Rebecca's Agreement Not to Become Pregnant Again

Rebecca’s agreement with Steef not to become pregnant again is a personal and bodily limit that becomes central to the novel’s reproductive deception. Rebecca says Steef insisted that she be sterilized, and that she agreed; meanwhile, she and Eva plan for Eva to become pregnant through sex with Steef. The contrast between the promise and the plan makes the rule more than a private marital condition: it helps shape a scheme whose consequences Steef later describes as the theft of his reproductive choice.

The promise and its circumstances

The agreement emerges in a conversation about children and family. Rebecca says she wants Sem to have a sibling, but explains that she has promised Steef never to become pregnant again, even by accident. When asked whether Steef might change his mind, she says he insisted that she undergo sterilization and confirms that she did. Her account presents the promise as more than a request to avoid another pregnancy: it is backed by a permanent intervention in her capacity to conceive.

Rebecca’s explanation also exposes an unequal allocation of responsibility. When asked why Steef did not undergo sterilization himself if he wanted no more children, she answers that he would not agree to a procedure involving his penis. The exchange places Rebecca’s sterilization alongside Steef’s refusal, showing that the couple’s shared limit on further pregnancy was enforced through her body rather than his. The text gives no indication that the promise was jointly embodied in equivalent choices.

From a boundary to a pregnancy plan

The promise takes on a different significance beside Rebecca and Eva’s plan. Against the background of Peter and Eva’s difficulty conceiving, including tests that found Peter had too few sperm and that they moved into fertility treatment, Rebecca proposes that she and Eva arrange a sexual encounter with Steef around Eva’s ovulation. She calls the method soft coercion, dismisses consultation with the men as too complicated, and suggests that a condom might leak. The plan is not simply a hope for an unassisted conception: it depends on keeping the intention from Steef and on a possible contraceptive failure.

That distinction matters to Rebecca’s agreement with Steef. Her promise concerned Rebecca not becoming pregnant again; the plan instead aimed to make Eva pregnant. The arrangement therefore does not straightforwardly break the literal terms Rebecca describes. It does, however, set those terms against a wider question the couple’s scheme evades: whether Steef has consented to the possibility of fathering another child. The agreement’s narrow focus on Rebecca’s own pregnancy does not settle that question.

The condom incident and Steef’s objection

After the condom incident, Steef visits Eva with a white box from the night pharmacy: emergency contraception. He apologizes for his earlier reaction and says he obtained it because he does not want to take any risk. He attributes the incident to his own mistake, but also describes the intimacy between them as a bond that had made him less guarded. Eva tells him she is not pregnant; he still insists that he does not want another child.

Steef explains that Sem was conceived against his will and says he is trying to be a good father despite feeling unstable and too attached to his freedom. His account makes clear why another pregnancy carries a different meaning for him than it does for Rebecca and Eva: the prospect is not merely a hoped-for sibling for Sem, but a possible repetition of a fatherhood he says he never chose. His insistence on emergency contraception thus gives practical force to the boundary he had already imposed on Rebecca, while also revealing that the boundary alone could not protect his reproductive choice if the women planned around it.

Later, Steef learns of the plan and accuses Rebecca and Eva of taking his semen with his wife’s consent. He calls their conduct criminal, rejects the child, and insists that he has a right not to want one. His anger turns the concealed plan into an explicit conflict over consent and control: Rebecca’s promise not to become pregnant again had not meant that Steef agreed to become a father through Eva.

Significance of the rule

The agreement is defined both by what it permits and by what it cannot prevent. It records Steef’s demand that Rebecca not conceive again and Rebecca’s reported sterilization, but it does not resolve the couple’s disagreement about whether he should have another child. In the parallel plan for Eva, the language of helping a friend and giving Sem a sibling coexists with secrecy and an intended condom failure. The rule therefore sits at the center of a distinction between pregnancy as a bodily possibility and parenthood as a decision claimed by more than one person.

The contrast also gives the promise an unsettling double edge. Rebecca has accepted a lasting bodily consequence in order to honor the agreement, while she participates in a plan that may impose a different reproductive consequence on Steef without his knowledge. His later accusation does not erase the asymmetry between Rebecca’s sterilization and his refusal of the procedure, but it makes the cost of treating the promise as a technical limit unmistakable: an agreement about who may become pregnant is not the same as consent to who may become a parent.