Reproduction (Part 1)

Chapter from “Culture Is Not Your Friend: Sex, Death, Drugs & Madness”.

“God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground’.” – The Bible, Genesis 1:28

Reproduction is seen as the endgame for sex in several cultures, and the rules we have surrounding sexuality, formal and informal, can in large part be traced back to the need to control reproduction. Share on X

But do humans have the right to reproduce or is it simply a possibility?

What Are Reproductive Rights?

“…the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health.”  – United Nations

So we have the right to decide whether or not to have children, how many children we want and when to have them. But what do these rights mean in practice?

Do they also include the right to obtain fertility treatments? To adopt or foster a child? To use a surrogate? What about sperm donation and egg donation?

How far are you allowed to go to have children, or not to have children? What about access to contraceptives and sterilisation?

These questions are largely left up to the individual member states to answer. In Germany, for instance, sperm donation is allowed, but not egg donation. Surrogacy is illegal in Finland, but legal in Ukraine. 

The Opportunity To Reproduce

“Who’s paying for this?” 

Whenever someone claims that they have a right to something, whether it is healthcare, food, education, having children – whatever it is, the question, “Who’s paying for this?” will usually follow. And it is a good question.

If you have the right to have children but not the ability, does that mean that I have an obligation to pay for the help you need to get them?

Should I pay for your fertility treatments, your IVF or surrogate through higher insurance premiums or raised taxes?

Or, if we decide that we do not as a collective bear the financial burden of these rights but leave it to the individual, are we then effectively banning the poor from breeding? Is the right to have children only for the healthy or wealthy?

And if we have equal rights on paper but not equal opportunity, can we still say that we have the right? 

“Why should we spend all these resources trying to have kids, when there are so many out there in need of loving homes? Shouldn’t we care for the ones who are already here instead of creating new ones?” 

If you already have kids of your own, or do not want any this is a logical question to ask. Apparently we are already in danger of overpopulating the planet, so why should we bring even more people into this world? 

For those desperately trying for a baby this question sounds a lot like an accusation, as if they are being told that they are selfish.

Although there are ‘surplus children’ out there that need looking after, we are missing something important here – the urge to reproduce.

This urge is an incredibly strong one. It has to be as the survival of the species depends upon it. And this urge makes us want our genes to survive, not just some random other genes.

It may sound cruel and selfish, but that is what reproduction is all about – passing on one’s genes to the next generation.

Spreading Your Genes

Having children with different partners increases the likelihood that at least one of your offspring will survive and pass your genes on to the next generation. Share on X Our genes do not only give us unique talents, tastes and looks, but also determine the strengths of our immune system. 

If a new plague should hit us, some will have the immune system to fight it off, others will not. If all of your children share the same genetic inheritance, there is an increased risk that you could loose them all. So having children with different partners increases the chances of your genetic survival, and from that perspective changing partners is a good idea.

But what about the social impact of spreading your genes this way?

Although it is becoming more common to have mixed families, we are still not entirely comfortable with the idea of genetic variety in a family. Especially not if the woman is the one spreading her genes.

Restrictions On Assisted Reproduction

Donating your eggs or sperm so that other people may have a chance to become parents, seems like a decent thing to do, but not all agree here. Some treat the sperm and the egg differently, allowing sperm donation, but not egg donation. 

The problem that some have with egg donation is that it enables older women to have children, women who they consider past their due date.

If a woman has kids at the age of 65, she may find that not all share in her happiness, but instead tell her she is too old to have kids, that she will not live to see them grow up and that she is being selfish.

Men who have children late are oddly enough not subject to the same criticism. Maybe they should be. 

Maybe we should spay and neuter people over the age of forty to stop them from breeding, just like we do with cats. Or, maybe we should respect their reproductive rights.

The only good reason that I see for disallowing any type of donation of genetic material for use in reproduction, is to avoid unintentional incest.

What if you do not know your genetic heritage and accidentally fall in love with your brother or sister? Apparently, this has already happened.

Surrogacy

Surrogacy is a controversial method of having children, and subject to restrictions in many countries.

