An alternative origin for Baby Teddy

[sunnyskywalker]

Because I was re-reading some old recaps in various places, and it suddenly struck me that there's an awful lot of speculation that if someone screwed up/deliberately skipped the contraceptive potion, that someone must have been Tonks. I've wondered about that possibility myself. It seems primarily based on two factors: (1) Tonks was pursuing Remus in the previous book, and he was reluctant for various and possibly-not-all-stated reasons, and (2) that's how the most reliable Muggle contraceptive method works.

Tonks was indeed pursuing Remus. She pressured him by debating the merits of their relationship in public, thus bringing more peer pressure to bear on his decision. But do we know her well enough to know whether she'd force a baby to participate in this drama? Hard to say, really - I'd be open to arguments either way. And since for the most part she only discusses her relationship issues in private with a very few people as far as we know during that whole year - granted Harry isn't around enough to provide reliable observation on that point, but at least she doesn't ever start telling the kids her woes - it's possible that the scene in the hospital wing was a stress-induced lapse on her part, if you want a more charitable reading.

So point 1 could go either way, and as for point 2, we can't rely on magical contraception being a perfect analogue of ours. Why couldn't they have a Spermus Mortalitus potion? (Or an easily-reversable Vasectomus or Fallopius Tie-us spell, for that matter... And yes these are all bad Latin, but so is JKR's.)

Just because Tonks ended up being happy about the results doesn't mean it was her actions that led to them.

And in canon, who is the person we know to have forgotten to take a very important potion at least once before, consequently endangering others and causing himself trouble as well?

Comments

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

Ste. Margaret Sanger, defend and protect us!

I would say, good Catholic that I was raised to be, Virgin and Martyr, but Margaret was most emphatically not a virgin (she was a friend of Emma Goldman's---you know, the one who advocating dancing joyously as the best form of rebellion) and she wasn't quite a martyr to the concept of contraception, though her enemies tried their best to make her so.

Still, if contraception wasn't known or accepted in Muggle Britain by Merope's time, it wasn't Margaret's fault.. There were people out there risking prison to get the word out, that there was a choice beyond "telling Jake to sleep on the roof."

What a witch might know, at that time.... I would imagine would depend on her antecedents.

Certainly if there were ways to control fertility magically (and there must be), the WW would be highly motivated to develop such controls. Who would wield the controls, on the other hand......

Only Merope was, as far as we could see, a motherless, auntless, sisterless, cousinless child. And abused by her father and brother.

[sunnyskywalker]

There were probably a lot of things Merope didn't know were possible or didn't have access to. If Marvolo's plan was for Morfin and Merope to bear the next Gaunt heir (there being no more cousins handy), he might even have taken special care that she not find out such a thing as contraception existed. Though we know virtually nothing about her, and that filtered through Dumbledore's suppositions, so who knows whether she would have wanted to use it even if she could have picked it up (or ingredients and a recipe) cheaply once she got to London.

Given the general time period and what we know of wizarding population, you could also concoct a dystopian scenario where contraceptive use is heavily regulated by the Ministry to the ends of breeding more magical people...

Merope's lack of a family network to teach her things raises a good point in favor of Merope having used Imperius on Tom rather than a love potion, if we have to choose between the two. Maybe she would have "found it more romantic" to use a love potion, but did Marvolo or Morfin really seem like the types to be brewing them up for her to have learned how? Imperius, on the other hand... Might even be a family knack, actually, for little Tom to find it so easy to "make" animals and people do things wandlessly.

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

>What a witch might know, at that time.... I would imagine would depend on her antecedents. <

In Marvolo Gaunt's household? That's a big 'if'.

Frankly, we've got a lot of unfounded assumptions regarding the Gaunts. Tom (who wouldn't really know one way or the other) strongly implies that they were never at Hogwarts at all, and the general incompetence Merope demonstrates certainly supports that. But then Albus tells us that she "didn't show to advantage" in the company of her father and brother, which would imply that she did at least attend long enough to sit her OWLs, and her academic record was available to him by the time she was sanctimoniously damning her with faint praise and condescending to her obvious inferiority to Harry.

We've no idea how old she was when she lost her mother -- or precisely who her mother was for that matter.

But it's strongly suggested that her father only valued her as potential breeding stock for future Gaunts, so having a child might well have seemed to her the best way to increase her value and status.

Plus, I'm sure she enthusiastically *wanted* Tom Riddle's children.

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes!

How I see it is, birth control (in all aspects of that phrase, not just contraception) was probably technically possible in the WW long before any of the various aspects were amenable to influence, still less anything to like firm control, by us science-based nerds.

And in the WW, such things were probably mostly controlled by whomever controlled everything else.

Which wasn't, any way you cut it, Merope.

But you're right--to whatever extent she could exert control, she'd have wanted to get pregnent, and expected to be valued more on its strength.

I truly hate to place any weight whatsoever on words of Twinkles, but his suppostion here actually fits quite well--if she'd been dosing Tom Sr. with a love potion, and if she thought that bearing a child increased her worth, then she really might have left off dosing Tom once she was pregnant with his wizard-son, assuming that Tom would start valuing the child, and its mother, as he obviously ought to.