My obsession:
My interest in why so many people cannot have the babies they want seems natural to me. On the other hand it is a fact that I have never had children, much as I wanted to, and now have no realistic prospect.
If one were to challenge me and say my mind is fixated on children because of my frustration I would answer simply that there are a large number of people without children, and none of them seem to be doing what I am doing so it must be something else.
But it is an idea worth toying with. Another of my interests (the one that spawned the paper I had published and which you may already know about) is how to contain malaria effectively. Numbers are difficult. I have seen estimates that a million die a year of the disease. I have seen lower estimates. I have seen estimates that half of the deaths are babies or young children. I can’t recall lower estimates on that. At all events, here we go again trying to save the babies.
Then there is my interest in Rh incompatibility. I mentioned that in a letter I posted recently. Many babies would be saved with little effort using known science. Nobody but me seems to think it is worth doing. So that’s three things with the common thread of saving babies.
Of course I am effectively a pacifist. I think war is terrible both for those who are being harmed directly and for those who are doing the harming. I think the evidence is pretty clear. Nobody else seems to think this is a reason to campaign against wars in general. And war, as they used to say, is bad for babies and other living things. Now that those who as young people chanted such things have had their years of effective command of the world’s resources, I don’t see a lot of change. I have come to doubt the sincerity of those protestors although my agreement with their position remains unchanged.
And these have been the four big interests of my life. But there is more. For one thing, as I hope to return to soon, there is the question of how much the loss of the arctic ice cap is going to disrupt the global climate. This could be important, and it could strike soon. It has nothing to do with babies. It might bring down civilization, but we are all about equally vulnerable if we are buried under an overnight glacier.
Then there is my first love, the question of why the universe seems to be expanding when that seems to me to be a simple physical impossibility and the related question of which direction is time running in anyway.
So yes out of six issues that I wish had wider debate, four concern babies. That’s not my fault. It’s just that babies are so important.
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