thoughts on abortion and contraception

In Rome & Jerusalem: The clash of ancient civilizations, historian Martin Goodman discusses abortion among the Romans. It seems that there were many pregnancies but few children. Due partly to child morality no doubt, but also to terminations, a subject little discussed in Roman writings. They seemed to treat it as 'late contraception', but it was no easier a subject for them than it is for us today. 

The Roman physician Soranus of Ephesus, who wrote a still-extant work on obstetrics and gynaecology, was descriptive rather than prescriptive:

A woman who intends to have an abortion must, for two or three days beforehand, take long baths and eat little food and use emollient pessaries and abstain from wine. You then need to open a vein and extract a good deal of blood.

So bloodletting wasn't just a curse of the eighteenth century [there's lots of it in the Marquis de Sade, surprise surprise] - in fact it was popular throughout the ancient world, even among the ancient Mesopotamians. A time span of thousands of years in spite of its inefficaciousness in nearly all cases.  

The interesting thing though is how familiar the Roman attitude is to a modern secularist. Abortion isn't treated lightly, but it is tolerated, and the choice largely if not entirely belongs to the woman [a noteworthy point considering that Roman women certainly didn't enjoy the freedoms they now have in the West].

The modern anti-abortion hysteria to be found in some benighted circles is due of course to the religious poison. The Catholic Church position on contraception seems to be that spermicide is infanticide, essentially a form of abortion. Certainly Mother Teresa denounced contraception as the moral equivalent of abortion. Every sperm is sacred, so she must have found it terribly lamentable that 50 to 500 million sperm cells die after every male ejaculation, as a matter of course. Now if we can work out how many ejaculations take place every minute around the globe....

Whichever way you look at it, the Catholic position is laughable. They've never quite been able to come to terms with the incredible wastefulness of the evolved reproductive process. Sex is murder! Think of all those poor dying spermy things on your hanky, your thighs, on your face, in your throat and other nooks and crannies... 

All the same it really is remarkable to think of this wastefulness. Fifty to five hundred million sperm cells released in one ejaculation, with only one having a chance to fertilize the egg. Say a couple are trying to make a child. Many ejaculations might occur before the pregnancy occurs - and then of course they might continue after the pregnancy, with none of those sperm cells having a chance. If we say, conservatively, 100 million dead sperm cells per ejaculation, and with our not so very horny young couple, one ejaculation a night, and they take two weeks to make a baby, and then go on fucking at more or less the same rate for another three months... Let's see, that's about 10.5 billion dead sperm cells! And that's just from one guy for a period of three and a half months!

So there you go - sex really is mass murder on a monstrous scale, and God made it that way.