(no subject)

[fpb]

My post on the Massachusetts pregnancy pact has generated more debate than anything I have written in years. Thank Heaven (and thank the goodwill of my f-list) it has all been in a polite spirit - even when people disagreed radically. If there are still lurkers watching this LJ for things to be offended by, they will have to make a more than usually thorough job of misrepresentation and lying to make it suitable for fandom_wank.

However, it seems to me that, with few exceptions, everyone seems to have gone off at a tangent - including myself. A few of the earliest posters caught some of my point at least, for, like many members of the conservative end of the spectrum, they have been worrying about the fall in childbirth in Western countries - currently at or beneath replacement level in nearly every major Western country including Japan and (but for immigration) the USA.

That was not, precisely, the thing I had in mind, either. I am not, I hope, simple enough to jump up and rejoice because a fad for childbirth seems to have seized a number of teen-age girls in one place in the USA. It is rather the case that I had been looking for something like this - although, of course, not exactly in the startling and rather troubling form it actually took. The Gloucester pregnancy pact confirmed a number of views I had been forming.

As a historian, I have never been convinced by the panicked spread of the belief that "demography is destiny" - as Mark Steyn and many other conservatives insist. To the contrary, history shows that nothing is more easily influenced and altered by circumstances than demography. In the nineteenth century - the classic century of European demographic explosion - one country noticeably bucked the tendency to huge families and enormous migratory flows, and that country was not a minor one, but France, the centre of Europe. France had 30 million inhabitants in 1801 and 39 million in 1914, and most of the increase was made of immigrants from Italy, Spain and eastern Europe. French families preferred to have few children. At the same time - the very same time - the French of Quebec, similar to the French of the French countryside in religion, manners, language and birth, had one of the enormous birth rates even in the high-rise demographics of the nineteenth-century West. They managed to keep up with the immigration-driven growth of their English-speaking rivals purely by the delirious rate of their growth. Then, one day in the late nineteen-fifties, the Quebecois just stopped having children. Today, their growth rate is one of the lowest in the world, and the very nationalist party whose anti-clerical policies caused or helped the disaster looks with horror upon the real possibility of national dissolution. And to give another instance of the quirks and sudden changes to which demography is subject, were you aware that in the last few years, the birthrate in both Iran and Algeria has gone through the floor, and that both these countries are currently in negative growth territory? Demographic trends can change radically in little more than the space of a morning.

However, the collapse in natality across the West is an undeniable and troubling phenomenon. It is also a very recent one. The conservative consensus that it was caused by the Sixties and the triumph of abortion and contraception is not supported by the facts: the real collapse began in the eighties, under Ronald Thatcher. It was my generation, the generation that came of age in the eighties, that had no children.

My family is typical. My Boomer parents had three children, and nearly every one of their brothers and sisters had similar families - small, but not too small. Whether they thought of it or not, they certainly took good care that the Barbieri and Fanelli genes should be passed on. It was we who did not have any; of my parents' three children, only my sister had a baby, and she had to wait till she was 38. Our family has some peculiar problems - my sister had medical problems, my brother is tetraplegic - but nonetheless I think I can discern, from the lives and experiences of people like me, a few major causes.

In my judgment, the demographic perfect storm that struck the West from the eighties onwards is due to two or three main causes. The first is indeed due to the Sixties, but not to abortion or contraception. This may seem counter-intuitive, but abortion and contraception do not necessarily reduce the birthrate. Britain has one of the highest birth rates in the West, and also by far the highest rate of abortion (I do not know if statistics about contraception are even collected, but they are likely to say the same thing). Far from the immense and still growing British use of abortion reducing the birth rate, the two have grown together. The gay abandon with which English girls, especially of the notorious underclass whose existence troubles journalists and sociologists, have sex and abortions, is the same gay abandon with which they accept to have live children.

No: the Sixties trend that affected us as a generation was the triumph of divorce. And the reasons for this are ancient and deep. I discussed them here: http://fpb.livejournal.com/260448.html. Please read that article if you have not already.

The reasons for marriage to be severely endangered in the sixties were real and grave. We are not talking, as some conservative writers tend to imply, of a silly fad. It was a major crisis, as damaging as a lost war (and attended, incidentally, by a lost war). When we read that Betty Friedan's statement of her own female discontents became, in the early sixties, an instant best-seller, it is just not good enough, as David Horowitz does, to point out that the lady was a lifelong Communist. It is not in the power of Communist propaganda, any more than of capitalist enterprise, to manufacture a runaway best-seller; if you believe that Friedan's writings succeeded because of some diabolical Communist conspiracy, you might as well believe that JK Rowling's novels succeded because of some diabolical marketing ploy, rather than because they fill some evident need in our souls. Besides, if Horowitz had more brains, he would realize that Friedan's writings really worked against her politics: because the searing anger and frustration she conveyed so effortlessly had been experienced as the blameless Party hack wife of a Party hack husband, in a model Communist marriage. The issue went beyond Communism and anti-Communism: the frustations felt by an ambitious young Marxist woman married to another Marxist-Leninist resonated exactly with hundreds of thousands of ordinary Western women married to every shade of person.

