Two Peas in a Pod: Contraception and Over-Population

Contraception was and still is encouraged and thought of as justified, at least in part, as a means for avoiding or slowing over-population.  Over-population is largely a myth, popularized in part by Paul Ehrlich's 1968 The Population Bomb --a topic for another day.  Nevertheless, the situation seemed dire and drastic measures were taken --massive contraception, sterilization plans, and other population control devices.  There's nothing like a dire situation to make drastic measures routine.  But what if the routine continues and the dire situation evaporates, like a forgotten tale told by strange people in foreign places, what justifies the routine then?  Nothing.  It's a routine.  Its own history justifies its continuance. 

I will end this short thought with a slightly abridged version of Anscombe's essay "Why Have Children?", which was delivered as a Plenary Session in 1989 at a meeting of the Catholic Philosophical Association.   Like a good philosopher she questions the question, its assumptions, the context it gets sincerely asked, the circumstances of its importance, etc. 

This very title tells of the times we live in. I would like you to imagine a title for a lecture eighty years hence: "Why digest food?" I leave it to the reader to imagine --or think of-- the technology already with us; and the 'scientific advance' and its practicalities, including the resultant apparatus ending in tubes with needles and switches in every house. Also the successful propaganda denigrating the "merely biological" conception of eating and the hostility --known to have prevailed in the Catholic church for many centuries-- towards its pleasure and thereby towards its spiritual meaningfulness and its civilized quality. As whole peoples in our time have regarded feeding their babies at the breast as something rather for savages, so might people of the future regard nourishment by digesting the lovely food we eat in the same way.

She continues:

Don't think it inconceivable. The human race is a fallen race. It has fits of madness, sometimes merely local, sometimes nearly global. Let us imagine something rather nearer the spirit of our own time. Couldn't a government have a five-year plan --no more children this coming five years; there are enough of us for the present, and this is a solid population measure?

Skipping ahead, she says:

The decision to promote contraception and abortion --whose has it been? "There are enough of us-let's make sure we don't become more numerous still." That is an accepted thought among people who have been mentally formed by the propaganda. But even where it sounds perfectly insane --in Australia, for example-- the world-wide propaganda works; and, as in some other places, as a feminist movement.

Continuing:

The Chinese have for some years had a law that a woman (or is it a couple?) can have only one baby. This struck me as the most appalling piece of tyranny I ever heard of, though I have not tried making a list. I always found it incredible that it should be enforced. Then I met a sinologist who had recently come back from China and asked him. He said: "If you live in Peking or near there or in one of the other centers treated as showplaces, yes, they make a show of enforcing it, but if you live sufficiently far away or in some rural area, then no." This of course rather interested me, or at least confirmed my belief about what could be enforced.

The Indian government sought to reduce conception. The infamous Indira Gandhi had a still more infamous son (fortunately killed in an air-crash) who went around trying to get people sterilized. There were quite a lot of sterilizers on the job offering (it was said) transistor radios to men who accepted sterilization; but I am happy to say that quite a few of the sterilizers got lynched.

Indeed, my suggestion of a plan to reduce the human race extensively does not sound likely to work --I have to point to some of the madnesses there have been, to reduce a natural scepticism on the point. But at most what has been effective has been so among what we call the advanced nations. But let us stretch our imaginations. A religion sweeps the world whose cardinal tenet is that the human race is too ghastly, too horrible in its ways of going on: it is a crime to perpetuate it. Everyone must be sterilized. This might be a sacrifice with a religious note in it, like that of the members of a Russian Christian sect who castrated themselves. But is it unreasonable to think of the human race as so evil? Think of the Aztecs cutting out the hearts of the captured among the peoples subject to them and piling them up as sacrifices before their frightful deities. Think of the many-armed statues of an Indian god or goddess, with as many means of killing as the many hands and a belt of human skulls. And think of us-encouraging lustful practices and confident of killing any resultant offspring. Either these things are good, and proofs that the destruction of human beings is desirable, or they are proofs that the human race is so thoroughly evil that it would be better to bring it to an end.

So you can see that if I ask this question in a general sort of way "Why have children?" the answer that the race will die out unless people do, is one that assumes that this would be a bad and regrettable thing --which may not be agreed.

The original natives of Tasmania, it is said, were a lot of them exterminated --white settlers not wanting them to be there. Indeed I have heard that at some stage the whites went in a line with a long rope across the whole island to make sure of no one escaping. It is also said that there were a remnant who were shipped off to some other but uninhabited island, and left to get on as they might. They were too depressed to reproduce themselves and so died out. Whether these stories are true, of course, I don't know. Certainly I have the impression that there aren't any aboriginal Tasmanians. True or not, this appears to us a sad story. But by what means can we be confident that this might not happen to the human race that we know? Perhaps Neanderthal man died out like that. Several of the nations of Europe and North America look in a fair way to do so too.

Well, arguments about the continuation of the human race may have to confront replies expressing positive hostility or mere indifference to it.

