Un enfant quand je veux si je veux… The battle cry of the feminists marching for freedom from fertility—“a baby when I want one if I want one”—was ringing out in the streets of Paris when I came to live here in 1972. After lagging behind the United States, where the diaphragm + spermicide had been available to married women since the 1940s and oral contraception since 1957, France caught up with The Pill in 1967 and legalized abortion in 1975, championed by Auschwitz survivor and then Health Minister Simone Veil. The process has gone forward on all fronts, with generalized use of fail-proof methods, unfettered access to abortion when fail-proof fails, reimbursement across the board including, just recently, 100% free contraceptive pills for women 15 to 18.
Contraception
and abortion alone could not bring about the desired transformation of
the female condition. They were the technology. The metaphysics was what
has become known as “gender studies.” In the early days of Women’s
Liberation it was makeshift ideology peddled in volumes of look-alike
fiction and non-fiction best sellers shouting that maternity was a drag,
femininity a hype, sexual differences induced by cynical manipulation,
love and marriage an extension of the military industrial complex, and
men were chauvinist pigs. No more pink for girls and blue for boys.
Sexually marked toys were not abandoned but switched: cars and trucks
for girls, dolls and tea sets for boys. Women wanted, or were told they
wanted, something called equality.
The
harbingers of this “sexual revolution” were, more often than not,
closet lesbians. Later we not only discovered that they were lesbians
telling heterosexual women to kick their men in the balls and out of
their lives, they were also playing stereotypical sexual roles in
private, some as simpering mistresses to others more macho than any man
could be.
In
the space of one generation we went from the prohibition of pre-marital
sex to promiscuity for all. The stakes were high for a young woman in
the 50s. Sleeping around or, oh horrors, getting pregnant killed her
chances of a good marriage… only way to climb the social ladder.
Unmarried women could not be fitted for a diaphragm. There was no place
to make love decently. When I was an undergraduate at the University of
Wisconsin in 1952, female students under 21 were not allowed to live off
campus. We were quartered in dorms, with 10 PM curfews. The lower
classes and a dissolute bohemian minority did what they wanted and dealt
with the consequences as best they could. Decent women waited to
discover the pleasures or disappointments of conjugal life. Twenty years
later, a young man with nothing to offer and nothing to lose, would
mumble his momentary itch; if the chick dared to decline, he’d toss off a
whiny “what’s the matter, you got hangups?” before shuffling off to
another.
Teenage
girls rushed to lose their virginity before getting their first bra.
The boys they slept with had a pressing need for freedom. Don’t cramp my
style, don’t try to hold on to me, I’m not into commitment. A girl who,
for whatever reason, didn’t solve the fertility problem by taking The
Pill was too much of a bother. Women were supposed to be liberated…
meaning, available 24/24 with no strings attached. Somehow Women’s
Liberation turned out to be an emergency exit for men, inclined to run
out on their responsibilities and give in to their more shiftless
instincts.
Well-
educated, professionally accomplished, financially independent women
made babies with a male friend or part time lover, with the clear
understanding that the woman would assume 100% of the responsibility for
raising and providing for the child. Looking back, it’s almost
laughable to see how feminine they were! Liberated from drudgery they
voluntarily opted for impossible burdens. A woman’s work is never done.
Marriage was spurned or diluted by up-front adultery. Lovers and
mistresses joined the family for dinner, children’s birthday parties,
and family vacations. Wives and husbands moved in and out, and it was no
more dramatic than changing seasons.
None
of this nullifies the undeniable improvements in the lives of women,
our chances for fulfillment in love, marriage, maternity, and a wide
range of professions. No longer on the outside looking in, we can see
for ourselves how the working world is organized, how power is won and
exercised, how many seemingly fascinating jobs are less interesting
than, for instance, taking care of babies. Today, young women deserve
our help in re-examining the past to reconceive the equilibrium between
biology and choice. They have heard enough about what was acquired. What
about the losses?
