by Robin Baker
For four years, they had always been able to find an excuse to wait ‘just another month or so’ before having a family. More than anything, they were waiting for his promotion – but it never came. Eventually, despite their financial problems, they decided to wait no longer. Part of her motivation had stemmed from her secret hope that a family would draw them back together again – because as their debts had mounted so their relationship had deteriorated. More and more frequently, irritability had begun to give way to open hostility.
To her dismay, she hadn’t conceived. Month after month went by, and she began to worry that she was infertile. As it turned out, her fears were unfounded. But it took nearly a year of unprotected sex before, relaxing on a holiday they couldn’t afford, she eventually conceived. Then, nearly three months later, her partner lost his job and within a week she miscarried.
From that tragic moment, their lives had gone from bad to worse. The house was repossessed and they were forced to move from one rented accommodation to another. With each move, as they struggled to manage on her income, they lowered their sights and their standard of living. Their current flat was cramped. Although pleasant enough in summer, it was cold, damp and mouldy in winter. Eventually, her partner had got another job, less well paid than the first but at least with prospects. By then, however, they were so far in debt they had no choice but to stay in their cheap flat, waiting for financial recovery.
During the worst of their deprivations they rarely had sex, and whole months sometimes passed without intercourse. With her partner’s new employment, however, their sexual interest in each other returned. But it was now two years since her miscarriage, and still she had not conceived. Their finances were slowly improving, but their standard of living was still far worse than they had originally expected it would be by now. They still argued frequently, sometimes violently, and often had bouts of ill-health.
Suddenly, she stopped crying, screwed up the paper and threw it at the wall. Her mind was made up. She scribbled a note to her partner and walked out of the door. At the end of the street, she went into a telephone kiosk and dialled a familiar number. When the man answered, she gave him the message he had been waiting all month to hear: if his offer was still open, she was ready to leave her partner and move in with him.
Ten minutes later, she was in his car. Thirty minutes after that, they were in his house in the suburbs. Ever since their affair began, he had been trying to persuade her to move in. His house was nothing special, but compared to the pit in which she was living it was a palace. Although maintenance payments to his ex-partner were a drain, he was not in debt, his house was warm, dry and well appointed, and he had a car.
She spent most of the day in tears and most of the night having sex. The next morning, she went back to her flat to collect her belongings. Her new partner wanted to accompany her, but she wouldn’t let him and took a taxi instead. Her ex-partner was in bed when she arrived. As she collected her clothes and other possessions, the arguments and recriminations reverberated around the bedroom. He eventually collapsed in tears. Then, begging her not to go, he told her how much he still cared for her.
She responded in a way that later she still could not believe. As he sobbed, she suddenly remembered the athletic, ambitious and arrogant young man she had once found so attractive. In a flood of compassion, she comforted him, calmed him, then positively encouraged him to have intercourse with her. However, almost immediately afterwards, she turned on him again, announced it was still over, and left.
Over the next few weeks, she settled into her new relationship. Sexually, they were very active – until she began to feel sick every morning. Having told her new partner she was infertile, it was a surprise to both of them to discover she was pregnant. They had no idea when it had happened until a routine scan told her the baby’s age. Then they calculated that she had conceived the very first week they had begun to live together.
Her ex-partner refused to leave them in peace, and from time to time throughout her pregnancy caused great stress. The baby threatened to miscarry on several occasions, but this time she hung on to it. In due course she gave birth, albeit slightly prematurely, to a small but otherwise healthy daughter. Now her ex-partner became even more demanding, claiming the child to be his. Surrounded by conflict, the woman lapsed into a deep post-natal depression and began to neglect and even to mistreat the baby. It might have died had her new partner not devoted himself to its protection and care, losing his job in the process. The woman returned to work, leaving her new partner to take the major role in raising the child.
Her ex-partner faded from their lives for a while. The woman emerged from her depression, her new partner found employment again, and they were able to afford child care. Then, just as her life was settling into a comfortable routine for the first time in years, her ex-partner reappeared. Now with a good job and rejuvenated physically, mentally and financially, he wanted to press his claim for the baby he insisted was his daughter. He paid for a paternity test. The new partner cooperated, confident that the results would end the argument once and for all. They did, but not in the way he had hoped. He was devastated. The baby girl he had cared for so much was not in fact his daughter.
Within weeks of the result, the woman left to share her old partner’s new and much improved lifestyle, taking her daughter with her. From then on, the woman’s fortunes went from strength to strength and within three years of their reunion she and her original partner had two more children.
In Scene 15, we met a woman who enhanced her reproductive success by conceiving when, consciously, the last thing she wanted was another child. In this scene we meet the converse – a woman who enhances her reproductive success by failing to conceive when consciously she really wants to.
