Restrained motherhood: the Lebanese state in times of changing demographics and moral values
Rola Yasmine, Batoul Sukkar

via Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters
Vol. 27, Issue 2
Issue topic: The Impact of Politics on Sexual and Reproductive Health

 

Abstract: The socially engrained notion that motherhood is essential to womanhood is strongly portrayed in how states view women’s political participation through their reproductive capacities. In Lebanon, the state’s political agenda influences laws and policies that restrict or encourage women’s procreation, depending on their nationality, sect, marital, and legal status. Since 1943, Lebanon’s system of proportionally allocating parliamentary seats to sectarian political parties based on their population size, has spurred fears of demographic changes across sects. This fear is also referenced by politicians as the reason why Lebanese women are legally denied their rights of passing citizenship on to their children and non-Lebanese spouses. With Lebanon holding the highest refugee population per capita in the world, the fear of disturbing the “sectarian balance” directly collides with the reproductive autonomy of both Syrian and Palestinian refugee women. Migrant women living in Lebanon are also restricted to playing out their role as workers and therefore have their sexual and reproductive health and rights denied. Another fear of the state is that of changing moral values, whereby motherhood and parenthood in single women queer, transgender, and intersex persons are perceived as deviant and a threat to traditional values. This review aims to display how, through fear - of changing moral values and demographic shifts - the Lebanese state practices reproductive oppression, on part of the population, while neglecting and exacerbating their difficult living conditions.  

 

Introduction  

In most population growth rate trajectories, state-policies limiting or incentivizing fertility primarily affect women and their reproductive functions. One way the state maintains its power of influence is through preserving and protecting notions of nationalism and origin, heterosexuality as natural, gender as binary, motherhood as innate to all women, and marriage as the solely acceptable institution of family formation.[1] This paper aims to explore the relationship of the Lebanese state to motherhood, and particularly how it categorizes ‘good’ mothers and ‘bad’ mothers. ‘Good’ referring to a type of motherhood the state supports, promotes and encourages, while ‘bad’ implying a type of motherhood actively suppressed, rejected, and demonized.

As the female body has been tantamount to that of a mother’s or a mother-to-be, its corporeality has been coupled with an ideal notion of motherhood, a notion rigid in its demand that women embody care, sacrifice, selflessness, purity, and overall goodness.[2] Conflating the characteristics of ideal motherhood with that of ideal womanhood has problematically made motherhood the essence of a woman. Such views are often firmly endorsed by the state and have served as necessary foundations for a capitalist economy that requires housework and reproductive labor to remain unpaid and unquestioned.[3] Outside the home and within the politics of the state, notions of motherhood are further ingrained by holding that women’s most significant political participation is to serve the realization of pro-natalist or anti-natalist political agendas. As such, state efforts to increase the population or minimize it, primarily target women and their reproductive capacities either through incentivizing reproduction or condemning it.[4]

In times of economic, political, or conflict crises, national debates often focus on population growth strategies and needs. For example, Malthusian theory can be referenced, which suggests that unrestrained populations exponentially increase and exhaust the state’s resources, implying that smaller populations would lead to less poverty and higher living standards.[4] On the other hand, proponents of large populations champion the idea that populations are a power necessary in times of wars and for the building of an empire. In places where ethnic or religious groupings are crucial for the constitution of a nation, the notion of “origin” or “quality” of a population breeds a eugenics-type of population assemblage.[4] Eugenicist policies are primarily concerned with the “quality” of a population, whereby active suppression or incentivization of  procreation of certain subpopulations is encouraged through different state apparatuses.[4] Within a power sharing system, frailly maintained on the population’s sectarian make-up, the Lebanese state’s focus on women’s reproductive functions and their citizenship is highly politically motivated.[5] Through making the conditions of living intolerable for millions of refugee and migrant residents, legally restricting female Lebanese citizens from passing their citizenship on to their children and non-Lebanese spouses , while inviting millions of its diaspora to claim citizenship[6], it is evident that the state’s invitation of mass naturalizations for economic prosperity[7] is not a call for just anyone.

The Lebanese state seems to neither subscribe to a Malthusian theory of population restraint nor one of growth, but rather displays a form of eugenist discourse through “differential encouragement and discouragement of child-bearing in different segments of the population.”[4] This paper extends an argument on how the Lebanese state condemns deviant motherhood underneath two banners: first, demographic fear, through which it denies Lebanese women the right to pass their citizenship on, and ostracizes refugee and migrant populations living in Lebanon, and second, a moral fear of the decay of family and traditional values through which it shuns unmarried, lesbian, and transgender mothers and parents.