Fertility
is formidable. Connecting unbridled fertility to irresistible sexual
pleasure is a work of genius. Is it true that primitive people did not
make the connection between making love and making babies? Everything
has been arranged to make young fertile men and women forget it… until
it’s too late. The consequences are enormous. Mouths to feed, and a
lifetime of responsibility. Women, until just recently, could be left
holding the bag… unless the man voluntarily took his share of the burden
and attendant joys. At the same time, women took the blame for
sterility. In the understandable wish to get beyond all of that
primitive stuff we have, of course, created new problems.
While
reassuring women that the advantages of oral contraception outweigh the
dangers, the French Health Ministry has issued warnings about 3rd and 4th
generation contraceptives after a young woman suffered a debilitating
stroke. But these dramatic risks are the visible peak of a throbbing
ache that has never been addressed. Women who cannot bear the changes
induced by oral contraceptives may be a minority but those who are
uncomfortable with the effects associated with artificial hormonal
activity are probably a silent majority. How does the body regain the
intelligence of reproduction when it has been silenced for years by oral
contraception or IUDs?
Fertility
is a daunting challenge, a stunning competitor that interferes with our
short and long term plans. It should not be treated as an enemy.
Granted, we need some control over this magnificent life force that
doesn’t exactly go with our current lifestyle. But if we smash it,
suppress it, rough it up, and fail to honor it we wake up one day with a
problem that few futurists imagined: drastic population decline. Just
as a family can wither away and disappear in a few generations, a nation
can lose its bid for posterity. We find ourselves with advanced
societies collapsing on an upended age pyramid while the under-25
majority of retrograde populations are out in the streets throwing rocks
and firebombs or drugging themselves on heroin and despair.
And
then there is AIDS. Super safe birth control that theoretically allows
for super carefree pleasure notwithstanding, the clumsy old condom was
brought back into service.
Once
and for all defined as progress, women’s liberation is stubbornly
entrenched. Thinking women, happy to be involved in board meetings,
business travel, financial transactions, and research projects, have
pocketed the progress and ignored the twisted paths that take us away
from our destination. The fine arts and literature, seemingly locked
into the hysterical phase, do little to help women conserve or recover
the delicate skills that help us nurture the masculinity of men. Women
have used more clout to get the right to drive buses, work on automobile
assembly lines and now, in the US, go into combat than to improve the
balance between work, maternity, and child care.
We
keep getting hit with the downside of our miracle solutions. For
example, the two-for-one baby boom. I am not qualified to say whether
the proliferation of twins is due to post-contraception sterility,
pre-menopausal maternity or new techniques of assisted procreation, but
it is troubling when every third stroller you pass on the street is a
double. First, contraception has to be 99.9% reliable for women at the
peak of fertility, then medical genius has to compensate for damaged
fertility… there is a time for everything but who knows what time it is?
Un enfant quand je veux comme je veux. The
motor of Progress must not idle. Having established the religion of
free love, liberated women from the disgusting femininity-maternity
couplet, placed abortion on the same level of noblesse as procreation,
demanded parity everywhere from floor sweepers to CEOs, purified
language of the despicable undifferentiated masculine collective, the
battalions of Progress are back on the front lines and their battle cry
is “A child when I want how I want.” Are homosexuals the latter day
saints of love marriage and procreation? The issue of same-sex marriage
is currently debated in the French legislature. Debate is a euphemism
for the arrogant steamroller of the left wing majority, reveling in a no
holds barred shouting match against the opposition. Deaf to the outcry
of a huge segment of the population, indifferent to reasoned argument,
secure in the certainty that President Hollande will not put the
question to a popular referendum, the majority is having a ball.
