12. Love Child – Diana Ross and The Supremes 1968

 Love Child, never meant to be

Love Child, born in poverty

Love Child, never meant to be

Love Child, take a look at me

 

Sombre moment here.

When I was young my beautiful big sister died as a result of having a 3 month premature baby. Now all of this created a lot of B.S. for my whole family to deal with, on many different levels, but thankfully the end result was that my parents eventually ended up raising my niece.

While my niece was still an infant we would get many weird looks if Mum, my niece and I happened to be out in public together. The weird looks were largely due to people not knowing if I had managed to get myself in trouble at a young age (18), or if my mum had got herself in trouble at a late age (43). This really bought home the social cringe that is apparently associated with childbearing. The average life expectancy of an Australian is something like 83 years, and yet during these 83 years we only have about 15 years during which society thinks that it’s socially acceptable for women to reproduce.

I used to think that the basis of ‘women and children first’ was to protect those who can’t protect themselves from danger. However, through studying biology (and horse breeding) comes enlightenment. Basically, males are expendable. From a reproductive point of view a population needs significantly less adult males to maintain numbers than it needs adult females. So ensuring that women and children are the first ones in the life rafts from a sinking ship is a means of giving the population a chance to efficiently regenerate, not to protect the women and children from apparent death.

Back to my original point, who’d have thunk it that a movie like Bridget Jones Baby would help to break down social cringe like this? I wrote this as ‘Oh my god! A woman!’ in my early forties who was still living with the hope of having a baby one day.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3oU1AlVATs