[Note: This is the forty-eighth sample from my rough draft of
a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy. The Search field on the right side will find
words in the full contents of all rants and reviews. These samples are not freestanding
pieces. They will be easier to
understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE —
if you happen to have some free time. If
you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording
my book HERE.
WILD
FAMILY PLANNING
Colin Turnbull wrote about tribal life in Africa. Hunting people paid careful attention to the
large game animals in their ecosystem, noting their migratory trends, and
comparing these to historic patterns.
There were periods of abundant game, and times of scarcity. While some species were rising, others
declined. Through long experience, they
roughly understood how many humans their territory could conservatively support
— it’s carrying capacity. They clearly
understood the difficult consequences of having too many mouths to feed when
meat was scarce. It was important to
avoid this.
The value of human life did not trump the value of
maintaining a healthy relationship with their ecosystem. Newborns were not automatically accepted into
the band. They might not be perceived as
being fully born before they opened their eyes for the first time, or while
their umbilical cord was still wet. When
folks agreed that a child had “come to stay,” it was given a name, and only
then became a proper person. If it died
before naming, it was as if it had never been born. Deformed newborns were always promptly buried
or smothered.
Elizabeth
Marshall Thomas spent a lot of time with the San people of the Kalahari,
and noted their methods of family planning.
Most of the women had one to four offspring. In lean times, intercourse was avoided. When a child could not be kept, the woman
gave birth alone, away from the camp, and buried the newborn before it drew
breath. In their culture, a newborn did
not immediately become alive, so disposing it was OK.
Because of low body fat and hard work, San women began
menstruating later. Some did not have
regular monthly periods. Nursing further
drained their bodies. Children were
usually nursed for about four years, which reduced mom’s fertility. In a drought year, underfed women lost their
milk, and some babies died. Infant
mortality was not uncommon. Wild
carnivores also took their share. Nomads
moved frequently, and belongings and infants had to be hauled to new sites. A woman could only carry one infant, so just
one twin was kept.
Peter
Freuchen wrote about the Inuit people of the Arctic. During long months of winter darkness,
stashes of frozen meat got smaller with every passing week, like a fuel gauge
getting closer to empty. Infanticide was
common and normal. When hunting was bad,
children were killed to spare the group from the misery of starvation. One woman survived a spell of bad hunting by
eating her husband and three children.
Folks who could no longer keep up with the hunting party were
abandoned. In lean times, those who were
too old to contribute to the wellbeing of the community committed suicide (a
one-way walk into the frozen darkness), or asked their children to hang them or
stab them — and these requests were honored without hysteria or drama, often
during a party when everyone was in high spirits.
CIVILIZED
FAMILY PLANING
Infanticide
and Abandonment
Like today, early civilizations were also hierarchical. The lucky few on top controlled and exploited
the less than lucky masses. This game
could work as long as the masses were not too numerous, and not too pissed at
the elites. Working folks got pissed
when they were unable to adequately feed their families. Unfortunately, the elites were often folks
who did not enjoy a reputation for being generous and benevolent. The lower rungs of society were disposable.
The other problem here was that folks did not have easy
access to effective contraceptives, or to clinically safe methods for ending
unwelcome pregnancies. When families
were struggling to feed the kids they already had, adding more would only
worsen their crisis. So, many took a
path that had an ancient tradition.
William Lecky wrote that the Greeks were devoted to the
greatest happiness principle. “Regarding
the community as a whole, they clearly saw that it is in the highest degree for
the interests of society that the increase of population should be very
jealously restricted.” Infanticide was
considered to be perfectly normal in most ancient Greek civilizations. Keeping more than one daughter was rare.
Infanticide was also common in Rome, during its Empire
phase. Lecky wrote that an ancient law
required “the father to bring up all his male children, and at least his eldest
female child, forbidding him to destroy any well-formed child till it had
completed its third year, when the affections of the parent might be supposed
to be developed, but permitting the exposition of deformed or maimed children
with the consent of their five nearest relations.”