This does not lead directly to demographic collapse. Friedan herself had three children. The divorce generation convinced themselves that they could still have children, in fact that they would probably do a better job of raising them than their narrow-minded, authoritarian, constrictive parents. This was also the age of Dr.Benjamin Spock. What they had not bargained for was the effect of divorce itself. There is no such thing as unbitter divorce; whatever good or bad reasons there may be for it (and by God, there can be good reasons a-plenty!), it amounts to rending apart what had been intended to be together. Each partner loses something that he or she had invested in, a fundamental part of his or her past. Hence divorce battles are famously bitter. But even more bitter are the months or years leading up to the inevitable collapse; times of screaming violence or sinister silence, times of bitter, unavailing and ever-mounting mutual resentment. And the children experience every single one of these moments. Contrary to popular belief, divorce itself often comes as a relief to children of a divided family - until they realize that it has by no means put an end to the argument, the bitterness, the toing-and-froing, and the too careful and too detailed divisions of everything in sight, including time with the children themselves.

If this happens in your home alone, it is bad enough. If it happens in the whole of society, if you see it happen time after time among your friends and relatives, it shapes your life. And those of us who grew up in the shadow of a widespread, widely agonizing, often violent series of dissolutions, could not help but approach any idea of relationship with fear and a complete lack of self-belief. Hence the disastrous popularity of the idea of cohabiting, either as a long-term trial for marriage, or as an alternative to the terrors of marriage. The subtext is that if things go wrong as our generation has so often confusedly and agonizingly seen them go wrong as children, there is an escape. In point of fact, the idea of escape is itself delusional; you have still dedicated years of your life to a pseudo-family, so you have all the pain of divorce without even the legal protection. (In point of fact, most Western jurisdiction have been developing, in response to widespread demand, legal instruments for cohabitation that approach divorce.) And the pull outwards rather than inwards brings out the very terrors and anger you have learned as a child to associate with divorce, and the learned behaviour of cruelty and vindictiveness. Some statistics claim that violence between partners is eight times more frequent among cohabiting couples than among married ones. But there is a more fundamental point: that this whole notion arises from, and tends to reinforce, the very inner fear, the very lack of self-belief and confidence, which our generation has learned as children, and which eats away at our stability.

This, then, is the first wind of Hell that goes into the making of the perfect demographic storm: the collapse of the relationship between male and female. Our generation is the generation of the children of divorce. In a hideous caricature of what Jesus said to be true of Paradise, we neither marry, nor have children.

The second factor is the collapse of the career structure for most men and women. Our generation saw it happen in the seventies and eighties; sometimes, especially in Britain and the USA, saw it being pursued as a matter of deliberate policy. WE grew up with the melancholy sound of Bruce Springsteen's "My home town" ringing in our ears: Foreman says, these jobs are going, boys, and they aren't coming back - to your hometown... - or that of any one of a million other messengers bringing the same message. Our fathers had queued up at the doors of personnel managers for big companies, looking for jobs they expected to keep for decades, to make careers on, to marry and have children on, to use to support long-term debt to buy and furnish a home and car. We knew from the moment we left school that work was scarce, hard to find and easy to lose, impermanent, desperately needed, and yet that, whatever we got, it would not last us long. The great English writer and journalist, Keith Waterhouse - himself the wonderful, articulate voice of the previous generation - had an epiphanic moment when he realized what this had done to the young of the eighties: when he saw a pleasant-looking, well-dresed young man bursting out of an office and running up to an equally pleasant-looking, well-dressed young woman, and telling her in tones of ecstasy: "I've got the job!" "Wonderful! You lucky dog!" answered the girl, and they went off skipping and all but dancing down the street. Waterhouse did not even know what job this was supposed to be; he was just struck, indeed horrified, that the very thought of having a job, any job, should cause such unrestrained joy, especially among a pair of people who did not look like beggars. The need to get and keep a job became the central feature of our lives; and as a result of woman's lib, as much of women's as of men's lives. Relationships, let alone children, lost importance. In the pursuit of work, of pleasing the boss, of avoiding the ever-present axe, we accepted conditions that would have made our fathers strike: unpaid overtime rose to giddy heights, benefits were cut, employees competed over which one could stay in the office longer and give the biggest impression of work done. And, I repeat, women were in there on the same level as men - competing for the same jobs by the same means.

It was in this environment that the idea really developed that a child is a nuisance, a danger to that all-important job, a threat to your future - rather than being the future. The neurotic pressure to perform perform perform, the constant downsizings and the constant increase of the responsibilities laid on the surviving employees, taught women to regard a child as a hindrance and a pregnancy as a catastrophe. Abortion, already entrenched in society for reasons I have discussed elsewhere, started being suggested none too subtly to any female employee foolish enough to get herself "in trouble"; with the equally unsubtle alternative of a pink slip (a P45, for you Britons). European governments, it must be admitted, saw the disaster coming and did what they could (short of making abortion illegal, which was unthinkable) to force employers to accept the obligations of mothers, and indeed of fathers. But a law can do little to alter a prevailing mentality. Employers regard babies as the enemy; they will do anything they can to avoid taking on an employee with encumbrances, and to get rid of one who develops them. From their point of view, you can hardly blame them. And employees are perfectly aware of the fact. Once a person had a job in order to have a family. Now they are encouraged not to have the family, in order to keep the job. The result we see all around us.

