Sterility is the Default

How Full Agency Short-Circuits Human Reproduction

Imagine you’re on a train. The ride is long and monotonous, but you know the layout well, going through this route countless times. Now there’s a fork on the track, leading to a destination that is more exciting and more appealing to your sensibilities. It’s also more unknown, more dangerous, and once you set off, there’s no way to get back to your original route. You know the conductor well, and you ask about the other route, he tells you there’s a button you can push that will switch the route, but only you can do it.

You ruminate every passthrough, sighing every time you see the fork go by without switching. Still, but every time there’s some thought that creeps up, some lingering doubt that keeps you from pressing the button. The conductor hears your ruminations so many times it becomes background noise. You want to travel the new route, but the terror of pressing the button and making a bad decision lingers in your mind. You wish there was a way for the track to malfunction, a way for the conductor to “accidentally” push the button, thereby giving you what you want without bearing the total responsibility.

Human sexuality is a strange thing. People are one of the only animals that have their reproductive cycle largely hidden. In most animals, the females make it clear when they are ovulating, practically begging the males to come and impregnate them during their cycle. Their physical features often change along with their smell and behavior. The males, upon seeing this, are only happy to oblige.

In women, however, their cycles are largely hidden from men. While women have been shown to be more outgoing and sexually attracted during ovulation, it’s small and subtle, with no clear outward indicators. There are several evo-psych just-so stories to explain this, such as women hiding their cycles make it easier to obtain resources from a male, as he has to be with her all the time lest another male get her pregnant. Whether you believe the explanations or not, the fact remains men largely have no idea when to get their mate pregnant, so their instinctual strategy is simple repetition.

Probably strangest of all, women themselves largely can’t tell when they are fertile. Studies have shown only somewhere around 13% of women can tell when they are ovulating with any sort of consistency. This is even more baffling, as it would seem the women who could keep track of their ovulation period would be at a distinct advantage in getting pregnant and bearing more children than their more clueless female counterparts, yet this isn’t the case.

Now, there are ways for a woman to tell when she is ovulating, even without technological measures such as testing her hormone levels. One of the more surefire ways that requires no equipment is tracking vaginal mucus. This protocol, called The Creighton Method, tests the mucus for different qualities such as color, tackiness, and viscosity. If it’s yellow and tacky, she’s not fertile, same as when it is nearly totally dry. However, as a woman nears ovulation, her vaginal lining develops very stretchy mucus in anticipation of incoming sperm. At that point it’s decided whether it’s sexy time or abstention time.

TMI

For those of you doing Catholic Natural Family Planning, this is old news. You’ve been having dinnertime conversations about vaginal mucus to your spouse with as much nonchalance as talking about the weather for years. Outside of this niche though, the fact remains most women have intrinsic no idea of these indicators, with no knowledge transfer of such indicators from mother to daughter through the generations. Their fertility window is a black box.

So why does this matter? Put simply, women are inherently very risk averse, and pregnancy is the most dangerous and life-changing transformation in any woman’s life. There is an avalanche of physical and emotional changes that happen in record time, culminating in hours of painful labor followed by months of sleepless nights nursing a helpless infant. And that’s if she doesn’t die. Even with modern medicine, pregnancy is dangerous, and women still die during complications. I personally know someone who lost five pints of blood during what was supposed to be a routine delivery. It was a miracle she survived.

So, in times past, how was a woman convinced to get pregnant? Was it biological urges overwhelming her risk aversion? Was it a rational cost-benefit analysis? Was it seeing everyone else with kids and wanting to fit in? All of these may have had some impact, but it was overwhelmingly due to the simple fact that once she made her marital vows, she had little choice in the matter.

Marriage 1.0: Fertility as Default. Low Agency.

Earlier, when a woman got married, the basic contract was the man would get sexual exclusivity to the woman in return for the man protecting her and their offspring. In some cultures, the man was subject to the same sexual exclusivity with the woman. Not only was there exclusivity, but also an implicit assumption of regular sexual relations outside of dire circumstances. In Christian circles this is referred to as The Marital Debt.

Few things cause the levels of online shrieking and sperging out than the Marital Debt. Many straw-man the argument to say that it meant great-grandpa could ravish and sexually abuse great-grandma whenever he got the urge, and many steel-man the argument by saying it simply says you should try to be sexually available. In practice it was likely somewhere in the middle. Sometimes Great-Grandpa would get frisky, and Great-Grandma wouldn’t be feeling it. She would sigh, lie down, and think of Germany. The debate kept ratcheting up and ended up getting so bad that Pope Francis, in a little known but popular encyclical titled “Desinite, vos Autistae Intolerabiles", decreed anyone debating over the concept anathema.