“Infanticide” means actively killing a child less than one
year old, via burying, drowning, suffocating, refusal to nurse, etc. Killing older offspring was child
murder. “Exposition” (abandonment) means
setting the infant down somewhere, and then walking away. In Rome, exposition “was certainly not
punished by law; it was practiced on a gigantic scale and with absolute
impunity, noticed by writers with the most frigid indifference, and at least,
in the case of destitute parents, considered a very venial offence.” Lecky added, that the abandoned infants were
often taken in by speculators “who educated them as slaves, or very frequently
as prostitutes.”
William Langer made one statement that I will never
forget. He said, “In the seventeenth
century, Jesuit missionaries to China were horrified to find that in Peking
alone several thousand babes (almost exclusively female) were thrown on the
streets like refuse, to be collected each morning by carriers who dumped them
into a huge pit outside the city.” This
practice remained common into the 1830s.
Langer also noted that in 1860s Britain, dead babies were
frequently found under bridges, in parks, in culverts and ditches, and even in
cesspools. He quoted Dr. Lankester, the
coroner of Middlesex, England: “The police seemed to think no more of finding a
dead child than of finding a dead dog or cat.”
Barbara Kellum pointed out that unbaptized children were
beings of immense dark juju. They were
evil, a “captive in the devil’s power.”
A mother who died in childbirth had to have the unbaptized child removed
from her corpse before she could be buried.
Dead unbaptized children could not be buried in the churchyard. They were buried in a secret place, which was
thereafter avoided. Sometimes a stake
was driven through their heart when buried, to prevent spooky mischief.
Lecky added that killing an infant was terrible, but even
worse was the fact that it died unbaptized, because its immortal soul was
forever damned, and would suffer for all eternity in the burning flames of
hell. Married mothers were often given
penance for infanticide. Sometimes,
unwed girls got off by pleading insanity.
Others got a death sentence, “in the most diabolical imaginable manner”
(especially for violent murder). They
were buried alive, drowned, or decapitated.
Hanging was rare.
He also mentioned a strange law passed in 1803 that declared
infanticide to be murder — but only if the baby had passed entirely out of the
mother. Thus, if the feet were still in
the womb, and you smashed the baby’s head, or cut its throat, no crime
occurred. Juries would not convict
mothers, because there was no compelling proof of wrongdoing without the
testimony of eyewitnesses. This enabled
private family matters to remain private.
Foundling
Hospitals
With the emergence of Christianity, the deliberate
elimination of unwanted babies was strongly denounced, but abandonment remained
a common practice among all social classes, especially the poor. In response to this preventable loss of life,
some churches were inspired to engage in social charity. They often found babies laying on their front
steps. Caring for foundlings was a
painful, tedious, and never-ending challenge.
In the thirteenth century, the first foundling hospitals
appeared. Their objective was to
anonymously receive unwanted infants, care for them, discourage murder, and
encourage the community to adopt them.
Unfortunately, many mothers worried about being recognized at the
hospitals, so they chose more discrete modes of disposal. Gradually, over the following centuries, more
cities built hospitals, including London, Paris, and St. Petersburg. On the downside, according to Lecky, under
their care 30 to 40 percent of the infants died in the first six weeks. Many were already sickly or half dead. Caretakers were often overwhelmed by large
caseloads and emotional strain.
London built Christ’s Hospital in 1552, to help foundlings
and legitimate orphans, but in 1676 they stopped caring for illegitimate
children. In 1741, the London Foundling
Hospital was opened. By 1760, it was
buried in abandoned babies, far more than they could properly care for. Langer wrote that the hospitals were terrible
at saving lives, but they were so popular that they became too expensive to
operate, forcing many to shut down. New
York City opened their hospital in 1869, and 123 infants arrived on the first
day.
