A home-truth about 'reproductive rights' in the past

[DL82]

It’s only really in the past 100 years that most women have given birth in hospitals. It’s only in the past 30-50 years that most fathers were able to be present in the delivery room. It’s only since hospitals became a public-health concern for governments at the end of the 19th century that the government has been able to effectively legislate for anything relating to childbirth.

For the first 19 centuries of Christian history, what happened during pregnancy and childbirth was a mystery kept between the mother and a midwife. The midwife was usually just an older woman in the town or village where the mother lived, and childbirth always happened behind closed doors.

How many babies with deformities were strangled at birth? Nobody knows. Even the mother would be too exhausted and probably too uneducated to know whether the midwife was responsible or whether the child died naturally. How many back-room abortions took place, either by washing in alcohol (gin was the famed ‘mothers ruin’ during the industrial revolution) or by physical means? Nobody knows. How many women were given the ‘wisdom’ of their elders about how to avoid pregnancy through herbal or withdrawal methods? Nobody knows.

Before contraception and abortion became a current issue among civil governments, how many Catholic women even knew precisely what the Church taught about marital relations and the sanctity of unborn life? Probably quite few, these things weren’t considered ‘proper’ to be talked about in polite society.

Although governments and the Church had agreed on laws against abortion and infanticide, the truth is, it’s only been in the past 100 years that these things have really been within the realm of men to legislate. Before this, childbirth was the realm of female authority, the delivery room door closed and firmly locked to priest and policeman alike.

Rather than saying “there was a time when legislation worked to protect the unborn, then it stopped working”, perhaps we need to say “there was a brief time when legislation was tried to protect the unborn, but it never worked”. I’m not saying this to defend abortion, quite the opposite.

If we start from the historical perspective above, then we can construct a truly heaven-centred, progressive, optimistic pro-life agenda. If we accept that we now have the advantages of a closer co-operation between medicine, the state and mothers, and all the advantages of modern hospitals, then we can ask ourselves how to make those three things work together to protect and exalt motherhood and children in a way that it has never been before in history. We can build for the first time, a truly Catholic society that loves all human life, rather than trying to re-build a fantasy past that never was. The Kingdom of Heaven, rather than any pre-modern earthly kingdom, is our model.

 

[Caesar517]

I’m not sure I see what you’re getting at, but if you construct this agenda I would be happy to discuss it.

 

[strngrnrth]

I’d be cautious about this approach, personally. Few women would willingly give up control they once had. A better way to begin might be to say, infanticide has normally been used against girls, the illegitimate and the disabled; it was discrimination, not freedom. Today we are more aware of how wrong that is. All children have a right to live. Instead of emphasizing how science has made it possible to interfere with a woman’s control of her reproduction, I’d stress how social awareness has made it more obvious that no one has the power to grant or revoke anyone’s right to life.

 

[DL82]

I’d be cautious about this approach, personally. Few women would willingly give up control they once had. A better way to begin might be to say, infanticide has normally been used against girls, the illegitimate and the disabled; it was discrimination, not freedom. Today we are more aware of how wrong that is. All children have a right to live. Instead of emphasizing how science has made it possible to interfere with a woman’s control of her reproduction, I’d stress how social awareness has made it more obvious that no one has the power to grant or revoke anyone’s right to life.

I completely agree with you. All I’m saying is, this is PROGRESS.

As a society, by bringing a woman’s reproductive rights into the public arena, and framing them in terms of legal and medical entitlement, we have progressed in our understanding of social justice.

Now we need to progress further, to build a society where no life is rejected at any stage as unworthy.

All I’m saying is, there was never a golden age when the state, the church and real life were in agreement and abortion and infanticide didn’t happen. These things have always happened, they just used to go unreported.