The fear of changing demographics

The alleged balance of Lebanon’s population concerns stem from its power sharing system that allocates state positions according to the sectarian political parties in what is called a confessionalist system. In Lebanon’s confessionalist system, the presidency is held by a Maronite Christian whereas its Prime Minister and Speaker of Parliament are held by a Sunni Muslim and a Shiite Muslim respectively.[8] In 1943, an unwritten agreement known as Lebanon’s National Pact allocated a ratio of 6 to 5 parliamentary seats in favor of Christians to Muslims.[8] This ratio was based on the 1932 census conducted under French colonization, which is the last known census of Lebanon. In 1989, after the Lebanese civil war ended, the National Reconciliation Accord (known as the Taif Agreement), which still governs the Lebanese confessionalist system today, revised this ratio with no reference to any updated census, to an even 5 to 5 parliamentary seat ratio for both Christians and Muslims. The sectarian demographic breakdown of the 1932 census has since then been contested on the grounds of having exaggerated the proportional size of Christians in Lebanon through the swift admittance of Christian immigrants (Armenians, Chaldeans, and Syriacs of Turkish origin), exclusion of Muslim immigrants (Kurds coming from Turkey), and the placing of bureaucratic hindrances on undocumented residents[8] (whose lineage remain statelessness and unregistered till today).[8] Currently, the proportion of Christians to Muslims has also decreased greatly as a result of high emigration and low birth rates amongst Christians.[9]  

Lebanese women

For two decades, women’s rights activists campaigning for the right of Lebanese women to pass their nationality to their children and non-Lebanese spouses, have been rejected on the basis that such a permission may unsettle the “sectarian balance” of the country.[5] While blatantly ignoring Lebanese women’s citizenship rights in the past 70 years, Lebanese politicians from various political parties, have been at a tug-of-war of naturalization allowances between sectarian populations  to build partisanships that would prove useful in upcoming elections.[10] Three prominent examples of naturalization decrees include: a decree in 1948, during the presidency of Camille Chamoun, which passed for a Christian majority of Palestinian refugees;[11] a highly contested and still-under-review decree[10] led by Prime Minister Rafic Hariri to naturalize over 150,000 persons of which an estimated two thirds were Muslim in 1994;[12] and most recently, in May 2018, the announcement by President Aoun that 375 individuals, 70 percent of whom are Christian, will gain Lebanese citizenship.[13] These naturalization efforts pale in comparison to the resolve that the Lebanese Minister of Foreign Affairs & Emigrants, Gebran Bassil, leader of the Free Patriotic Movement party, exhibited when his ministry launched an official website[14] urging foreign wives of Lebanese men, or anyone of Lebanese paternal (father or grandfather) lineage, to claim their citizenship. Whilst visiting Brazil in 2016, Bassil invited the Lebanese diaspora, well-known to be of a Christian majority, to reclaim their Lebanese identity, heritage, and citizenship, and implied that sectarian solidarity is needed in the struggle to persevere in Lebanon.[7] To add insult to injury, in March 2018, Bassil suggested amending the citizenship laws to allow Lebanese women to transfer their nationality, so long as they are not married to men from neighboring countries.[15] This amendment describes the paternalistic state-gaze of good versus bad Lebanese women. Selecting the “right” foreign spouse, good Lebanese women will be spared the humiliation and distress of lengthy bureaucratic residency applications and their fees[5], and more importantly, in performing their (wifely) duties to the state they are at last seen as fully legitimate citizens.  Most recently, the National Commission for Lebanese Women (NCLW), an official institution directly affiliated to the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, suggested an amendment to the citizenship law that allows Lebanese women to pass their citizenship only to their below-18-years-of-age children.[16] Those above 18 would be issued a “green card” (conditional to having no prior or present criminal charges or nationalities from hostile countries) that grants civil, economic, and social rights, but not political rights, property rights, or the right to hold positions in public office.[16] Only after being granted this green card for five years can these above-18 offspring apply for a Lebanese nationality; hence, they are not guaranteed nationality rights, but are rather treated as foreigners seeking naturalization in Lebanon which subjects their applications to a case by case review.[16]  While the NCLW claims that this legal amendment is to achieve social justice and equality between men and women in Lebanon, Lebanese women would still not be granted full citizenship rights compared to their male counterparts. In fact, as children of Lebanese men do not need to prove good behavior for full citizenship, the above-18 children of Lebanese women will have to be evaluated on whether they are morally fit to be granted this nationality; an evaluation that casts reflection on the quality of rearing and transferring of nationalist-values that a good citizen mother should have done. These discriminatory legal and social impediments facing Lebanese women and their 21,796 children and spouses[17], impose prejudiced notions of desirability.