Especially contested is the use of commercial surrogates from developing nations, where it is claimed that poor women are being exploited and used as incubators for rich Westerners. But how is this any different from the other types of exploitation that we put the poor people in developing countries through?

What about the workers our companies employ in the clothes factories of Bangladesh, where the working environment is deeply unhealthy and where the buildings they work in even collapse on top of them? Not to mention the minimal pay that they receive for their efforts that only make them marginally better off than slaves.

But of course, allowing one form of exploitation is no reason for allowing another. But is surrogacy exploitation, and should we ban it?

Maybe.

First ask the surrogates themselves before you come to any conclusions. Do not make this decision over their heads.

Maybe they will tell you that they make more as a surrogate than they do sowing clothes for H&M. Maybe they believe that the best option they have of feeding their own family, is to help someone else create theirs. Maybe they would rather carry a life inside of them for nine months, than be treated as expendable slave labour by our companies.

Besides, they also have reproductive rights.
Respect their decisions.

Population Control

One of the more infamous attempts at population control is China’s One Child Policy, which was introduced in 1979 in an effort to slow down population growth. An ageing populace and the need for young people to enter the workforce has recently led to a change in this policy, and the state now allows two children per woman.

Forced sterilisation is another method employed by governments to reduce the overall population, or parts of the population, such as indigenous people, ethnic minorities and those they consider unfit for reproduction, which may be disabled persons, transgendered and intersex individuals and those living with HIV.

“Paying people a cash incentive for sterilisation is against the law in many countries, but in India, state governments continue to legally pay some to undergo vasectomies and tubectomies.” – BBC, “Why do Indian women go to sterilisation camps?”

Incentivised sterilisation has been, and still is popular in many places. The incentives usually target the poor and uneducated. Share on X

In Singapore during the 80’s, a woman choosing to be sterilised would receive $5000. In 2014, eleven women died after being sterilised in government run sterilisation camp in India.

Western nations will gladly fund contraception and sterilisation programmes in poor and developing countries. Sometimes with the use of incentives which would cause people to make decisions they later regret.

But here, in our own corner of the globe, we try to protect people from regret, even against their own wishes.

Voluntary Sterilisation

“Hah! You say that now, sure. But you’ll regret it when you are older.”

This subject is sometimes even more taboo than abortion. At least if you are young, female and do not have any children.

Although the reproductive rights also include the right not to reproduce, do not expect to be sterilised by doctors in the UK or the US if you are under the age of 30. Young women who have opted for a child-free life and seek sterilisation are often turned away by medical professionals.

Although you technically have the right to get sterilised once you reach the age of majority, this does not mean you are automatically assumed competent enough to make that decision for yourself. Share on XEven if it is your life and your health that is on the line.

“A woman’s ability to choose if and when to become pregnant has a direct impact on her health and well-being.” – WHO

What does your partner think about you wanting to get your tubes tied? Have you talked it over with them, and are they supportive? And if you are single, what if you suddenly meet ‘the one’ and that person wants kids, or suddenly makes you wish that you could create a wobbly mini-human with bladder control issues that looks just like them?

And what about your parents? Don’t they want grandchildren? How can you be so selfish and deny them that? And who is going to look after you when you get old?

These are the questions and attitudes that women under 30 are routinely met with when they express the desire to have their tubes tied. And to top it all off, doctors may also tell them that if they become pregnant and do not want it, they can always have an abortion.

So much for prevention being the best cure. Both for unwanted pregnancies and a certain, global overpopulation problem.

But we live in the rich West. That overpopulation stuff only applies to poor people in Africa and Asia and places like that, right?

“Well they shouldn’t have kids cause they can’t feed them. They’re poor you know. But we’re rich, so we should have them cause we can take care of them.”

So, when it comes to poor women in developing countries, we want to discourage them from having children. In the West we discourage sterilisation, and we tell both of these groups of women that it is for their own good. Share on X

Is it just me, or is there something terribly wrong here?

Remember this little bit about reproductive rights – “the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children”?

Are people truly deciding freely when sterilisation is either routinely incentivised or discouraged?

© Merlyn Gabriel Miller