This, then, is the perfect demographic storm that has struck our generation: the collapse of marriage, caused by social pressures articulated and indeed encouraged by the left; joined with the collapse of the career structure that underpinned the family, caused by economic pressures articulated and indeed encouraged by Ronald Thatcher. If we divide the world into right and left, then nobody is innocent. I would add, as a third factor, the colossal yet uncounted and unmeasurable burden of guilt, acknowledged or unacknowledged, that exists among many of the women, and at least some of the men, who have followed the supposedly guilt-free path of abortion; and the dissociation of sex and procreation, prophetically condemned by Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae. The effect is a society of forty-year-olds, quickly turning into a society of fifty-year-olds. People my age find themselves melanchonically wondering where the time has gone.

I have, however, long had a feeling that this situation was artifical and could not last. I felt change would come from somewhere, and at one point imagined that I could see it coming in the rise of conservatism across the West, the increasing dissatisfaction with current conditions. However, this was a movement mainly of people like me - dissatisfied former boomers and their children - and the more I became familiar with the imaginative and moral world of the new generation, our children, the more I realized that it did not apply to them. That is not always and everywhere the case: there are such things as young conservatives, and the children of homeschooling parents. But these are themselves aware that they are something like a fringe movement, dwarfed by the numbers of generation-x children who have grown up in the ordinary pieties and who simply do not speak the language we do.

My point of contact with the younger generation, and especially with girls, has been Harry Potter fandom. As redcoast pointed out to me some time ago, HP fandom is unusual even among fandom groups for being a first-generation product - the gathering largely of people who had fallen in love with JKR's world as children and had grown and socialized themselves into fandom. (She described it as a "feral fandom", without any of the social protocols and worldly wisdom that older established fandoms and fandoms which appeal to older readers, from Star Trek to superheroes to Sherlock Holmes, tend to develop.) That makes it, in my view, a particularly good observation point for a culture historan - like me - to observe cultural trends.

Many results can be described as discouraging. There is the enormous prevalence of slash. (When I tried to describe this to my mother, an educated Boomer, she asked me among what kind of perverts I had fallen - this is the distance between Boomer average and contemporary average. I assure you, Mum, they are perfectly ordinary contemporary girls.) Even more significant, there is the habit of playing with "ships" as if they were interchangeable; read the "Help! I am looking for..." column in Fiction Alley Park, and wonder. ("I want stories about Harry/Salazar" - and they find them, too!) These are both, as johncwright pointed out, symptoms of the disastrous belief that relationships are wholly interchangeable; and, I would add, that they are an end in themselves, with no future prospec, no further family dimension, and no inherent connection with procreation. And, I would add, that they are to be chosen like candy in a shop - "I want Harry/Salazar..." It ha s been said that the success of the Harry Potter world is itself a symptom of a universal need for a cleaner, a more morally defined world, a world in which right and wrong are dominant categories; but even granting that this was the case (and not all HP fans seem enamoured of the concept of right and wrong), who gets to define what is right and what is wrong? There are quite a lot of HP fans who would adore to cast Voldemort as a Christian conservative. Remember the tag that was going around for a while - Are you a Dumblecrat or a Voldepublican?

However, side by side with this sort of attitude, I was interested and struck to notice another.I think the HP fanfics I have read, with the odd exception obviously written by older and more cultured types, are a pretty good indication of the mind of the modern young woman. And in some ways it is clearly the result of what modern culture has made them - for instance, the universal assumpion that there is no moral difference between homosexuality and straight sexuality, the fascination with slash, etc. I mention the things which are relevant to what I want to say, because what I was on about here had to do with childbirth.

Now there is a sub-genre in which one of the female heroines gets pregnant. It is usually Ginny, more rarely Hermione, and it is usually too early in her life - and the author tends to say so. And the interesting thing is that, though abortion is mentioned as a possiblity in every fic I have read, it is NEVER chosen. The heroine ALWAYS keeps the baby. And that includes the splendid fic "Fractured Triangle" by Fyre, in which Hermione is the victim of a vicious rape by Lucius Malfoy, who then nearly murders her. And in spite not only of his rape but of his murderous assault, she keeps the baby, and the writer presents this as a heroic act. "It's not the baby's fault," says Hermione; and again, "it isn't a monster - it is a little person." And bear in mind that when Fyre wrote this, she was about nineteen herself. A very talented nineteen, but nineteen.

Alternatively, you have Ginny being made pregnant by Harry. At least one of the fics I have read (It Happened One Night by SunDevil05 - http://www.siye.co.uk/siye/viewstory.php?sid=705), features a terrifyingly realistic account of childbirth - one that would satisfy even privatemaladict - and a nastily credible account of everything that poor Harry and Ginny would have to go through before people get used to their early pregnancy and marriage. And the point is that, without exception, all these fics present the heroine as keeping the baby, and bringing it up, and those which feature a heroic character - in particular, Harry - present him as heroically standing by her and taking his share of the responsibility. In "Fractured Triangle", Ron accepts Hermione's baby and resolves to treat him as his own. (After he gives Lucius Malfoy a beating so savage and so, shall we say, to the point, that it is doubtful whether Lucius will ever be able to impregnate anyone again!) This is the picture of heroism and moral steadfastness that these young female writers have developed.