Non-citizen spouses and children of Lebanese women are regularly harassed with the renewal of their residency and employment permits, restricted in employment opportunities and protection, and  initially even made to pledge that they would not seek employment at all.[5] Restricting Lebanese women’s spouses mostly to manual labor and ensuring they cannot attain higher-skilled and better paying jobs suggests that the state perceives them to be a risk to the Lebanese men’s job market.[18] However, the same risk to the Lebanese women’s job market is inconceivable to the state when a Lebanese man marries a non-citizen. Undoubtedly, the state is reassured that women, citizens or not, entering the market would not threaten the employability of Lebanese men, as systemic inequalities, including the glass ceiling and the gendered division of labor, would maintain the value of wives being occupied with tending to unpaid housework instead of attempting to be sole breadwinners or heads of households.[19]  

Refugee women living in Lebanon

Lebanon hosts the highest refugee population per capita in the world, yet it has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, or its 1967 protocol. However, Lebanon is a signatory to multiple human rights conventions that are relevant to the protection of refugees. Both the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), officially operate in Lebanon.[20] Palestinian and Syrian refugees have spent 70 years and 7 years respectively living in Lebanon. The Lebanese state’s deliberate restrictions on improving the quality of life of Syrian refugees after the 2011 uprising, and of Palestinians after the Israeli occupation and Palestinian exoduses of 1948 and 1967, is justified through the feigning concern of both populations’ “right of return” home, i.e. elsewhere.[21,22] This insistence on barring both these refugee populations, who are of a Muslim majority, from humane living conditions, with Palestinians in particular being restricted from gaining any civil or political rights, can also be linked to the recurring theme of maintaining a sectarian balance. As a result, the political agendas of the Lebanese government[23, 24] and discrimination of hosting communities and Lebanese healthcare systems[23,25,26,27], negatively impact Syrian and Palestinian women’s sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and reproductive autonomy.

     Palestinian women

Only one week prior to US President Trump’s reinstating of the Global Gag Rule[1], UNRWA, the agency providing Palestinians with education and healthcare services where host states refuse to, also suffered a drastic budget cut from 350 million USD to 60 million USD by the US administration.[28] UNRWA is the primary source of comprehensive reproductive, maternal and child health services to Palestinians and Palestinians from Syria who live in Lebanon.[29] This attack on UNRWA, which poses a real threat to the sustenance of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, was merely interpreted by the Lebanese state as a threat of Palestinians’ permanent settlement in Lebanon.[24] Over the last 70 years, the systemic aggravation and deterioration of Palestinians’ conditions in Lebanon has been justified as part of a long-term repatriation plan by the Lebanese state. Today, a large majority of Palestinians live in poverty, reside in areas with inadequate infrastructure and housing, have restricted access to basic services and social protection, and face discriminatory laws. Lebanese law restricts Palestinians from owning property, starting their own businesses, taking up employment in at least 19 syndicated prosperous professions, requires they attain work permits, and excludes them from maternity, sickness, and family allowance benefits in the National Social Security Fund (NSSF).[18] While these restrictive laws have come a long way from where they began, where employment permits were solely issued for construction and farming, they do raise the question of how in a time of dire need and refuge many generations and families have been purposefully impoverished in unemployment, and discouraged from pursuing a higher education or profession which they would be barred from practicing. These legal, social, and political discriminations have anchored many to refugee camps and blocked their attempts of a better livelihood and circumstance.

