Trafford Publishing: Beyond Conception: Our Children's Children

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Beyond Conception: Our Children's Children

by Martha Kent Denniston

300 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #02-0942; ISBN 1-55395-228-6; US$25.00, C$28.00, EUR20.50, £14.50

Over the long term, people and resources must be in balance. This book views the problem for America and the world, suggesting directions in which we should seek to go.

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About the Book About the Author Excerpts Catalogue Information

About the Book

Overpopulation, the most severe threat to human existence, has been caused by individual human beings following habit rather than adapting their behavior to changing conditions. The outcome is not in the lap of Fate; it is in the hands of individuals able both to be single-minded about their acts and to work with others. In clear, humane terms the author discusses all aspects of the dilemma - historical, economic, religious, political, racial, ecological and above all medical. She presents unusual concepts, fresh ideas, and startling statistics with thoughtfulness and authority.
Over the last half-century, death control in the form of the elimination of killer diseases, reduction of infant mortality, and a great extension of adult life expectancy has created a rapidly worsening situation for which the only remedy is Birth Control - employing known methods and others yet to be devised - on a comparable scale.
In the United States not much positive initiative can be expected from government, organzied medicine, the Catholic Church, or business. The impetus toward the small family, toward one child a piece for each parent, must come from informed and energetic citizens. This book describes encouraging beginnings already made and suggests methods for much greater accomplishments.

About the Author

Martha Kent Denniston was born in Philadelphia. She holds an A.B. from Bryn Mawr and a M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Washington. She is the mother of four sons.
Mrs. Denniston has been interested in conservation and population problems most of her life. She has done research in the field of zoology. She is the director of a birth control clinic in Seattle. She produced the classic documentary film, Beyond Conception, on the population dilemma in the United States.
If young people and their leaders around the world acted upon the ideas presented in this book, humans would have a much better chance of joyous lives, and indeed, of survival.

