lost interest in, is a polygamist with 5 wives and about 13 kids. He intends making polygamy legal again, after it was outlawed by the British colonial government and later under Apartheid. Of course the white women are not so happy but stay mum since complaining about black chauvinists may just cause someone to label them racist, which is the worst thing that could happen to a modern (white) human being. I have a suspicion that quite a few white men do not mind the new legal possibility and that de facto pseudo-polygamy is also going to set in under whites. This may be a model for poor Afrikaner girls.
It’s ironic in that many liberal white women there and of course in the West were so sympathetic to the black movement. Most are mum now, as are the pastors and other apologists of the ANC. Of course they now say that Mandela would not have done this, but he just practised serial polygamy because he was smart enough to know it would not go down so well amongst his western donors. It's funny how quickly we went from Human Rights, freedom, anti-racism and other high-minded slogans to polygamy and bascially primitive tribal society. It only took 15 years in South Africa.
David Davenport said...
What's the Muslim position on abortion? I assume it is "pro life," correct?
Nope. Abortion is OK for the early stage of pregnancy in Islam.
Only (real) Christianity and Theravada Buddhism, as far as I know, are strictly pro-life (i.e. direct abortion is never permissible).
The upshot is, of course, that there is and will be tremendous pressure for Iranians to emigrate to Europe - mostly under the guise of 'asylum seekers' (some have even pretended to be gay to gain asylum).
This pressure must be strenuously resisted.
one peculiarly Iranian custom is the institution of 'temporary marriage' in which a single man - for a fixed fee - agrees to marry a woman for a defined time interval, and then divorces her, as a purely contractual obligation.I believe many Iranian women make thir sole living this way, and the comparison with prostitution - of course the 'temporary marriage' is al about the groom's sexual gratification, cannot be avoided.
But saying all that, the instituion is ancient and fully supported by religious scholars in the Islamic Republic, and compared to hypocritical western laws on prostitution, it is perhaps more enlightened than anything the 'liberated west' has to offer.
I hate to say it, bot if what you say is true, the Iranians are doomed.
Now that their women have recognized that natality is optional and that they can compete with each other in the women's community without having babies, they will not.
I am amazed that a patriarchal religion/culture like Persian Islam ever encouraged the practice.
Having no present exampbles of women making due on a small income and raising several children AND no longer being esteemed for reproducing, they will merely follow the Japanese and European examples and cease making them when times get tough.
This struggle to keep women isolated, ignorant and pregnant has been a constant background struggle in Jewish culture in Israel for decades.
The Persian mullahs/imams (unlike the traditional rabbis of Jewish culture) apparently don'tunderstand what is going to happen if they did indeed encourage this baby dearth.
Countries with lots of natural resources to export but low economic productivity tent to have lots of domestic inflation as a by-product. There are lots of dollars & Euros chasing very few goods. The problem is that the oil money in Iran tends to flow to relatively few people who then can buy up those few assets. This includes the Real Estate which becomes a premium.
The same thing happened in South Korea because of the laws against exporting currency. The Cherbols had all the money and once they bought up all of the stocks they bought all the real estate which left the average korean with only his left hand.
I brought up your Affordable Family Formation in a certain country during the evilestest time in the world.
People just cannot let go of the Spanish Inqusiition.
"Online news sites ran stories in which women angrily denounced the scheme, arguing that it afforded men a legal and pious route to easy sex while offering women nothing by way of security or social respect. The government hastily dropped the plan."
But...but...I thought Iran was a desert where towel-heads repressed women. Online news sites? Women angrily denouncing the government in public over a dis? The government hastily backing down?
Must be antisemitic propaganda. We know Iranians are savages. Nuke 'em! Nuke 'em!
"As a general rule, anyone who is strongly anti-abortion is not a reliable source on anything."
The link you provided had no context of anything Jill Stanek said. It was a merely as assertion of a report of a report.
Shall we also say that anyone who is a strong supporter of HBD is a liar and a racist and therefore not reliable?
Basically anyone you disagree with is not a reliable source on anything?
Anyone who takes a strong position is a liar?
