Straight (17 page)

Children are still a common part of marriage. But on the whole our views on them are rather different. The same changes in social ideals and expectations that gave would-be spouses a voice regarding whom they would marry, and provided women an autonomous social and civil existence, also dramatically changed our attitudes toward reproduction.

Today in the West, it is considered something of a default setting that pregnancies and childbirths will be, or at least ought to be, planned. “Accidents happen,” as the saying goes, but when it comes to reproduction, an accident is considered irresponsible, possibly shameful. Bearing as many children as come one's way, without family planning of any kind, is so unusual now that we view it as nothing short of a freak show: witness the several iterations of reality television shows about the Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar family, whose nineteen children have made them the poster family for the controversial, fundamentalist Christian “Quiverfull” movement.[
20
] Parents of large families, particularly if they are poor (and especially if they receive government assistance) are often demonized as selfish and lacking restraint. Alternately it may be assumed that they are the unquestioning dupes of authoritarian religion. In either case, the marriage that centers around raising many children is presumed to be old-fashioned
and frumpy.

It wasn't always like this, of course. For most of human history, women had no real option other than to cope, one way or another, with however many pregnancies happened to them. It was common for women to bear many more than the two children that women in most of the West average today, although not all of those children were likely to survive. Families were often large, and a fairly constant round of pregnancies was a standard feature of many women's lives. The gulf between that approach to marriage and childbearing and today's is the result of a fortuitous merging of technology and culture, the science of reliable conception plus the various forces that contributed to its social legitimacy.

The desire to control fertility is nothing new. Since time immemorial, women (and some men) have tried virtually anything to limit the likelihood of conception. Ancient Egyptians used acacia pessaries; Europeans from the ancient Romans to the nineteenth century ingested herbs like Queen Anne's lace and pennyroyal. Across history, women desperate not to bear a child did whatever they could think of—throwing themselves down stairs, lifting heavy weights, leaping from heights, sitting over boiling pots of water, drinking turpentine or gin mixed with iron filings, stewing themselves in hot baths, and much more besides—if they thought it could help them avoid it. The desperation of some of these methods speaks with great clarity to the fact that these were no mere attempts to create a situation where women could enjoy more sex and more sexual pleasure without paying the proverbial piper. While the “women just want to have consequence-free sex” anti-contraceptive argument is often trotted out by latter-day social conservatives, such a view is a cruel and misogynist oversimplification. A more realistic assessment of the struggle for effective contraception would be to see it as the struggle to achieve some level of control over the single most dangerous, resource-intensive, and biologically crucial activity in which human beings regularly engage.

Conception, of course, is unpredictable. Even today we have no really good way of knowing whether or not any individual act of intercourse might result in a conception. It was not until 1927 that we could reliably test to see whether conception
had
taken place. Prior to
that, early pregnancy could only be guessed at based on whether or not a woman's menses arrived on time. Historically there were many would-be contraceptives available, from coitus interruptus and herbal brews to improvised condoms. But access was unreliable, some methods were toxic, others difficult or inconvenient, and even the best historical contraceptives were not particularly dependable. Given that even the timing of ovulation in the context of the menstrual cycle was not well understood until 1924, penis-in-vagina intercourse, for most of human history, was nothing more and nothing less than a game of chance.

The chance of a pregnancy, in turn, meant the assumption of frankly terrifying risks, to say nothing of responsibilities. Pregnancy has always been a fraught time, gradually interfering with women's physical function even when it doesn't bring serious discomforts or complications. It has always meant the prospect of another mouth to feed. What we often forget, from our first-world perch with its hospital births, antibiotics, and antiseptic procedures, is that until the twentieth century, childbirth was also deadly.

Prior to the twentieth century, maternal mortality never fell much below 7 percent.[
21
] However, Lawrence Stone notes, in a sobering statistic, that from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, three out of every four marriages among the aristocracy that ended before the tenth anniversary did so because of the death of the wife.[
22
] Nor was early childhood any safer, with an infant mortality rate that ranged from 15 percent to 25 percent, a rate that today is found only in the poorest of third world nations. Angola's 2009 infant mortality rate, for example, was around 18 percent, and Afghanistan's around 15 percent, according to the
CIA World Factbook.
Compare that to less than 1 percent for the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Union countries.

To us in the West today, these numbers describe an alien world. It is so unusual for a woman or an infant not to survive a pregnancy today that we regard it as a tragedy when it happens. For our ancestors, it was a sad commonplace. So too was the awareness that repeated childbearing tended to sap women's strength and leave them (and frequently their children as well) vulnerable to illness and injury. Little wonder that many of our foremothers openly feared and avoided sex.
Theirs was not a world where there could be any sense of balance between sexual pleasure and the perils of pregnancy and childbirth.

Maternal health and welfare were not the only motivations in the struggle for reliable contraception. In fact, thanks to the advent of antiseptic practices, maternal mortality was already on the wane by the time Margaret Sanger went to work as a visiting nurse in the immigrant tenements of New York City in 1912. But Sanger, whose own mother had died miserably at fifty after bearing eleven children, was deeply aware of just how much further there was to go before pregnancy and childbirth could become a net positive in women's lives. She was not the first to consider contraception essential to solving this problem. Since the nineteenth century, reformers like Eliza Duffy had been arguing against “enforced childbearing” for the sake of women themselves, as well as the sakes of their children. In the early twentieth century, as women solidified their legal and economic independence and governments increasingly took on the responsibility of assuring public health, maternal and child health began to become more compelling civic issues. But feminist appeals on the subject—then as now—met with only limited success. Socioeconomics provided a far more convincing argument for contraception than women's welfare had.