Excerpts

Chapter 17 Lifeboat Behavior
VOLUNTARY POPULATION CONTROL is a very different task from voluntary family planning. To reduce population we must reach beyond the individual family and reverse the social forces that encourage having children. Many serious Americans doubt that this can be done in any voluntary way. It is certainly clear from study of animals that our population problem is complex. Instinctive reactions to density, and ecological harvesting are both trustworthy controls humans have been deprived of. Instead, we must react to a danger grasped only by the intellect, and only by handfuls of people. Our problem is further complicated because of our sexual pattern. For us, love and reproduction are never out of season. There is no natural infertile period which means contraception must be practiced around the year and around the clock. This has practical consequences in the design and use of contraceptives, and even more critical consequences when we contemplate preventing conception for twenty years or for an unwilling person. As if these physical difficulties were not enough, human beings raise religious and ethical objections, which also have to be met.
No epidemic can be controlled by human measures without an energetic and perspicuous design. We can do the wrong things; we can do the right things too slowly; and in either case, the epidemic of humans will run its course, burning out in one or another of the dooms predicted for it. Nevertheless, while some despair, others are bound to try preventive measures and to pursue them.
Humane population reduction requires several steps. Accepting a limit of two children per couple is the first one, and resolving to make maximum use of our best methods of birth control is the second. Closely related to this second step is an urgent need to develop much better methods. A straightforward effort to achieve even this much would be quite effective.
Unfortunately, even perfect methods of control will not prevent births we do not in fact want to prevent. We must realize all the while that the will to solve the problem is the determining factor, and communicating this to masses of uninformed people is a major task. Even a general resolve to reduce births will not be uniform. It can come in all degrees, from lip service to complete dedication. Each one of us, seriously considering population, is being pressed to move a little farther than is comfortable, a little farther than last year. Even so, many people who admit the need, and accept the methods, find it distasteful or presumptuous to influence the behavior of others. Yet this is the third step, transforming our dubious commitment into decisive action.
Each one of us has a part to play: the druggist who determines to display contraceptives; the insurance executive who determines to cover costs of abortion; the housewife who decides against another child; the young girl who goes to job training instead of marriage; the doctor who changes lifelong habits and takes up his share of birth prevention. Important also is the politician who listens to advocates of population and ecology control, and understands the consequences of ignoring them - all these and countless other sorts of practical people take part in producing change. Organizations can be influential also. Banks will fund new patterns of community living and industry will redesign itself to profit from lowered population and conserved resources. Churches, by placing a higher value on the quality of life and the appreciation of children can counteract the natalist forces within their structure. If populations are to be reduced by humane means, selected by us, and not by war, famine and disease, then everyone will have to take part. That is the condition of success.
Once we have enlisted the public, then specific issues become important. Some will work for abortion. Some will not. Some are voluntary family planners. Others are ready to set limits and urge legislation. The difficulties that arise here never bothered animal populations! But words, their use, misuse and abuse are severe obstacles to effective human action. Just because such verbal confusion is a peculiarly civilized illness does not mean that populations cannot die of it!
Errors in our use of language are matched by serious distortions built into language itself. In English, adjectives come in contrasting pairs which tempt us to think them more separate than they are: good and evil; natural and unnatural; voluntary and involuntary. The true-false logic into which these adjectives fit is a powerful tool in mathematics, and the basis of scientific classification. We are perfectly familiar with it in many forms. As children we play the guessing game, animal, vegetable, mineral. We answer true-false questionnaires in school and in employment forms. We are aware that some of our most complex thinking is produced in the yes-no dichotomy of computer languages. Thus from an early age, powerful forces encourage us to exaggerate difference and seize upon extremes.
But we ought to be cautious. Computer programming commands some of the highest wages in industry and research, for very good reasons. The two-valued system does violence to the mixed and shifting experience of being alive. It takes great skill to translate experience from common English into accurate binary bits that can be read by electric circuits. It takes just as much skill to use the sensitive English language correctly, to reflect truthfully the many shades of living experience. Forcing us into an either-or schema in debate invokes the very distortions we need to avoid. Modern linguistics recognizes this, and gives the speaker of common language a new stature as the arbiter of what words are doing. Once the English-speaking person has learned to use such words as right and wrong, natural and unnatural, it would be difficult to upset his usage. We expect him to learn a word, to say how he is going to use it and to use it consistently that way. The only thing we can do with his definition is to contrast it with our own, to discuss the adequacy of the criteria he used, and to make him uneasy about them. If he is using a word in a more special or more restricted way, or in a way that differs from common understanding, then modern language study shows how to document this by investigating com-mon usage. Many a population argument could stand such an investigation!
Campaigns to change abortion laws are a good example. They run into the sentence: abortion is murder. Investigating, we find general agreement that murder applies to the death by violence of a human being. Offspring are conceived and born. When do they become human beings? At conception? When they first kick? At birth? After surviving for a year? We find different groups upholding each of these definitions. In 1970 the California Supreme Court held that an embryo is not a human being. For abortions in the early months, we find none of the usual ceremonies of human death: no public mourning, no burial service, and no masses for the dead. We do not find many indictments for abortion as murder; we find few convictions. Looking further, the penalties actually imposed for performing an early abortion are not the penalties imposed on murderers.