The bill, in an inimitable French lace formulation, is called “mariage pour tous [marriage
for everyone]. It actually means “marriage for no one,” in that the
institution will be gutted and the shell decorated with garlands of
flowers. Lurking behind this mariage nouveau is a devious plan
for “procreation without biological borders.” With imperial disdain, a
government, elected with a modest majority is dismantling the basic
building block of society. Long stretches of the proceedings at the
National Assembly are broadcast live on our equivalent of C-Span. Dozens
of mini-Robespierres grab the microphone as if it were a whip and lash
out at the Opposition, accused of homophobia, retrogradia, and
obstruction of the wheels of History. Following the lead of Justice
Minister Christiane Taubira, whose corn rows are meant to be an argument
in themselves, deputies alternate revolutionary thunder with cooing
over kitschy homosexual weddings with all the trimmings and heartfelt
pleas for the children (hundreds? thousands? who knows?) who will
finally bathe in the crowning glory of marriage for their homoparents.
Indulgent
media visit the happy homes of happy homosexuals with their happy
broods. No complaints from these child soldiers. Daddy plus Daddy makes a
house a home. And aren’t two mothers better than one? Who are the
dastardly reactionaries that would deprive innocent children of the
dignity of married homoparenthood? How dare they insinuate that same sex
parents are not as good if not better than heterosexuals? Who are they
to say that marriage is the union of a man and a woman intending to make
a family? Homosexuals deserve the same rights to marry and found a
family as heterosexuals!
The opposition claims “mariage pour tous”
is a Trojan horse: procreation-booster rights will inevitably follow
the same-sex marriage & adoption bill. In fact, MAP (medically
assisted procreation) for lesbian partners, included in an earlier draft
of the bill, was withdrawn due to opposition within the majority party
and the French electorate. It will eventually be tacked on to a family
affairs bill initially promised for March, now postponed to October,
pending—but not depending on—the recommendations of the Bioethical
commission. Opposition deputies predict that males will demand and
obtain, on the grounds of equality, legalization of surrogate
motherhood. The majority cries Foul! You don’t want same-sex marriage so
you drag in unrelated issues. False, shouts the opposition, and the
memorandum shows what’s up your sleeve. For some reason the Justice
Minister issued a memorandum last week notifying consular officials that
recourse to surrogate motherhood-- a criminal offense under French
law-- is not in and of itself grounds for refusal to naturalize the
child.
Once
these fait accompli children are brought to France, the father(s) will
demand official filiation. Does the wish to have children--against the
implacable laws of nature--justify cheating? Other subterfuges are
detailed in a chuckling article in Le Monde.1 One
member of a lesbian union hides all evidence of her partner during the
adoption procedure. Then the two women raise the adopted child together…
until they separate. The once-hidden partner now fears her ties to the
child might be broken. Karim was the odd man out when his partner Yann
fertilized a Ukrainian woman, but today they live happily with their
five year-old twins in a remote village where friendly neighbors are
satisfied to learn that that both men are "papas d’intention" [daddies by intention] of the children born via a "maman de naissance" [birth mommy]. Yann doesn’t like the term “maman porteuse” [carrying mommy]; it sounds too industrial. He says there’s nothing inspiring about the biological bond. "The act itself is shabby-- masturbating into a test tube--and the consequences are a monstrosity.” I assume he means the pregnancy.
Members
of the left wing parliamentary majority, infuriated by the Trojan horse
argument of the opposition, cannot in fact justify the same-sex
marriage juggernaut without the hidden procreative project. Back in
1999, their predecessors promised that the PACS [contract of civil
solidarity], tailored to the needs of homosexuals, was the last and
final stage. No marriage, no adoption, no procreation, no filiation. Of
142,738 contracts signed in 2012, 3,680 were male-male, 3,064
female-female, and 135,994 male-female. Did homosexuals shun the PACS
because it was beneath them or because they weren’t really interested in
forming more perfect unions? And what if a tiny minority of a tiny
minority will actually take advantage of same-sex marriage? How can that
justify the slapdash, sloppy, ill-considered, unjustified dismantling
of marriage and filiation?
Can
the impossibility of making children without a male and a female
participant be solved by same-sex marriage, MAP, and surrogate
motherhood? Isn’t it a way of forcing the children born under these
circumstances to perpetuate the myth of homoparenthood? Neither our
respect for homosexual friends and family nor individual examples of
wonderful children raised by same-sex partners can resolve this dilemma.