What should we say to that? I don't know. I don't know how we can know-without prophetical revelation or a blind belief in the care of God- in face of all the evidence, that our dreadful race is not better all damned (a proof of God's justice) or all abolished.

There is a saying in Proverbs, the last thing in Chapter 8, "Those who hate me love death." It applies well to the lovers of abortion and 'euthanasia.' Did Neanderthal man die out aided by lovers of death who hated God? 1 don't know, of course; nobody does. I don't know if they were in any important sense a different race from ours. The last I heard, a few years ago, was that those who think they know say that Neanderthal man was homo sapiens-so that race of men dying out would be comparable to the Tasmanians doing so.

The King James bible translates that text in Proverbs with the words "All those who hate me love death." I have known a philosopher saying "I hope, facing the omnipotent God, I would have the decency to say 'Very well, damn me'." He was not meaning it like Mill who said "If God is going to damn me for not calling him good, then to Hell I will go." My philosopher wasn't laying down any condition. The mere idea of God's being almighty outraged him. So, if the King James translation is right, it would appear that he loved death --if he meant what he said, he hated God. Remembering him, I do not think that he would have cared whether the human race died out or not; at least, he would not have responded favorably to an argument which assumed that it would be a terrible thing to follow practices and rules of life and to have laws and beliefs which looked favorably on the dying out of our race.

I have only imagined such policies, together with the thought that humans are mad enough to embrace them. Let me revert to my title: "Why have children?"--for my considerations so far have just concerned the attitudes which might make the world, or part of it, say "Why indeed?"

Luckily we don't seem to be faced with such attitudes in our time. On the other hand, the questions "Why have children?", "Shall we try to have children?" have become natural ones, just because of the strong propaganda for contraception and abortion. (Here I may mention the wording of the howl set up in England when grants for "Planned Parenthood" organizations, i.e., for contraception and abortion were, like other grants, cut down. "What we had was a growing thing and you are just cutting it off.") Formerly that now natural question would have been a natural one only in the minds of a pair who did not propose to marry or set up any very permanent relationship. Otherwise the question would have seemed absurd. You marry, you set up to live together or the like, and if not barren you expect to have children, they will come. But now the situation is greatly changed. Bernard Berenson took another man's wife, made her his, and got her pregnant. He insisted that she have the baby aborted. His life was not to be inconvenienced by babies.

An Indian woman was once reproached by some Westerner for having babies --India's population was too big and she was adding to it. The government didn't want there to be so many babies. She asked her interlocutor: "Will the government take care of me when I am old?" So she had a definite n:ason to reject the possibility offered her of seeing to it that she didn't have babies, or another baby. And because of this possibility, it is a perfectly familiar idea that a married couple should ask themselves "Shall we have children?" (Or an equivalent couple: marriage hasn't so much point now.)

There is, however, actually a desire to have children, or at least a child. You get married, you don't want a family straight away, you want a child some time. The time comes, and the woman conceives. And now we perceive the remarkable thing, that she has an abortion because tests suggest that the baby might be handicapped. It is odd indeed: kill the baby, just in case, and try to get a perfect one --one over whom there hangs no threat. The reason, suggested to me by a philosophical daughter, and which I found convincing, was: a baby is a luxury, an expensive one at that, a special thing to have. So, just as you'd not buy a car that you learned might be faulty in inconvenient ways, but go for the best you can afford, so you won't take the risk of an imperfect specimen if you can be forewarned. You'll get rid of it, if told the test suggest it may be imperfect. You won't say "Well, if it's twins joined together in some awkward way, I'll take it the Lord's given me them to raise and he'll help me to raise them." That is something heard of sometimes --but not often. It does suggest a greater conviction than that expressed by Proverbs: "Those who hate me love death." It suggests rather "Those who love me do not love death." 

Skipping ahead:

This last attitude [of aborting children that might be handicapped, idiotic or otherwise deformed] is an attitude of people who want a child-perhaps even want children --but what for? Not for loving except as one loves something that does one credit. Formerly there was not that often a choice, not for vast numbers of people. I have described the common attitude. Why have children? Well, they come along, they happen, don't they? What a funny question "Why have children?" is. "Why want children?" --that's a different thing. Maybe you've been married for years and not managed to get one and you passionately want one, you look with envy and sorrow on those who are so lucky. But "Why have children?" was a question that simply didn't arise except for some who were wicked enough to not want them and think of ways of preventing them from ever being conceived, or destroying them if they were.

Skipping forward:

Now, some people much want a child, but it's got to be a son. So they find out what it is, so as to kill it if it's a girl. Not an altogether new thing, though in other ages and places they waited for the birth. It is distressing to live in a world where this question "Why have children?" so intelligibly presents itself --as "Why digest food?" does not. The purpose of my paper has been in the first place by that comparison, to show what a weird distorted question it is. The weirdness of the question forces our attention, however, on this: as we used to hear of 'occasions of sin,' we should now, because of this question, if we did not before, think of a child as an 'occasion of love'-to be embraced, not like those 'occasions' to be avoided --by destruction.