NIDRA POLLER: IN THE FAMILY WAY….SEE NOTE PLEASE
Lars Hedegaard, co-editor in chief of Dispatch International is under police protection since an attempted assassination on February 5th. You can read a series of articles and follow links to the (rare) coverage of the attack in other media. As if press freedom only mattered when the media could display a “free of Islamophobia additives.” Of the few who even bothered to cover the incident, most did not hesitate to use the epithet “anti-Islam” to define Hedegaard. Strange world in which murderous jihadis are called freedom fighters and a man who defends freedom is labeled anti-Islam. After you’ve read the free-access article, how about subscribing to Dispatch to help defend our freedom? It is a bargain!!!N.P.
PARIS. Everything is flitting, flying, zinging, zapping in our developed world: Money, ideas, and information speed down cyber highways. People and their baggage zip around in fast trains and high flying jets. We go from the idea to the pitch to publication and remuneration in less time than it took to send a letter. Ordinary people carry in their pockets communications devices that CEOs didn’t have 20 years ago. Labor saving devices make household drudgery a museum item.
But it still takes nine months to carry a baby. Nine months of anatomical incongruity. If you have never carried a baby to term you can’t imagine the challenge of accommodating the beloved creature that presses on your bladder, weighs on your lower abdomen making it sting, pushes up on your diaphragm giving you heartburn, kicks you around by day and leaves you nowhere to turn in bed at night. Most pregnant women in developed countries have access to excellent prenatal care. They know better than previous generations how to keep fit during pregnancy and emerge with minimum damage. Though we don’t live in dread of dying in childbirth every minute from conception to delivery is still fraught with risk. Maternity clothes aren’t ugly anymore, even in Japan, where women used to wear potato sack maternity pinafores. Here in France, as might be expected, there’s no limit to the charm and chirpy bounce of sexy clothes adapted or designed for the mother to be. So much has changed but it still takes nine months to carry a baby and no one can help you pull the weight.
Life expectancy has increased dramatically but a female’s stock of ovules, supplied at birth, diminishes and deteriorates at the same rate as ever. Women look fresh and young into what used to be the twilight years but the circulatory system loses its spring and resistance at the same pace as in olden days. Not to mention the long term effects of delayed child bearing that doubles the length of a generation means there will be less chance of relying on a grandmother’s helping hands.
Everything is going faster, people are living longer, but the prime years for childbirth, biologically speaking, haven’t changed. Looking down from the pinnacle of reproductive control achieved in the latter half of the 20th century, we discover that women’s liberation ideology and the high-tech separation of sexual relations from procreation has inadvertently compromised our long term survival; the birth rate in developed countries has fallen below replacement levels.
What’s more, that decline was already underway before the invention of Absolute Contraception and militant rejection of maternity. In other words, our drowning society was diving into the depths instead of struggling to the surface. Neo-Malthusians preached zero population growth and zero economic growth. Ecologists today are more concerned with plastic bags, melting ice caps, and carbon footprints than they are with the disappearance of our population and culture. As for those who think that immigration will compensate, they have a curious notion of humanity as interchangeable building blocks, and are obviously indifferent to the fate of population- exporting nations.
It is admittedly difficult for urban dwellers to appreciate this crisis as they fight for breathing space in public transportation, get caught in traffic jams, and desperately try to find a place to raise the children they so generously contribute to posterity. But most of us haven’t seen the melting ice caps either. There is ample evidence, above and beyond demographics, of serious disruption of reproductive patterns.
Procreation is not a one way street. Eggs and sperm determined to couple and produce new human beings are often in conflict with men and women burning to make love without taking on weighty responsibilities. Oral contraceptives, IUDs, and legalized abortion give an unfair advantage to recalcitrant procreators. But society can’t fill its production quotas without accidents. Liberated from coercion, men and women lose the knack of finding and keeping each other. Granted, we can’t expect today’s 20 to 30s generation to marry precociously, have children before the end of the first fiscal year, grit their teeth and stay together even if miserable, but old tactics–from religious regulations to gold medals for motherhood– can’t be laughed off so easily. It is time to develop new fertility strategies.
What better indication of this reproductive confusion than the current fad of same-sex marriage laws? The issue has just been thrashed out in a 10-day session of the National Assembly in France. Under cover of the deceptive generosity of extending to homosexuals a privilege previously reserved for heterosexuals, the proponents of mariage pour tous [marriage for everyone] take a swipe at the institution of marriage. The precious specificity of the union of the sexually different, a man and a woman, committed to the possibility of perpetuating life, is torn away from its biological foundation. The bill provides for adoption rights that will establish a civil absurdity, naming a pair of men or a pair of women as parents of the adopted child. Plans are afoot to subsequently approve artificial insemination for lesbian partners and, despite vehement denials from the government, there is reason to believe that recourse to surrogate mothers will be tolerated. The left wing coalition, dominated by President Hollande’s Socialist party, can count on its majority in the Assembly and the Senate to pass the bill.
What we need is a new conversation across the generations to restore our society’s vitality, mitigate the adverse effects of absolute contraception and devise new timetables that will encourage women to have children when their bodies are most suited, reduce the number of abortions and the parallel proliferation of latecomers running for fertility treatments on the eve of menopause, and restore the image of male-female commitment. What we get is the last straw. After decades of discouraging marriage, maternity, femininity, and fidelity, our irrepressible Progressives want to bring them back draped in the rainbow flag of artificial equality. And, as usual, they claim to be in the driver’s seat of History.
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