[TW: Discussion of abortion, rape, murder]
While going through my history stuff, I just stumbled across an essay I read a few years back, and which I’ve now re-read. It was written in 1781 by a German civil servant on the issue of an urgent social problem: the murder of children by their own mothers.
To us modern people, such a thought is shocking, horrifying, and whenever such a murder occurs in our society, media coverage is extensive. Back in the 18th and (early) 19th century, such killings were far more common - in fact, the most famous German drama, Faust, written around this time, has the male lead, with the help of a devil, seduce an innocent maiden far younger than him, leaving her pregnant and abandoned, a shamed outcast without resources or a way to regain a place in society, resulting in her killing her own child and being executed for it (it should be noted that Goethe, the author, despite being a rather sexist prick himself, depicts this woman in a highly sympathetic light, as a victim more than as the murderer she is condemned as by society in the play).
As this example from literature shows, the main problem was the shame and taboo assigned to having a child out of wedlock - now, interestingly, at the time it was apparently common and accepted for couples to have sex before marriages, not due to lust (though that was probably the main reason for many, let’s face it), but because that way the men could be sure of marrying fertile brides - basically, the marriage would take place once pregnancy arrived. Of course, such a custom would leave women very vulnerable to men leaving them at the onset of pregnancy instead of marrying them. The result, in a time when abortion was not readily available, often also highly risky and probably not even always known as an option to young women, and when adoption was not a common thing to happen, was the death of children at the hands of their own mothers, as described above.
This is something that anti-choicers should consider: denying women access to abortion does in no way guarantee that the pregnancy thus continued leads to a healthy, happy baby nurtured by a mother coming to terms with her motherhood after all. Not only can the mother’s life be endangered or ruined by the enforced pregnancy, but the chances of the fetus to reach adulthood, healthy and happy, are far worse than for a wanted child.
Anyway, back to the written source: the writer, a man of enlightenment-era education and mentality, muses on how to reduce the cases of child murder. His solution? Two-fold: one, each act of PIV sex should be seen as an implicit promise of marriage. That way, if a woman found herself pregnant, she could always hold the man who impregnated her to that implicit promise, ensuring that she and her child would not be shamed and unsupported financially. Second, in cases when this was not a feasible solution, or when the new husband was not able to support his wife and child, the young mother should be supported out of a trust fond, to be established by levying a moderate tax on every wedding.
Surely those solutions were not perfect, yet I find them remarkable nevertheless. For many women, such measures would have made a huge improvement.
Sadly, as so often with enlightenment reform ideas, it was not implemented. It would take many decades more before social reforms would finally drastically reduce the number of children killed by their own mothers, to the level we have today - and even now, is not each such tragedy one too many? Should we not learn from history, and ensure that all uterus-bearers have access to adequate sex education, abortion if needed/wanted, or financial and social support for the continuation of the pregnancy and the raising of the child? Would that not be pro-life in the best sense, and a sign of a, well, enlightened society?
