The accusation that one's enemies kill one's babies is very old, reaching back through Euro history to the first writing. I remember the cartoons of Asian soldiers bayoneting infants in WWII and the more recent constant descriptions of American cavalry killing indigenous babies. Police today kill children with little or no provocation. Inflamed, prejudicial, indefensible murder of children runs along constantly. There are countries where street children are simply shot on sight. No one knows whose children they are until they don't show up at home that night. If they had a home.
We place the value of children higher than grown people. We are shocked at children being required to carry guns in rebel armies. We are horrified by a little boy's body being washed up on a beach. Somehow it seems like adult men are okay to kill or make into killers. Women? We don't think about them.
In real life sometimes things go wrong and the mother kills the infants -- maybe during the period of gestation and maybe in that three years which amounts to a second gestation. Some mammals kill their babies if they are frightened, attacked, alienated. Only recently have we understood anything at all about postpartum depression, which can do the same thing in humans, or about "crib death" when the baby just stops living and no one can pinpoint a cause. We don't want to hear about it. We pretend we're not animals.
This has always happened. Plague, famine, war, and so on take varying fractions of the human birth rate over the years and places. Even 100% like an environmental catastrophe. But in the US lately there was been a steady obsession with the handling of abortion and newborns, a conviction that somehow there is murder and the expert scientific doctors are to blame. The birth rate is going down. Not as much as in Russia.
Politics is quick to pounce on these dynamics. The Repubs don't QUITE claim that Dems drink the blood of babies in order to stay young, but if one looks at the faces of the more Reptilian control dominators, a semi-secret party within a party, it's not hard to think they might do it if they thought it worked. In fact, there is talk about scientifically, medically, drawing the blood of young people to infuse into older people. They say that about shit, too. You're supposed to swallow it in a capsule.
Not long ago someone posted on Twitter a protest about the way we handle babies now. Rather than sequestering our little ones and their mothers in a safe, dark place and leaving them to bond, we put newborns in plastic carriers and take them everywhere at the end of our arm, as though they were sea creatures in calcareous shells. This is not the same as people who put the babies against their backs so they can do the day's work, rhythmically pounding and bending. The modern babies are dazzled, chilled, banged into by careless people, left behind as convenient -- sometimes left behind for good, forgotten. Like an umbrella. In such a situation, the idea of a newborn murdered by neglect, ignorance, malevolence, opens up a well of guilt and too-late realization that can easily translate to hatred.
Images of tiny bodies in pieces explode advertising imaginations of pink and tender bliss, so that the actuality of pulling or pushing one new person out of the supporting older person gets entirely lost. Again, a fraction of conceptions die soon afterwards and are never even noticed. Another fraction have something bad enough wrong with them that they can't survive, even in the womb. Another fraction exist until they lose their umbilical feed through birth. I can't remember any statistics about how many babies die at birth or soon after. There are lots of statistics after that. Risk at every stage. The highest rate right now is the adolescent and the nearly highest cause is suicide, not wanting to live. Is that not a form of abortion? Shouldn't that be addressed?
When is a baby a little human being? One modern opinion is two-fold: the gestation period and then the three years following. We have special protective sentiments towards little mammals in this "basic becoming" time period, much shorter in most mammals. They are "cute" and we say "aaaawww" and want to put our hands on them. We try to make giving birth into an heroic event, an euphoric ordeal -- and it is. But even on "Call the Midwife," the actuality is often tragic and wrenching.
Birth is one of the clear, organic, in-or-out points in a woman's life. But after that, every baby is unique -- unused parts of the brain pruned out, little bodies nourished and exercised differently, some received into happy families and some distorted by starvation and abuse. Suffering and delight will mix throughout whatever happens. This is true of any mammal.
To make this into a political football and a source of torture by controlling abortion clinics is evil.
No comments:
Post a Comment