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by L. Rae Lake

(Please note: this article concerns hormonal, not genetic factors in childbirth. Visualization may have a hormonal effect on a pregnancy but in no way affects a genetically troubled pregnancy. Ideas in this article are experimental and under no circumstances should they replace conventional birth control methods, or normal medical advice. rl).

Aside from the fact that homicide is the most common cause of death of pregnant women today, another type of death faces too many babies.  The term neonaticide is replacing infanticide in industrialized nations today. Neonaticide seems to reflect the attitude that the impulse to get rid of a child, while deplorable, results from the residual genetic programming of our ancient past when women had to make such terrible decisions for their family's survival. However you view it, there is growing public concern about teenage mothers who kill their newborn babies. Those who kill infants today--and are caught--are charged with murder. The penalties are light, however, perhaps because historically in nearly every country such neonaticide, infanticide, was once legal. Remnants of this thinking still linger in human memory.

Abortion was a criminal offense among Hebrews and Assyrians but few cared about infant death. In many early societies both female babies (considered a useless liability) and twins (considered unnatural) were put to death. Oddly enough, even in countries where it was legal to kill healthy living infants, abortions were forbidden. Prior to modern technology which can reveal the sex of a fetus, an abortion risked accidentally killing a male child.

In many countries, when a family had a daughter, additional girl babies were often eliminated. This is an excellent example of sexual discrimination because females were killed for being without perceived value and often because they threatened the family economy in terms of food or dowry. Technological discrimination against females remains prevalent in Eastern nations where sonogram shops are run by untrained vendors and back-street technicians. Vast numbers of women rush to discover the sex of their embryo or fetus but only males are desired.

Abortion of females has become a problem of such technological magnitude that it was the subject of a major recent world conference. In India, among other things, according to Rosalind Miles in Women's History of the World, they were "thrown into the sea, exposed in the jungle, fed to sharks, or drowned in milk with the prayer they would return as sons". Until the 19th century, European, Indian, Arabian and Chinese infanticide was common. Chinese babies were usually suffocated in a box of ashes. According to The New York Times, the 1990 Chinese census showed five percent of all infant girls born since the previous census were 'unaccounted for'. Not always as positive as murder, it is simply a matter of abuse or leaving an ailing or newborn child exposed to the elements. Shaken baby syndrome and lack of nurture kill babies all over the world, every day.

Sometimes murder of babies occurs as a convenience, or for political reasons. In days gone by, certain Polynesian tribes put two-thirds of their children to death at a time, and one nomadic tribe in Angola killed them all periodically, so their women were free to march. They stole children from other tribes when they needed them. In 19th century Australia, there was even a tribe that ritually ate every tenth baby born to keep the population down.

In an ironic form of population control, the long and bloody Greek wars ought to have produced a tremendous surplus of women, except that female infanticide kept pace with the high male war mortality rate. Aristotle once remarked that in Crete pederasty was regulated by the State as a more humane means of controlling the population than infanticide. Only in Sparta were weak or malformed male infants were put out to die. Most cities in Greece and Rome had a dedicated pedestal where naked, unwanted infants were left to die. Passers-by were free to take them for slaves, employees, or even sons or daughters, if they wanted to fool with raising them. Most didn't.

The Politics of Fertility

In revolutionary America, 13-year old Colonial brides were common because even then girls didn't always stay chaste, and our forefathers couldn't risk the social and religious consequences. Abortion done before quickening was not an indictable offense. Early church fathers counted abortion within 40 days of conception as 'less sinful', requiring little penance. Nothing much changed in America for a hundred years. A 19th century survey in the State of Michigan showed, in one year, 34 percent of all pregnancies were terminated.

Things began to change in the late eighteen hundreds with the introduction in America of Victorian romanticism, an insidious, lingering form of emotional sentimentality. At the urging of the civil war-strengthened American Medical Association, states began passing laws making abortion by midwives illegal. Women giving birth were shepherded into hospitals 'for their own good' and soon all abortion was forbidden. Without legal protection, this can happen again, any time, any place.

