Before closing for the night, we notice yet another Biblical quotation that we seem not to have noted before. Ingeborg, former prostitute, now kept woman, tells a merwoman:
"'...we on the land bear the curse of Eve. How often I've heard told me the word of God - "in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee" -'" (p. 218)
No. Not every scripture is true for all time.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Adam did not escape punishment, see Genesis 3.17-19.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
Here's another bit of Scripture, John 16.21: "A woman about to give birth has sorrow, because her hour has come. But when she has brought forth the child, she no longer remembers the anguish for her joy that a man is born into the world."
Ad astra! Sean
Note that humans have higher risks in childbirth because we walk erect and have huge heads. That's also the reason for the prolonged helplessness of human children -- they have to be born less developed than other mammals.
Stirling: "they have to be born less developed than other mammals."
Something of a shift toward doing things like marsupials.
I read about a program for keeping premature babies alive & well in regions where incubators are impractical. The mother, and sometimes a helper such as the father, has some cloth wrappings holding the baby against the adult body to keep it warm. Another step toward the marsupial style.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Jim!
Mr. Stirling: Anderson wrote somewhere that the fact human females are permanently in estrus gave males a good reason to stay with one woman and help support her and their children.
Jim: Even better, perhaps, would be artificial wombs to help babies survive till "birth." An idea I may have first seen in OATH OF FEALTY, by Pournelle/Niven/and another writer whose name I don't quite recall.
Ad astra! Sean
The artificial womb is important to the plot of several of the novels by L.M. Bujold, for uses both beneficial and malicious. It is called a 'Uterine Replicator' in those stories. This would reduce strain on the mothers.
However, if humans became dependent on the technology for reproduction a disaster that cut off access to the technology would result in human extinction. It would be much harder to eliminate access to cloth wraps to keep premature infants alive.
Kaor, Jim!
Bujold is one of those writers I keep forgetting to look up, despite knowing I should. Another being David Weber.
That is a disturbing idea, women on some colonial planets being unable to carry babies full term and needing artificial assistance. Yes, loss of such assistance will lead to extinction of humans on those worlds.
Ad astra! Sean
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