The hypocrisy in the Lebanese state’s benevolent approval of Palestinians to register with the NSSF, is that it mandates them and their employers to pay the same obligated sum, as it would from any Lebanese employee, but then forbids them from fully benefiting from it. The NSSF sends a clear message to working Palestinian women: it will not pay for their child births or maternity leave, it will not support them in their illness, it will cover solely work-injuries, and if they should accept these conditions of labor up till the retirement age of 60, then and only then, may they cash in their end-of-service compensation.[18] In their entering the Lebanese labor force, Palestinian women must forgo maternity benefits as this is a position the state does not appreciate seeing them in. However, when Palestinian refugee women marry Lebanese men, this image becomes a lot more tolerable. In accordance with the citizenship law, Palestinian women married to Lebanese men should be able to take Lebanese citizenship one year after registering their marriage. However, in practice, it appears that the General Security Directorate, a security agency under the Ministry of Interior, tends to stall this process among couples who have not had a child. In fact, an officer of high ranking in the General Security Directorate states that within three years of marriage, it should be possible for the couple to have had one or two children; this process they say helps identify sham marriages from real ones.[30] It is not surprising that patriarchal practice informs the implementation of the citizenship law, seeing that the Palestinian wife is not sufficient in her marriage until she births a Lebanese child and becomes a Lebanese mother.

In under 20 years, Palestinian refugee women living in Lebanon have had their total fertility rate (TFR) drop from 4.49 in 1987[31] to 2.3 in 2006.[32] Though there is a distinguished 2020 projection of a negative TFR among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, this overall declining TFR trend is not at all uncommon in that time, as refugees and non-refugee populations in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan all witnessed a steep TFR decline.[33] Compared to Palestinian refugees in Syria and Jordan, Palestinian women in Lebanon have a much higher rate of contraceptive usage across the reproductive age, are most to frequent UNRWA clinics for modern methods of contraception, and constitute the largest proportion of never-married women.[34] Such trends bear resemblance with both the host population (Lebanese) and developed countries[34], and within a public health perspective indicates a positive met-need for contraceptive usage. However, in light of the previously described conditions of living, persistent impoverishment, and discrimination, it would be inaccurate and rash to compare TFR trends of populations of radically different social, economic, and legal privileges. There is a need to investigate the underlying factors that affect women’s reproductive choices; from hostile budget cuts to Palestinian women’s reproductive and maternal healthcare services from across the globe[28], to the host state’s discourse that never misses the opportunity to remind refugee women that they are unwelcome and must never feel settled.[24]                  

     Syrian women

The influx of Syrian refugees has sparked similar sentiments and reactions by the Lebanese state towards Palestinians, where population concerns are used as a justification to spread a demographic fear to the Lebanese public. Rising resentment and hostility between Syrian and Lebanese people is fueled by Lebanese state actors through media reports of increased crime and socio-economic instabilities, a scapegoating necessary to deflect from holding the Lebanese state accountable for the deteriorating socio-economic conditions in Lebanon.[35] This hostility largely affects underprivileged Syrian refugees much more than those from middle or bourgeois classes, whose consumerism and economic power makes them more “relatable” to the Lebanese middle class.[35] Through spreading a moral panic (when a condition or a group of people are defined and presented as a threat to societal values and interests[36]) of looming demographic change, news outlets describe a takeover of the once elegant touristic areas in Lebanon’s capital[37] by large numbers of indigent Syrian children faking economic difficulties[38], as well as a takeover of the once wholesome family neighborhoods by Syrian women being sex trafficked and involved in sex work.[39] A review of local newspaper articles examining Syrian refugee women’s reproductive health, demonstrated that publications were only focused on the need to limit Syrian women’s fertility, to stop early marriage, and to increase their access to contraceptive services and family planning awareness programs.[40]

While the Lebanese state endorses a discourse of population control, it simultaneously falls short in the provision of reproductive health services to these same Syrian women. In fact, a study of Syrian refugee women’s reproductive health status in the West Bekaa region, describes the difficulties that these women face in their access to contraception, as compared to the free provision they were accustomed to back in Syria.[41] Syrian refugee women, in West Bekaa[41] and other regions in Lebanon[23], face many difficulties in reproductive health access due to the privatization and high cost of health services in Lebanon, the costs of transportation, and lack of availability of their preferred contraceptive methods. Moreover, contraceptives offered by humanitarian aid agencies and NGOs would often run out.[41] Aside from availability and reachability of reproductive healthcare services, Syrian refugee women also reported being discouraged from seeking such services due to the discriminatory treatment of health care providers, as well as the absence of female health care providers.[41,23] Meanwhile, there is a lack of interest in uncovering and understanding refugee women’s reasons to have more children; whether it be the social pressure they feel to replace those lost in conflict, the fact that having more boys would eventually increase the family income, the belief there is a better chance at resettlement or aid services with a larger family, or simply that their lives and desire to have and raise a family does not cease in conflict and refuge.[41,23]