The early nineteenth-century's Reverend Thomas Malthus had correctly identified fertility and population growth as crucial economic and political issues, both at the level of the individual household and of the nation: if population outstripped resources, he argued, disaster would result. These ideas proved central to early contraceptives campaigns, and are still used today by groups like Population Connection (formerly known as Zero Population Growth). The language employed to decry the “overproduction” of children was a useful, clinical-sounding counter to the moral indignation levied against contraceptive practices. People long accustomed to the notion that pregnancies represented God's will could be induced—through the high-status language of industrial success and failure—to agree that perhaps it was not so bad for human ingenuity to intervene in the Divine plan, now and then, in the name of com-mon profit.

Malthusian arguments also fit in well with the social Darwinist worries of the age. On a relatively benign level, these manifested in the familiar concern that children should not be brought into the world
unless their parents were prepared to give them a “proper,” meaning middle-class, upbringing. The ability to provide “respectable” education, clothing, nutrition, and the like to children was seen not just as the admirable goal it had been earlier, but was now a standard by which readiness for parenthood could be measured. There was a growing expectation that the well-prepared parent would provide for children in very specific and often costly ways, including the use of myriad new specialized products often touted as “scientific”: commercial baby foods, purpose-built toilet-training equipment, specially designed children's clothes, nutritional supplements.[
23
] All these new inventions were touted as necessary because, as the editorial tagline for
Parents Magazine
read, from its founding in the 1920s until it was changed in 1951, “The future of the race marches forward on the feet of little children.”

With the “future of the race” at stake, fears about inappropriate childbearing also assumed more sinister forms. An increasingly widespread fear that the “unfit” and “unsuitable” were breeding at such a rate that their numbers would overtake those of the “fit” and “worthy” slotted in neatly beside common paranoia about the poor, the nonwhite, the slum-dweller, and their even more terrifying cousins, the addict, the prostitute, the indigent, and the disabled. That such sorry specimens might theoretically outbreed the upright, respectable middle classes intensified the nineteenth-century tendency to panic about “race suicide” and national failure. Such fears continued unabated into the twentieth century, when they eventually received a red-scare makeover. As politically influential Dixie Cup magnate Hugh Moore put it in a widely circulated 1956 letter, “We're not primarily interested in the sociological or humanitarian aspects of birth control. We
are
interested in the use . . . which the Communists make of hungry people in their drive to conquer the earth.”[
24
]

The solution to both increasing birth among the worthy and minimizing it among the unworthy, at least in theory, was relatively simple. The fit and worthy were to be encouraged to have more children. They would be supported in the effort to boost the middle-class population through government-sponsored maternal benefits, classes for new parents, and child welfare programs, all of which sprang up in quantity throughout the West during the interwar years. As part of this overall effort, the phrase “family planning” came into being in the
1940s, its reassuring overtones promising an appealing brand of domestic security. If having a family could be planned, in the same way one might plan the building of a house, doing it systematically seemed to make the task much less daunting.

Then there were those who were not to be given the option of parenthood, whether planned or not. Compulsory sterilizations in small numbers were performed in the United States on “undesirables” beginning in 1907. The practice was adopted in Scandinavia in the interwar years. An attempt to establish sterilization as a state policy in Britain in 1913 failed, but, in 1933, Germany passed a Eugenic Sterilization Law, modeled on the Model Sterilization Law developed by the Eugenics Record Office of the United States. The Eugenic Sterilization Law, in turn, swiftly became an infamous tool of the Third Reich.

One might think that considering the extremes to which governments were willing to go to stop the wrong people from having babies, garden-variety contraception would have been, as it were, a simple pill to swallow. But anxiety that the right people would procreate, combined with centuries of moral opposition to contraception (not least that of the Catholic Church), meant that this was hardly the case. In many jurisdictions, contraception was either illegal or of dubious legal status. In virtually all, it was officially taboo.

What governments or religious authorities dictated, and what the average Joe and Jane did in their private lives, however, were often two different things. After all, economic, medical, and social motivations for family planning are hardly limited to governments. The nineteenth century appears to have been an era of widespread do-it-yourself family planning. Researchers including Karl Ittmann and Daniel Scott Smith have found ample evidence that even among the poor working classes in the turn-of-the-century United States and UK, enough people were deliberately limiting family size for it to be demographically apparent in statistical retrospect.[
25
] Imperfect as the available methods were (withdrawal was the favorite), Victorians' dedication to their contraceptive practices must have been impressively consistent. Birthrates among American white women declined from 7 babies per woman in 1800 to around 3.5 in 1900, a sort of drop that simply does not happen without some sort of intentional brake on fertility. This was precisely the sort of decline in birthrate among the “right” people
that provoked so much paranoid “race suicide” speculation.

By the start of the twentieth century, it was becoming obvious that intentional fertility limitation was not just a superficial trend but increasingly a part of standard middle-class experience. Faced with a fait accompli, religious authorities and then major secular governments began to grant their grudging approval to contraception. The Church of England was first, permitting it as of 1930 for married couples who felt a “moral obligation” to limit parenthood. The influential Council of Churches of Christ, representing about 22 million American Protestants, followed with a similar pronouncement in 1931. It was not until much later that major Western governments got on board. In 1965,
Griswold v. Connecticut
established that contraception was constitutional in the United States on privacy grounds, while Britain's National Health Service Amendment (Family Planning) Act of 1967 established that contraceptive devices could be distributed freely under the auspices of the National Health Service.