Week 5: Conception, generation and sexuality
Introduction
We all know where babies come from, and that they aren’t delivered by storks! Having an heir to inherit your wealth, and to ensure you were looked after in your old age, was crucial to people in the ancient world. This week, you will explore some of the different theories about conception and birth that were developed in the ancient world.
In the first video for the week, Helen King and Mathijs Lucassen discuss the gaps in modern knowledge about conception and birth, and the classical precedents for some modern developments.
Download this video clip.Video player: Video 1
Transcript: Video 1 The mysteries of new life
HELEN KING
I'm Helen King from the Open University, where I'm professor of classical studies. And I'm with Mathijs Lucassen, who's also from the Open University from the School of Health, Wellbeing, and Social Care. Hello, Mathijs. We're going to talk about pregnancy and childbirth.
MATHIJS LUCASSEN
Great.
HELEN KING
So first question, how much do we really know these days about where babies come from? I mean, when I grew up I was told about the stork when I was a child. What do we know now? Do we all know it?
MATHIJS LUCASSEN
Well, I think it depends on the sort of education people have had. I mean, we would hope that a lot of people would have learned that from, I guess, family members. But a lot of the time it can be through schools and through the curriculum that you’re exposed to. So for me, I learned a lot through doing biology at high school. And the focus very much there was around control and preventing unwanted pregnancies basically.
HELEN KING
Right. Yes. So I think when I got to the school level, it was certainly about preventing unwanted pregnancies. Which is interesting because it’s a contrast with the ancient world where it was actually all about trying to get pregnant because you wanted to have more children. I mean, now, yes, it’s all about this sort of thing, isn’t it? It’s the pill. It’s various forms of contraception. It’s which ones you should use. But in the ancient world really, very few contraceptive remedies around. It’s all about how to get pregnant.
MATHIJS LUCASSEN
Yeah. I guess we have both ends of the spectrum in that way because we have the pregnancy prevention, the technology around that, in the modern world. But we also have IVF and the technologies around conception. So I guess what we want really is to have real certainty around the number of children and control about when those children come in your lives.
HELEN KING
And certainty. You’re not going to get any certainty at all in the ancient world where you’ve got much more chance of your children dying before they reach adulthood. So unless you have a reasonable number to start with, you’re not going to have enough to survive to look after you in your old age. So I suppose there’s a social thing there, too, isn’t there, about why we need children?
MATHIJS LUCASSEN
Yeah, which is different now in the modern world where we have so much in the way of quite sophisticated health services and social services. So it’s not a necessity to have children to look after you in your old age.
HELEN KING
Yes. Yes, I suppose that’s right. So if you are trying to get pregnant in the ancient world, you can presumably try all the various remedies that are going in ancient medicine to open you up and clean you out so you can then get pregnant. But once you’ve done that, once you got pregnant, what do you do after that?
Obviously, now we’ve got pregnancy tests. Then, they hadn’t. So in the ancient world there were various ways you could try and make sure you had a child of the desired sex, so ways like tying up one testicle or making the woman lie on her left side or her right side. It’s all very left-right focused. Presumably in the modern world, there are rather more sophisticated ways of making sure you have a boy or a girl?
MATHIJS LUCASSEN
Yeah. Well, we have the technology now to pretty much guarantee a male or a female baby. But there’s a whole lot of ethical or moral debates that are tied in with that.
HELEN KING
And then, kind of going from that, you’ve got the rabbits here. The rabbits are here to remind us that in the ancient world they did have this theory of maternal impression which survived into the 19th century. So that if you were looking at a particular animal or you were frightened by an animal or you were looking at a picture on the wall, you could actually make your child look like that.
MATHIJS LUCASSEN
Like a rabbit?
HELEN KING
Well, yes, actually, or you could even give birth to rabbits. That’s not an ancient story, but it’s a modern one based on the theory of maternal impression. Yeah, you could give birth to rabbits.
MATHIJS LUCASSEN
That is just bonkers.
HELEN KING
Yes, it is bonkers. It’s wonderful. But I suppose that also gets you to the issue of the binary. So we’re assuming you’re going to have a boy or a girl. But actually, sex isn’t so straightforward, is it?
MATHIJS LUCASSEN
Yeah, correct. Like we have those people that will not neatly fit into male or female. We have the intersex people and all the different, I guess, conditions or presentations of sex diversity. I think it’s about 1 in 2,000 babies that are intersex
HELEN KING
Wow. Because if a child was born in the ancient Roman world who wasn’t clearly one sex or the other, the usual response was to say that it’s some message from the gods, that actually you’ve done something wrong as a culture. And this is a warning to check it out, to sacrifice to the right gods, to behave better morally, or something like that. So the child becomes a way in which the gods are speaking to you rather than a child.
MATHIJS LUCASSEN
Yeah, and in the modern world, I think that there’s still quite a lot of sort of, I guess, it can be a real stigma. And people don’t necessarily talk openly about what experience is like for intersex babies, intersex people, their families growing up. But again, technology plays a part in that a lot of the time we have forced surgical procedures on infants so that they are then seen to conform to the sex binary. And with that comes a whole load of challenges that are ethical or moral.
HELEN KING
Yeah. So we thought a bit about the mother. We thought about the child. What about the father of the child, the presence of the father at birth? Is that normal in all cultures around the world now?
MATHIJS LUCASSEN
Well, I think it varies so much in terms of the context. It probably, in part, would depend on the setting where the birth takes place. So in a home setting it is probably more likely to have the fathers present than you would in a hospital setting. And I guess in Western societies many of those now, there is an expectation that the father should be present. And, in fact, if the father isn’t, it’s sort of frowned upon because they’re looking like they’re not a very good dad.
HELEN KING
It’s swung the other way, then. Yeah. So in terms of what we have between the modern and the ancient there, our knowledge is obviously much better. We don’t know for sure everything, but we’ve got better knowledge. But also we’ve got a different social setting in which we’re giving birth so that the importance of having children isn’t as great as it might have been in the ancient world. Although many people obviously still want them. But socially, we can survive without children as our insurance in old age.
And in terms of the presence of men at birth, ancient men, we do have some evidence now that even they were sometimes at birth. But, again, it’s a sort of fashion thing, isn’t it? It has changed in my generation certainly, in my lifetime, showing the change is recent as well as just change between the ancient world and now. Thanks very much.
Video 1 The mysteries of new life
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