About the time I was finishing my biography of Dr. Charles Knowlton, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a book review for The New Yorker called “The Case Against Kids”. Kolbert typically covers environmental issues, so as you’d expect, she talked about the ecological consequences of population growth. But she also did something interesting, that got some people riled up. She discussed childbearing as a moral question.
Kolbert began her article with a synopsis of Charles Knowlton’s story and some quotes from Fruits of Philosophy. Then she turned to a recent book by Philosophy professor Christine Overall, called Why Have Children?: The Ethical Debate. Dr. Overall, as far as I can tell, doesn’t mention Knowlton at all, so credit goes to Kolbert for adding him to the story.
It should have been obvious to everyone reading the article that Kolbert (who seems to have a few kids of her own) was not saying that people should stop. But that seems to be the way some folks out in the blogosphere took it. A christian couple with sixteen kids who had written a book called Love Another Child weighed in with “8 Responses to ‘The Case Against Kids’.” I hadn’t really appreciated the continuing power of pronatalism, until I read their screed.
Yeah, screed. The couple claimed to be debate instructors and apparently marketed a program for home-schoolers. Here’s an example of the quality of their argument:
“The Case Against Kids” is an attempt to dig back to the birth of the idea of birth control, the roots most birth control advocates would rather forget. According to Kolbert, the idea came from a grave robber and convicted pornographer, Charles Knowlton. Kolbert chooses to crown him with dignified titles as “freethinker” and “adventurous” and the bearer of “a good idea that can’t be kept down.” Kolbert has the right to her opinion, but in her attempt to credential Knowlton, she refers to a few other nut jobs – er, adventurous freethinkers – in history.
Okay. Thanks for that. If I had harbored any doubt about the contemporary relevance of my biography of Charles Knowlton, this puts it to rest.
Knowlton was not a pornographer. He was convicted for publishing The Fruits of Philosophy, but the charge was blasphemous libel rather than indecency. And of course, Knowlton never called children an “evil.” He and Tabitha had five. Knowlton (and freethinking friends of his such as Robert Dale Owen, Frances Wright, and Abner Kneeland) wanted people to have a choice how many mouths they’d be responsible to feed, and the means to exercise that choice. This was the first half of the nineteenth century – there was no social safety net to speak of.
And as for birth control advocates wanting to distance themselves from the origins of their movement, I hope that isn’t so. We still live in a world where pronatalist nut jobs – er, christian family advocates – want to silence even the suggestion that how many kids you bring into the world is a moral choice that has responsibilities and consequences attached to it. So imagine how much harder it must have been, when everybody believed that way, to challenge the mainstream and even imagine birth control in the first place. And then to have the courage to publish a book about it. What type of person would do that?
The answer is obvious: a freethinker. And as for the body-snatching: yes, Knowlton also did time in jail for stealing a corpse. But he was never convicted or even accused of pornography – the debate instructors made that part up. Modern medicine was invented by guys like Knowlton who stole corpses so they could learn anatomy, instead of depending on ancient texts that claimed health came from balancing the humors. If the religious majority had had its way, doctors would still be sticking lancets in our veins.
So let me be clear about this: the modern world exists largely because freethinkers defied conservative, religious, social authorities and followed truth. Yeah, we got some problems along with central heating, running water, antibiotics, and choice. Civilization is a mixed bag, but it’s a lot better than the alternative.