(This piece is not about Holly or her personal tragedy per se - her tragedy to me is literally beyond belief - being a woman unable to conceive a child. Nor is it about how she deals with it (see this). In my own life I have been close to similar tragedy and I know that it can easily scare a woman for life.)
While Holly's story is tragic the real tragedy is that her problems could have been avoided had she simply had children earlier in her life.
I remember personally the horror and shock in 1977 of friends and family when we disclosed that we were having children...
"How could you throw your life and freedom away like that!"
"That's too much responsibility for some one so young!"
"How will you manage a child - you're barely a child yourself (I was 19, my wife 18)."
The real problem, of course, was not us. We were merely doing what virtually every couple and parent before us had done for a hundred or so thousand years before us - conceiving children when we were biologically at our most able. (And no, I don't believe a single "study" telling me how its much better to have children "later in life." This is simply selfish, ME generation bullshit.)
I have a garden outside - we plant two kinds of seeds - one from the local big box hardware store - one from of the"heirloom" variety. The difference between the seeds is vast - the heirloom's grow rapidly and reproduce efficiently, almost violently. The other kind struggle.
The reason for this is simple - the natural genetic diversity of the heirlooms has been developed (bred) over the last centuries for viability, the ability to fruit, and the ability to reproduce. Really no different than us as humans because, regardless of what you might believe religiously or otherwise, humans have spent a very, very long time becoming efficient reproducers as well.
Like plants humans are able to reproduce soon after they reach "sexual maturity" - which until very recently was typically "puberty." Before about 1960 or so no one did much to interfere with this process (there was no female oriented birth control and in general there wasn't much birth control at all). Before this, in the middle ages for example, girls were married on average around mid to late teens - males somewhat later.
This is just like my heirloom seeds. The plants, like us, reach sexual maturity, they flower, the insects come and pollinate them, and they bear fruit.
But poor Holly was blindsided along the way by the 1960's ME generation.
This generation that thought women were better off not being women, not having children until late in life, if at all, and certainly not at the whim of any man. Holly, being younger than me by some thirteen or so years, no doubt heard far worse than I did about the evils of children and men. I imagine the message was well entrenched in, for example, schools by that time (middle to late 1980's).
By the time Holly was a young woman (say 18 or 19) the message of the evils of having children "young" had had time to hit home - leaving poor Holly to wander through her twenties and thirties without a concern about having children. Modern medical science no doubt helped to ease the journey with its spurious successes with things like IVF.
However, like garden plants, human reproductive biology does not listen much to what society says or the reason it gives for delaying children.
If you garden you know what happens to plants that are not fertilized at the right time - they tend to bear bad fruit if they bear any at all.
Sadly this is biological fact. The viability of the plants sexual organs diminishes as time advances.
Which makes me wonder about the so called "logic" of those who clamor to move back child bearing to the late thirties or forties.
And this, of course, is the real tragedy.
Who are these "people" (or experts or whoever) who like Satan whisper into little girls ears that they should in fact not be little girls, should not grow into women, should not give in to their desires to marry, should not bear children until they are forty and have had time to "enjoy life"? Clearly Holly is not now "enjoying life". Would she have been better off with children at a much younger age?
What I see is that these "idiots" are in fact the divorced, burnout ME generation idiots who ruined their own lives with drugs and superfluous sexual relationships and now want you to ruin yours too - so you can be like them and there make them feel better about themselves.
The problem was that they were put on TV (because that's all there was in the 1960's and early 1970's) or in books and newspapers as if they were some kind of societal experts on human reproduction when in fact they were merely trying to convert the rest of us to their self centered ME-first way of thinking.
(Fortunately for me my young wife paid this bullshit no heed what-so-ever.)
Holly though, like many others, was drawn into the flame. It all "sounded" logical - wait until you are older, have a career, have money, pick the right person to marry, blah, blah, blah...
The only problem was that it did not (and still does not) make any biological sense what-so-ever.
And more than likely Holly's problems were compounded by the trickery human birth control pills play on the female mind (see "Failing Our Future") - causing them to choose mates less wisely and without the underlying biologics to choose the best partner for conceiving children.
There are many studies that show human love is very much like an addiction (while lust is much like opiate addiction, oxytocin, on the other hand, helps with the sexual imprinting that makes bonds last a life time). In Failing I describe how modern birth control pills destroy these processes as well.
At the end of the day I see Holly as being literally robbed of her womanhood by a foolish, selfish society that cares only for the individual ME and what it can "have" and not for couples or children or families.
(I recall living in New York City in the late 1970's with our two small children. We could have made money as freaks in a sideshow so rare was our condition. Twenty year old parents with two tots. And what irony that any time in the preceding hundred thousand years we would have been considered "old geezers" with children.)
Where is the "social justice" for Holly? For her robbery?
Why must Holly and others pay for this through the price of excessive and more than likely useless fertility treatments?
Will Holly have a child? Will that child pay for this with biological problems caused by diminished reproductive capability?
While no one can answer these questions it would be nice for those responsible for Holly's plight to at least own up to it...
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