The state adopts and perpetuates a xenophobic and reductive narrative that paints a picture of reckless, negligent, promiscuous, immoral, uncalculating, and broken women, who have fallen too far from the virtue of motherhood, while actively neglecting and dismissing the sexual and reproductive health needs and conditions of Syrian refugee women. As the hosting state and its political parties continue propagating such rhetoric, its impact is ever present in Syrian refugee women’s reproductive decisions and their access to care, and in how healthcare providers, landlords, employers, aid workers, and the hosting community continue to mistreat these women.[23] Syrian refugee women, Syrian mothers, and especially pregnant Syrian women are made to feel as though they are uncivilized for the number of children they have, their children face bullying and violence, and they themselves face verbal and sexual violence. These accounts of violence are not reported, as many are afraid that their partners’ and their own “legal” status would be investigated, and that they may face incarceration and deportation.[23]  

Migrant women

The demographic fear of migrant women’s reproduction, and particularly migrant domestic workers’ (MDW), is not similar to the concerns mentioned earlier, because migrants come from multiple countries of different political tensions with Lebanon. The characterization of migrant domestic mothers as deviant mothers is more about their being from low-income countries, being black or brown, or of East/ South-East Asian origin. The dehumanization of migrant women in the belief that they are fundamentally different from Lebanese people in culture, intellect, and social values is crucial as it suits the inhumane employment conditions they find themselves in. The sponsorship system (Kafala) governs migrant domestic workers’ residency and ties their legal stay in Lebanon to the employers’ legal status as citizens. The Kafala system does not adhere to the Lebanese Labor Law[42], it allows for salaries well below the minimum wage, and does not ensure the protection of basic labor rights (weekend days off or holidays, working hours, proper lodgings). This system subjects migrant domestic workers to the whims of their sponsor/ employer, placing constraints and restrictions on all aspects of their lives. Migrant women are essentially seen as workers who should have no other personal interests besides their labor. Nevertheless, it is estimated that approximately 15,000 children of MDWs live in Lebanon. These forbidden pregnancies, whether or not a result of rape, lead many MDWs to leave the houses of employment and renders them in breach of contract; a condition of high precarity for both mother and child.[43]

In August 2018, the mysterious death of Lembibo, an Ethiopian domestic worker employed in South Lebanon, sparked media and activists’ outrage. Lembibo was discovered by her employers to be pregnant one month before delivery, her daughter died only two hours after she was born, and days after, Lembibo’s deceased body was discovered in the private pool of the house she worked in. So far, no proper medical explanation has been given for both deaths.[44] The circumstances surrounding how Lembibo came to be pregnant and who the biological father was, are also unknown. As with many other MDWs, Lembibo faced physical and verbal violence at work, even her employers casually stated that they had to call in the employment agency because they could not comprehend why Lembibo would not get back to work after her newborn had died.[44] The notion that MDWs are women who may wish to have a personal life outside of work is both societally and governmentally rejected, and invokes demographic fears and moral panic alike. Constraints in the mobility of freedom of MDWs aim to curtail familial or intimate relations, and unequivocally restrict access to contraception, abortion, antenatal, emergency obstetric, and delivery care services.[43] The threat of migrant women’s sexual, intimate or familial relations to the Lebanese state, was further proven when a memo, drafted by the General Directorate of General Security to the Ministry of Justice in 2015, proposed that sponsors pledge to forbid their employees from sexual activity or else MDWs will face arrest and deportation.[45] As per the 2014 and 2016 Human Rights Watch reports, migrant domestic workers who have had children in Lebanon have been detained, deported, and denied renewal of their residency permits.[46] Lebanese General Security Directorate  have responded to these allegations saying that they have never forbid border entry to a MDW who wished to bring her child with her (an unprecedented event), but that the situation of giving birth to a child in Lebanon is “difficult to achieve without violating many laws and regulations”.[46]  

