If it’s men who have visions,
what do women do?
The character of Merlin dominates Mary Stewart’s retelling of the Arthurian legends. He is neither wizard nor magician. His paranormal powers are grounded in experiences real people claim to have in this world, and his supernatural feats are more a matter of vision coupled with engineering genius than magic. He is a clairvoyant Leonardo da Vinci, not Gandalf.
This is why, when the Arthur he has seen in his visions materializes in the form of a helpless newborn, Merlin is suddenly perplexed. After a dangerous journey from Cornwall to Brittany, he gives his old nurse the infant to rear in obscurity. But now, as he watches the baby suckle his wetnurse, he is riddled with doubts. The possibility of realizing his vision feels distant and insecure.
“I did this that Britain might not go down into the dark—visions and prophecies, gods and voices speaking in the night—things seen cloudy in the flames and in the stars but real as pain in the blood and piercing the brain like ice. But now—now it is no longer a god’s voice or a vision. Now it is a small human child with lusty lungs, a baby who cries and sucks milk and soaks his swaddling clothes. One’s visions do not take account of this.”
The old nurse Moravik is undaunted.
“It’s men who have visions,” she replies. “It’s women who bear the children to fulfill them.”
Men may have visions,
but it’s women who fulfill them.
Classical civilization understood the importance of childbearing. Ancient Greek laws provided legal guidelines for men to have children from other men’s wives with the husband’s consent. These liaisons were not affairs conducted to satisfy sexual lust. They were pragmatic, contractual arrangements with the sole purpose of producing young Arthurs who could keep the Greek city-states and all their liberties and enlightened ways of living inviolate and strong.
Please don’t remind me of the dangers of treating women as breeding stock. I am familiar with A Modest Proposal and The Handmaid’s Tale. I am not advocating the womb as the source of a woman’s value. The ability to bear children is not a measure of her worth or a necessary element of her identity. As women, we have fought long and hard to be valued as individual beings, not possessions, and free agents who can choose our destinies and are not forced into them.
But Moravik had a point—
The realization of a vision starts in the womb. It is birthed through blood, pain, and hard labor. Its fulfillment requires years of sacrifice, self-denial, and discipline. It is the investment of one’s energies, finances, and principles into another person’s identity rather than into one’s self. In a culture that tells women the womb is a liability and the bearing of children one of life’s options rather than an integral part of life’s definition, we sow the seeds of our own extinction.
One of feminism’s great ironies is its embrace of traditionally male roles and values as its goals. To an outside observer, women’s identities may appear more defined by a male agenda than ever before in human history.
Western women, as well as those in cultures saturated with western values, are choosing not to have children. Symbolically, they are Rin Fangs from Kuang’s The Poppy Wars, destroying their uteruses in pursuit of male-defined destinies.
The consequences of this attack on the womb loom heavily over us. The Atlantic featured no less than three articles on the world’s falling birth rates in the first half of 2025. By as soon as 2055, we could see our financial, social, and medical institutions collapsing.
It is the death knell of a vision.
The womb is not a liability.
It is a source of power that is urgently needed
and only a woman’s to give.
For a vision to live, it must be realized through flesh and blood. If men have visions, it’s women who give them life.