Linguistic analysis might look next for words like child or baby, which designate a human being. In the early months we say she had a "miss" or she was pregnant and she lost it. We say the baby kicks. The Bible says great with child. By the time anyone is great these days, we say she is carrying a baby. The common language does make a clear distinction between early and late pregnancy, just as the absence of funeral ceremonies distinguishes between abortion and ordinary death. Therefore the sentence abortion is murder is not a statement of fact, but an emotional claim. We waste a great deal of time in treating it like a factual statement. Reduced from a statement to a claim, it becomes like any other claim; the burden of demonstrating it falls on its supporters.
If we are going to reduce population quickly enough, we cannot afford such intractable arguments. We should recognize them as an illness and apply a remedy. The most conservative groups in America today have less than a high-school education, are over forty and are women. They are particularly vulnerable to misleading slogans. It is always useful to show these limited but sensible people how a statement of fact differs from a claim and to defuse for them the rhetoric by which they are especially influenced. Angry debate can be shifted into practical analysis of human behavior, and to the common misuse of troublesome words. Such education is a very tedious road. Even educators think we have no time for it. Looking at the political scene in population, it seems we have no time for anything else! Without it we will not get the solid political backing necessary to carry out projects even if we get the votes to vote them in. Many more people will take part in reducing population if we respect them enough to handle population arguments in this manner.
This is especially true of coercion. It is misleading to attempt to draw a sharp line between what is voluntary and what is non-voluntary. Every day we take part in a number of actions which fall somewhere between voluntary and compulsory. We drive on the right. We stop at red lights. Most of us pay taxes with at least enough willingness to forestall the Internal Revenue Service. Any one of us could refuse to pay taxes, could run red lights, and risk the censure, the legal sanction, or the smashup. The public at large could not be forced into any of these actions by any power but its own. We surrender some "freedoms" to do as we please in order to obtain more important ones - to drive with reasonable safety and to live in a solvent community offering facilities we could not provide for ourselves.
Not so very long ago one had the "freedom" to choose whether or not to be vaccinated for smallpox. A great deal of heavy selling was required to persuade the public to support the legislation that made vaccination mandatory. Far from feeling that their freedom was impaired, people accepted vaccination thankfully as one of their greatest protections. This is a hopeful model for population control. After causing untold suffering to humans for thousands of years, smallpox has recently been eradicated from the face of the earth. Since terrorists may possess some live smallpox virus, we have to consider compulsory vaccination all over again.
In their pure forms it is not difficult to distinguish between what is voluntary and what is coercive, but when these terms are applied to matters of wide public interest, they at once begin to partake of each other. Are we being coerced when we are forbidden by law to go through red lights in order that we may survive to go safely through green ones? Certainly, yes, if we define freedom as that particular kind of anarchy. Are we being coerced when all the tricks of the media are used to urge us to buy orange juice, vitamins and milk? Or are we being coerced only when the media are selling cigarettes? An honest answer has to be that the pressures are indistinguishable. Nevertheless we seem to be in general agreement that liquor and now cigarettes should not be promoted by such powerful means. Public consensus occurs prior to legislation on most issues, and such a consensus in favor of the small family could be extremely effective.
We know perfectly well that public behavior is manipulated by advertising and by prestige suggestion. The planned obsoles-cence of American consumer goods in the last four decades has depended upon our willingness to follow fashion. Since American family size has already dropped from eight children to three without any deliberate effort, family size is not an inherent value or a fixed pattern. Indeed if Margaret Mead is correct, family size responds to peer pressure and is sensitive to fashion. Even if superficial and short-lived, a fad for the one child family could be very helpful at this point while we are turning our populations around! Advertising for small families is already beginning. This is a normal use of social pressure to accomplish a desired end. Only those groups can object who do not wish small families to become the norm. Advertising attempts to obtain by fashion and consensus what fewer people are ready to obtain by law. If American advertising were to try an all-out campaign it might be very effective.
Population control is usually talked about in abstract terms, as though there really were such a technical possibility. For the time being at least, there is no promise at all of any mass method, so there can be no population control without individual birth control and individual compliance. Too often this goes unsaid. Even the most sincere demographers, urging us to stop at two, fall silent when asked, How?
On the other hand, personal birth control can become effective population control only when it extends across society in an organized way. It is not enough for idealistic young couples to stop at one or two, or have none themselves. Theirs may be an important example; it directly reduces births. They feel perhaps too keenly that if the worst happens, if the ills of unchecked population swamp them and their children, they will have fewer to agonize with, fewer to suffer. For the long run, such private sacrifice merely favors breeders over non-breeders and fails to accomplish its aim. To be effective, personal population control must expand quickly into public policies.
Experts in birth-control methods have been just as blind, refusing to discuss population control while working hard to improve techniques in contraception, sterilization and abortion. The west is still caught in the absurd rationalization of voluntary family planning and "every child a wanted child". Meanwhile the general public evades the issue of controls or becomes vituperative. On the religious front we are treated to the spectacle of celibate priesthoods busily enforcing pregnancy and childbirth on overburdened families around the world. This Freudian paradox is too peculiar to dwell on, but it does suggest a consoling thought. If it is good to have many children, it is sacred not to have any! Face to face with uneven breeding behavior, with existing deselection and thousands of irresponsible births, we must exchange notions of voluntary family planning for population control. Enormous sums are spent by federal and state governments to encourage use of good parental stock in animal hus-bandry, to reduce herds and conserve the range. Yet the nas-tiest words in the language are hurled at anyone who tries to discuss limits or to discourage unsuitable parents from breeding. Even informed and dedicated people have failed to grapple with this issue because they have missed the role which coercion plays in everyday life.
