Ban on Contraception and Sterilization

The Ban on Contraception and Sterilization made reproductive restraint a religious offense among the First Men: contraception and sterilization were condemned as interference with divine potency. Because the ban left the dangerous screening of newborns as the accepted check on population, it shaped not only family life but also which traits survived. Its consequences expose a central contradiction of the First World State: a society that sanctified energy and activity undermined the intellectual capacities on which its future depended.

Religious Basis and Earlier Practice

Before the prohibition, sterilization had been used during the zenith of Western Civilization to prevent people deemed subnormal from having children. The later worshippers of Gordelpus rejected both sterilization and contraception, treating them as wrongful interference with the divine potency. Their doctrine followed a broader religious elevation of spontaneous impulse: if human vigor came from divine energy, reasoned restraint of reproduction could be cast as an offense against its source.

This was not a rule shared by every human society or period in the chronicle. Among the Second Men, for example, conception was closely associated with mental union, and psychologists developed autosuggestion that could either facilitate conception or prevent it. Their approach makes clear that the First Men’s ban was a particular religious and social order, not a universal condition of human reproduction.

The Permitted Check on Population

With contraception and sterilization forbidden, population control was left to a newborn flight ritual. Immediately after birth, an infant was carried aloft by a priestess of flight and released with a parachute, to be caught on the wings of the father’s plane. The rite was presented as a substitute for contraception, which the religion treated as an impermissible restraint on divine energy.

The ritual’s consequences depended on an inherited trait: many infants no longer possessed the old simian grasping instinct, and a substantial proportion failed to hold on. The practice therefore eliminated some newborns while allowing the population to continue without deliberate contraceptive or surgical control. It was not a neutral alternative. The account says it favored primitive traits over highly developed ones among infants who were otherwise healthy.

Effects on the Species

The author links the policy to a steady decline in the intelligence of the First Men. The newborn test might remove some weak infants, but because it favored the primitive over the more developed, it did not preserve the qualities that the society’s scientific and technical achievements seemed to require. The narrative states that this decline went unregretted, in keeping with a wider reversal of values: instinct was revered, while reasoning beyond one’s permitted sphere was restricted.

That restriction extended into scientific work. Reasoning and experiment outside official duties required a costly license, granted only when research could be shown to increase world activity. Within this system, reproductive control and intellectual inquiry were constrained by related religious assumptions: both could be opposed when they appeared to thwart spontaneous energy or established ends. The result was a society that managed birth through a ritual selection mechanism while narrowing the scope for deliberate investigation.

Scope and Historical Contrast

The rule belongs to the First Men’s religious order; the evidence does not establish it as a policy maintained unchanged across later species. The Second Men’s use of autosuggestion to prevent conception offers a direct contrast, while the earlier practice of sterilization shows that the First Men’s doctrine had reversed an existing intervention rather than simply continuing it.

The contrast gives the prohibition its historical significance. It was more than a restriction on individual reproductive choice: by making population restraint sacrilegious and substituting a flight test at birth, it turned reproduction into a test of religious orthodoxy and a mechanism with lasting consequences for the species. The resulting decline in intelligence forms part of the broader vulnerability of the First Men, whose long-established routines and biological deterioration later helped leave them unable to recover from catastrophe.