Lecky mentioned that in 1811, Napoleon created foundling
hospitals in every department of France.
These had “tours,” a rotating table that allowed mothers outside the
building to put the baby on the table, ring the bell, disappear into the night,
and remain anonymous. Nurses then spun
the baby indoors, where its chances of survival were dubious. This reduced child murders, but the hospitals
were quickly swamped. In 1883, 164,319
babies were left at the French hospitals.
Tours were a mistake. They made
it too easy to discard the unwanted, and were therefore accused of encouraging
immorality.
Foundling hospitals were not located in every big city. In some places, they operated for many years,
in other places they didn’t last long.
The journal Pediatrics
noted that foundling hospitals did not solve the problem of abandoned
infants. “A majority of the children
died within a few years of admission in most areas of Europe …in some times and
places the mortality rate exceeded ninety percent.”
So, far fewer babies died illegally, but the mortality rates
in foundling hospitals were extremely high.
Some have called this “legalized infanticide,” because the hospitals
were provided by religious organizations.
Most infants perished from neglect, and many were mercifully put out of
their misery by wet nurses.
Baby
Farms
Dorothy
Haller noted that the English traditionally sneered at young bastards
(illegitimate children). Baby farming, a
cottage industry that provided illegal infanticide services, received a major
boost when the Poor Law of Britain was reformed in 1834. It revised earlier legislation that required
the fathers of bastards to be responsible for them. The new regulation shifted all responsibility
to the mothers, whose low moral standards were at the root of the problem. They had to support themselves, and their
kids, until they reached age 16. Good luck!
Infanticide, abandonment, and abortion were illegal. Communities did not provide effective social
safety nets. Churches typically declared
pregnancy out of wedlock to be a mortal sin, and said that the women were
“fallen.” The offender was often ostracized
by her neighbors and family, and forced to leave in disgrace. She had to relocate to a place where she was
not known, where alone and friendless, she gave birth to an unwanted
child. Mom and her infant might not be
welcome back home.
She might find work in the new place, but would promptly be
fired as soon as her condition became visible.
Joni
Johnson noted that it was often impossible for an unskilled unmarried woman
to both have a job and take care of her child.
A number of orphanages refused to accept illegitimate children, because
they were the disgusting offspring of immoral people. The mother of a bastard was not at all
appealing to gentlemen looking for a wholesome wife. For many, a baby farmer offered the possibility
of a second chance. It was easy to find
them, because they printed ads in newspapers.
A journalist ran an ad in a paper seeking a nurse for an unwanted child. He promptly received 333 responses.
Baby farmers were women who offered to care for, or adopt,
illegitimate children — for a price.
Sometimes the mother made regular payments so the caretaker would serve
as a foster parent. Other times, the
mother paid a fee, allowing the caretaker to adopt the child, or find a family
willing to adopt it. The mother would
never see the child alive again. Mothers
asked few questions, baby farmers kept no records, and doctors didn’t get nosey
when infants died because their high mortality rate was the norm.
When a mother paid a fixed sum for the caretaker to adopt her
child, the sooner the child died, the more profitable it was. Long-term care could not be expected when the
fee paid was modest. Some infants died
from opiate overdoses. For some reason,
baby farmers had two nicknames, “killer nurses” and “angel makers.”
Haller mentioned Mrs. Winsor who, for a weekly fee, agreed to
take in the four-month old son of Mary Jane Harris. When Mary couldn’t keep up the payments, she
watched Winsor smother her son, and wrap his body in a newspaper. He was dumped on the side of a road. Winsor enjoyed a steady business.
Mrs. Martin boasted that, in a ten month period, she
discarded 555 fetuses and infants. In
Tottenham, Mrs. Jagger had taken in 40 to 60 infants over three years. Most perished from starvation. The “baby butcher” Amelia Dyer was suspected
of murdering at least 400 infants over 20 years. Her career ended at the gallows.
