Another voice
The baby famine
Auberon Waugh
I don't suppose many babies were conceived last Monday. Since time immemorial, May Day has been honoured with pagan rites and dances, propitiatory sacrifices and uncouth symbols, all suggestive of sexual intercourse and fecundity. It was banned in 1644 at the beginning of the Puritan Terror and remained banned until the Restoration, when Charles II put up a huge 134-foot maypole outside the old church of St Maryle-Strand, where it stood for fifty years. Its original purpose would appear to have been frustrated again now the day has been officially designated as a Festival of Idleness to celebrate the Second International of 1 May 1889, the federation of socialist parties which eventually, on Lenin's insistence, committed all socialist parties to the class struggle and the inevitability of social revolution.
The Second International was founded at a congress in Paris, but Britain's workers might have had difficulty in getting abroad on Monday because baggage-handlers at Heathrow were threatening a strike, as they usually do on days of national holiday. This time they were protesting about police interrogation of a baggage handler over alleged thefts from baggage. Was it to protect the rights of baggage-handlers to pilfer from baggage' that Wat Tyler marched on London? But it did mean that any British worker who felt like celebrating the Second International by being international in Benidorm had to think again. Nor could he visit many public places at home, since all the major state-owned galleries, museums and gardens were closed down in the galloping epidemic of idleness which has marked the progress of workers' power in Britain.
But it is not my intention to demonstr*e yet again how the loathsome stupidity and short-sightedness of workers' leaders must inevitably create a society in which workers are poor, miserable and repressed. I merely wish to draw attention to the removal of any association with fertility from these gruesome May Day celebrations. A few months ago I wrote about the collapse of the birth rate in Britain. The social consequences of this development are, of course, exacer bated by emigration which represents a solid drain of the healthier and more qualified. But it is no use pointing this out to the Government, since there can be little doubt that the modern administrative mind does not welcome such people. Emigration is the result of deliberate government policy aimed, through the tax and education systems, at producing a malleable population of government employees and second class citizens or welfare fodder. But thd social planners of the future are going to find themselves horribly frustrated if there is nobody left to plan, and I really think the Government might address itself to the problem of the collapsing birthrate. Since writing about the phenomenon I have done some research into the various ordeals and humiliations attendant on childbirth in the Welfare State, and my conclusion is that it is a miracle any English woman has a baby at all.
In the first place, there is a vast army of social workers and health visitors waiting to harass, patronise and insult the expectant mother. As fewer women have babies, so the army of experts in supervision grows and a friend who returned home from having a baby recently was visited by five separate government officials to remonstrate with her for not taking the baby to a welfare clinic. When she eventually sent the baby round in charge of her au pair, the clinic responded by sending a doctor to her house on the assumption that she was insane or gravely ill. A further stream of welfare visitors continued to arrive to demand that she breastfeed her infant and insult her for declining to do so, until she discovered a wonderful and little known form which applied for permission to look after her own baby. This provoked a return of all the bossy and embittered spinsters —mostly, she
suspected, lesbians — who had been haranguing her about the benefits of breastfeeding. They were very cross indeed that she had applied for permission to take res ponsibility for her own child, implied that she was plainly incapable of it, lacking their experience of what happens when things go wrong, and let it be known that she was being very rude to them personally, in applying for this permission. But few mothers put up such a fight. The sister of a friend who had a baby recently was visited by another of these white-coated lesbian ladies who said she wanted to see the baby smile. The baby took one look at her and screamed, so she came again the next day at the same time, which happened to be feeding time, so the baby screamed again. Next day the council sent round its chief expert in baby-smiling techniques who brought every sort of gadget known to human science to make the baby smile and the same result. As she left, the chief council baby-smiler looked worried. 'I am sorry', she said, 'but your baby will have to go down on the files as being socially unaware'. Goodness knows what sort of handicap this will prove when the poor little thing eventually has to apply for a job in the welfare service.
A third young mother of my acquaintance decided to do everything she was told to do, and regularly takes her baby to the clinic for inspection and discussions. First the baby is stripped and examined, then it is put through a series of humiliating tests.
Then a lesbian stood in front of the baby and built bricks while another lesbian stood behind and rang a bell. When the baby showed more interest in the brick than the bell, the second lesbian said she was afraid the baby would have to go on the files as being deaf. It was only by taking the matter to the local Infant Deafness Appeals Tri bunal that the mother managed to have its hearing officially restored. At another clinic, she was asked whether the baby was talking yet. The baby was only ten and a halt months old, so the mother replied that although it made many interesting noises, there was nothing that could really be described as conversation.
The interrogating lesbian then put on a
stern expression. 'You've got to talk to her you know' she said. 'It's no good expecting baby to talk if you don't talk to her'. There followed a long lecture on Talking to Baby which my friend, an intelligent educated girl of proper middle class background, had to take on the chin.
Of course the trouble may be that the lesbians are too early. In time, when we are thoroughly proletarianised, they will be
able to treat all citizens as if they were ten-year-old halfwits watching Blue Peter.
Perhaps mothers of the new, cowed working class will learn to enjoy this treatment and start having babies again. But it seems bit of a risk and what distresses me is the wetness of Fleet Street in the face of the existing peril. Whenever a baby is murdered by its parents, every newspaper in the land sets up a wail for stricter and more effective welfare supervision. In fact babies have been battered since time began and it is very sad, but the only thing to do about it is to send the wretched parents to prison when the bodies are found. By treating all parents as potential baby-batterers, they simplY ensure that nobody has babies. I hope Mrs Thatcher will restore May Day to its original, pagan function.
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