SATURDAY, OCT 28, 2023: NOTE TO FILE
Natural Birth Control
Lactational amenorrhea, the natural and normal of it
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: O, FROM THE WIRES, D
Abstract: .
COOS BAY (A-P) — The elephant in the birth control topic room is LA (Lactational Amenorrhea) and we moderns are pervasively (willfully?) ignorant of how to live properly with the planet. Our modern form of human seemingly lives as if to be an enemy of all that is natural and normal, of what works to persist as the millennia and epochs pass.
Normal is to nurse infants on demand no more than 4 hours apart during the day and 6 hours at night (women evolved to have elevated prolactin levels at night, so one night feeding of infant/child sleeping next to the mommy-thing is normal even if no modern women do it).
Foragers (e.g. the San) need to have a baby about every 4 years/mother, so the San nurse 3–5 years, during which time they do not mensurate (amenorrhea) or ovulate and do not get pregnant (ovulation occurs before mensuration, so pregnancy can occur without warning and in non-expert women, failure of LA is about 2%, far better than other birth control methods, typically 7% failure rate).
Normal is for about a quarter of infants to die before becoming a yearling, and for total childhood mortality to be about half (50%). This is to allow for optimal evolution by producing offspring that vary at random when parents sexually shuffle their decks. Most random changes to what works (the current forager adult population) don’t work better. That they die before reproducing is necessary in an evolvable species.
That sometimes, by chance, a child is more fit and functional (able to persist and prosper) when they join the adult breeding population is the pay-off. We moderns have declared war on childhood mortality (<4% now worldwide) in the firm belief that there can be no adverse outcome as the centuries and millennia pass (reality check: dramatic degradation in function is observable within 8–12 generations of our war on Nature — just look around).
Nursing for longer than 3–5 years works (among normal humans). Some women in India provide breast milk to hospitals and the years go by without menorrhea (note: breast pumps don’t work, the frequency of nipple stimulation needs to mimic that of an infant).
The condition of near constant menorrhea, no 4–5 year breaks, is abnormal and has adverse women’s health outcomes (increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer, type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure). If all infants must live and all must have prizes, reproducing for all cannot be one of them. An increase in population noticeable over the course of one lifetime is not normal. Die-off of populations in overshoot (e.g. reindeer on St. Matthew Island) is.
By the way, our condition of ecological overshoot is not normal either. When the San women go shopping every other day, and if the shelves aren’t fully stocked, they are concerned and nurse longer, and if food is always abundant, they wean a bit sooner, likely as all our K-strategist K-culture hominin ancestors did for over 6 million years.
K-strategists do not overshoot carrying capacity as the outcome is always bad (environmental degradation, starvation, to local extinction, e.g. reindeer on islands). We are profoundly denormalized humans and our children face a ghastly future (sorry about that).