It wasn’t until the 1860s that doctors began investigating
baby farmers, and demanding reforms.
Laws were eventually passed to regulate or prohibit baby farming
(decades after animal protection laws were passed). The capital of baby farming was Britain, but
it also occurred in Australia, New Zealand, the U.S., Scandinavia, and
elsewhere.
Reproductive
Rights
For the first 69 years of the United States, there were no
laws against surgical abortion.
Massachusetts passed the first regulation in 1845. By 1900, just about every state banned most
forms of abortion. As their options
diminished, many women felt compelled to choose the risky option of do-it-yourself
abortion. Many attempts succeeded, but
more than a few died from the unintended consequences, back in the days before
antibiotics and reproductive freedom.
Dayna
Troisi wrote that the methods women attempted included swallowing
gunpowder, drinking turpentine, spending a night in the snow, throwing
themselves down the stairs, harshly punching their stomach, pennyroyal, opium,
or using a scraping instrument, like the notorious metal coat hanger. In many locations, illegal abortions were
provided by underground enterprises, sometimes by real doctors, sometimes by
folks having varying levels of experience.
In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the Roe v. Wade case,
and in a 7 to 2 decision decided that a woman could have an abortion without
excessive government restriction. This
struck down many state and federal laws.
Since then, a number of states have worked to reduce the inherent freedom
of female American citizens to make important life changing decisions about their
own bodies. Oddly, a number of religious
folks are obsessed with returning to the traditional situation of dead babies
laying all over the place. No effort has
been made to harshly punish what horny boys do with their frisky throbbing weenies. I am overwhelmed by the powerful stench of
patriarchy and injustice.
As I write today, there are 7.8 billion humans on Earth, and
growing. We’ve managed to temporarily send
the planet’s carrying capacity into the stratosphere by becoming extremely
innovative in food production and health care, a rocket ride enabled by a
one-time-only binge on fantastic quantities of nonrenewable fossil
hydrocarbons.
We live in ridiculous decadence, directly at the expense of
our children, grandchildren, and the entire family of life. This seems rather daffy. Coming generations are not going to inherit
cool stuff like healthy soils, forests, fisheries, wildlife, clean water, and a
stable climate. They missed the riotous
home wrecking party, and will inherit the toxic smoldering ruins.
In a subway system, you must never, ever step on the third
rail, to avoid instant death by electrocution.
In modern society, the notion of setting guidelines on reproduction is a
third rail subject, and a 100% effective method of political suicide (except in
totalitarian states). In the good old
days, hungry carnivores, wars, famines, and pestilence helped to reduce the
possibility of population outbursts, sparing folks from having to contemplate
touchy issues.
Garrett
Hardin was often criticized for ranting about overpopulation without also revealing
some brilliant solutions. He confessed
that he had been intimidated by the ostrich factor — never touch 800-volt
issues that are surrounded by large piles of scorched skeletons. You can’t win, so bury your head in the sand,
and have a nice day! The world was not
interested in contemplating the foolishness of perpetual growth. Mass stupidity got the green light.
He lamented that the U.N. decreed two rights
simultaneously. (1) Every man, woman,
and child has the inalienable right to be free from hunger and
malnutrition. (2) Every woman has the
right — perhaps with the agreement of her mate(s) — to determine how many
children she shall produce. He countered
that, in a finite world, unrestricted freedom is intolerable, a loose cannon
having great destructive potential. We
cherish sacred rights, but have zero interest in <spit!> sacred
responsibilities.
John
Livingston lamented that human fetuses have a right to life, but nature
does not. Rights are one half of a
dynamic duo, and they are typically amputated from their sacred partner, wise responsibilities. Rights are human inventions. Limits are not, they are absolutely real. In theory, a woman may have the right to bear
a thousand children, but limits trump rights.
Limits matter, rights are dreams induced by hopium. In our culture, limits are demonic bastards.