In conditions of scarcity the civil right to have unlimited births simply does not exist. Such a claim is attention getting and suspect. It is a favorite argument of minorities in support of their own overproduction of births. The right to have children fits into the network of other rights and duties we share and must dovetail with the rights of others. When all of us must curtail our production of children none of us has an overriding civil right of this kind. The closer we live together and the more of us there are, the fewer civil rights we can exercise before they infringe upon those of another. This adverse relation between dense population and personal freedom is easily documented around the world. It is time for people sincerely interested in civil rights to expose such special pleading, and to intervene when it is leveled against local or national programs.
Population control has yet to mobilize "nice" American women. Yet if American wives united behind a pattern of later marriage, small family size and new occupations for women, we could reduce births with unexpected speed. A new spirit is needed. Instead of indulging in superiority and dissension, women need to support and understand each other, and to energize their untapped capacities. Margaret Sanger is gone. Margaret Mead was born before 1900, and is gone. Where are the leaders in their thirties and forties? The time is ripe for them to appear.
In America, demand for more of everything has brought more food, more housing, cars, boats, TVs, fashionable clothes, within range of poorer and poorer people. To bring a better life within the range of everyone is on the national agenda. In our industrial history technical solutions have flowed from serious demands. Demand for the small family will produce the new methods and forms of service, will produce the climate of opinion and the community effort needed. Our greatest efforts as a nation have been made when we glimpsed a new future, with happier possibilities. This is what is bound to happen when we finally grasp the meaning of our present population growth. Incentives and sanctions will hustle advertising, education and research. This is not a one-shot epidemic, a one-shot cure, but a total change of human patterns for all foreseeable generations. If birth control is to remain voluntary in any sense of the word, we, and the world must rapidly demand a pattern of small families and zero growth. "More is better" is one of the central economic issues we are attacking. Biologically, ecologically, more humans are not better but worse, for themselves and for every aspect of the ecosystem that supports them. The economic natalist proceeds from the hard position "more humans are always better." Once that may have been true, but no longer. To convince industrialists must be our goal. The size of the average working family is at the heart of this conflict and this issue must be fought out reasonably among us. If people really believe that "more is better," or that they have a civil right to produce all the children they want, what then? How are we to convince them, or to coerce them if they cannot be convinced?
There seems to be unreasonable gloom over this issue. The instinct for survival is strong in us. Truth tends to become accepted. These two forces together will move us to do some-thing about too many people in a surprising hurry - once the breeding population feels the personal pinch. It is our rights, our space, our water and air that is being wrecked and intruded upon.
Around the world and in America we are moving from abundance to scarcity. This is an old story to human populations. It has happened before and the patterns to deal with it are well understood. Plenty of living people remember bundling paper, squashing cans, and lining up for gasoline and meat. We already know what the ethics and politics must become.
This is the moment of lemmings, crowding to the edge of the sea. We are crowding our children into the lifeboat earth with hardly more perception than lemmings that this is what we are doing. Each of us wants to hand over a child, wants a place in the lifeboat for our own. Each one, having one, each couple having no more than two, expects to share in the gene pool of the next generation. Already the lifeboat is full. With more children it will be unseaworthy, endangering all the rest. But along come some couples with five or six children saying, "We had a right to have them. Put them aboard."
What then are the ethics of parents handing over only one or two children to the future, trusting them to the lifeboat planet which so far as we know is all there is of life in the interstellar spaces? The cruelty of the dilemma is caused by those who create more than their share in the first place. Somehow or other, the ration and the rule of the lifeboat will be enforced. We will not permit the crowding of lemmings. For the sake of all children, no one can be allowed to have more than his share. This is lifeboat behavior. Pure water, pure air, enough oxygen and a stable climate are essentials none of us know how to produce but which our mere existence in too great numbers is enough to destroy. Once we admit this we can face up to our lifeboat situation.
The astronauts of Apollo 13, struggling with systems failure in their spacecraft shared the tension and extra work, but also the final oxygen supply. The horrified nation, listening to their ordeal in space, did not ask aloud the final question, and no one has given the answer. If the supply was too small to get all three of them back, what was the military decision? Unequivocal orders to one of them to bring the ship back? And to others to turn off their oxygen supply? Or permission to share to the end? Permission for none of them to make it. . . .
Once we recognize an emergency, we can bring to bear the ethics of scarcity and sharing. We have techniques for dealing with disaster. We can develop an orderly flow of births into - and deaths out of - the world. Resources can be in balance with the people who use them. We can recover a margin of safety in all our life systems. But we cannot have this order, this sharing, or this margin of safety until we admit we have been almost crushed in the crisis. We have no hope of systematizing a rescue until we know that we need to be rescued.
Thus we are in the midst of two very critical jobs at the same time. We have to make a luxurious nation believe it is on the brink of irreversible scarcity and damage. We have to police and self-police the country in the world which prides itself most on its personal liberty, its constitutional rights, and its love of children. We have to turn our values around one hundred and eighty degrees.

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