“I would be exempt, even so,” Camilla flashed, “although I didn’t volunteer for the colony at all; I was crew. But you know as well as I do that women with advanced scientific degrees are exempt–otherwise no woman with a career she valued would ever go out to the colonies! I’m going to fight this, Ewen! Damn you, I’m not going to accept forced childbearing! No woman is forced to have a child!”
Ewen smiled ruefully at the angry woman. He said, “Sit down, Camilla; be sensible. In the first place, love, the very fact that you have an advanced degree makes you valuable to us. We need your genes a lot more than we need your engineering skills. We won’t be needing skills like that for half a dozen generations–if then. But genes for high intelligence and mathematical ability have to be preserved in the gene pool, we can’t risk letting them die out.”
“Are you trying to tell me I’ll be forced to have children? Like some savage woman, some walking womb from the prehistoric planets?” Her face was white with rage. “This is completely unendurable! Every woman on the crew will go out on strike when they hear that!”
Ewen shrugged. “I doubt it,” he said. “In the first place, you’ve got the law wrong. Women are not allowed to volunteer for colonies unless they have intact genes, are of childbearing age and sign an agreement to have children–but women over childbearing age are occasionally accepted if they have medical or scientific degrees. Otherwise the end of your fertile years means the end of your chance to be accepted for a Colony–and do you know how long the waiting lists are for the Colonies? I waited four years; Heather’s parents put her name down when she was ten, and she’s twenty-three. The Overpopulation laws on Earth mean that some women have been on waiting lists for twelve years to have a second child.”
“I can’t imagine why they’d bother,” Camilla said in disgust “One child ought to be enough for any woman, if she has anything above the neck, unless she’s a real neurotic with no independent sense of self-esteem.”
“Camilla,” Ewen said very gently, “this is biological. Even back in the 20th century, they did experiments on rats and ghetto populations and things, and found that one of the first results of crucial social overcrowding was the failure of maternal behavior. It’s a pathology. Man is a rationalizing animal, so sociologists called it “Women’s Liberation” and things like that, but what it amounted to was a pathological reaction to overpopulation and overcrowding. Women who couldn’t be allowed to have children, had to be given some other work, for the sake of their mental health. But it wears off. Women sign an agreement, when they go to the colonies, to have a minimum of two children; but most of them, once they’re out of the crowding of Earth, recover their mental and emotional health, and the average Colony family is four children–which is about right, psychologically speaking. By the time the baby comes, you’ll probably have normal hormones too, and make a good mother. If not, well, it will at least have your genes, and we’ll give it to some sterile woman to bring up for you. Trust me, Camilla.”
“Are you trying to tell me that I’ve got to have this baby?”
“I sure as hell am,” Ewen said, and suddenly his voice went hard, “and others too, provided you can carry them to term. There’s a one in two chance that you’ll have a miscarriage.” Steadily, unflinching, he rehearsed the statistics which MacAran had heard from Moray earlier that same day. “If we’re lucky, Camilla, we have fifty-nine fertile women now. Even if they all became pregnant this year, we’ll be lucky to have twelve living children… and the viable level for this colony to survive means we’ve got to bring our numbers up to about four hundred before the oldest women start losing their fertility. It’s going to be touch and go, and I have a feeling that any woman who refuses to have as many children as she can physically manage, is going to be awfully damned unpopular. Public Enemy Number One isn’t in it”