Canadian Jewish Outlook, July-August 1980

Herewith, the latest selection from dusted-off published poetry and short fiction, circa 1970s vintage and beyond....

Food and Fertility

There is an old adage that the chronically indigent are efficient breeders. Good for nothing else, society often sneered. But it would appear that they bred, not because they wanted to, necessarily. Man is a normally heterosexual creature and the act of sex is as much an emotional comfort and release as it is pure sensual pleasure. In all likelihood, the poor of any population do not engage in sexual activities resulting in many pregnancies any more than do the upper stratum of society - with deliberation.

Nor do they engage in more frequent sexual activity than their more affluent counterparts for cheap recreation. The answer to the fecundity of the poor is not to be found in the explanation that so few infants survive in slum conditions due to poor nutrition and inadequate hygienic conditions; nor are they bred merely to have a few survive. Nor is it the compulsion of the poor to procreate in order to raise to adulthood children who will then feel a compulsion to look after their poor old parents in old age.

The reason for fecundity among the world's poor populations is probably linked to the type of diet available to those same indigent populations. It is as simple as observing the physical or physiological proportions of low-income people. Invariably, there appears to be a preponderance of fat people among such populations. At least, the marginally under-privileged.

As, for example, people living in crowded urban centres. There, men and women are often unhealthily obese and so are their children. The obesity is no indication of having lived and eaten well, but rather it is an indication of malnourishment. Malnourishment in that these urban poor tend to purchase cheap food, mainly carbohydrates. A lack of nutritive value, but often, quick calories which satisfy the pangs of hunger while doing little to maintain good physical health.

Studies recently carried out on menstrual cycles have shed some light on the physiological mechanisms involved in lowering the fertility of lactating women. Although women themselves have traditionally nursed their young as long as possible, feeling by experience, that by so doing, they would remain immune to further impregnation, medical science has been known in the past to hold the unspoken and unwritten theory at arm's length.

But these were no mere old wives' tales. These wives knew whereof they practised. It was more than mere theory that kept lactating women from another pregnancy; yet another unwanted pregnancy. Menstruation took its time resuming when a woman was nursing and as long as ovulation was kept at bay women felt safe with good reason, although the reason may have been unknown to them.

It now appears that a certain percentage of female body weight in fat must be reached before a woman will be ready to resume ovulation following pregnancy and delivery. There is an estimate of 20 to 25 percent of body fat as a critical threshold before a mechanism is triggered to resume menstruation. The estimated average energy package necessary to meet the needs of a pregnancy is set at about 27,000 calories. This amount of calories must be stored as body fat, generally speaking, before the biological mechanisms are set in motion to induce menstruation with a view to egg fertilization. And the 27,000 calories are just about what a pregnancy brought to term costs in caloric value.

It becomes quite difficult, under normal conditions, for a lactating female to store this critical threshold of stored fat while she is nursing. A nursing infant takes around 1,000 calories from its mother each day, thus making it difficult to reserve the necessary calories toward that vital build-up for menstruation to take place. And as long as the infant is dependent on its mother for milk, or as long as the mother wishes her child to remain dependent on her nursing output, she has good reason to believe she is 'safe' from pregnancy. Ovulation resumes gradually once the mother removes her nursing child from daily milk nourishment at her breast - once her physical state reaches its norm of fat storage for a fertile female.

In countries where females put on body weight at an early age, menarche, or early menstruation, is most common. In societies where female nourishment is of a leaner variety, where women tend to be lean physiologically, menarche is retarded by as much as five years.

In our relatively well-nourished female populations on the North American and European continents, menarche takes place at around thirteen years of age, whereas in chronically diet-deficient populations it takes considerably longer for the female population to build up the necessary fat reserves to become sexually mature.

The contradiction here, is that it takes a high protein diet to successfully permit a woman to nurse her infant for a prolonged period of time and at the same time maintain her own body vigour and flow of milk. And if the same woman is placed on a high carbohydrate diet she puts on too much weight too rapidly, thus triggering the resumption of ovulation - while at the same time the infant she nurses is deprived of sound nutrition since on the high carbohydrate diet, the nursing mother is, as well.

However, it has been discovered that high protein diets, those same diets which are available generally only to those enjoying a high income, are also responsible for low fertility rates. Conversely, high carbohydrate diets, those most commonly connected with low-income people, are responsible for high fertility rates.

A recent study demonstrated that nursing mothers from underdeveloped countries where the diet consisted in large part of starchy grains and root crops, were unable to extend the period between births to any appreciable extent. On the other hand, nursing Bushman women, whose diet is rich in animal and plant proteins, manage to avoid pregnancies for four or more years between each birth.

What this points to is that as populations increase and the demands on the quality of food supplies outstrip the capacity to produce, and poorer quality of food replaces the more nutritionally viable foods, populations tend to increase, rather than decrease. This is an obviously vicious spiral since, with food in shorter supply, less protein is available to a greater proportion of a population. The population for whom the nutritionally-poor carbohydrates in the form of root crops and starch-based foods form the basis of their intake, tend then to produce a greater fertility rate; thus further straining the food supply.

In the past, many societies have incorporated into their culture means by which their populations could be controlled when the food supply was threatened by more mouths than it could be expected to feed. The most common means of control were infanticide, geronticide and induced abortions. Women would be induced to abort by means chemical or mechanical, utilizing herbicides and sometimes means as brutal as the laying of a board across the pregnant woman's middle and applying weight until blood spurted from the vagina. While effectively doing away with the foetus, this type of treatment was also inimical to the expectant mother.

And, to illustrate a society which practised infanticide and geronticide, we can look to the Inuit who were wont to expose female babies to a harsh environment and whose elderly (given the lengthier life expectancy of females and their shorter perceived 'usefulness', doubtless these were mostly women) were expected to practise voluntarily, a type of passive suicide by exposing themselves, unprotected, to the elements.

Infanticide in various societies took many forms, from actively inducing death to benign neglect. Whatever the method, the purpose was the same; population control ... and traditionally the female of the species by nature of her biology was the sacrificial lamb.

With the above information, it becomes increasingly evident that population growth stability does become a more vital necessity than had been previously thought. For it is imperative not only to feed greater populations, but in our own defence, with a world population nudging four billion, to properly feed these populations in the hopes of staving off a prodigious upswing in fertility.

The poor, it would appear, do indeed breed prolifically. But not because they plan to; not because it is their only free recreation, but because nature appears to have an extremely capricious sense of humour.

c. 1980 Rita Rosenfeld
published in Canadian Jewish Outlook, Vol.18, No.7