William Langer, writing in 1974, celebrated the fact that,
since the end of World War Two, the wonders of progress have provided humankind
with the contraceptive pill, intrauterine device, and legalized abortion. At long last, in theory, there was no longer
any excuse for unwanted pregnancy, infanticide, abandonment, or baby
farmers. Oddly, now in the twenty-first
century, there are still folks who oppose all forms of family planning except the
heavenly pleasures of celibacy.
I shall now reveal both good news and an effective
solution. The good news is that
ecological sustainability is, by definition, inevitable. Unsustainable foolishness can only be a
temporary deviation (industrial civilization for example). Whether or not bipedal primates will survive
to see the restoration of sustainability is another matter. Time will tell.
I cannot imagine that civilized humans will ever mindfully
summon their wisdom and foresight, and then proceed to intelligently resolve
the issue of extreme overpopulation.
Luckily, overpopulation is merely a problem, not a predicament. Problems have solutions, predicaments do not
(i.e., climate change, ocean acidification, mass extinctions, etc.).
The one and only guaranteed solution to the problem of overpopulation
is time. In the coming years, countless
hordes of turbulent problems and predicaments will tirelessly work to reduce
the planet’s carrying capacity for humans — from the stratosphere of furious
decadence, to the humble ground floor of utter simplicity (and hopefully
sustainability). When Big Mama Nature
pulls the plug on the mega-mob, one way or another the population issue will be
resolved, like magic! We won’t even have
to do anything, like think, or get off the couch.
12 comments:
Wow! While looking for something else this morning, I came across a PDF I downloaded six years ago, never read, and entirely forgot about. It’s a 266 page book — Infanticide: Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention, and History, written by William Burke Ryan, M.D., and published in London in 1862. It was digitized by Google, and is a free download.
once more, well done, as depressing a topic as this is.
1. When a person who brought more than one (I am a father of one son), OK make it two, accuses global warming deniers as ignorant, I mentally ask them, 'With so many methods available for preventing birth of babies and freedom to use them, who is a denier?'
2. I wrote a short story in Tamil loosely based on a real incident. In sixties before condoms became available at subsidized prices, I got angry at our neighbor for not breast feeding her fourth new born baby resulting in one less mouth to feed. I do not have that sensitivity now.
Whoops! HERE is the link.
Hi Marlowe! Yeah, the incredible hysteria surrounding family planning is surreal. It’s surprising how little its history is explored, because third rail subjects must be avoided at all costs. BIG FEAR! Well, hopefully this rant will set the record straight, and deactivate the hysteria. Peace, love, and family planning.
Hi Amarnath! Yes, indeed, it’s a super-sensitive subject. My notes for unfinished sections of this include jabber on belief. Belief may very well be the biggest threat to the survival of our species, worse than all the other threats combined. Even the most ridiculous, insanely stupid, self-destructive beliefs can be highly contagious, readily passing from one generation to the next, fully resistant to reason, common sense, or factual reality. Belief trumps reason. Belief insists that human-caused climate change is impossible. Humans do not share common ancestors with chimps and baboons. Technology can solve any problem. Perpetual growth is possible on a finite planet.
That's some eye opening stuff you've reviewed and shared. On a related topic, could you recommend the best book(s) you've read that described the American Indian culture, governance structures and economies before they were disrupted by the European invasion? I've gleaned some from your book ( What Is Sustainable, which I liked and now own) but wanted to dig deeper.
thanks
Hi Steve! I can send you some book notes in a day or three if you still live at Gmail.
Wow, and wow, Rick! I just read this aloud to Connie (and recorded it, of course) and we both loved the historical perspective and prophetic tone. Bravo!
Send me what you send Steve, please. Thanks, bro!
Thanks Micheal. I just sent you what I sent to Steve.
Hi peakaustria! Killing the elderly is called geronticide. It's sad business, but so is having too many mouths, not enough food.
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