Most people think of family planning and contraception as modern inventions. They are not. Even ‘deliberate’ contraception is not that new. For centuries, women in various cultures have been placing leaves or fruit (even crocodile dung!) in their vaginas in an attempt to avoid conception. Chemical contraception, as in the pill, isn’t even a human invention. Female chimpanzees, for example, at appropriate times chew leaves that contain contraceptive chemicals. In fact, the female body was planning families and avoiding conception for tens of millions of years before humans had even evolved. Women simply inherited these natural traits from their mammalian ancestors.
For women and all other mammals, the natural mediator between bad conditions and the avoidance of reproduction is stress. The stress reaction usually seems like an enemy – a pathological condition that we cannot shake off and that prevents us from functioning efficiently and normally. But there is another interpretation: that the stress reaction is a friend – a means by which the body prevents itself from doing anything disadvantageous when times are bad. In particular, stress is a powerful contraceptive. And, to a woman, the avoidance of conception is an invaluable ally in her pursuit of reproductive success! How can this be?
The key paradox is that a woman does not necessarily achieve greatest reproductive success simply by having as many children as possible as quickly as possible. The very fact that women, like most primates, usually have only one child at a time is testimony to the dangers and difficulties of trying to raise more than one child simultaneously. Twins might seem a good way of increasing reproductive success, but there is more than twice the danger that both will die. Unless the woman’s circumstances are very favourable, she is less likely to raise two healthy, fertile children by conceiving twins than she is by conceiving two children a few years apart.
Women inherited a basic problem from their primate ancestors - it is very difficult to carry more than one child at a time when walking long distances. This difficulty is particularly great when walking upright on two legs, and has plagued women throughout human evolution – it is not totally unfamiliar even to those living in modern industrial societies. Of course, the limitation was, and still is, particularly crucial in those cultures in which w
omen are responsible for collecting and carrying large quantities of food, water, firewood, or other materials. Carrying even one child as well is difficult. Under such circumstances, the greatest reproductive success is achieved by those who avoid having another child until the previous one can not only walk but can keep up.
The time interval between successive children is not the only aspect of ‘family planning’ that influences a woman’s reproductive success. Children are most likely to survive and grow into healthy, fertile adults if they are born into a favourable environment. Plenty of space and an adequate supply of healthy, nutritious food are paramount. Children then have the lowest risk of contracting diseases and the greatest resistance to those they do get. In modern societies, space and nutrition depend on wealth. Even now, the chances of a child from a poor family dying before reproducing are double those of a child from a rich family. In the historical and evolutionary past – when wealth will have been measured not in terms of money but in terms of crops and livestock, or even simply in terms of access to the best areas for food, water and shelter – these differences will have been even greater.
There is a general principle, considered briefly in Scene 8 in connection with the benefits and dangers of a ‘one-child’ family: namely, that for any given woman in any particular situation there will be a size of family which will give her the greatest number of grandchildren. If she has a smaller family than this, she will naturally have fewer grandchildren. Equally, if she tries to have a larger family, she risks an overcrowded household and spreading herself and her resources too thinly. The resulting disease and infertility again mean that she ends up with fewer grandchildren. The challenge that faces every woman is first to identify the optimum family size for her circumstances, then to ensure that she has that number of children. Another factor that influences the number of grandchildren a woman may have is how she times her conceptions. Life is a mosaic of situations. Health, wealth and circumstance vary with time, and some periods in a woman’s life are better for having children than others. Those who time their conceptions to coincide with the good times will produce the most grandchildren.
It is not just the children who may suffer from being conceived when times are bad – the mother may suffer also. An untimely conception may damage her health and situation so much that she may never again be able to conceive. If the woman in Scene 16 had produced a child during any of the most stressful phases in her relationships, she could have suffered irrevocable damage (the demands of a child when a couple can scarcely maintain themselves may even be fatal). Under such strained circumstances, there is an increased risk of ill-health and subsequent infertility. Hostility also increases, making physical abuse or even murder more likely. The woman in the scene, by delaying her first child until circumstances improved, managed, eventually, to have three children for whom she had the space, time and resources. In the end, she also had the support of an able partner. Had she tried to reproduce earlier, she might not only have failed but might also have forfeited her chances of conceiving in the future.
The best method of avoiding conception is, of course, sexual abstinence, and the woman and her partner did indeed have spells without sex in their most stressful days. This happened not because they consciously wanted to avoid conception – on the contrary – but because they lost interest in each other. At times, they even felt hostile. Their bodies were manipulating their emotions to reduce the chances of conception. Rarely, however, did they give up routine sex for long. This is because abstinence is in general disadvantageous as an overall contraception strategy - for the following reasons.
As we discussed in Scene 2, the primary function of routine sex is not conception: it is for the woman to confuse the man – and it is for the man to protect himself against his partner’s infidelity by maintaining a sperm army inside her. Since neither partner can afford to give up routine sex for too long, both men and women have mechanisms other than abstinence which, despite continued sexual activity, reduce the chances of conception when the situation is unfavourable.
