Chapter 20
(Laura's POV)

I have to say that this is not what I was expecting when Bill called me but now as I head back to my own ship I can't stop thinking about our little talk, I can't stop thinking about Lieutenant Thrace and I can't stop thinking about what we learned about those farms. Sure, the rational part of my mind knows that that should take priority, that that's where the most immediate threat is, but it's not that simple and there's another part of me that can't let go of the other half of this story.

As I told Bill, for years I forced myself to look the other way, for years I tried to keep my distance but the truth is that the operative word in that statement is 'tried'. In fact that was the one thing I really didn't miss about teaching when I turned to politics: seeing my children being hurt day in and day out and being powerless to do anything about it.

Yes, child abuse is something I know well, something I had almost allowed myself to believe we had left behind when we turned our backs on the Twelve Colonies but now I realize that that is not really the case, nowhere near it. The thing is that my conversation with Bill was a very vivid reminder of the fact that while we may have escaped the carnage ourselves, escaping our memories is going to be nowhere near that easy and we are going to have to work hard if we want to do as much as minimize their impact on the next generation. In fact, if we can do it at all, that is going to take a minor miracle. The problem is that in the end it's going to be precisely up to people like Lieutenant Thrace and those younger than she is to be the parents of that next generation, there's no way around that and, as deep as the scars that young woman carries may be, they pale in comparison to the wounds inflicted by the cylons on most of our children.

That is a situation we are going to have to do something about --I don't really know what-- and we are going to have to do it soon because the clock is ticking and, even though we have close to fifty thousand survivors, that figure does not accurately reflect how desperate our situation really is.

Sure, fifty thousand souls does not sound like much but, at least in theory, it should still represent a fairly viable population. Unfortunately it's not so simple because on top of that we also have to contend with the fact that, due to the nature of the work involved --a work that used to take them away from their families for extended periods of time-- crews had a marked tendency to be more male than female. When this whole thing began we found ourselves with ships such as the Astral Queen --with more than six hundred men on board and absolutely no women-- and mining ships and freighters in which the ratio was not much better. Since then we have reshuffled the population of the different ships in an attempt to improve living conditions, of course, but that does nothing to change the basic numbers. In fact out of close to fifty thousand people less than ten thousand are women and close to three thousand of those are more than forty years old. That leaves us with about seven thousand women who are young enough to bear children and that figure does include girls under the age of fifteen, take the girls out of the equation and the number drops to a little more than five thousand. To make matters worse there is also the fact that most of our ships are already overcrowded and that means that, even though ideally each one of those women should be encouraged to have no less than five children to enable us to maintain our current population in the long run, in the short term we just can't afford it.

The simple fact is that right now we don't have the room to accommodate that many children, not to mention that having crying babies everywhere would put an unbearable strain on what is already a pretty dismal quality of life throughout the fleet and that would probably lead to an increase in violence... and women and children would almost certainly end up being the targets of that violence.

That means that, at least in the next couple of decades, if we manage to survive that long, we can expect to see our total numbers decline even further because for the time being a rate of one or two children per woman is a far more realistic expectation and even that is going to be pushing our resources to the breaking point but at the same time, considering those numbers, there can be no exceptions. Simply put, we have no choice but to encourage each and every woman to have at least one child if we want to maintain anything remotely resembling a healthy genetic diversity.

The problem is that there are also bound to be some women among us who under normal circumstances would have been more than a little reluctant to become mothers themselves and any attempt to impose motherhood on them would not only be unfair but it could also turn out to be a disaster. Of that Lieutenant Thrace herself is a perfect example. Yes, she is one of those precious few fertile women but, at least for the time being, she is likely to find the mere thought of having a child to be utterly terrifying though maybe --with a little luck-- someday she'll be able to overcome that fear.

Her situation, however, does serve to illustrate why establishing a policy that mandates how many children each woman must have could easily become the first step down a very slippery slope: because it's not just about having children, it's about raising them and --genetics aside-- having unwanted children who are deeply resented by their parents would do very little to contribute to a healthy population. In other words, women must be encouraged to have children, there's no denying that, but at the same time ordering them to do so is not an ideal solution --far from it-- though unfortunately it is not something we can afford to rule out either, not completely.

In a way it is more than a little ironic to think that our situation in that regard is so similar to the one confronting the cylons, though maybe that's because the real difference is to be found not so much in the predicament itself but rather in how we tackle it. The cylons are willing to impose a mockery of motherhood on unwilling women, seeing them as little more than breathing incubators. We, on the other hand, have so far resisted the temptation to do just that, even though our situation is just as desperate... or maybe even more so. We know our children hold the key to our future, we know they are the one thing the cylons haven't been able to duplicate and therefore they must be protected at all costs. In the end our children are what keeps us human... or they should have been, though as Lieutenant Thrace's past clearly demonstrates, that hasn't always turned out to be the case. In other words, the question is: when facing the very real possibility of our own extinction, how far will we be willing to go and by the time all is said and done, will there be anything left of that original difference?