In a message dated 3/13/01 11:50:42 AM Eastern Standard Time, stephend999@yahoo.co.uk writes:
<< I find it difficult to imagine a motive for this. Furthermore discussions about family members seem to assume normalish sort of family relations - Blake refers to siblings, Avon has a brother, Jenna's mother is seen, Hal Mellanby does not feel the need to explain away the existence of a daughter, nor does the existence of Ushton's daughter excite any undue comment. This is just off the top of my head.<<
The existence of 'siblings' could merely mean that the two of you came out of the same test tube batch. As for Jenna, Hal Mellanby and Ushton, it's probably significant that all three (plus Tyce) came from off-world. Perhaps the whole thing is confined to Earth, and isn't practiced on colony worlds.
<< A lot of the environments that we saw were not really the sort of place you'd expect to see children - The London, the planet of the lost, the bases on Saurian Major and Centero, Space Command HQ, Star One, The Thaarn's artificial black hole, Malodaar... again, those are just the ones off the top of my head.<<
True. But there were other places where children *would* have been appropriate, and we saw none.
Given that the Federation had renounced cloning
(Weapon) and that Servalan wanted to use the techniques the Auronar possessed in CoA as the Federation didn't have them it seems that natural birth would have still been the norm in the Federation.<<
Actually, your example might be proof otherwise; that Servalan knew that the best way to bypass a Federation system that forbade its citizens individual, natural birth was to cheat and have her eggs extracted and fertilized off-world, where the rules were different.
Vila's comments about choosing the wrong parents, seem
to indicate that the class system was largely hereditary. I imagine creches would have been available for Alpha women who also had careers - possibly there was an element of class resentment in Bayban's sneer at Blake.<<
Likewise, Vila's comment could also be a generalized one about the source stock that the Federation used for himself, as well as other Deltas.
FWIW I don't think there were any real pressures for
the Federation to control fertility as the surplus population could always be shipped off to found another colony.<<
If nothing else, we learned that the Federation was into control. They didn't even want their citizens leaving the domes, much easily emigrating. I imagine they had a good deal of control over that process, too. Pirates and aliens exempted, of course. And oh yes, rebels who steal bloody big ships and run away.
Possibly leaving earth could be one of
the few ways for social advancement - which in turn may have been why Governor Le Grand wanted the leader of her new alliance to come from Earth.<<
And yet another clue that leaving Earth wasn't an easy matter for a Dome-raised citizen of the Federation.
Leah