Thursday, February 17, 2011

First thoughts on birth

From what I've been told, people think in terms of opposite so thinking of birth and death simultaneously should seem natural. After growing up with example of that all around me since childhood - the life cycles of animals like flies posted in science rooms, when Littlefoot's grandmother sings to him about the circle of life - I'm not sure if I find it strange or not. As far as I know, there's no actual correlation between deaths and the occurrence of births but it's certainly something I wonder about. Is there any proof to the rumors that after some sort of disaster, a baby boom occurs nine months later? If there is, is it a result of a conscious desire to make up for the lives lost? Or does seeing the death and devastation make us grateful for what we do have and urge us to expand on it? Maybe it's neither. Our society seems to be obsessed with making sure that everything has a perfect rhyme and reason to it happening and if they don't exist, whatever they don't exist for should be scrapped. Ironically, in a way, they've found a way to do just that. Pregnancies, birth itself, can be planned out so much to the point that unexpected pregnancies can seem 'counterproductive' to the lives of even couples who even plan to have children elsewhere along the line. Once again, we bring ourselves to the birth-death connection.

When pregnancies are not wanted, aborting (depending on the location of the woman) becomes an option. People have argued for years about a) if abortion is truly killing the unborn child and b) if so, then at what point does the life actually begin? Why are women who, for whatever the reason, choose or require an abortion frowned upon when women who have a miscarriage are not? What suddenly makes the unborn, miscarried, child more valued than the child who might have been aborted? People mourn both, yes, but it seems like the miscarriages are much more of a tragedy rather than abortions which still seem like a taboo topic to bring up. Why isn't your body's failure to hold and carry a baby term a taboo?

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