Population control is and has always been a political factor in society. Whether to have children, how many, when, by whom is also significant in the politics of personal relationships. Whether by church, state or family, population control imposed by pressure ranges from suppressive laws to crude, even cruel punishments. Only when women stop depending on others for contraception or abortion and discover the inner politics of fertility within their own mind (where self-control is the only controlling factor) will this problem disappear.

When abortion was illegal, botched operations (by unqualified opportunists or by women themselves) were the number one cause of death among pregnant women. In the late sixties, in New York City hospitals alone, 10,000 women a year were brought in suffering from illegal or physically self-induced abortions. Abortion is unquestionably disturbing, and may be wrong, but no abortion is unthinkable. Morally, it is equally wrong to impose one group's values on others by civil law. We don't have to approve of abortion to respect the right of others to choose for themselves, even if we think their choices are wrong or stupid.

No one likes abortion. Circumstance demands it; women do it. But no one reacts to it with joy. Relief, yes, ambivalence, grief or guilt. Statistically, those feeling guilt usually have small children, or are women who let others influence their decision.

Who do you think owns your body? Not you. The State owns your body. Abortion in most countries is not a right, it is a privilege, a legislated privilege. Courts would refuse to legislate abortion if it were, in fact, a human right. As a Supreme Court giveth, a Supreme Court can taketh away. And so can local jurisdictions where old laws remain unchallenged.

In Catholic dominated countries it appears that the Church owns your body. Without constitutional separation of Church and State, the Church can and does exert political pressure to restrict civil liberties with little opposition and less recourse, even in apparently free societies.

Abortion is neither a political nor a religious issue but instead is an intensely personal, human issue, subject to interpretation by agencies of each of the three departments of human living--Government (politics, law, economics), Religion, and Education (including science, philosophy, psychology, culture and the arts). If hormonal self-control in some variation becomes an accepted factor in human life (whether as an innate reaction or a learned technique), reproductive choice finally may become an inherent right to decide, rather than the foundering legislative privilege we see today. And then perhaps genetic manipulation and cloning issues which have far greater ethical consequences for humanity than legal abortion will be given due consideration.

Stress-Related Child Abuse

Along with the rise in unwanted babies, we are seeing a parallel rise in all types of child abuse. Among the most distressing are sexual abuse and incest. Incest is a chronic problem of gross ignorance, compounded by a criminal lack of responsibility for the child or children involved. Both produce life-long repercussions and problems for the victim. Child abuse (for any reason) takes at least three forms, and can be played out on any or all of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels:

Verbal abuse is the most widely condoned use of abusive force in the industrialized world. The variety of abusive forms includes but is not limited to verbal, economic, educational, sexual and psychological abuse, neglect and suppression on any and all levels.

Physical abuse can range from the deliberate mutilation of children for begging in some societies, to harmful, even lethal punishment elsewhere. Neglect often means unattended children, fending for themselves. Whether in families where both parents must work to eat and children raise each other, or in countries where homeless street children fend for themselves, neglect leads to ignorance and apathy.

Selective suppression of ideas and experience, as found in religious schooling, for example, or political environments, perpetuates ignorance and circumscribes the mental life, leading to racism, cultism and other 'isms', and is associated with anti-this and pro-that. Abuse of any type seriously undermines the self-image critical to productive integration into society. Even verbal abuse damages our sense of self-worth, which dramatically affects our perception of others. Without access to therapy, abused becomes abuser, and this leads to abusive or even criminal behavior, drugs, prostitution, pornography, and other forms of degradation of oneself and others. Unfortunately, neither children nor adults outgrow wrong patterns of reaction to stress, which usually require some form of therapy. Exercising negative reactions under stress ruins families without intent and without warning but Parenting classes, teaching appropriate disciplinary skills for various age levels, are proving invaluable.

On the level of the psyche, the most inexcusable form of abuse is to bring in souls by accident. Other forms of abuse include bringing in souls to provide for us in old age, or calling in a soul because we are bored, or want someone to love us, or to mend a faltering relationship.

Unwanted infants are a world problem, a human problem. The children themselves are not the problem but their presence in families who can't provide for them produces an on-going multiplicity of problems for societies which also can't provide for them. This is compounded when such children are refugees, homeless, addicted, or ill. Tragically, even legalized abortions can't begin to keep pace with the phenomenal rate of increase in stress-related child abuse. And motherhood becomes a punishment for sex, no matter how incurred, when abortion is desired but not available. This must stop because forcing an unwanted baby to be born to punish its mother for a sexual crime against society is the ultimate in child abuse.