The question is what shall society encourage, allow, condone,
facilitate, tolerate, forbid or punish.
The
idea that a child needs a mother and a father is suddenly labeled
reactionary! One might as well burn all the world’s literature and
retool humanity into heartless robots. Who can deny the suffering of a
child who loses a mother or a father by illness, accident, abandonment
or divorce? Proponents of mariage pour tous claim the opposition
is motivated by base prejudice against equality in marriage, while they
stubbornly deny the inequality imposed on the children brought into the
world via this misconception. An infant doesn’t need to be cradled
against a mother’s breast and held in strong male arms? The
orchestration of contrasting male-female sensations--muscles, odor,
voice, rhythm, mentality-- is a vital need for children. It has nothing
to do with socially-imposed stereotypes; it is a corollary of the
ineluctable reality that reproduction is only possible when a female
ovule is fertilized by male sperm.
Advocates
of same-sex marriage portray homosexuals as innocent victims of
discrimination; there is nothing intrinsically distressing about their
biologically sterile sexuality. Evil lies in the eyes of the beholder.
End the social disapproval, costume homosexuals in bridal attire, and
let them get on with their normal lives. The reality is far more
complex. Honest acceptance of homosexuals does not exclude a guts
rejection of their sexuality. In your face lurid gay pride, smoldering
hostility to heterosexuals, coteries and rainbow flag nationalism can’t
be ignored. The slogan on a banner carried in a Mariage pour Tous demonstration -- “Une paire de meres est mieux qu’un père de merde”
[a pair of mothers is better than a shitty father]—reminds us of the
70s: “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” When
homosexuality was a disgrace, many hid their shame in heterosexual
marriage; when coming out was in style, homosexuality was worn as a
badge of honor. Many of the children raised in same-sex households today
were born of heterosexual marriages that ended when one of the partners
discovered his or her homosexuality. Children should not be dragged
like rag dolls into these complications.
At
a time when half the children born in France are technically out of
wedlock, why would homosexuals be dying to get married? Why not create
an institution that is truly adapted to their difference? No. If we
don’t give them our marriage and turn ourselves into fish farms to
provide them with progeny, we’re selfish reactionaries. Same-sex
marriage, we are promised, will subtract nothing from marriage; it is
the simple addition of one unjustly excluded category of citizens to the
existing cohort. Though the opposition doesn’t have the votes to defeat
the mariage pour tous bill, the National Assembly debate has the
merit of casting light on its hidden consequences. The “simple”
addition of same-sex unions nullifies marriage, makes spaghetti of
filiation, axes the patronym, betrays the biological facts of
procreation by deleting their representation in law and language, and
dumps centuries of continuity into muddy confusion. The nation is
sterilized. Justice Minister Taubira pours an acid smile on opposition
deputies who object to some 200 radiations of the words (and the
concept) “father and mother” from the Code Civil. Voyons, messieurs, it’s replaced by “parents.”(“Parents” means parents or relatives.) And what’s wrong with replacing “mari” and “femme” by the unisex “époux.”
The
government and its majority are now spelling opposition
“o-b-s-t-r-u-c-t-i-o-n.” No one must stand in the way of the forward
march of History. Or should it be called Itstory?
We
have reached the endpoint of a package of social changes that began in
the sixties. Instead of reexamining the premises and consequences,
today’s activists want to take us over the cliff. Before we can help our
homosexual citizens, we have to ask ourselves why the femininity
decried in women is acceptable when parodied by men. Why men were male
chauvinist pigs but macho women can simultaneously be husbands to their
female partners and mothers to “their” children. Why is everything
organized so that young women at the most propitious time for
childbearing use overwhelming contraception while women in their forties
and same sex partners resort to every possible stratagem to have
children?
And
how can we maintain the prohibition against incest when Johnny
Appleseed donors are spreading their sperm to the winds with no return
address?
Nidra Poller
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