One of my friends, to whom I was saying something of this kind, commented that it was entirely unsurprising. Have you ever, in your life, met a nineteen year old who *honestly* thought abortion was a good thing? I know a handful who would insist it was, or at least so insist in public--but I can't believe they actually feel the way they claim to think; the usual "but I wouldn't myself" usually creep in as an admission that what they've been taught to say they think is at odds with what they *do* think. That is her experience, though I am not sure it is mine; certainly, however, this kind of stories shows that there is at least a section of young girls coming up who has looked childbirth in the face, has seen the worst that can be said of it, and still regards it as heroic and central. The truth is that any stories around which present abortion as good or desirable are stories written by middle-aged men or older women, and they are written professionally for Hollywood - e.g. the already old Michael Caine vehicle The Cider House Rules. I would be surprised to see any such story in HP fandom, and if it happened I would expect it, first, to be outnumbered by the have-the-baby ones, and second, to present the decision as painful and alienating.

Now what struck me about the Gloucester pregnancy pact, is that it seemed to me pretty much the practical version of this shift in values. An important part of the heroine-gets-pregnant sub-genre is that the heroine is always underage, and most adults feel that she is probably unfit to have a baby. She invariably proves them wrong. This is the imaginative result of a generation that has been pelted with warnings about safe sex and pregnancy virtually from when they could read - and instead of developing a fear and revulsion of pregnancy and babies, appears to have got used to the idea. I laughed with contempt when one of the Gloucester officers said that perhaps they should try to improve their sex ed. You poor fool, don't you understand that it is exactly sex ed that has done this? You have got your children used to thinking of procreation; but you could not convey the terror of procreation you yourself learned at work or in the unemployment queues. Work, to these children, is far in the future. When you are 16, 20 is an enormous amount of time away. And without that, human nature reasserts itself. Sorry, curia_regis; I know we have discussed this matter already; but I insist on using the terms human nature as I understand them. And however much variation there may be, most human beings love babies. They certainly are more directly attracted to them than to some distant notion of a job. (That is why, by the way, the sense of vocation makes so much difference.)

This is not even entirely a good thing. There are a lot of things about this phenonemon I would easily do without; in particular, the assumption that fathers are at best a variable of the childbearing process. These girls promised to help each other; that is, they had both a clear idea that a young mother needs help, and a strong belief that they could not turn to anyone else for the help they would need. In that one recognizes the terrorizing message that sex ed tries to convey - the baby as a burden that the mother must bear alone; and I think that they probably underrated most of their families and at least some of their boyfriends. But it is a realistic, and, if anything, a too cynical and pessimistic assessment of the facts. Sure, I am associating this with stories in which Harry and Ron show the most ironbound loyalty to their girlfriends, later wives; but then Harry and Ron are heroes out of books, and clearly the Gloucester girls did not expect the fathers of their children to be heroes out of books. They had fully got the message of three generation of cohabitation, divorce, and instability. The only way in which they prove immature and optimistic - though I must admit it is a serious way - is the implicit expectation that high school friendships would last for a lifetime, or at least long enough to bring up children together.

This is something altogether new, and not wholly good. Like the imaginative world of Buffy, it features teen-agers helping each other and being left virtually alone by the older generation, against a world of infinite menace and struggle. There is no direct way from here to what I would like to see - a strengthening of the family, especially the extended family. (Given the tone in which I have been speaking, it is as well to remember that at least a half of marriages, even now, do not end up in divorce, and most families tend to remain cohesive.) But it is something both new and, in my judgment, important, the point in which the perfect storm begins to break up.

My point, and the reason why I intercalated the Dylan song, is that it is one of those moments where a real culture change becomes manifest. And it is one I suspected had been coming for a while, although I was not sure where to look for it. I saw it coming in HP fanfics - which are as close to the voice of the inchoate masses as you can very well get. This accounts for a not wholly warranted triumphant tone in the original article: not that I am pleased with everything I see, but that I am pleased that something I thought might happen, does seem to be happening. Underlying all my thinking was a basic sense that human nature will, indeed that it must, reassert itself against the umpteenth attempt to treat it as a blank slate for the Enlightened Minority to write upon as it pleases. Such revolts and such reassertions are rarely perfect manifestations of good will. They can be scary; they can bring about unforeseen results and downright vicious ones. That is why fear and hysteria is part of the reaction. As old Bob Dylan made clear. After all, when the earth shakes, you do not exactly feel settled and happy, do you?

Comments

[superversive.livejournal.com]

No, the collapse didn‘t ‘begin under Ronald Thatcher’, at least not in North America. In both the U.S. and Canada, the fertility rate plummeted beginning in about 1965; the total number of children born in 1975 was not much over half the number born ten years earlier, despite a substantially larger population of childbearing age. In the 1980s, the birthrate actually recovered somewhat, because the Baby Boomers, though having far fewer children on average than their parents, had some; many of them just deferred childbearing until later in life, so the ‘Echo Generation’ didn’t arrive in large numbers until a decade after they were first expected.

The rest of your argument I find quite sound and convincing. I just wanted to caution you about a subsidiary point where you have made a slip with one of your supporting facts.

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

And, to be fair, Reagan did in fact play an important personal role in the collapse -- just not during his Presidency. He signed the first American no-fault divorce law in 1969, as governor of California.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I believe he also had something to do with a local abortion law, pre-Wade vs. Roe. As I said, abortion as such has little to do with what I am describing here, but, if I remember correctly of course, it shows that Reagan was pretty much going with the flow at the time. There does seem to be something about California - look at Arnold's rhetoric about "girle men" (which implies that effeminacy is somehow wrong) as compared with the reality of his highly sympathetic treatment of the local gay community.

