bearing blog

I wrote this as a post to a newsgroup about the Continuum Concept — mainly focused on raising children according to their human sociobiological needs (e.g. nursing, babywearing, cosleeping) — in response to a thread about contraception.  (The term "in the continuum" is a bit of jargon that roughly means, "in a lifestyle that meets the human needs communicated to us by our biology, our bodies.")

A previous poster had mentioned — perhaps in order to make a point that population control is common and should be considered a part of our continuum expectation — that infanticide exists in nearly all cultures, including our own.  True enough, and it’s certainly especially widespread in our own if you include abortion as a form of "invisible infanticide."  I was interested in exploring the idea of what contraception does to the human continuum of relationships.  I wonder if it might even be more insidious than infanticide (note:  this doesn’t mean "more evil" but only "more insidious") at destroying our sense of rightness of being, precisely because it’s so invisible.  Here’s what I wrote.

I’m glad [name withheld] brought this up.  ISTM that contraception is profoundly incompatible with continuum living.

Even though infanticide and/or abortion, tragically, exist in all cultures, and
even though I suppose there’s always been herbal concoctions and other attempts
to regulate fertility, there’s something more insidiously noncontinuum (note:  more noncontinuum does not necessarily equal "more bad" here) about modern contraception’s effects on relationships and sexuality.

I mean, it’s basically sowed an attitude among many people that sex and babies are
NOT inherently associated.  Remember, without modern contraception, every time a
man has sexual intercourse with a nonpregnant, nonlactating woman of childbearing
age, it is a reasonable expectation that a baby might result.  (Even those of us
who know our cycles very well know we can be mistaken about them.) With modern contraception, the same couple engaging in sexual intercourse might well have an expectation that a baby is practically impossible.  Enough of that and they might not even think in terms of "this is an activity that may make a baby," or may not have
any real concept that "baby" and "sex" are intimately related activities.  If they fall pregnant, they may be surprised.  "How did this happen?" they may ask.  The answer then seems to be "Something was wrong with my contraceptive," rather than, "I had sex with a fertile partner."

Why do I say that this is perhaps less compatible with the human continuum than infanticide?  If the only effect of either was on the population numbers, maybe it wouldn’t matter. 

But even if a baby is killed after birth, the baby existed, and the link between
sex and babies is known in the depth of everyone’s being.  The woman experienced
pregnancy, swelled and grew, gave birth to a wriggling, squalling, rooting little
human being that everyone knew originated in a sexual encounter that she had had
some months before.  For the community to control the population via infanticide, someone has to take that baby and kill her, one way or another.
That is a very… concrete… experience within a family or within a community,
to say the least.   

One would expect that in a culture that knows in its bones that sex makes babies,
sex itself would be a somewhat different experience than in a culture where sex
and babies have been, effectively, disconnected.  By extension, relationships between
men and women, husbands and wives, would be different too.  We’ve nearly destroyed
our expectation that sex makes babies.  Abortion, too, is different from infanticide
in that its invisibility makes it possible for many people to deny that the baby
ever existed — and so it, too, feeds that attitude.  Sex and babies are not linked,
because today it is possible, with not too much effort, to have plenty of sex and
never lay eyes on a single live, wriggling, squalling, rooting little human being.

I mean, let me point out from the discussion that’s gone on about teenagers and
sex.  There’s a lot of people here hoping that they can help their teenagers wait
until they are "emotionally ready" for sex.  Certainly this is true, because
sex tends to bond people to each other (and the biological reason for this, of course,
is the babies that sex naturally tends to bring into being.)  But ISTM that a more
cc test for being ready for sex — one based in our biological expectations —
is being ready and willing to parent a child.  And perhaps being ready and willing
to parent a child is not all that different from being truly emotionally ready for
sex, no?  If we look at it from the point of view of the continuum, *within which
the expectation is that sex can make a baby — a wriggling, squalling, rooting
little human being?*

I mean, if we have the quite rational expectation that sex makes babies, then we
would KNOW in our bones that if you’re not ready and willing to mother a child,
to father a child, you’re not ready for sex. 

And if we DON’T have that expectation, if we prefer to live in a world where we
can effectively pretend that sex is not going to lead to babies, how can we say
we are trying to live in the continuum?  What does it do to our sex lives, the sex
lives of our children, when we can have sex without the slightest thought that pregnancy and birth and a baby might result?

Disclaimer:  I don’t use artificial contraception, and I am expecting my third wriggling,
squalling, rooting little human being this summer.

I am curious what kind of response I will get.  I hope I didn’t water my comments down too much — I’m really not trying to say that infanticide is preferable to contraception — but seeing as how I was placed on "moderated" status last year due to "inflammatory comments" (I objected strongly to a comment from someone who felt that adoption was cruel and abortion was kind), I always feel that I can’t be fully expressive of my opinions lest none of them at all make it through.