The common refrain of feminists that the old marriage model intentionally subjugated a woman’s sexuality is one of the few things they get correct. What’s left unsaid is the woman chose this out of her own volition in times past and had full understanding of the contract she entered into. Given there was no way to turn off her fertility, no way to pinpoint her actual ovulation window, and a marital debt for sexual relations, pregnancy would happen sooner or later in healthy women. Pregnancy wasn’t something she consciously sought out. Good or bad, it was simply something that happened to her as part of Marriage.

Marriage 2.0: Sterility as Default. High Agency

In the last fifty years, marital relations have been turned on its head. Most women from High School on have used some form of contraceptive to avoid pregnancy. Contraceptives have turned from a frowned upon but ubiquitous presence to being openly encouraged. They have conquered the world, with even fundamentalist countries like Saudi Arabia having a 30 percent contraceptive rate. This has turned the default state for most young women entering sexual relations to go from fertility to sterility.

The fearmongering from modern culture exacerbates this issue. From Middle School sex-ed onwards, women are told about the horrors of teen pregnancy, the loss of one’s life when having a child young, the countless STD’s they can get, and the necessity of having “safe” sex. Then, they are told, when they are good are ready, maybe they can choose to have a child. Career and seeking self-fulfillment were the default state, having children was the exception. On top of this, the medical profession is shockingly ghoulish with regards with pregnancy, with even OB-GYNs often treating pregnancy more like a disease to be treated than bringing new life into the world.

Obligations in marriage have also suffered an upheaval. The idea of the Marital Debt is seen as antiquated at best, and abusive at worst, and there is currently no moral expectation for a spouse to give regular sexual relations. Even in marriage, outside of exclusivity, a woman now has no sexual obligations to her husband. She can force her husband to live like a monk if she chooses. If she doesn’t want a child, she won’t bear one, plain as that.

One would think with this full autonomy women would have as many children as they want, and no more. That desired fertility and actual fertility will be same. Unfortunately, this isn’t how it’s worked out. While female fertility has hovered at below replacement for the United States, women’s stated ideal number is higher, around 2.5. This means, even with full autonomy, they are consistently not reaching their ideal number of children. It’s not the contraceptives directly that have caused the decline to below replacement fertility, but the secondary effects of contraceptives in the form of increased choice anxiety.

While a lot of the drop in fertility is due to marriage decline, the effects are across the board. More years married helps, but the gap still persists through the years. Modernity has created a psychological monster that no woman in history has had to combat. There’s a tug of war between her biological urges to reproduce and her risk-aversion, and the final decision is hers to make. There’s also no one to offload the responsibility to. It’s largely socially acceptable to have no children, and more social status is lost by having what’s deemed “too many” kids than none. Instead of pregnancy “just happening”, she has to take active steps to make it happen, with all the anxiety it produces. It means taking active steps to get pregnant. It means going off the pill. It means removing the IUD.

This also means the anxiety of finances, how to juggle work and day care, home improvement needs, and every other worry enters the equation. Where before she got pregnant and the family just had to figure it out, now there’s the opportunity to get everything in order first. Unsurprisingly to anyone who has had a kid, there’s never a time you’re truly ever ready, but the quest to be ready delays fertility as her biological clock ticks away, the constant procrastination in making a risky decision culminating in menopause.

Also, as weird as it sounds, female social groups are very emotionally sensitive to pregnancy, and it’s often not positive. Some will be angry she is having another kid because she is having fertility issues. Some will start whisper circles about breeding like a rabbit if she has more than three kids. This is especially true in professional environments. This doesn’t even go into the medical professionals, who will often chastise women who aren’t in an ideal condition to have another child. She can’t just shrug and say her husband can’t keep his hands off her. There’s now a serious risk in social standing that she has full responsibility over.

The Agony of Choice

Once someone gets control of a crucial aspect of their lives, they hold on to it for dear life. Even in the cases where more options make them miserable as opposed to empowered, they’re not giving it away. Such is the conundrum with fertility.

Moderate centrists like Jim’s Blog enthusiasts will likely see an obvious, if socially uncouth solution to this issue. Just totally remove their sexual agency. Just how they plan to do that is left unanswered.

On the other side, if you talked to a feminist, they would likely talk about the need to have better family leave, better health care, better wages, and better husbands. The anxiety is not a matter of women being too risk averse, but a problem of society being unamenable to mothers. Of course, anyone who has followed the discourse with the never-ending chores discussion will soon realize that the minute things shift in their favor, they will move the goalposts with yet more demands. Even in this age where housework is easier than ever and the job market has never been better for women, fertility continues to decline.

Many TradCons would argue the solution is returning to Marriage 1.0. In many niche communities this is the norm, such as the TradCath social circle I’m a part of. The issue is these sorts of communities self-select for two types of people, those who had trad parents who successfully transmitted their values to their children, and those who converted and embraced their new identity with fanatical zeal.