[curia-regis.livejournal.com]

You forgot a closing italics tag in there somewhere. :)

Shall comment on the rest of it when I've finished reading it!

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Oh, eff! Thanks for pointing that out, will attend to it.

[curia-regis.livejournal.com]

And the interesting thing is that, though abortion is mentioned as a possiblity in every fic I have read, it is NEVER chosen.

A minor point, but I think that's more for the interest value rather than anything else. In any case, I'm pretty sure there would be fics out there where the woman chose to abort the baby. It's just most of the time, the author's wanting to write more than Woman-gets-pregnant, Woman-aborts-baby. It just doesn't make for a very long nor interesting story. In addition, most of the time, those fics tend to be 'romance' stories (or least the ones I've read, which, admittedly are mostly Snape/Hermione, are!) where the happy couple + baby live happily ever after. It just wouldn't be the traditional happy ending sans baby.

Have you ever, in your life, met a nineteen year old who *honestly* thought abortion was a good thing?

Do I count? I know I'm not nineteen any more, but, yes, I do honestly believe it is a good thing in some circumstances. Obviously I wouldn't advocate abortions for everybody or anything ridiculous like that. But I would keep the option open for myself. In fact, one of the first things I did when I moved to Canberra was to check where the nearest places that performed abortions was. And yes, this is my actual belief.

An important part of the heroine-gets-pregnant sub-genre is that the heroine is always underage, and most adults feel that she is probably unfit to have a baby.

Actually, I'm quite fond of those types of fics. However, I think it's a bit idealistic to imagine that happens in RL. Most of those fics need happy endings and the authors engineer these happy endings accordingly.

There are quite a lot of HP fans who would adore to cast Voldemort as a Christian conservative.

Really? I've seen him typecast as Hitler far more often...

for instance, the universal assumpion that there is no moral difference between homosexuality and straight sexuality, the fascination with slash

I think you know my opinion on this. And if that is what modern culture made me, you are a product of your family, your culture and your religion. Hell, if we go by what you said earlier about 'who chooses right and wrong', I don't have the right to say what's right any more than you do. And my views on cohabiting should be fairly obvious as well.

And as for the main point, if our childbirth levels in Western nations weren't this low, the population of Earth would increase far more quickly than it does already. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be sustainable. Not at the level we consume resources in Western nations anyway.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Sharing one's background and beliefs is not the same as sharing the errors. Overpopulation is a legend. And birth rates are going down across the board - not just in the West, but in Africa and even, as I pointed out, in some Muslim countries. The legend of the irresistible Muslim growth rate is even worse than a legend, it is one deliberately created for political reasons.

Having said that, I have no desire to see ballooning population numbers of the nineteenth-century kind. I think that a replacement level would be the best option especially for Europe, which is overcrowded as it is. It is not that we cannot feed ourselves, but that the spread of ever less attractive cities devours beautiful countryside and villages. We are rich as it is, and growth for its own sake does not strike me as desirable.

The passage about a nineteen-year-old thinking abortion was a good thing was a quotation, and you can take it up with the original author, if she wishes to make herself known. I certainly felt that she was being rather one-sided, and I tried to signal that.

And considering the vast number of abortion-is-good-for-you movies, I would say that there is no dictate that says that an abortion offers less in terms of dramatic possibilities than a choice to have a baby.

[privatemaladict.livejournal.com]

I was going to say the same thing as curia_regis about pregnancy stories, but she beat me to it. "Girl gets pregnant, girl gets abortion" does not make for a very interesting story. A girl dealing with the challenges of pregnancy and motherhood is much more compelling. And the genre isn't limited to HP fanfiction. During the past year, I've seen three fairly popular works of fiction come out dealing with the topic. Two are movies - "Knocked Up" and "Juno", and the third is a book - "Slam" by Nick Hornby.

All of these, in their own way are quite good. The heroine in "Knocked Up" is not a teenager - she's a 23-year-old career girl who falls pregnant after a drunken one-night-stand. It's probably the most unrealistic of three though - the story revolves around the pregnancy, and trying to make some sort of relationship work with the father of the baby. It all turns out rather well in the end... if you see the movie I think even you will agree that it's a bit overly optimistic.

"Juno" and "Slam", however, are both about teenagers, and both are relatively positive about the ability of teenagers to make responsible decisions, even when they've made a mistake and screwed up. I think you might find them interesting.

I need to get some sleep, so I won't try to respond to your other points just now. But you raise some good ones - even, believe it or not, some that I whole-heartedly agree with! And some that I don't, but like I said, I'll leave this for later.

Oh, and congratulations on the lack of wank in the previous essay. I'm actually amazed - it got heated, but nobody insulted each other very much at all. :)

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

As a writer, I find the notion that a 'girl gets pregnant, girl gets abortion' story' is less interesting than a 'girl keeps the baby' story strange. The only way a story about abortion could be uninteresting is if abortion is treated as a plot device to prevent the inconvenience of a child interrupting the story.

