Megan McArdle hasn’t had any babies yet, but she knows women who have:
The women I know who have given birth, whether pro-life or pro-choice, do not romanticize it. They speak, of course, of the miracle that it is. But they also speak, often rather too frankly, of how difficult and often disgusting the process is. If a substantial number of pro-lifers are women who have given birth–and they are–then we pro-choicers can’t simply tell ourselves that it’s because they haven’t really thought about what birth entails.
Pundette is a mother of seven and permits her husband to respond to McArdle:
So this is what is at the bottom of the pro-choice argument — they are “disgusted” by pregnancy and birth? I thought it was supposed to be the crazy fundamentalists that hated the human body and feared sex. How sick do you have to be to be revolted by the process that brings new life, that brought your life, into being?
What accounts for these differences in attitude? Anti-natalist sentiments are a natural byproduct of the Contraceptive Culture, which propagates the belief that sex without pregnancy is normal, and where pregnancy is considered a rare medical anomaly.
This way of thinking — nowadays so common that we don’t even recognize it as an ideological phenomenon — is an inversion of nature.
From a strictly biological point of view, procreation is the only purpose of sex. People who like to condemn conservatives as being “anti-science” because we don’t go along with the global-warming crusade ought to be asked to explain why they are so hostile to the scientific purpose of sex, i.e., making babies.
