Halcyon Days

My oldest daughter gave birth to her own daughter last June. Unexpectedly - and sadly - she did so as a single mother. As a result, we have spent most of the time since the baby's arrival together - with our other daughter joining us as often as possible as well. 

It has been wonderful. As a woman at a supermarket checkout said to my daughter a month or two after the baby's birth, "Children are the joy of the world." Disappointingly for her she had only two, as she went on to explain; ideally, she'd have had several, but her husband turned out to be more violent than she had reckoned on (whatever exactly that means).

Some people would label that conversation "oversharing", but for me it was an affirmation of all that I was feeling. This new life transformed our family circle, endowing each of us with new stores of happiness and love.

Why did I need a reminder of the marvel that the universe becomes when children arrive? Because I am a discontented soul, inclined to focus on how disturbing so much in the world is and too ready to worry, whenever I want to point out loveliness, that I am being sentimental, Pollyannish, or rather like Fotherington-Thomas, deemed total wet and weed at Molesworth's school St Custard's. 

Anyway, thanks to the arrival of our grand daughter, life in our family has become infinitely more full of all sorts of things I hesitate to mention, such as joy, love, laughter ... actually this is getting emetic. Let's just say, it's been great. 

Given the delight brought by a baby's arrival in my own family, I feel more than ever that having children is something good. However, I don't think this is the message many young people are getting. I met someone the other day who said she couldn't have children because of climate anxiety. Others decide they can't pursue the careers they have just begun to succeed in or to afford housing while also meeting the needs of offspring. These are understandable worries but they suggest that things in the world we have built for ourselves need improving, not that young people should have to give up one of the most extraordinary experiences a person can have.

Sadly though during my whole lifetime the politics of childbearing has been focussed on another battle. Instead of campaigning for changes in the way we support those raising children, shaping policies on the principle that having children is the most important thing human beings can do, if they get the chance, the big fight has been for the opportunity to pull part grown babies out of women's bodies.

What a colossal mistake the leaders of the women's liberation movement made when they chose abortion as the central tenet of their struggle. Although any challenge to the argument that abortion is a woman's right to choose is generally met with outrage, to me it has always seemed incoherent, for a range of reasons.

These include: 

(a) it is against women's interests to fight for the right to have something rather violent done to us in order to allow us to continue a path through life as uninterrupted as that of men, rather than advocating for deep changes to be made in society that will ensure women are not disadvantaged but supported when they become mothers; 

(b) the main liberation abortion provides is that of allowing men to avoid responsibility; 

(c)  'my body, my right to choose' is logically flawed as an argument because, except in a tiny proportion of instances, women have the right to choose not to indulge in an activity that makes them pregnant but once they have made the choice to participate in that activity and as a result got pregnant - as they knew might be possible - their bodies, precisely because of the choice they have already made, stop being the only ones at stake.

The catalyst for my suddenly pouring all this out in a post was an article in this weekend's Telegraph magazine. It tells the story of the sadness of infertility from the point of view of a man, which in itself is quite unusual. It explains how the writer and his wife, having lived the kind of life that young people are encouraged to live by all the various images and influences that surround them, arrived at their mid-thirties and were hit by "the desire to have a child". Perhaps in part because they were both already well into their thirties, things didn't go well when they set out on a quest to conceive. They ended up in "the absolute medical world of IVF". 

This couple were lucky. After all the horrible intrusions of the IVF process, they ended up with a child. Although I acknowledge it, I won't try to grapple here with the ethical quagmire of the fact that in the process they conceived 10 embryos but 9 were discarded because the doctors deemed them all "in some way doomed".  Instead, I'd like to quote from the article and invite readers to contrast the way in which a foetus conceived five days ago is regarded if you are an IVF patient compared to the way we are exhorted to see it by advocates of abortion:

"For five days this child, our child, now a blastocyst, lived in a petri dish in the laboratory. After five days, we went back to the clinic. On a screen they showed us an image: a collection of cells, smudged softly together like bubbles. These cells were then placed inside my wife's body. We left with a Xerox of the image of the cells. It felt very strange, to have this photograph of a person before they were a person, but also comforting, as if the fact that something can be photographed makes it definite and real."

I am reading The Secular Age  by Charles Taylor, which traces among other things a loss of enchantment in the western perception of the world after the Middle Ages Therefore, I was also intrigued by the way in which the author of the Telegraph article returned to the thought habits of the enchanted world when he was hoping to become a father:

"I have never wanted somthing more than I wanted this process (IVF) to work, this change to happen: to have something where before there was nothing. To want something so much was a trauma [this bit is so modern and to me annoying - the word trauma has become so overused.] Perhaps as a way of coping with the need I was feeling, I became very superstitious. I decided that I had to keep reading the same book I happened to be reading when we began the process so I read it every day, even though I had long exhausted it. Or I wore the same T-shirt to every medical appointment.

Of course now this all seems crazy. But maybe the truth is that however much we have a desire for change, in fact to change is very arduous and strange, so that it's not as irrational as it might seem, to need some kind of help in a process of transformation. It was as if the universe became a being that I needed to placate every day, the way I used to talk to unseen spirits and imaginary friends when I was a child."

At the centre of what I see as our current misunderstanding and undervaluing of human procreation may be our state of disenchantment, an attitude to life of banal practicality, something that most of us are schooled in from birth. We are immersed in a noisy world of distractions and novelty - screens and gadgets and all the other flashy stuff we are encouraged to waste our attention on. In this world, while we understand more and more about the mechanics of existence, the mystery at the heart of it  - simply put, "why?" - is rarely even acknowledged. 

Until, for those of us who experience it, childbirth breaks through the clamouring static, reminding us there is something beyond the day-to-day. Perhaps this is another reason we are not strongly encouraged toward having children - the fact that the birth of a baby gives us a glimpse of transcendence, of wonder, of the miraculous. Every single arrival is amazing, a dazzling, confounding event. What creates this inexhaustible supply of unique spirits? Where do they come from, these new individuals emerging daily into the world?