Kenan Malik’s article is an excellent expose of the rise in rightwing populism across the globe (“Conservative calls for women to have more babies hide pernicious motives”, Comment). Coercive pronatalism – pressures to compel women to have more children – inspired by nationalism, xenophobia, militarism or market fundamentalism is at an all-time high, and is a threat to reproductive rights everywhere. The decline in fertility rates is cause for celebration because it represents greater gender equality and greater reproductive autonomy in countries where it occurring.
This is a distant reality for the more than 250 million girls and women who do not have access to education, autonomy or reproductive health care services in order to decide whether and when to have children. A globally unified effort to elevate reproductive rights, not squash them for ideological agendas, is what is urgently needed. In addition, the billions of dollars going towards such coercive pronatalist policies would be better used towards climate mitigation efforts, rewilding, supporting an aging population and assisting the more than 1 billion people expected to become climate refugees in the coming decades. On a planet facing numerous ecological and social catastrophes, bemoaning a decline in national fertility rates is a reprehensible distraction.
Nandita Bajaj, executive director, Population Balance
Toronto, Canada
Level playing field? Hmmm
Jonathan Wilson could only reach the conclusion that the Championship is a level playing field by ignoring the effect of parachute payments (“Cherish the Championship: its level playing field offers football as it should be”, Sport). These are the massive financial rewards for failure given to clubs relegated from the Premier League. The other clubs in the Championship don’t get these payments and in comparative terms some are run on a shoestring.
Dave Pollard
Leicester
Don’t diss daughters
As the mother of three brilliant, feisty and intelligent girls aged 14, 12 and 10, I entirely relate to and agree with Joanna Moorhead (“Three daughters and no sons isn’t a bad omen. I should know, I had four”, Comment). I and my husband were also told (or it was implied) that we should be disappointed to have girls. Repeatedly. By the time I was pregnant with my third, the questioning about whether I wanted a boy was off the scale. I once counted 26 such questions in a single morning.
My husband was told he would have to find a hobby while we “ladies” went shopping, that it would be all pink and no football, that they would be impossible teenagers (they aren’t) but that at least he would “have someone took look after him”, among other choice comments. In short, there has been a constant cultural drumbeat that daughters are second rate, even if this is often presented as a joke.
Around this time Zoe Williams, who had just had her son, joked in an article, that even she couldn’t find an issue with the patriarchy connected to having her baby. I remember thinking: you wouldn’t think that if you had had a girl, let alone two or three.
The misogynist “jealousy” hypothesis advanced by the researchers (to explain why mothers of three girls were slightly more likely to have lower wellbeing) simply didn’t resonate with me either. Rather than the mothers having an outdated preference for boys as the researcher suggested, it seemed to me the researchers themselves reached for an outdated stereotype and assumption to explain their research findings, and one that tallies with the barrage of negative attitudes that mothers of three girls face.
Perhaps the constant battle from day one against patriarchal assumptions that is waged by mothers of three girls is the explanation for the dip in wellbeing that some mothers face? I know at times I have found that exhausting and demoralising, rather than my amazing, adored daughters.
Maddy Shaw
London N5
My grandfather was a farmer and hoped to have a son to help him on the farm. After seven daughters they gave up. It worked out well for a number of reasons, not the least of which was when the daughters matured, young men would come courting and want to impress the old man. They became enthusiastic farm workers.
Andrew Warford
Coupeville, Washington, US
GPs aren’t miracle workers
The NHS has become a false religion in this country that is obscuring dreadful suffering (“My live fast, die young youth was fun, but I don’t expect the NHS to pick up the pieces”, Comment).
The NHS encourages abdication of responsibility where the entire focus of a consultation appears to be what the doctor will do to “fix” a situation. Several of my colleagues in hospital and fellow GPs have given up trying to engage politely with the subject of smoking, obesity and excessive alcohol consumption because it triggers complaints as people take “offence” when instructed to take responsibility for their health. Consultations have become “eggshell consultations” where doctors cannot engage frankly for fear of repercussions for their careers.
I am a full-time GP who has seen vexatious patient complaints put strain on fellow doctors’ marriages and sometimes cause so much stress that doctors go off sick. The NHS with its fake promises has created a hedonistic society that wants doctors to work miracles when people do not want to accept personal responsibility.
Dr Zishan Syed
Maidstone, Kent
America’s fundamental flaw
Jill Abramson points to the fact that the US founders “intended the judicial branch of the federal government to be insulated from politics” (“Trump’s assault on American justice gives inspiration to authoritarians everywhere”, Comment). While the US constitution is, in all other respects, an impeccable blueprint for democratic governance, one cannot but wonder why, when drafting article 2 (giving the president the power “with the advice and consent of Senate” to appoint supreme court judges), those founders failed to recognise the fundamental flaw in their objective: the politicisation of the judiciary.
The dissenting judges in the recent overturning of Roe v Wade, wringing their hands “because the composition of this court has changed”, are doubtless even more dejected by the fact that the founders’ intention to insulate the judiciary from politics by determining that appointments are for life, has now saddled them, and the nation, with a staunchly conservative majority for the foreseeable future.
Martin Allen
Shoreham, West Sussex
UN peacekeeping: a warning
Luke Taylor’s article, “Kenya’s offer to send police to Haiti sparks human rights concerns” (World), raises the question: will the UN be sent into a new operation that is doomed to failure? I served with the UN Civilian Police Mission in Haiti from 1998 to 2000. While civilian police have been a traditional element of UN peacekeeping, it is a relatively new development to have missions based on civilian police, rather than military.
Some member states have seen armed civilian police as the acceptable and least costly option between doing nothing and deploying military contingents. Such perceptions carry the risk of civilian police being deployed in situations and given tasks for which they may not be equipped.
Unrealistic and impractical mandates are recipes for failure and risk compounding the very problems that they are intended to resolve.
Moreover, to be effective, peacekeeping should be part of a coherent political framework for conflict resolution. A broad strategy for peace in Haiti requires a responsible political class and leaders who can articulate the will of the communities they represent. In the Haitian context, it is especially important to learn the lessons of the recent past, and to recognise what UN civilian police operations can do and what lies beyond their power.
Professor Abiodun Williams
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, USA
