CHILDBIRTH

To follow the development of their sexual life we shall begin the cycle of birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, and birth again, with the event of pregnancy, a great blessing to every Balinese household.

Most people we talked to had a quite correct idea of the physiology of procreation; they said that the man's seminal fluid (semara, named after the god of love) , coming in contact with the " female semen," turns into blood in the womb, forming a ball which, fed by the woman's own blood, eventually takes human form and develops into a child. Along with this almost scientific notion goes the belief that a child is the reincarnation of an ancestor whose life-giving spirit comes down to earth in the form of dew, which is inadvertently eaten by the parents, the process of gestation taking place after intercourse.

With children generally welcome, birth control is rarely practised, although it is not unknown to unmarried girls who do not want to become pregnant. Apparently the only method of prevention they know is for the woman to stand up after intercourse and free herself of the seminal fluid. There are medicines to cause abortion and to make a woman sterile, but both ideas are criminal and fall within the category of black magic.

In Bali a woman with child is free of rigid taboos, and her life is carried on as usual. Omens are taken carefully into consideration, and special attention is paid to exorcizing obnoxious spirits, the butas, that persecute her at this critical time, but her real enemies are then the leyaks, the witches that infest Bali, whose main diet consists of the blood of pregnant women and the entrails of unborn children.

However, for a small sum her husband can procure amulets from the local priest or witch-doctor; magic words and symbols drawn on a piece of paper or cloth, hung at the house gate or carried on her belt to keep the leyaks away.

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