The Nomadic Alternative – Page 175

on population growth. Infanticide proved that misery and the

inadequacy of savage life.

Close examination reveals a startlingly different picture.

Infanticide is rare. The hunters blame it on some recent disruption

of their usual activities. The husband is sometimes required to keep

away from his wife until she has weaned the child. But as 'mystic'

wanderers have discovered in all ages, travel is of itself abortive.

Obsessive concern with sexuality is but a response to confinement,

which a life of perpetual motion dissipates. What is more, prolonged

lactation usually prevents conception. No stigma, however, attaches

to a mother who smothers her child before it comes on life. Breath

is life, and a child who has not breathed has not lived. Naturally,

the mother who has nurtured a baby in her womb is distressed when

she retires with a female companion to perform this horrid operation.

But in the long weeks of pregnancy, she has already steeled herself

to the loss of her child. And one can rest assured that every known

technique of abortion - from manipulation to herbal remedies - will

have failed. Those who castigate the unnaturalness of birth control,

might reflect that under 'natural' conditions their policies would

amount to racial suicide.

The society that does not admit the value of change cannot approve

of changed numbers. A man's harmonious relationship with his own

people and outsiders depends directly on numerical stability. This

is the way he lives in peace. The average number of surviving

children born to a married couple of hunters seems to rest in between

2.5 and 3. Allowing for later accidents and deaths, this prevents

increases in population. Voluntary control of population numbers

is not some arbitrary proposal of modern man. From the start it has

been the prerequisite of the Society of Equals.