friends and family, we would have said no, Erin, sorry, not for you. This baby you insist on having keeps other babies out, ones which won’t cause this distress to you and yours. Just not this one; Erin, try again. All women have as many babies as they can manage: four, three, two, one, none at all: as many as they can afford—physically, emotionally, practically. I managed two. A woman spends years saying no, not this one, stay out of my bed: I’ll wait, a better man will come along: and with the better man a better baby. Let’s hope, here’s hoping he comes along! The lover at the gate is the father at the gate. Where is he? I’ll wait, yes I’ll wait, for a baby I can feed better, love better, provide running water for, give a father to, who stays around and bounces babies on his knee. To this end she stays a virgin, or practises abstinence, or contraception, or if things get further in spite of her best endeavours—for both men and her own desires are importunate—terminates. If she didn’t, she’d have babies annually from puberty until death by childbirth around the age of thirty or so. How it must have been for our Stone Age grandmothers—swell, oh, oh, pop, look, a little one—oh, it’s dead—oh, I’m dying, dying; dead! And even now we get it wrong; how often, for all our knowledge, we get it wrong. Choose a husband who leaves, a father who doesn’t provide; the genes don’t match, the conjunction goes wrong—the wrong baby at the wrong time; oh, bad luck! My neighbours, my friends, why did you not save me from this?
It wouldn’t all be negative. My other friend Edie gave birth to a baby with one leg. It showed up in the scan—one child in three, they say, is now born with some imperfection or other, mostly minor, sometimes major, and whether that’s due to pollution, or insecticides, or growth hormones, or radon gas, or nuclear power plants, take your choice, take your pick: and whatever the cause, the mothers stay healthy enough, are sufficiently medicated one way or another to bring babies to term—and we all said to Edie, what’s a missing leg? Keep this baby, look after this baby, you have a great husband, the other kids aren’t the kind to care, and we were right. It was okay. This child has a metal prosthesis and kicks hell out of the others at football. Of course he’d be happier if he had two legs, so would she, so would everyone, but he’d rather live with one leg than not live at all. We did know. We are born into a group, not just into a family, not just to an individual woman. Let the group decide. Ten good neighbours and true.
It isn’t the perfect way; it remains horrible, but the lesser of many evils. In Darcy’s Utopia it has to be. All babies terminated unless validated. What happens otherwise in our two-hundred-year, five-hundred-year plan? Can we wait for prosperity and education to keep mankind in check; so the humble villager, the wretched dweller in the shantytown doesn’t choose the traditional, unthinking, long-term option of a dozen children, the decision which in the long term destroys both them and theirs? We have lost that race: we must face it. It is all paradox, this business of procreation!
Every way we look we see a barrier and on the wall is written ‘No! Immoral! Unkind! Fascist!’ Everything but the free flow of natural selection is disagreeable to so much as contemplate, but the planet sinks beneath the weight of us, stinks because of the shit of us; if we don’t do something we all go down together, gasping for air, for heaven’s blessing. Governments do what they can. Time and time again they fail. Let neighbours, simple neighbours, try and do better. Meeting their quota, their too-small-for-comfort quota, always with generosity, understanding and compassion, understanding as a group what the individual woman knows by instinct, that this child, by existing, keeps that other child out.
Hugo says I am so persuasive in convincing myself on this subject he begins to wonder who it is who speaks through Eleanor Darcy, is it God or the Devil? This is quite an advance on his initial assumption that poor Julian Darcy, the Rasputin of Bridport, economic theorist and prisoner of his nation’s conscience, victim of its guilt, indolence and fear, is the motivating force behind Darcy’s