Responsible Parenting

There may be no clearer indication of the long-term significance of parental irresponsibility than the recent revelation that 40% of the homeless in America were once in foster care, children whose parents could not or would not care for them. Alice Bailey points out in Education in the New Age that "one of the major distinctions between the human state of consciousness and that of the animal has developed through the divine imposition of the Law of Necessity. This law has provided opportunity for the development of the sense of responsibility for the care of the family. Once an animal or a bird can fend for itself physically, it is cast off by the parent or parents and left to its own resources. In the case of the human family, the physical care of the child, as well as its psychological unfoldment, has gradually been extended until either the parent or the church, the community or the state, is responsible for him for many years, the time element varying according to the country of birth and social status." Fortunately, serious foster care reform and legislation began in America in the early 1980's because such homeless adults are rootless, without grandparents for their children, without the proverbial 'port in a storm'. Their parenting skills, marginal at best,, may be further decimated by drugs, alcohol, poverty, and mental illness, leaving their progeny at great risk.

The Reproductive Danger of Sentimentality

Even among stable 'family-oriented' families, sexual sentimentality imprisons many otherwise sensible people where their children are concerned. Parents become tangled in a fog of emotional reactions based on good intentions, sentimental love, and what people might think. Parental love is mostly the desire to love, to be loved, and most of all, to be comfortable, or stress-free. The typical parental search for peace of mind, even at the expense of their children, is unbelievable. Otherwise articulate parents are made ineffectual by their indecision, pussy-footing between Church and State on the subjects of sex education and contraception, while their children and grandchildren bear ill-timed babies which may destroy their dreams. Why is it so difficult for otherwise enlightened parents to drop this outmoded morality and false embarrassment for the sake of the children?

Babies place economic and emotional stress on any marriage and if young parents aren't adequately bonded this leads to divorce. Married or not, bonding involves accepting each other not just as a couple (based on unity) but as a parental unit or family (based on synthesis). Adequately bonded parents are sustained through good times and bad by their perceived sense of family purpose. When love and loyalty are no longer issues and the relationship requires little direct attention, a family is ready for children.

The Significant Value of Fatherhood

Conception aside, fatherhood is a significant factor in the life of a child only after birth. Perhaps it is because an economic relationship is so tangible, so easily grasped by children but studies show that "a father has a positive influence on a child only when he assumes economic responsibility for that child". This reality has led to misunderstanding because the economic relationship merely maintains that positive flow of communication and energy whereby the father's real contribution to the child is made.

Men are as capable of nurturing as women, sometimes more so, but it may clarify the father's very important role in a child's life (and more significantly, his role in society) by pointing out, for the sake of distinction only, that the mother represents the child's relationship with the individual. The mother brings the child to the nest and bridges the passage from conception into the family. The father represents the child's relationship with society. The father prepares the child to leave the nest and bridges the passage from family into society. As an example in the child's experience of adult male behavior, the father helps the child take his place in society. As this important male talent or skill or function is clarified, public opinion may begin to reinforce this critical element of child rearing. Whether a man sees it or not, accepts it or not, or acts on it or not, the 'positive influence' of his financial support directly and profoundly affects the child's ability to integrate into society.

Do growing numbers of young men and women unable to find or hold employment simply lack the inherited skills to interface in a positive way with society as a whole? Without satisfactory employment, young people fall into under-employment, welfare, crime, or despair. When men take a more active, creative role with children, society can only benefit. As women begin to practice hormonal self-control along with contraceptives to avoid unwanted pregnancies, men may feel less victimized by unexpected pregnancies and more privileged when they do father a baby. They may take greater responsibility.

