Life Outside the Garden

      by Susan Stevens


	“Because we consume our resources at a destructive rate, 
	our industrial-technological society can no longer
	axiomatically be taken as ‘here to stay.’ As we crowd
	together on the planet, old bitternesses of race and
	tribe and nation will become increasingly exacerbated.
	The imperatives remaining are two: to learn to share
	and preserve, and to practice a ‘morality of scarcity.’ ”

				Dr. William G. Pollard, 1969
				Physicist, Oak Ridge Laboratory

	“If the current administration has its way, we’ll be back in
	business in no time.”

				Caption of cartoon with two sleazy
				men hanging a shingle for backstreet
				abortion

	“The night my father got me his mind was not on me.”
	
				A.E. Housman


Babies bloom like oleander along a California freeway, while people carry placards to save 
prefetuses. Their emotional graphics stagger those who don’t stop to think about abuse and 
neglect, orphans and starvation. Just how lucky is the fetus who lives to afford therapy to justify 
the years that long inconvenience passed from mother to child? People with placards should 
interview fetuses that can talk back: the result of an abortion that was not performed 20, 30, 
or 40 years ago–and then decide whether all fetuses have value in a country where 70% of all 
pregnancies are unplanned. How is it ever right for a human to be the result of a blown condom 
or an extra drink?

“Garden of Eden Era Believed Nearing End,” a headline proclaims, because in 1830 there were one 
billion people; in 1970, three and one-half billion. (You may fill in the blank with numbers current 
in the year you read this prose poem.) For those hoping to sail inky waters into yet another galaxy–fleeing 
our own quaint population cancer, know this: In the light years required to travel to a habitable planet, 
the ship would be overpopulated before you could arrive.

Meanwhile, what is needed here is a poem, not a tract. Babies bloom.... I think of my California 
pediatrician, who swore he had far too much business and said, “We don’t care that some 
people don’t believe in contraceptives–they don’t have to copulate at all! Far too many think 
they’re virtuous if they teach their six kids not to toss beer cans.”