Nyvra and Children
Nyvra is birth control — the preparation and the practice, and the only word for it. A physician writing a prescription and two women talking in a kitchen use the same word; the Known World does not find the subject taboo. One dose holds until it is reversed. Free women choose whether to take it and the vast majority do. Slaves are on it as a matter of course.
The reversal
Wynyvra is the dose that undoes it, from an apothecary and not cheap. Two things are required and neither is sufficient alone: the household pays for the Wynyvra, and the woman agrees to carry a child. Her owner cannot compel her to carry — forcing nine months and a birth on someone is the same order of violation as forcing anything else on their body — and she cannot commit him to eighteen years of a household's money and attention. So it is a decision between them both, one of only two things in the whole arrangement that require her actual agreement rather than her compliance. The other is sex. That is not a concession made for slaves; it is what having a child is, and the same rule applies to free couples. Once carrying, she cannot be compelled to continue, and ending a pregnancy is her decision for the same reason that starting one was.
When it was not planned
Nyvra does not fail. A pregnancy nobody planned means she was never given it, which is somebody's carelessness with her keeping, and the kind people notice. It is rare, and rarer for the pregnancy to be unwanted.
The child is free
A child born to a slave is free — born with no mark, never collared, nothing of its mother's condition passing to it. This is not leniency; it follows from the philosophy. Every person is required to find and follow their own nature, and a person born into a collar has had that decided before anyone could know what their nature was. If the world bred its slaves it would have abandoned the only argument it has. Nobody in the Known World breeds slaves for sale, because there would be nothing to sell.
- Oathbond and Famrae
- Where the father is a free man, the child takes his Oathbond and enters his Famrae; he acknowledges it because the Oathbond requires it, and pays for its keeping to the household that houses it. Where both parents are slaves, the child is free and holds its personal Oathbond and no Famrae, growing up in the household its parents serve — free, unplaced, belonging to nobody in particular — until it builds an Oathbond through work or marries into one. An owner may adopt the child into his Famrae, and adoption and birth carry the same weight; it is entirely his choice, and it decides the shape of that child's life.
- Raising it
- The parents raise it and the household pays for it. Children are not separated from their mothers; there is nothing to separate them for, since the child is not property and has no value that could be made into a transaction.
- Free children raised by slaves
- A wealthy household may keep a slave for child care. She holds no authority over the child beyond what the parents delegate, and correction is usually not among it. A child of six already knows the woman who dressed him cannot make him do anything; what he does with that knowledge is what his parents require of him.
- Her own children
- She raises them and is their mother in every way that matters daily. What she lacks is the authority to compel them once they are old enough to understand; most households require the child to treat its parent as a parent, and most children never test it. A slave father is in the same position and slightly worse, standing outside the family of his own child.