Otherwise, one would think that the internal struggle with that choice would be high drama. Maybe it's a product of our culture at this point that it's not considered to be one, that the choice is considered as mechanical and bereft of moral choice as what you should eat for lunch... but that assumption is rather frightening, and so I hope I'm wrong. :,

plot device

[elskuligr.livejournal.com]

I think the point they were making is that 'girl gets pregnant, girl gets abortion' is going to be a rather shorter story than 'girl gets pregnant, girl has to deal with the consequences for the rest of her life'. Not to mention that the potential for light humour and romance is more limited. Of course you could still make a pretty good story about it, but it's a much harder topic to deal with.

Re: plot device

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Here I can call superiority as a writer. I am the only HP fanfic writer I know who has created a good character - namely Cleo Malfoy - who has had an abortion. And while at the stage the story is now you might think that that part of the story is over and done with, if I ever complete it according to the plot I have in mind, you will find that what you said is just plain wrong. Writing does not end with cliches, and given your excellent plot ideas, it surprises me that you should talk as though it does. There always is a way to handle something intelligently.

Re: plot device

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

The story is as short as you choose to treat the subject. The abortion plotline can last an entire novel, if it affects the character significantly... while "girl has baby and lives happily ever after with man" is often the end of stories, particularly romances.

Like I said, I don't believe it's about how it affects a story. From a writing perspective, that's utterly malleable.


As to it being a harder topic to deal with... that I can wholeheartedly agree with...!

Re: plot device

[fpb.livejournal.com]

This is also wrong in terms of the actual fics I mentioned. In at least one of them, Fractured Triangle, the decision to keep the baby comes at the end of the story, which is concerned with Lucius' atrocious rape and its terrible consequences. After the story Fyre told, nobody would be surprised if Hermione decided to abort the baby, and her decision not to do so is one of the climaxes of the story. It is obvious that the message that Fyre is conveying is that keeping a baby, even the result of the most awful rape, is morally better than destroying it; it is the kind of thing a heroine would do.

[dustthouart.livejournal.com]

Your post reminds me of the song Dégénération by Mes Aïeux:

natality rate

[elskuligr.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm pretty sure France has a birth rate slightly above what's necessary for generation renewal. I think it's mostly due to the fact that it's relatively easy (i.e. not very easy but easier than in many other countries) to work AND have children here because there are a lot of kindergartens and children stay at school most of the day from age 3 (obviously for the small kids, school is actually like kindergartens with a nap in the afternoon, etc.).

This is also part of a more general trend: people have more kids and marry slightly earlier than ten years ago from what I heard, but paradoxically I think it's because compared with my parents' generation for example, the pressure to do that has lessened so much that now people feel they can do it out of love and enthusiasm, and not because their parents want them to, which I guess is much more motivating :)

Iceland I think also have a fairly healthy birth rate, and their policy for equality between men and women at work is one of the best.
When a child is born, both its parents have a long "parenting leave" so the dad doesn't go back straight to work, leaving the mum coping on her own. As a consequence, employers do not have more qualms hiring young women than young men.
I guess I'm getting a bit off topic, but what I'm trying to say is that signs of "healthy natality" should not be looked for in teenagers having sex with random guys without contraception but in societies where people try to make work compatible with family and do not promote a model where the man works all the time to make enough money for the family and rarely sees them while the woman stays at home all the time to take care of her kids.

PS: that post was incredibly long, I confess I skipped over some bits.

PPS: also, I'm not kissing the ground everyday thanking my country for allowing abortion, but almost. Of course it's not a 'good' thing in the sense that it's awful having to go through it, and everybody in their right mind would rather never have to go through it. That's why it's important to be very careful with contraception. But if contraception fails, then it's important to have that possibility. I think unwanted pregnancy is one of the scariest thing in the world.

Re: natality rate

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Abortion is murder. If you want to contest that, go here: http://fpb.livejournal.com/69029.html, read the arguments made there (including the discussion thread) and answer them. Do not skip bits. If you take it upon yourself to argue with me, I do not argue your right to do so, but I demand that my whole view be taken into account. Especially the point that humanity is not a timeless image, but a process in time, and that its time dimension must be taken into consideration when deciding what is human.

The evidence that you did not read with great care, as you yourself admit, is that you do not seem to have noticed that I gave credit to most European governments for doing their best to convince or force employers not to force mothers and pregnant women out of employment. I just said that such laws cannot do much to change a common mood among employers - and if you were an employer, would you employ someone who has one or two full years of her life spoken for in advance, or someone who can give his/her time for you without intruding obligations? And the evidence that the French government is not satisfied (and never has been) with the French birthrate is in the continuous sequence of new proposals to raise it, which has been a constant of French life since the mid-nineteenth century. And no wonder, since if France were as populous as her neighbours, Italy, Germany, or Britain, she would have 150 million inhabitants and probably be a greater economic power than Japan. Having said that, I have no desire to see any great growth of population in Europe myself, as I said above in my response to curia_regis. Replacement rate seems to me quite a sane goal for western Europe. But if one thing is at all clear, it is that the French government does not agree with me and never has.

Re: natality rate

[privatemaladict.livejournal.com]

signs of "healthy natality" should not be looked for in teenagers having sex with random guys without contraception but in societies where people try to make work compatible with family and do not promote a model where the man works all the time to make enough money for the family and rarely sees them while the woman stays at home all the time to take care of her kids.