The roles and talents of each parent overlap in many ways, based on circumstance and need with a multiplicity of variations. However, small findings keep cropping up. For example, children read earlier and better if the father reads to them. A child's time in the nest reflects (if he is lucky) the dual influence of mother and father but as the child matures, identifiable, positive, maternal influence (not love) tends to wane. In the absence of recognized social rituals, this youthful shift in interest provides a type of blueprint with which to work. As a youngster reaches adolescence and begins to prepare to leave home, the father's influence waxes and his advice and opinions make a deeper impression. Mothers often fail to see what, exactly, fathers do. A father's skill in directing his child out into the world is based in part on lack of direction, leaving the fledgling young person free to make mistakes, and to grow.

In the past, most fathers raised daughters to be help-mates to future husbands. Today, by appreciating her qualities and skills and giving her tacit permission to succeed, a father can play a major role in enhancing his daughter's professional self-image, allowing her to supersede any corporate 'glass ceiling'. Her attitude is shaped by years of observation and interaction with her father as an authority figure and, if positive, this has a strengthening effect on daughters in business. Thousands of exceptions aside, this may explain why so many offspring from single-parent families (with little or no positive paternal influence) are under-employed, if employed at all, or are still living with mom at thirty.

Fatherless young men also find it more difficult to get a job, keep it, and move up the ladder, than their fathered counterparts. The reason is partly mythical, based on the often mistaken belief that things are easier with a father who pulls strings to get you a job, a father who invites you into the economic network, so to speak. 'Fatherless families' are families without the positive influence of contributing father-figures. In reality, everyone has a father, somewhere, even if only God knows who he is. With cheap, reliable and accessible DNA testing, soon everyone will know; then more fathers can support their children.

Positive male influence need not and often does not come from the genetic father. Positive male influence is equally effective from a father-figure who contributes regularly to the economic well-being of the child, and who cares. And children know. They always know.

The U.S. Population Resource Center contends that unwanted babies will cost American taxpayers, in this decade, over one hundred million dollars as welfare feeds and cares for those babies. We hear little about the 1.2 million men who produce those unwanted babies each year and this reveals a critical component of that complex journey into society. Young men who haven't been taught by their fathers to tolerate financial stress, too often walk away from family responsibility. Teenage fathers usually love their children but when they can't provide for them, they leave town. This is a disastrous trend for young families and for society, especially since in most cases it is not a matter of how much money they contribute but how regularly. Fathers who are present demonstrate for their sons that financial pressure is not too great a burden to bear for the family. The good news is that coping with insufficient money normally leads to stimulated ambition, control over material desires, and an increased ability to earn money.

If divorced fathers realized that the degree of positive influence on a child's entry into society correlates with the degree of their paternal financial involvement divorced they might reconsider evasive tactics to avoid supporting their children. It matters. And, barring abuse, divorced mothers might reconsider visitation and more positive relationship, even if economic help is not always forthcoming, for the sake of the children and of society.

Fathers have a great deal of potential influence in society, as well as in the home. As a group, fathers are enormously resourceful, practical, and realistic. Any time they wish, fathers can override outmoded and conflicted systems and attitudes about youthful sex, to provide their children with leadership support and to inspire them, ethically, before sexual maturity. From an early age, daughters need to know from a man they trust that it is okay to say no. And sons need to know from a man they respect that it is okay to accept a no. Before the children are ready, fathers can teach their daughters self-respect, how to say no and mean it, and fathers can teach their sons not only to honor that no but to protect and defend it.

 "[Through] widespread promiscuity of the sexes...millions of souls have been brought into incarnation who were never intended at this time to incarnate and achieve exoteric manifestation. This fact is largely responsible for much of the present economic distress and for the modern planetary dilemma. The economic situation and the necessity to provide for the unduly large population of the planet lies behind much of the aggression and greed of the nations down the ages, and for the effort being made today as never before to provide better and more adequate living conditions. War has consequently been the inevitable result of this undue and unlimited propagation of the human species. This lack of sexual control has brought into the world thousands of unwanted children whose appearance is solely the result of accidental and uncontrolled sexual relations, and in no way indicates the planned intention of parents--planned because intending to offer experience to incarnating souls, with the conscious intent of offering the opportunity to hasten the 'birth into the light' of those particular souls, thus rendering service to the divine plan" (Education in the New Age, Alice A. Bailey, pp. 135-6).