Isn't more reasonable to question the motives of both sides of an issue, rather than assume only those we are predisposed to agree with are honest, without really looking at what each is saying?
The US Senate passed the Born Alive Infant Protection Act unanimously. No abortion rights groups opposed it.
"airtommy said...
He was the only Senator to speak against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act ... Her name was Jill Stanek. She has a blog.
And she admitted she was lying.
link"
__________________
I checked out that link. It was so vague I couldn't figure out what it was referring to.
Anyway, preferring to judge for myself, I looked at what Obama said in the Illinois State Senate record.
http://www.ilga.gov/senate/transcripts/strans92/ST033001.pdf
Obama argued against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act on the Senate floor and said he would vote present, which is functionally equivalent to "no".
Bottom line, Obama doesn't seem weak on abortion, which is what started the discussion.
stop bashing iranians. Iranian women are kind of hot, the hotter in the Middle East, below only the israelis (and this comes from an anti semite), and far above anything in arabian peninsula. iranians face competition for the second place only from lebanese chicks.
iranians are not low IQ, they are probably midway between whites and hispanics, and closer to whites.
iranians have a tradition of artistic refinement that is beaten only by European countries like Italy and France. Until 1800, Germany could still be called barbaric and unrefined by iranians.
airtommy:
Jill Stanek did not admit she was lying in the Chicago Trib article cited in your link.
Nothing in this Chicago Trib article questioned her assertion that Obama was the only Senator to speak against the Born Alive Act (There is a reference to Obama trying to block the legislation). On the otherhand, Stanek provides a number of links to the IL gov websites that show Obamas voting record here.
I'm conflicted on the issue myself, but find shamlessly twisted propaganda like this insufferable and dangerous. Is EvilNeocon/Whiskey/99 the new standard for falsification here?
"Shall we also say that anyone who is a strong supporter of HBD is a liar and a racist and therefore not reliable?"
Slow down there...That's Saletan's job!
Big Bill said...
I hate to say it, bot if what you say is true, the Iranians are doomed.
Now that their women have recognized that natality is optional and that they can compete with each other in the women's community without having babies, they will not.
I am amazed that a patriarchal religion/culture like Persian Islam ever encouraged the practice.
One thing Americans don't understand about Iran is that it has been among the most liberal Islamic nations in the world regarding the position of women for a long time. As much as people hear about the oppression of Iranian women, they know virtually nothing about the fact that in Iran women can vote, hold seats in the Majlis, work outside the home, drive, hold powerful positions, etc.
During the Iran Iraq war, the country was virtually run by women, and many of the most dedicated supporters of the Islamic regime were female. So much of what we hear about Iran is sheer distortion cooked up by a lazy, ignorant press.
As for the low birth rate, it was encouraged from above following the huge baby boom of the 80s -- Iran simply can't afford any more people at this point.
Thanks for the link to Time comics. It's an insightful piece, like anything with the words "Top 10" in the title. I particularly like that the magic word "Hate" is is featured so prominently at the top of the article.
I'll never get it, Sailer. You write interesting things, you've cultivated a pretty intelligent readership, and yet you're often right on board with the constant creation of devils by the good old USA. Since you're always on the lookout for data here, maybe you should try to discover what the average IQ is for guys who believe that ONE MAN controls every single aspect of a modern nation. It's like half-wit leftists blaming the previous half-wit in the White House for everything from crumbling concrete levees to the passing rate of black kids in mathematics.
Yank yourself out of the medieval Satan routine, man.
Anonymous said: "one peculiarly Iranian custom is the institution of 'temporary marriage' in which a single man - for a fixed fee - agrees to marry a woman for a defined time interval, and then divorces her, as a purely contractual obligation."
Short-term marriages were also available in Early Medieval Ireland (believe it or not), but they tended to be year-long affairs (sorry about the pun).
I too followed the link provided by airtommy and still don't know what the "lie" was.
I assume it was the story she told of holding a dying infant in her hand after it survived extraction and was being denied care as a matter of hospital policy, as related by David Freddoso in "The Case Against Barack Obama"
Nonetheless Obama has been the most consistently pro-abortion politician in the Senate and, now, to gain the presidency. If you're for abortion rights then none of this is scandalous or embarrassing. If you find your position requires vigilance against too much clarity, you've got a problem.