Hear, hear! It's good to know that there are some countries, at least, where family-friendly policies are in place and seem to be working. But it's an uphill battle to get there. In Australia, we're still arguing over paid maternity leave, let alone paternity leave. (The main argument against paid maternity leave, by the way is that "Small businesses can't afford it, therefore if we enforce it, the economy will collapse.") What's more, we seem to have become a society where women are placed in a double bind. We are now expected to have careers (at least in suburban Sydney - out in the country is a very different ball game), and are under just as much pressure as men to finish university and get good jobs. If somebody from my graduating high school class said that all she wants is to be a wife and mother, she would get a lot of strange looks, and there'd be a general sense of "how disappointing". (And hey, did I say "pressure"? Pressure they may be, but for most school graduates, I think the have-a-job and live-independently lifestyle seems pretty appealing. Plenty of us want to get married and have kids... but not for a while!)

But while we're expected to be just as successful as men, there isn't the same pressure on men to become more family-oriented - to work less so as to share more of the housekeeping/childminding duties.

Re: natality rate

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That the so-called family-friendly policies seem to be working is her opinion. It is definitely not mine. They are as effective as a strip of plaster over a malignant melanoma, in my opinon - and as it happens, I live in Europe too.

Re: natality rate

[privatemaladict.livejournal.com]

So... what is the solution, then? I mean - what are you trying to say? Do you think women should stay home and look after the kids? Unless they have a vocation? Or... I'm just confused.

Re: natality rate

[fpb.livejournal.com]

First, whatever happens, my opinion is worth the same as a finger placed in the way of the Niagara Falls. Social and cultural change will or will not take place as it pleases; the best I can do is try and understand how it is going and why. Second, my ideal society is one in which male and female roles do tend to be distinguished, and motherhood is honoured rather than persecuted, but in which a woman like Ann Douglas - or Katharine Hepburn - or Dorothy Hodgkin - is able to follow her calling and use the talent God gave her rather than waste it away in a corner. It sounds like a difficult balance? It is. That is why both extremes must be confronted and, if necessary, opposed. As for what I think of abortion, you know that already.

Re: natality rate

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I may expand on this if I write the follow-up article I have in mind, and make my views clearer. However, remember that, when dealing with my part in these things, you must never underrate my dominant and monumental laziness!

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

My parents apparently made it their life's work to buck the trend when it comes to family size! Actually, to tell the truth, I have no idea why they had so many children. :/

Interesting essay, but I admit I only read half - let me read the other half and get back to you!

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As I suggested once, after contemplating photographs of your whole family, it probably was because you lot turned out so amazingly beautiful and talented. And I am not really exaggerating. But some people just like having children. I gather your parents are on the reserved side, so they probably would not just admit it.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

That might be it - my father in particular seems to just like babies.

Juno is also a weird part of the trend - a 16 year old gets pregnant, doesn't have an abortion, gives the baby away, and she's lauded! One analysis I read suggested that the leftists didn't want to criticize a teenage mom, and the rightists were glad that she didn't have an abortion.

I knew so many teens and young women who got pregnant (and one guy who fathered a child accidentally), and the only thing I think they all have in common is that they all seem pretty unhappy people. I don't understand it at all, but I'm one of those odd people you mentioned.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The most curious thing about Juno is that it was scripted by a woman who worked as an exotic dancer (read stripper) and who claims not to have any pro-life or pro-choice axe to grind. I had noticed it as another cultural straw in the wind.

[privatemaladict.livejournal.com]

Well, that was the great thing about the movie. It didn't seem to be preaching one way or the other. It was just "This girl got pregnant, couldn't go through with the abortion and decided to give the baby away to a childless couple. And this is what happened." It was just a movie about people, and the comlicated thing that is life... And maybe about how you never know what life will throw at you. Have you seen it?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Yes, but I think I can tell you that nobody would have written a story like that in the days of my youth, and that, if they did, it would never have been published or filmed. That is what struck me so much about Juno. Incidentally, I would say that redcoast is wrong in thinking that the US and international left did not dare attack Juno. In point of fact, the movie was shot more full of ideological arrows than a pincushion; but it merely shrugged them off and went on to score a huge box-office success. Which is significant in itself. And indeed, people did not fail to notice that something worth discussing had just happened.

Very Interesting essay

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

"... this kind of stories shows that there is at least a section of young girls coming up who has looked childbirth in the face, has seen the worst that can be said of it, and still regards it as heroic and central."

You may think it sentimental or even foolish of me, but this sentence brought a tear to my normally cold and unsentimental eye. The heroism of motherhood, which, at one time, had been the inspiration of countless trivial popular ballads and songs and Mother's Day Cards, is a hard sentiment to maintain in a divorce culture.

Love of motherhood is the vulgar sentiment: so of course G.K. Chesterton, and all sane men, should approve of it and adore it.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you speak of divorce, rather than contraception and abortion, as a source of the modern malaise, what (me and other) conservatives call "the attack on family values."

If I was suddenly elected monarch in my nation, I would, frankly, ignore the cries of my fellow Christian Conservatives about trivial things like Gay Marriage, Pornography, Unwed Motherhood. If I were monarch, my first law would be to repeal no-fault divorce. That, nothing else, is the source of the disintegration of the nuclear family. Let the heterosexuals remove the beam from their own eye before lifting the mote from the homosexual eye.

