Natalism, Alcoholism, & Public Health
posted by Frank Pasquale
Many news outlets have reported on a recent Russian initiative to shore up a declining population by encouraging workers to take a day off to “make babies:”
Today has been declared the Day of Conception in Ulyanovsk, Lenin’s birthplace, when couples are told go to home and multiply. If they succeed they could win a car, cash or a fridge. Under the city council’s “Give Birth to a Patriot” scheme, those who give birth on June 12, Lenin’s birthday, will get a prize.
I guess the Putin Youth needs new members. The story reminded me of Vichy France’s natalist policy, as related in Paul V. Dutton’s book on the US and French health care systems. Apparently the political class there was deeply upset by “decadent” urban regions’ failure to keep up with the birth rate in rural areas.
A recent story in The Lancet* suggests another approach to increasing Russia’s life expectancy–reviving the anti-alcohol policy of the Gorbachev years. As I recall from a podcast on the article (sadly, no ungated version is up), Gorbachev’s initiative probably increased life expectancy by 2 years.
Expect to see more disputes over “biopolitics” in coming years.
As Jed Purdy notes,
In India and China, a population gap has opened between young men and women. There are now about 100 million more men than women in those countries and a few of their neighbors. Many of the “missing women” either were never born because of sex-selective abortion or died in childhood because families devote more medical and other resources to boys. “Missing women” mean men who will never marry. Socially unintegrated young men are associated with a variety of social pathologies; most importantly, they are the prime recruitment targets of nationalist and fundamentalist political groups.
Conservatives . . . have always argued that society and the state have an interest in individual reproductive decisions; liberals have answered that reproduction belongs to a zone of personal autonomy. These crises demonstrate that individual choices do have systemic consequences in which society has to take an interest.
For instance, one commentator (I believe Herbert Meyer) suggests that China and India may eventually invade Russia for its resources, given their rising and its now declining population. I hope that “doomsday scenario” gets discounted, and Russia supplements its natalism with some concern about improving the lives of those most affected by the alcoholism crisis.
*Cite: Lipman, Alcohol consumption and public health in Russia, The Lancet, Vol. 370, Issue 9587, 18 August 2007, Pages 561-562.
[This is a cross-post from the Medical Humanities Blog, where I'm presently a guest. If you want that post, with a full complement of links, click here.]
September 20, 2007 at 4:59 pm
Posted in: Health Law
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Responses (3)
Matt - September 20, 2007 at 10:21 pm
My understanding is that the only time that life expectancy for men in Russia has gone up over the last 30 years or so was during the time of the so-called “dry laws” put in place by Gorbachev. This was so even despite a lot of deaths due to bad home-made alcohol. (The situation for women is rather different.) But, these laws were also massively unpopular and helped contribute to both Gorbachev’s eventual downfall and also to his inability to push reform that might have lead to a more stable end to the soviet union so no one is seriously considering anything like them again. (The laws didn’t bad alcohol like prohibition in the US but put strong limits on how much could be bought at a time.)
M. Simon - September 21, 2007 at 10:41 am
People drink in Russia because it is a depressing place.
A better solution would get people to grow their own anti-depressants:
PTSD and the Endocannabinoid System.
BTW tobacco is an anti-depressant; it fouls the lungs. Pot clears them and also has anti-tumor properties. A better deal.
Why not the same thing for America? Can you imagine all the interests that would be harmed by such a policy? Doctors, lawyers, prison guards, pharmacists, judges, etc. There is an awful lot of money to be made by putting depressives, PTSD sufferers, and the mentally ill in jail.
Note that when most Americans were farmers we had a huge per capita alcohol consumption. Farm life must not have been as bucolic as Currier and Ives presented it.
M. Simon - September 21, 2007 at 10:48 am
Also note: the excess of boys is NOT due to reproductive choices. It is due to people’s dependence on agriculture for sustenance. (Plus customs and culture left over from the agricultural age).
This is especially true in China with its one child policy.
Even so. With a shortage of women, their value will rise.
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