Mother and Child by Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012)
There has been a tendency in modern times that a surefire symptom of a country sliding into dictatorship is stripping women of any personal rights. As most of us know, the attack on reproductive rights isn't about the sanctity of the unborn life. It's about forcing women to pump out as many children as possible in order to 1. provide a plentiful supply of boys for military service, and 2. maintain a giant pool of potential laborers to toil hard for cheap, barely subsistence wages to maintain the dictator and a few close relatives and associates to the luxury they crave.
We see this happening with Putin and Xi Jinping. Both are obsessed with their internal unfolding demographic disaster. Couples are nowhere near having even the minimum number of children to replace the dying.
The trouble with forcing women to bear children while at the same time refusing to raise wages, denying maternity and paternity leave benefits, access to healthy food, access to basic reproductive healthcare, and access to affordable child care will have catastrophic effects on these forced children.
One is, through no fault of their own, babies are incredibly hard to raise, and are expensive, especially in urban areas where you can't send them to the farm fields to do tasks all day. Without family planning, there comes a point where there is not enough to keep everyone fed, clothed, and housed.
Two is, the bonding process itself. On well managed farms, when horses, cows, sheep, goats, or llamas give birth, mother animal and newborn foal, calf, lamb,kid, and whatever llama babies are called, are usually put in a private stable away from the herd. This is to provide a quiet place for the two to form a bond. Mother animal cleans baby animal, nuzzles them, nurses them, makes lowing noises to them and gets a response. They need this to recognize each other at all. Separate them, even in an emergency, there is a chance for maternal rejection.
How long does it take for human parents to properly bond with their newborns? We are members of the most complex species on Earth so far. Human newborns are among the most helpless of mammals. We can't see straight at all, our hearing is terrible, we're cold, and have no idea what these wriggling appendages are attached to shoulders and hips. We need the constant touch, the cooing, the kisses and the snuggling 24/7 for at least a few months. This is crucial, not just in order to survive, but germinate a sense of connection to the human race at all.
America is the only Western nation in the world that forces both parents back to work within hours or days of a birth.
Three is, being forced to have a unwanted child is a societal disaster. Being a born female does not automatically trigger visions of material desire and instinctual mothering skill. Some have more talent than others. A woman who wishes to remain childless doesn't mean she hates children. She can love them in a different way, but not maternally. If she understands this, the decision not to have a child could benefit society by not adding another generation of neurotics. Easy access to precautions for both men and women are vital.
Unwanted children denied acceptance could cause more violence in the long run. In the late 1990s, a book called "Freakanomics", by Steven Leavitt, came out that dealt with how access to abortion affected poverty and crime statistics. The 1960s and 1970s saw the greatest violent crime per capita in the modern age. Starting in the late 1980s, about 18 years after Roe, the per capita crime gradually fell to a level that's still true today.
By allowing fascists back into government ( because you're too busy doing ..what?), we run the risk in the United States of reproducing on a large scale, the horrors that Romania went through under the authoritarian grip of Nicolai Ceaucescu.
Romania is a mystique filled, awesome, majestic nation bordering Ukraine to the south. In 1965, Ceaucescu made the decision to ban all abortions and contraception in the country, for the twin purposes of providing a large pool of cheap labor and maintaining a standing army. He said outright that fetuses were the property of the state. Any woman trying to abort one or refusing to get pregnant were traitors.
What happened was this: with poverty already endemic in Romania, tens of thousands of Romanian babies were abandoned and sent to state orphanages where they were warehoused ghastly conditions with insufficient staff and funds.
I leave you with these articles for further research. Romania still heals from that hellish period, and will for decades to come. The vitality of a nation depends on the health of its women.
This is one reason why we have to vote a Blue Tsunami to Congress in 2024.
"The Troubled History of Romanian Orphanages" (no date), www.borgenproject.org
"The Romanian Orphans are Adults Now", August 15, 2020
www theatlantic.com. (possible paywall)
"Romania's Forgotten Children: Sensory Deprivation" March 16th, 2020
www.tandfonline.com
