[The Blues Brothers]
When exactly did we stop thinking of children as being the natural outcome of sex, and turn them into commodities to be traded on the open market?
Part 1: ‘natural outcome’. I believe that this view changed with the invention, in the early twentieth century, of reliable methods of contraception (antecedent methods having been less than reliable), and was confirmed in the middle of that century following the general availability of highly reliable oral contraceptives.
Part 2: ‘commodities’. The use of children as commodities apparently greatly predates the use of artificial contraceptives of any kind. Mediaeval kings would exchange sons, to be brought up in one another’s courts, as hostages to treaties; the commercial aspects of the practice of apprenticeship, dating perhaps in its recognisable form from the Dark Ages, might be considered as relevant; and some sources suggest that in the Old Kingdom of classical Egypt it was an offence for a son to attempt to follow any trade other than that of his father.
If anything, I am inclined to believe that the ability to have only as many children as one wants is likely to increase the perceived value of each child, which in turn has probably led to the overprotective attitude of many modern parents.
On the other hand we have baby-farming benefit claimants, like our former neighbours, who called their children (of whom they had as many as they possibly could) by numbers rather than names, and clearly regarded them quite cynically as nominal liabilities to be traded against increased benefits.
There is, I think, quite possibly a causal relation between contraception and child-commercialism, but if there is then I would say that its sense is inverse with respect to that suggested by AR.
As we all know to our great cost in many different ways of paying, sex was invented in 1963.
Sex seems to have been something that is “had” by people on the Wireless Tele Vision or in the MSM, rather more frequently than one has had the pleasure of, oneself.
1963 was I believe when the pig Kenneth Tynan said “f***” on live broadcast Wireless Tele Vision; the Public Prints dined out on it for weeks.
Since sex was only invented in 1963, that must be why we have all these undesired children today, and it begs the question about how persons were generated beforehand.
None of the post-sex hominids can be over 45 years old or thereabouts (these will be the grandmothers and grandfathers as is natural.)
As Auberon Waugh would have said: “I am not suggesting that we should round up and shoot all people under 46, but….”
Waugh of course misses the point. He did after all nearly machine-gun himself to death in an accident while a conscript.
Perhaps we ought to think about the role of science, engineering and modern medicine, in the transition of beliefs about how and why one ought to have children and how many one “would need”. Darwin had nine, of whom six survived, and he thought that was a result.
These days, if my dear wife is anything to go by, we ought to have either none (being pregnant was the most tormenting, sickening, uncomfortable, painful and unpleasant event to happen in her life, ever, and twice too! Think of it! How did she allow herself to undergo it? I’m not joking…) or at most, one, for form’s sake, for the grandparents to feel they have been passed on slightly (the 4 of them are dead anyway, so they don’t have a view.)
Contraception makes children an optional headache. I begin to see where the poor maligned Popes are coming from. They are not stargazers nor intergalactic travellers – as we shall inevitably, one day, have to learn to become. But if people don’t bother to raise children, because
(a) you are having too much fun without them, or
(b) it’s too much trouble to read stories at bedtime when you want to blog or watch porn, or
(c) you have to help them with their homework and you have forgotten how or you can’t be arsed, or
(d) something else that means they get in the way, like you are a serial socialist-created barnyard-animal,
then we will go down.
We didn’t have any because we couldn’t afford that and a roof over our heads. Also, we didn’t really feel like watching them being taken off us by television and state conditioning centres and turned into people we really don’t like.
However, the numbers were more than made up by our professional-claimant neighbours, who had seven.
That ought to be good enough even for the Pope, in my humble opinion.