Contrary to the assumption that these women would be docile and naive, the opposite tends to be the case. In order to live in a society with values in strong contrast to the dominant culture, they need to be tribalist, intelligent, and very disagreeable. The reason for tribalism is obvious, a good amount of intelligence is necessary to resist near constant propaganda, and the disagreeability is necessary to refuse to go-along-to-get-along with general society. There’s likely a genetic component and general disposition to the types of people who can live Marriage 1.0 in modern society, one unshared by most of the population. Even if divorce laws were changed and family courts stopped being insane, it’s doubtful that the Pandora’s box of contraception can be put back away.

The online Vitalists and the TradCons tend to be at odds with the idea of Marriage 1.0 in modern times. The Vitalists argue that even this sort of “traditional” marriage is more like a longhouse using masculine terms like patriarch, family leader, etc. but still living a life of dull domesticity. The Tradcons retort that the Vitalists are incapable of creating anything that cements a legacy that will outlast their short lives. They both have a point. While both understand the new conception of Marriage is a disaster, they are at odds with what needs to replace it.

One thing I noticed reading all the chores articles, articles regarding responsibility of the spouse to have sexual relations, and the complaints about women feeling they are the “project manager” of their home life, and single people bragging about their lack of responsibilities, is how freaking dull it all sounds. You have the eTradMoms parading around their perfectly dressed kids in a field where none of them has a speck of dirt, the corporate women exclaiming how very important their phony baloney job is, and the DINKs who have no kids but can’t think of doing anything better to do than eat at restaurants and watch Netflix. The drabness is everywhere, brought about by a risk aversion and domesticity that is strangling everyone of life. It’s no wonder no one is having kids when everyone needs a spreadsheet with a cost-benefit analysis to decide whether or not to breathe.

I’ll offer an alternative.

Marriage 3.0? YOLO

Lucky for us, Nature has a way of getting past the anxieties and uncertainties of life. It’s what led young women to go to the frontier to marry a man they only knew through letters. It’s what has galvanized men to risk life and limb to travel to the unknown and conquer. It’s what has inspired couples to stick it through the rough patches to make it to the other end. It’s about having a dream and jumping into the unknown. It’s about unbounded spiritual energy.

The online Tradcon idea of marriage pushed by many mommy bloggers and wife guys is boring and spiritually sterile, no matter how many old-style words are attached to it. Modern marriage is spiritually as well as physically sterile. Both lack the energy, risk-tolerance, and confidence to live an authentic life. One is inundated with fitting old forms into the realm of modernity without any understanding of what made them real, and the other has all the zeal and passion of an excel spreadsheet.

Few people aspire to just nice white-picket fences and kids in a tame suburban domestic life. Not even women. Neither do they want simply a romantic partner to cohabitate with while largely living their own lives. They want to dream of what their partnership can do. They ponder the things they can accomplish working together. They want to have the adventure of a lifetime.

What’s needed, more than anything, is the youthful arrogance and optimism that was the foundation for so many happy couples. It’s the reckless energy to go out on a limb. This, in turn, will lead young women to see their fertility not as something to be managed, not something to be planned, but something to embrace fully. While a man’s vitality is exercised through external action, through conquest, a woman’s vitality is interior, the spiritual resilience to let the chips fall where they will, to let things just happen.

With the proper, vitalistic interior life, birth control is understood as being just as sterilizing to her spirit as to her body. The house that everyone thinks is too small for your increasing family seems perfectly suitable. The sneers and dejection of your peers is ignored, and the accolades of the corporate office are seen as just as artificial as the email no one reads.

Advocates of Marriage 2.0 encourage long, long courtships, usually involving cohabiting. We’re talking years of dating followed by a long engagement, meaning many couples are dating for three or more years before finally tying the knot. While they argue this is to make sure it’s a good match, all it accomplishes is making marriage a mere formality, all the while removing the reckless energy of young love that is the foundation of early married life.

Trads are also their own worst enemy here. Many Churches now require an entire year of formation after engagement before marriage. Then they expect the young horny couple to keep it in their pants that entire time. Give me a break. They say this is to make sure the couple understands their Church’s marital teachings, but this is silly. It’s naive to assume people get divorced or use contraception because they didn’t read John Paul II’s Theology of the Body in detail.

In short, if you want couples to have kids again:

• To hell with excessively long courtships. Encourage a ring within six months. Encourage short engagements.

• Advocate couples have adventures before domesticity

• Build a social network that encourages risk taking before safety

• Encourage them to let things happen without catastrophizing the future. Then have their back.

• Advocate building a legacy instead of the 9-5 job

• Make children a core part of that legacy

Choice paralysis and safetyism is the scourge of modernity, putting everyone in self-created mental cages that obsess over analysis before living. It’s everywhere now, its suffocating blanket depriving everyone of that vigor so necessary for living beings. If you want couples to have children, encourage them to live with abandon.

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