Kathryn Joyce is a clear writer.   That talent of deliberate clarity is well reflected in her latest piece: Missing: The ‘Right’ Babies.

The American Christian right, increasingly seeking influence abroad, has recognized that this anxiety over shifting national identities creates fertile terrain for spreading its ideology of traditional sexual morality as a quick fix for a postmodern age.

She weaves in past history with current history makers skillfully playing their part in nationalism wrapped up as national family politics.

Christian-right watchers agree that demographic winter appeals to struggling new EU countries in devout Eastern Europe could have “serious” results. Ruse himself, not given to understatement, imagines the global Christian profamily alliance is “unlike anything we’ve seen since the Reformation.” A bloc like this, he boasts, is capable of mayhem: “Picture the documentaries about Africa: the hyenas going after the wildebeest. You’re just surrounded. We are everywhere, doing everything.”

Joyce knows her subject and players well.  Producer Barry McLerran of Demographic Winter: the decline of the human family  felt it necessary to put out a press release to mount a defense yesterday. It’s hasty and falls short, those that appear have an pronatalist agenda of panic and Joyce did not hesitate to call them on it, saying;  “belonging is defined by ethnicity alone and demographic winter itself begins to seem just a prelude: for a new cold war, a “clash of civilizations” to be fought through women’s bodies, with the maternity ward as battleground.”  The press release only further strengthens her argument.

 

“But the film notes that falling birthrates is a worldwide phenomenon — affecting developing as well as developed nations,” McLerran says. “It speaks of emigration as a threat to developing nations.”

 

Those who appear in the film include sociologists, demographers, and economists (among them, a Nobel laureate in economics) from some of the most prestigious universities here and abroad.

 

McLerran concluded: “We look forward to ‘Demographic Winter: the decline of the human family’ stimulating a candid discussion of a global  crisis and a debate based on the reality of demographic decline — instead of the type of polemic contained in The Nation article.”