From the perspective of the relative rights of the soul versus the rights of the form, a pregnant woman is far more sacred than a fetus, not because she's pregnant but because she's worked so long and so hard in this incarnation to be a functioning human being. If her future is threatened by inability to rid herself of an untimely pregnancy, our future is threatened. Birth, whether by the will of God or the will of Man, deals essentially with the rights of the soul--not the right of babies, of parents, of form, of society, of humanity.

The abortion problem may turn out not to be a conundrum (a problem with no satisfactory solution) after all but rather a passing phase as humanity moves forward into greater freedom. Ideally, hormonal self-control should be considered prior to conception. When hormonal choice is better understood, the responsibility of parents towards their children will alter drastically. Emphasis will be placed on the timing and correctness of a pregnancy as a service to humanity. Pregnancy will be perceived in terms of producing excellent new forms through which the incarnating person may experience the conflicts and rewards of human life.

When sexual relationships are seen as reproductive opportunities rather than as a form of entertainment, pregnancies will again become purposeful and planned, and all babies will be welcome. From such excellent beginnings, humanity may someday realize its full potential.

In revolutionary America, 13-year old Colonial brides were common because even then girls didn't always stay chaste, and our forefathers couldn't risk the social and religious consequences. Abortion done before quickening was not an indictable offense. Early church fathers counted abortion within 40 days of conception as 'less sinful', requiring little penance. Nothing much changed in America for a hundred years. A 19th century survey in the State of Michigan showed, in one year, 34 percent of all pregnancies were terminated.

Things began to change in the late eighteen hundreds with the introduction in America of Victorian romanticism, an insidious, lingering form of emotional sentimentality. At the urging of the civil war-strengthened American Medical Association, states began passing laws making abortion by midwives illegal. Women giving birth were shepherded into hospitals 'for their own good' and soon all abortion was forbidden. Without legal protection, this can happen again, any time, any place.

Population control is and has always been a political factor in society. Whether to have children, how many, when, by whom is also significant in the politics of personal relationships. Whether by church, state or family, population control imposed by pressure ranges from suppressive laws to crude, even cruel punishments. Only when women stop depending on others for contraception or abortion and discover the inner politics of fertility within their own mind (where self-control is the only controlling factor) will this problem disappear.

When abortion was illegal, botched operations (by unqualified opportunists or by women themselves) were the number one cause of death among pregnant women. In the late sixties, in New York City hospitals alone, 10,000 women a year were brought in suffering from illegal or physically self-induced abortions. Abortion is unquestionably disturbing, and may be wrong, but no abortion is unthinkable. Morally, it is equally wrong to impose one group's values on others by civil law. We don't have to approve of abortion to respect the right of others to choose for themselves, even if we think their choices are wrong or stupid.

No one likes abortion. Circumstance demands it; women do it. But no one reacts to it with joy. Relief, yes, ambivalence, grief or guilt. Statistically, those feeling guilt usually have small children, or are women who let others influence their decision.

Who Owns Your Body?

Who do you think owns your body? Certainly not you. 

The State owns your body. Abortion in most countries is not a right, it is a privilege, a legislated privilege. Courts would refuse to legislate abortion if it were, in fact, a human right. As a Supreme Court giveth, a Supreme Court can taketh away. And so can local jurisdictions where old laws remain unchallenged.

In Catholic dominated countries it appears that the Church owns your body. Without constitutional separation of Church and State, the Church can and does exert political pressure to restrict civil liberties with little opposition and less recourse, even in apparently free societies.

Abortion is neither a political nor a religious issue but instead is an intensely personal, human issue, subject to interpretation by agencies of each of the three departments of human living--Government (politics, law, economics), Religion, and Education (including science, philosophy, psychology, culture and the arts). If hormonal self-control in some variation becomes an accepted factor in human life (whether as an innate reaction or a learned technique), reproductive choice finally may become an inherent right to decide, rather than the foundering legislative privilege we see today. And then perhaps genetic manipulation and cloning issues which have far greater ethical consequences for humanity than legal abortion will be given due consideration.

When sexual relationships are seen as reproductive opportunities rather than as a form of stimulation or entertainment, pregnancies will again become purposeful and planned.  Then all babies will be welcome. From such excellent beginnings, humanity may someday realize its full potential.