Testament to the times

• Published in: The Lancet (British edition) Vol. 394; no. 10207; pp. 1403 - 1404
• Main Author: Ditum, Sarah
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Elsevier Ltd 19-10-2019; Elsevier Limited
• Subjects: Abortion; Aggression; Artists; Birth rate; Court decisions; Feminism; Historians; Infertility; Men; Oppression; Political campaigns; Reproductive health; Reproductive rights; Sexual health; Terrorism; Urbanization; Violence; Women; Womens rights; United States > US
• ISSN: 0140-6736; 1474-547X
• DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(19)32307-4

Popular culture—in the form of primetime television, evangelical preachers, and bad-science bloviators—was fomenting a back-to-the-home doctrine for women. In The Handmaid's Tale, Gilead's reproductive coercion was introduced as a solution to falling birth rates caused by pollution; today, birth rates are in decline in almost every high-income nation, not because of infertility but partly because of improved access to contraception, urbanisation, women's education, and women delaying childbearing. In the USA, itself under the strongman rule of Donald Trump, decades of consistent attacks on the Roe vs Wade Supreme Court decision have made abortion rights more fragile than they have ever been before, while Trump's global gag rule is depriving women in many countries of essential sexual and reproductive health services. Online subcultures such as “red pillers” (who believe men are the oppressed sex), “pick-up artists” (who treat women as objects to be assessed, acquired, and discarded), and “incels” (“involuntary celibates”, who bond over the perceived injustice of their own lack of sexual success) have radicalised some men; there have been acts of violence for the masculine cause.