The fear of changing moral values

In order to justify its increase in social control, states need to claim an impending security threat to the public[47], one that is so great, it poses a risk to populations’ existence, moral standards and social values. Non-conforming women and mothers, diverse family formations, sexual orientations, and gender identities and expressions, portray a type of chaos to state officials which threatens the very fabric of public and legal order. By spreading a moral panic, state and religious officials justify the arrests and detentions of non-normatives and non-conformatives, through associating them with vice and crime that would afflict innocent victims.[48] While having adopted a learnt benevolent appearance and modern discourse, catered to middle and upper-middle classes, the Internal Security Forces of Lebanon have continuously carried out raids, arrests, and detentions[49] that have restricted men, women, and transgenders of non-normative sexual orientations or gender expressions from mobility, presence within the social sphere, and the ability to form families.  

     Unmarried, queer or lesbian women

Rigid social and state recognitions of motherhood are legitimized only through marriage, and only to heterosexual women. Merely having the reproductive capacity to bear children is not sufficient; good Lebanese women who surely strive to be good mothers, must desire and seek to marry Lebanese men of the same sect, race, and class, and not have illegitimate children. Under the Personal Status Laws, Lebanese women’s experiences of legal matters relating to marriage, inheritance, divorce, and custody differ according to their sect, however they are united under the patrilineal legal reality that when they marry, they are crossed off their father’s Personal Status Records [sijil[at] nufus] and transferred to that of their husbands’. However, there exists a legal loophole allowing unmarried Lebanese mothers to register their children under their own (read father’s) surname and sect.[50] The repercussion for this exception however, is that these mothers are labeled ‘bad’ - women who have already failed at motherhood by birthing children who themselves will face discrimination in employment and society. For example, in the previously-mentioned suggested alterations to the citizenship law, Minister Bassil states that the maternal transfer of citizenship to a child out-of-wedlock is a “strange and unacceptable” discrimination against Lebanese mothers married to foreigners, since the latter are legally barred from passing their citizenship to their “legitimate” children, whereas the former are not.[15] Even for a nationalist right-wing politician, the standards of legitimacy of respectable motherhood focus primarily on her marital status before the nationality of her spouse.

Despite the legal loophole, Lebanese women of any sexual orientation, are thus shamed and punished for deliberately choosing not to enter the state and sect regulated institution of marriage. The discrediting and dismissal of queer and lesbian women’s existence is historically a practice of compulsory heterosexuality[1], one which the Lebanese state practices by rendering women socio-legally, and often economically, dependent on men, forcing them to ignore their sexual attractions and desires, and restricting their reproduction and pathways of family formation to the confinement of heterosexual marriages. Additionally, under the pressures of “honor” and respectability that set a high value on virginity for marriageability, unwed women who do engage in penetrative sex are expected to abort pregnancies so as not to bring shame to their families. While abortion in Lebanon is criminalized on all accounts except for saving a woman’s life, we are left to wonder if the lack of implementation of these strict penal codes is to maintain the sanctity of having children within marriage and avert a surge of illegitimate births.

  Transgender and Intersex people

The Lebanese state has made it clear that it does not respect transgender and intersex people’s most basic of human rights, and most definitely not their reproductive choices. So far, there are no intersex people’s groups in Lebanon organizing in defense of intersex people’s rights, however in 2014 a person born with “ambiguous genitalia” was charged with Article 534 of the Lebanese Penal Code that prohibits engaging in sexual intercourse that is “contrary to nature”. While the charges against the defendant were nullified and dropped[51], the question that remains is: how many other persons born with “ambiguous genitalia” in Lebanon have been medically “corrected” in order to spare state-mandated birth registration documents from having to address their own deficiencies? Or from having to ask difficult questions about sex and gender? Early medical interferences on young healthy bodies that do not fit a sex binary blatantly ignore the person’s consent in whether they wish to undergo major surgery which could affect their fertility and mismatch their gender identity. These interventions disregard a person’s decision to have a biological family, and renders their gendered classification in society far more important than their bodily autonomy.

