Women and reasons they do not want children these days, and why they might want to have abortions is something that has been in the mainstream of late in various forms. Aside from the modern argument that currently exists, I saw another angle mentioned on a podcast, about how society has steered some of these mentalities. So, I gave it thought having seen women screaming at each over it at protests online, as well as try to have a calm and well-reasoned discussion.

Although I have recently written about orphans and how children have been used as a commodity, as a tool of society and conditioning and of leverage. (See articles A Train of Thought and A Rather Dark Enterprise). I can see that women have had a strange set up too, as the ones who are required to birth the next generation, expectations and demand clearly have played their role.

We are led to believe that it starts from the top down, with a royal expectation for a male heir, and then it filters down. And in general society also, with very different roles ‘of the household’ moulding the mentality. Slowly moving away from family structures and natural processes, instead to be replaced with updated quotas and interference. Because there has been interference of some kind for the longest time.

Being told you do not have absolute right over your offspring, being denied a place in society if you get pregnant outside of the rules of wedlock. Not allowed financial independence, therefore placing burdens of breeding on women without much freedom outside of that. For hundreds of years at least, as well as being educated to a lower level, or not at all. All plays its part in creating a certain landscape and state of mind, passed down through the generations in many cases. With the trauma and conditions of that time being felt for more than an age after, and the continued Social Status and stigmas to carry it all on.

And of those rules, some led to other behaviour, very much not a maternal one. In the Victorian times, they had nurses who would take on the care of others children. One in particular actually murdered over 400 children and babies it is said, check out Amelia Dyer if you are unfamiliar with that. But it was a baby farming enterprise she was running, and women gave their children to her, and paid her to look after them. A strange case really, and as it led to stricter laws on adoption and the formation of the NSPCC, I have suspicions about its authenticity. But the idea that women needed to offload their children, or pay someone else to look after them, or adopt them, leads me to ask why?

With our current engineered cost of living crisis, its easy to see how society is set up to create the conditions necessary for things to occur. For a state of mind to develop, to see children as potentially a burden rather than a blessing. The joy of parenting being replaced by the stress of survival, with your landscape being remoulded and redefined within that.

And it’s not just casual interference being added to that, when you think of the rules that surround breeding or the laws created to ensnare you into ‘the system’ by way of your children as if it’s one big baby farm. With more extreme outcomes in some cases than others, with caps on numbers and certain sexes favoured over others.

I saw a clip of an Indian woman last year, kind of casually explaining how she had killed 9 of her own babies over the years after they were born, because they were girls. There was no compassion or remorse in what she was saying, but there was a worn-down emptiness to her expression. Fear seems to drive an awful lot of the reasons put forward, fear of being judged, fear of failure, fear of not affording it, pressure or influence from others. So many reasons, and most of them sound like a product of society and reasoning, not instinct or nature. But within that instinct and nature will be intermingled, and perhaps why it is such a fierce debate. Carrying forward centuries of injustice mixed with modern logic. I guess that could be said of many things these days.

But the overall mentality of women, their perceived worth and thought process towards things has been a long time in the making and is nurtured, but not in a maternal way, in fact quite the opposite. And all of those rules and restrictions had a price and an effect, which could perhaps be part of why it’s so split between people on the ground in society. The For and Against battling it out, all leading to a certain state of mind, where the state is always in your mind…

(c) K Wicks