My next act as monarch (should history be so cruel as to elevate a philosopher, lawyer, newspaperman, and novel-writer to the throne-- all professions that should be disqualified from holding power) would be to reintroduce the legal and social stigma attached to the mothers of bastards.

There is nothing wrong, indeed, much that is right and even holy about sixteen-year-olds yearning for motherhood. The wrongheadedness is in thinking that fathers are replaceable, expendable. No, the Virgin Mary herself needed no man to have a son, but even she did not forget or ignore Saint Joseph, patron saint of Fathers.

How cruel is the kindness and convenience of no-fault divorce. Divorce is like amputation. I can imagine it being needed in some rare cases: adultery, abandonment, wifebeating. I cannot imagine it as a good thing.

You speak of the pain and bitterness, the lingering bitterness of divorce. Your words ring true. Have we not seen what it is like to have two or three generations raised with a distaste for marriage, or a suspicion of it? The Culture of Death is also the Culture of Bitterness.

Let me ask a question on a tangent to the original post: do you see a relationship between the reaction to the Pregnancy Pact story, or at least your reader's posts on it, and their religious convictions, if known? I ask because I suspect this is not a conservative-versus-liberal issue, but a Christian-versus-Worldly-'Wisdom' issue.

(I cannot see too many Catholics objecting to the yearning for motherhood, even if they object to the madness of an unwed group of schoolgirls vowing to help each other raise the babies without those and long-extinct creatures myth calls reliable bread-winning fathers.)

Re: Very Interesting essay

[fpb.livejournal.com]

To be frank, it is as much a matter of life experience vs. lack thereof. There is one highly intelligent person, a scholar to boot, whom I will have to metaphorically take by hand and guide over the ABC, because she has simply never met anyone like me before, and all her life has obviously been spent among like-minded people. I find it tragic to see so intelligent and sensitive a person simply repeating the cliches that I was mouthing at twenty or so, but then, she is probably the same age now. Other than that, yes, of course there is a difference between Christians like lametiger and eliskimo, well-meaning agnostics such as privatemaladict, and conscious atheists such as curia_regis; however, my impression is that the issues that have been raised are not so much to do with my analysis - especially after the second post - as much as with side issues. And I am frankly delighted with the way everyone has been dealing with issues rather than trying to shoot the messenger. The tone this discussion has kept is a credit, not to me, but at least to my taste in online friends.

Re: Very Interesting essay

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

For the record, I am not Christian in the religious sense, and I believe I am one of your stronger proponents for regarding the family and child-rearing as a natural and commendable enterprise, far too undervalued these days.

Some fannish comments

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

As a 'dirty old fan' (I started getting involved in fandom back in the Star Trek days, and still attend conventions) I find the current prevalence of slash...interesting. There was a time not too many years ago when the publisher of a Star Wars slash fanzine got a cease and desist letter from Lucasfilm--now it seems every other fic on the internet is slash.

I will read slash but I prefer het or gen--too many slash stories just don't ring 'true' to me in the sense of characterization or tone of the source material, and some stories just fall into what my friends and I call the Why Dogs Lick Their Balls Theory of Slashfic--the authors do it just because they can.

The original theory behind slash fic was that the source materials had no strong female characters the fanwriter could identify, and for many years adding an original female character (OFC) drew instant cries of "MarySue!"
In my opinion that theory is no longer valid (if it ever was) as nowadays movies and TV series have some great women characters to work with, and I've also seen some wonderful OFCs in fanfic too. There are some fandoms now--for example, The Sentinel, where almost all of the fan work produced is slash. I'm sure there's no one explanation for the whole phenomenon, but it's interesting.

[kennahijja.livejournal.com]

*surfaces*

And the interesting thing is that, though abortion is mentioned as a possiblity in every fic I have read, it is NEVER chosen.

I wrote something like that... well, sort of...

*disappears*

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Actually, I did - remember Cleo Malfoy? Her abortion is going to become a more important thing as time goes on, if I go back and finish the story. And there is no need to sound so terrified - you can hardly say much that, for instance, curia_regis has not already said. My point, however, is that I was talking of girls ten to fifteen years younger than you are, and American for choice.

[goreism.livejournal.com]

I think it's dangerous to extrapolate from one incident and see this as a harbinger of "real culture change." I looked up teen pregnancy rates in the US, and it seems that they've been declining sharply: "Teenage birth rates fell one-third from the 1991 peak (61.8 per 1,000) through 2004 (41.1) (Table 2 [on p. 3]), and continued to decline through 2005 (by 35 percent to 40.5) (11)."

So I agree that all we really see is that "a fad for childbirth seems to have seized a number of teen-age girls in one place in the USA."

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And I stand by my interpretation. This is not about numbers - yet - but about culture change. As for statistics, in so far as they are trustworthy at all (and I shall never trust British census figures again since my experiences as a census taker in the 2001 census), they only tell us what happened in the past - even the recent past.

[goreism.livejournal.com]

they only tell us what happened in the past

The human condition is the Humean condition.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

I have a magazine with a very interesting article pertaining to the whole career/children issue that you might be interested in. I don't have any way of transmitting the article online, but I can send it regular mail if you'd like. I added you to my flist so you can see my contact info.

[headnoises.livejournal.com]

I have a sudden urge to watch Jurassic Park....

Life will find a way, indeed....