Japanese officials punished childless women as selfish freeloaders

Evidence

To enlarge the working population in Japan, women are pressured to have more babies and chastised for not doing so. The former prime minister of Japan, Yoshiro Mori, suggested that women who bore no children should be barred from receiving pensions: “It is truly strange to say we have to use tax money to take care of women who don’t even give birth once, who grow old living their lives selfishly and singing the praises of freedom” (McAvoy, 2003). One politician expressed the need for baby production in stark, dehumanizing terms when he characterized women who limit their childbearing as “recalcitrant baby-making machines” (Pollitt, 2007). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2645

Categorization

• SHARE: The Yoshiro Mori pension threat and the ‘recalcitrant baby-making machines’ quote would land with anyone tracking gender policy or demographic anxiety in East Asia.
• XREF: Connects thematically to the reader’s article on cross-cultural moral panics and to population-as-moral-failure framing.