Similarly, transgender people who wish to change the sex registration of their identification documentation at birth, also need to make concessions to their reproductive autonomy if they are to be legally recognized in the gender they ascribe to. If the changing of the sex on registration documents is successful, it is framed by the courts as a previous clerical error that needs to be corrected, and not as an affirmation and acknowledgement by the state of transgender existence.[52] Disregarding the right of a transgender person to choose whether they wish to undergo gender affirming therapies and surgeries and if so which ones, courts require a costly and lengthy legal, surgical, medical, and social transition to even consider admitting to this fictitious clerical error in the first place.[52] Transgender persons need to be informed that this demanding legal process inevitably leads to sterility, and that, prior to any medico-surgical intervention, they could benefit from advancements in reproductive technology and broaden their procreative options. The threat that procreative transgender persons pose to the Personal Status Law’s patrilineal structure is so grave that the only successfully appealed cases of sex change on birth registration documents, were of transgender persons who are childless or who have never been married.[52] Legal and medical restrictions to the fertility of transgender people, is truly a fear of a shift in moral values, it forbids the very real possibility that in the eyes of the law: a (trans)man has delivered a child and was once married to another man, and that a (trans)woman has been married to a woman whom she had a biological child with.  

Conclusion

Daily, the Lebanese state through its security, legal, prison, and media apparatuses informs women, transgender and intersex people that their reproductive capacities are not truly at their disposal. Moral values that are associated with good motherhood are necessary for the production of a “quality” population and the construction of a nation-state, by weeding out the unwanted motherhoods pertaining to migrant and migrant domestic working-class women, women seeking refuge, and those of non-normative sexualities, gender, or familial statuses. Legal, social, economic, and medical penalizations are set in place as state tools of reproductive oppression. In light of these occurrences, there is a need to unearth narratives, through qualitative research, from people who have had to negotiate having or not having children in return for their freedom from state-persecution. Documenting the additional levels of precarity that befalls migrant women who have had children on Lebanese land, is another layer of argumentation against the Kafala system, and in favor of respecting the bodily rights and integrity of women’s reproductive health and rights. Furthermore, in response to the defunded and under-funded refugee women’s sexual and reproductive health services, the Lebanese government must allocate resources in order to support women’s access to non-judgmental, affordable, and appropriate comprehensive reproductive health services. Media discourse fueling tensions between refugee and host-communities by scapegoating women’s reproductive choices must be challenged by politicians, academics, journalists, and activists alike. Lastly, Lebanon must repeal discriminatory laws forbidding Lebanese women from passing their nationality to their children and spouses, and must become a signatory to both the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 2011 International Labour Organization’s domestic workers’ convention as a step in the right direction of fulfilling its duty to protect the wellbeing of refugee and migrant women living in Lebanon. The political discourse of marginalization and discrimination that are described in this paper must be countered on numerous levels, as their influence is palpable in the lives, wellbeing, safety, and access of sexual and reproductive health and rights of women, transgender, and intersex people who live in Lebanon.

    References:

[1] Rich A. Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. Signs. 1980;5(4):631-660.  

[2] Rich A. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton; 1976. Chapter 1, Anger and tenderness; p. 21-40.

[3] Federici S. Wages against housework. London: Power of Women Collective; 1975. 

[4] Yuval-Davis N. Gender and Nation. London: SAGE Publications Ltd; 1997. Chapter 2, Women and the biological reproduction of the nation; p. 26-38.

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[7] Caretaker FM opens Lebanese Diaspora Energy Conference in Brazil. The Daily Star [internet]. 2016 Nov 28 [cited 2018 Oct 19];Lebanon News:[about 2 screens]. Available from:  http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2016/Nov-28/383200-caretaker-fm-opens-lebanese-diaspora-energy-conference-in-brazil.ashx

[8] Maktabi R. The Lebanese Census of 1932 Revisited. Who Are the Lebanese? Br J of Middle East Stud. 1999;26(2):219-241.

[9] Census and Sensibility. The Economist [internet]. 2016 Nov 5 [cited 2018 Oct 22];Lebanon:[about 5 screens]. Available from: https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2016/11/05/census-and-sensibility.

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[11] Siklawi R. The Dynamics of Palestinian Political Endurance in Lebanon. Middle East J. 2010;64(4):597-611.

[12] Thibaut J. Citizenship, migration, and confessional democracy in Lebanon. Middle East Law and Gov. 2014;6(3):250-271.

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* The Global Gag Rule (GGR), or Mexico City Policy, prohibits foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who receive U.S. global health assistance from providing legal abortion services or referrals, while also barring advocacy for abortion law reform, even if it’s done with the NGO’s own, non-U.S. funds. Indirectly, the GGR, blocks critical funding for services like contraception, maternal health, and HIV prevention and treatment.