Assuming the woman lied, why would one abandon a position on either side of the debate as a result? What would it change?
The phenomenon of children surviving extraction forces us to confront that which we can usually avoid--what an abortion is.
The thing is either defensible or it isn't.
Does the truth itself have to be sacrificed to this right? Can we just stop pretending that it doesn't entail the destruction of human life? Surely we're all capable of this minimum level of maturity?
But this cannot go un-ridiculed (sorry, Tommy):
As a general rule, anyone who is strongly anti-abortion is not a reliable source on anything.
On what, precisely, is this maxim based? That they dare feel "strongly" about something? I can't trust them on "anything"? What if they told me my house was on fire? Should I call Planned Parenthood for a second opinon?
This is too much considering the incoherent link provided used the absurd formulation "anti-choice". When did this latest Orwellian dodge manifest? Let's recall that anti-abortion forces managed to will "pro-life" into the discourse because "anti-abortion" sounded too "negative."
That too is absurd (by about half); "anti-abortion" is precisely accurate. But we, apparently, signed off on this BS, and ended up with "pro-choice".
I understand why people reject "pro-abortion", after all; one isn't necessarily for abortion if he nonetheless feels the state has no right to ban the practice, but we don't speak of, for instance, the issue of drug criminalization being about "choice". When is deliberate action not the result of choice? How about this for a maxim:
be skeptical of a point of view that labels itself by an idiotic level of generalization.
But look how the progression of this nonsense, starting with "pro-life" degrades the language, rendering it false--when the pro-abortion rights side could have simply insisted on "anti-abortion" all this time, instead, they've seen the bet and raised it one more level of idiocy. Shame.
The language is like a rag being ripped apart by a pair of terriers.
Headache said...
This may be a model for poor Afrikaner girls.
But not for poor Afrikaner men.
Dennis Dale said...
Does the truth itself have to be sacrificed to this right? Can we just stop pretending that it doesn't entail the destruction of human life? Surely we're all capable of this minimum level of maturity?
The Chinese call abortion "sha (kill) haizi (child)." There's no argument in China about whether or not abortion is OK, but there's no 1st amendment there, either.
err. the chinese call abortion "ren liu", abreviation of renkou liuchan, meaning artificial abortion. The abbreviation takes a lot of meaning from the original, making it pretty neutral. So no killing kids. It makes no sense even, they have an anti-natalist policy, they government approves of abortion.
But you need the approval of your husband, or even your boyfriend to have an abortion. So they are more conservative than us.
spandrell said...
err. the chinese call abortion "ren liu", abreviation of renkou liuchan, meaning artificial abortion.
I heard sha haizi in colloquial speech in Beijing (and it was clearly referring to abortion -- not "silly children"). This was around 2000, and I remember it very clearly because the contrast between how Americans and Chinese talk about abortion was remarkable to me as an American. But ren liu is probably what would be used on TV. This disparity between official and colloquial speech, which is so common in China, is one reason I had a lot more trouble understanding the broadcast news than ordinary speech.
But you need the approval of your husband, or even your boyfriend to have an abortion. So they are more conservative than us.
I can tell you with certainty that if this is a law, it is not enforced. Abortion is freely available, and women get them without obtaining the father's consent all the time. Anyway, what's a guy going to do, sue? Given the widespread availability of abortion in China, there are no practical limits on the procedure.
Frank Herbert, of the book "Dune", realized how an islamist errrr, highly religious society resolves this.
The Axolotl (birthing) tanks.
Significantly, in the books, there are NO tleilaxu women, at all.
So how are they birthed?
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=462
"Axolotl tanks are a closely guarded secret of the Bene Tleilax, genetic engineers of the planet Tleilax. Even the name is misleading. A clue is provided in Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune; no one has ever seen a Tleilaxu female.
Females are taken and transformed into special wombs used by the Bene Tleilax to produce their biological products"
I foresee this is the future of Saudi islamist development - the technology to do this already exists.
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