SKIRTING THE ISSUE

MOTHERS AND BIRTH (Part one)

In the beginning when the elderly were seen to be the most vulnerable to the Covid virus and when the new vaccine was still rationed, the doctor gave his allotted vaccine shot to his aged mother. But when soon the vaccine became universally available and the evolving virus became more dangerous to all ages, he forgot to go get his own shot. This produced a potentially contagious and endangered professional who was in constant contact with vulnerable people and did not check whether they had been vaccinated, nor urge them to do so. And what about his wife and daughters? His sentimentality snuffed his professional sense.

Responding to the cultural bent to individualization rather than community, he thought of vaccines as one-by-one rather than a universal necessity. He had, of course, the ability to excuse people from vaccination if they had overriding preconditions like compromised immunity. He may have had a connection to persons like Christian Science believers or Jehovah’s Witness who refuse medicines of all kinds, even transfusions. Several friends I knew chose to die rather than accept medical help.

These factors go deep, so I want to go even deeper by picking up on the most primal of concepts, the Mother. In the beginning all creatures reproduced by dividing in half or “budding”. Then came meiosis, the doubling of the DNA carrying spiral, so that one stayed in place to become the vehicle of the new being and the other spiral abandoned everything but the essentials so as to be a key to travel to “start the engines” of the first body, the ovum, the egg, which was the Mother, the matrix, the Mere within a sea of potential.

Recently scientists have premised that the New Being in the womb fights the Mold for resources. The mother can simply sluff off the intruder. The Conceptus can burden the mother or at the most dangerous moment, actual birth, can kill her with hemorrhaging or infection.

“We see that in the 19th century about 500 to 1,000 mothers died for every 100,000 births. Every 100th to 200th birth led to the mother’s death. Since women gave birth much more often than today maternal death was not uncommon.”

“The most recent U.S. maternal mortality ratio, or rate, of 17.4 per 100,000 pregnancies represented approximately 660 maternal deaths in 2018. This ranks last overall among industrialized countries. More than half of recorded maternal deaths occur after the day of birth.”

Birth control and medical intervention when pregnancy is discovered have changed society. Some people do not want their position in society to be changed.

Data shows close relationship to wealth, nutrition, education, and cultural support. At present the successful birth rate is declining, partly because of discouragement with the economic and pandemic prospects. The life span of men is also shortening. The culture has greatly diminished the importance of family in favor of individual economic success, diverting child care at infancy to low income people who may be from another culture that ennobles mothering.

“MOTHER” as a concept rather than a reality is now sentimentalized, romanticized, made central to identity, but has an equal but opposite demonic, consuming, painful image, sometimes qualified by using “step” as an explanation. “Adopted” and “foster” hover in between. Institutional care is almost universally considered destructive and at the moment among indigenous people involuntarily pushed into boarding schools, it is framed as fatal. Yet some persist in choosing quantity of population rather than quality.

Nurturing, protection, endorsement are meant to be shared by parents in early times, but the breaking of the agricultural basis of family has not discouraged the father who tries to keep the control he once had, treating wife and children as livestock to be “owned.” This gets transferred to the larger culture so that one political party says they “own” the other, so are justified in running everything. This is a kind of social virus, a fragment that tries to become a source of self-replication.

THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY (Part Two)

“Thomas Malthus was an 18th-century British philosopher and economist noted for the Malthusian growth model, an exponential formula used to project population growth. The theory states that food production will not be able to keep up with growth in the human population, resulting in disease, famine, war, and calamity.”

We have not done well at romanticizing the fear of overpopulation, though the Repub “death cult” people try with dramatic “end of the world” scenarios and the presumed assumption of the obedient into heaven as eternals.

“A child dies from hunger every 10 seconds. Poor nutrition and hunger is responsible for the death of 3.1 million children a year.”

This is explained by saying that these children are not Christian and more romantically by supplying food aid that is actually food subsidies for the mega-ag people in the US. Nature addresses food limits by imposing lethal starvation, but we can’t tolerate that, esp. with media ready to capitalize on the images.

THE SOLUTION (Part Three)

Education is the demonstrated answer. In places where women and their families achieve education that brings economic parity, the raw numbers of people lost in birth or famine go down but the proportion of mothers and births that survive and grow will increase. In this way culture can oppose raw nature that treats us all as just another species like beetles.

Reduced population means reduced exploitation of resources from wood for heat to exotic metals for cell phones. The same goes for climate. This is not a single-species issue. it is not even a benefit limited to living creatures, but benefits the very ground we walk on, the seas that rise around us.

We need a new poetry of life that doesn’t depend on pregnancy or its prevention, that celebrates connection and mutual harmony in ecosystems, both physical and emotional. We must turn away from the eternal and give deep regard to right now, right here, right next to others.

Human institutions that dictate otherwise are out-of-date and demonic. Some “religions” have nothing to do with awareness of the sacred and holy or even basic simple version. They are simply rival governments within the wombs of nations, trying to kill the cultural matrix in order to become dominant. To them even death is simply a marketing opportunity so long as birth is forced.