bujold on reproduction

Here’s an interesting notion for you.

Bujold quote on reproduction and family from ‘A Civil Campaign’: Tante Cordelia said thoughtfully, “It’s not entirely that simple. Both societies seek to solve the same fundamental problem–to assure that all children arriving will be cared for. Betans make the choice to do it directly, technologically, by mandating a biochemical padlock on everyone’s gonads. Sexual behavior seems open at the price of absolute social control of its reproductive consequences. Has it never crossed your mind how that is enforced? It should. Now Beta can control one’s ovaries; Barrayar, especially during the Time of Isolation, was forced to try to control the entire woman attached to them. Throw in Barrayar’s need to increase its population to survive, at least as pressing as Beta’s to limit its to the same end, and your peculiar gender biased inheritance laws, and, well, here we are.

Throw in ideas of cultural inertia, and one begins to understand why cultural conservatives are kicking and screaming. It helps to note, though, that the cultural system and the family’s place therein at the dawn of television, was quite different from the cultural system 50 years prior. And the leap from the 1950’s to now may well be even more profound.

related autobiographical babblings: My parents were both born in 1950. Both in large families. My dad’s was rural, my mom’s was urban. My dad was raised in no small part by aunts, uncles, grand parents, great aunts and uncles, etc, alongside cousins and sibling in a tight-knit extended family clustered in a rural town. I honestly don’t know what mom’s early life was like, but mine was quite different from this. I grew up with two sisters, in college towns, in columbus, and eventually, for the longest stretch, in the middle of nowhere, far from my extended family, and with two very busy parents. I spent my adolescence in a suburban area, which a few of you have seen. I’ve never gotten around to showing any of you where I grew up before that. But the isolation is important to understand. It was at least a 5 minute walk to our nearest neighbors, and we didn’t have all that much in common with them.

The part of growing up I can remember involved a fair amount of tv watching, a hell of alot of book reading, and frequent walks in the woods. Thinking about this, I make a bit more sense to myself. Anyway.

As much as the car, the television reshaped society. Increasing cultural homogeneity, decreasing interactivity, encouraging smaller group clustering, much faster transmission of consistent messages, though I’ll claim the prime difference between it and radio in this regard is the depth of engagement a recipient experiences, and the greater time a viewer spends engaged vs a listener. (a family of twenty sitting around a single tv is rather awkward.) It also provided a substitute (albeit a poor one) for human contact, the sharing of stories, the learning of norms. It made protecting one’s children easier, because so long as they watch tv, they aren’t running around risking life and limb, and parents can spend less of their limited time resources on watching the kids.

The nuclear family and the car also go together, due to mobility, and a practical minimalism. A nuclear family has a certain simplicity to it: a bread winner, and a direct care taker, providing for the next generation. When dad’s job moves, who is he going to take with him? The wife and kids, most commonly, but granny and grandpa? What about his brothers and sisters (and their spouses and kids)?

But the nuclear family is a less stable unit than the extended family. The parents become overtaxed, and have fewer alternatives for childcare. In the absence of a stable community, in which the family is enmeshed, and therefore, which the family knows it can rely on, the burdens are harder to shift to someone else for a night, and the resources less shared. (that last one’s probably putting the cart before the ox, but still…) The stress therefore increases. As the pressure increases, the problems increase too. More bankruptcy, more divorce, etc.

People cast about desperately for something to blame. Scapegoats are found (homos, for instance). But really, our increasing visibility is just a product of the same social transformations. And there is important work to be done. Building solutions to the wrong questions helps nothing. Developing a functional social structure to care for everyone’s well-being is non-trivial. But the genie won’t go back in the bottle. The 50’s will never be again, for good and for ill.

And here I’d intended to talk about abortion in the eyes of the pro-life.

Take pro-lifers seriously, for a moment. Forget about religion, because religion is an excuse for cultural values. The next time you see a fundy, check their wardrobe for mixed fabrics, and you’ll see what I mean. But they really do think an important life begins at conception. Think about the joy of a couple trying to conceive that just found at that the little one’s on the way. That is the framework for pregnancy these people are dealing with. And the responsible way to deal with unwanted pregnancies in this framework is to make sure they don’t happen in the first place–by not having sex in the first place. If/when unwanted babies are made, the parents need to suck it up, take responsibility for their actions, and see that the child is raised properly. Pro-lifers want to make sure that every kid is cared for.

Those backing abortion are killing little bundles of joy. Scarcity mentalities may play into this. Also, evolution. Assuming one’s children will take (or at least tend to take) the view of their parents’, prolifers have a reproductive edge. I was informed that I was an accident that was kept, a point to ponder. Also, there are currently more would-be adoptive parents than there are babies up for adoption. Not-so-coincidentally, would be adopters tend to be pro-life.

Pro-choicers want to make sure that every kid is cared for, so they try to give options about when and whether kids are brought into the world. I know of no pro-choicers who are actually anti-lifers, though I don’t doubt they exist, they are certainly few and far between.

Technology is pushing us in a certain direction. It will probably take us to a point where reproductive control is exercised not by sexual control, but more directly, through “a biochemical padlock” one’s gonads. Pro-lifers will probably go the way of the dinosaur. As will the anti-homos. To paraphrase a different author: While I may wish I lived in different times, that is not my choice to make. My only choice is what to do with the time I have. (and I wish I had a copy of FotR right about now =)