Women in particular have a wide range of such mechanisms. One of these is widely known: the influence of lactation on ovulation. If a woman breast-feeds her baby for a few months after giving birth, she is unlikely to ovulate during that time. This is the case even if she resumes her periods. Absence of ovulation is one of the main ways in which a mother spaces the conception of successive children.
However, most of the ways in which she avoids reproducing at inappropriate times involve stress. In Scene 16, not only did the woman avoid conception during her most stressful phases, she also miscarried, then later threatened the life of her new-born baby, in response to stress.
The stress reaction manifests itself in many ways. In the scene, faced with a difficult relationship during adolescence, the woman lapsed into anorexia, as do 1 per cent of girls between sixteen and eighteen years of age. The physiological stress caused by such near-starvation is contraceptive – ovulation, and often menstruation, are inhibited. Usually the situation is temporary. Although a few anorexics (5-10 per cent) die as a result of their behaviour and a few more (15-20 per cent) continue to be anorexic throughout their lives, the majority (75 per cent) emerge from the condition to live a normal, healthy and eventually reproductive life.
Most contraceptive reactions are less extreme than anorexia. Even so, the more a woman is stressed the less likely she is to ovulate (Scene 15). She is also less likely to help sperm reach the egg or to allow a fertilised egg to implant in her womb. Finally, she is more likely to miscarry, particularly during the first three months of pregnancy.
It is estimated that, whereas most fertilised eggs survive to reach the womb, on average about 40 per cent fail to implant and, of the remainder, about 60 per cent die before the twelfth day of pregnancy. Even then, about 20 per cent are miscarried during the next three months. All of these figures are higher if a woman is stressed, lower if she is not. The death of a partner, a partner’s infidelity, or the outbreak of war, for example, are all known to increase the chances of miscarriage. During the first few months, miscarriage is also more likely if there is anything wrong with the baby, either genetically or developmentally.
At first, it might seem odd that a woman has so many different ways of avoiding having a child. Certainly, if any one of these systems were efficient, there would seem no need for others. But this apparent excess of responses is not an error in female programming. Circumstances change, often quickly, and a woman’s body needs to respond equally quickly. For example, circumstances may be favourable when she ovulates but no longer so by the time the egg reaches her womb. So she will ovulate, but then avoid implantation. Or circumstances may be favourable at the time of implantation but may become unfavourable a month or so later. So, having become pregnant, she miscarries.
Even if circumstances remain favourable throughout early pregnancy, they may yet deteriorate before the baby is born. The last three months of pregnancy are often associated with marked changes in a woman’s psychology. First, there are the well-known spells of ‘nest-building’ – strong urges to prepare the environment into which the baby will be born. Also there are spells of intense reappraisal – primary targets are her partner, home and general environment. These spells often manifest themselves as phases of worry, depression and irritability. Finally, there is often a preoccupation with the future. Any major deterioration in a woman’s circumstances at this time can lead to pathological depression and the later rejection, or even abuse, of the baby.
Post-natal depression as an irresistible urge to abandon, abuse or even kill a new baby is widely recognised. So widely, in fact, that many legal systems around the world accept that a woman may not be responsible for her actions in the phase immediately after giving birth.
Throughout human history infanticide has been, and still is, one of the major forms of family planning employed by women. In hunter-gatherers, people who live by hunting and foraging rather than by cultivation, abo
ut 7 per cent of children are killed by their mother. According to the World Health Organisation, infanticide was the most prevalent form of family planning in late-nineteenth-century Britain.
Such behaviour is not restricted to humans. Like all the other forms of natural family planning, we inherited infanticide from our mammalian ancestors. Anybody who has kept pets such as rabbits, gerbils, hamsters or mice will know that if the mother is at all stressed soon after giving birth, she is likely to kill, even eat, some or all of her litter. Such infanticide is not pathological: it reflects the mother’s subconscious decision not to raise the litter in the current circumstances. She opts instead to delay her attempt until circumstances improve.
So far, we have concentrated on family planning from the woman’s viewpoint. But men, too, have many of the same problems. They direct a large part of their reproductive effort into preparing an environment for their children. During hard times, a man should want to avoid raising children just as much as his partner.
Most of the time, a couple’s interests coincide. The woman’s body will plan their family to their mutual benefit. But there are times when their interests do not coincide. Then, a man needs a contraceptive mechanism of his own. Interests are most likely to conflict when the couple’s circumstances are almost, but not quite, good enough to have a child. In this situation, if the woman meets someone her body deems to be genetically superior to her partner, she may be tempted into trying to have a child with another man. In such circumstances, discussed further in Scene 18, the reproductive benefit to the woman of a child with this other man would be worth the risk of overstretching her and her partner’s resources. Obviously, her partner would gain no such benefit.
