First meetings in the Enderverse by Orson Scott Card Page A

communities have to promote in order to win wars? Is it the community that drives the trait, or the trait that drives the community?” Which John Paul realized was the very crux of the theory she was putting forth-and he rather liked the question.
    “And what,” she finally asked, “are the resources a community has to protect?”
    Food, they said. Water. Shelter. But these obvious answers did not seem to be what she was looking for. “All these are important, but you’re missing the most important one.”
    To his own surprise, John Paul found himself wanting to come up with the right answer. He had never expected to feel that way in a class taught by a grad student.
    What community resource could be more important to the survival of the community than food, water, or shelter? He raised his hand.
    “Mr. Wiggin seems to think he knows.” She looked at him. “Wombs,” he said.
    “As a community resource,” she said.
    “As the community,” said John Paul. “Women are community.”
    She smiled. “That is the great secret.”
    There were howls of protest from other students. About how men have always run most communities. How women were treated like property.
    “Some men,” she answered. “Most men are treated far more like property than women. Because women are almost never simply thrown away, while men are thrown away by the thousands in time of war.”
    “But men still rule,” a student protested.
    “Yes, they do,” said Ms. Brown. “The handful of alpha males rule, while all the other males become tools. But even the ruling males know that the most vital resource of the community is the women, and any community that is going to survive has to bend all its efforts to one primary task-to promote the ability of women to reproduce and bring their offspring to adulthood.”
    “So what about societies that selectively abort or kill off their girl children?” insisted a student.
    “Those would be societies that had decided to die, wouldn’t they?” said Ms. Brown. Consternation. Uproar.
    It was an interesting model. Communities that killed off their girls would have fewer girls reach reproductive age. Therefore they would be less successful in maintaining a high population. He raised his hand.
    “Enlighten us, Mr. Wiggin,” she said.
    “I just have a question,” he said. “Couldn’t there be an advantage in having an excess of males?”
    “It must not be an important one,” said Ms. Brown, “because the vast majority of human communitiesespecially the ones that survive longest-have shown a willingness to throw away males, not females. Besides, killing female babies gives you a higher proportion of males, but a lower absolute number of males, because there are fewer females to give birth to them.”
    “But what about when resources are scarce?” a student asked.
    “What about it?” said Ms. Brown.
    “I mean, don’t you have to reduce the population to sustainable levels?”
    Suddenly the room was very quiet.
    Ms. Brown laughed. “Anyone want to try an answer to that?”
    No one spoke.
    “And why have we suddenly become silent?” she asked. She waited. Finally someone murmured, “The population laws.”
    “Ah,” she said. “Politics. We have a worldwide decision to decrease the human population by limiting the number of births to two per couple. And you don’t want to talk about it.”
    The silence said that they didn’t even want to talk about the fact that they didn’t want to talk about it.
    “The human race is fighting for its survival against an alien invasion,” she said, “and in the process, we have decided to limit our reproduction.”
    “Somebody named Brown,” said John Paul, “ought to know how dangerous it can be to go on record as opposing the population laws.”
    She looked at him icily. “This is a science class, not a political debate,” she said. “There are community traits that promote survival of the individual, and individual traits that promote the