Courtesy of Pam Martens
Jenny Brown, Author of Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over Women’s Work
Jenny Brown has cracked the code that few writers, outside of analysts trained by the CIA, has cracked. In her new book scheduled for release on March 1 by PM Press, Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight Over Women’s Work, Brown performs a brilliant forensic examination of the money and people behind the stealth agenda to raise the low birth-rate in the United States. That agenda includes concerted campaigns against abortion, the “morning-after pill” and other forms of contraception. Using exhaustive research, Brown convincingly makes the case that it’s a well-financed corporate agenda implanted in Washington with an end goal of putting more American women in the maternity ward.
It’s not a cultural or religious agenda as many people believe. It’s just about money – corporate profits to be more specific. More babies mean more workers and more workers mean cheaper labor because there is no shortage of supply and thus no bargaining power for higher wages. (In that respect, it’s akin to why corporations spent decades undermining the right to unionize. Without a union, the individual worker has little negotiating power for higher wages, benefits or a shorter work week.)
Brown’s book is a critically important read if you are politically engaged, involved in social justice issues, or simply want a greater understanding of how corporations rule in Washington. It provides a powerful arsenal of facts, figures and historical context while simultaneously offering a fast-paced and fascinating story-telling quality.
The book revolves around these two facts: “A stable population in the developed world requires a birth rate of 2.1 children per woman, enough to replace the woman and her male counterpart. The current birth rate in the United States is estimated at 1.76, considerably below this replacement level,” writes Brown. Equally at issue, the current birth rate has “decreased 16 percent since 1990,” Brown notes.
The stealth agenda to boost the supply of corporate workers by raising the birth rate is not as stealthy as it once was – although it has eluded a lot of feminist writers until now. Brown provides numerous examples of men openly acknowledging the agenda. For example, Brown cites the 2014 book by Steven Philip Kramer of the National Defense University, The Other Population Crisis: What Governments Can Do about Falling Birth Rates, and the 2004 book by Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation, The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do about It. Longman writes: “Capitalism has never flourished except when accompanied by population growth and it is now languishing in those parts of the world (such as Japan, Europe, and the Great Plains of the United States) where population has become stagnant.”
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