Family In The Giver

“Family” is a term that broadly identifies a group of organisms with some form of relation. In today’s society, this can encompass people who are biologically related or those who consider themselves as being unified. There are various types of families that vary by scale of opinion and perception. Lowry’s novel, The Giver, has a constructed idea of “family”. Each “family” is determined by the Committee of Elders and consists of two carefully selected parents, a daughter, and a son.
Chapter two gives detail behind Jonas’s perspective about the time his sister was introduced into the family. Lowry explains, “Though Jonas had only become a Five the year that they acquired Lily and learned her name, he remembered the excitement, the conversations
In chapter three Jonas’s father brings an infant named, Gabriel into the house in hopes to further Gabriel’s development so that he will not be sent to “elsewhere”. At that time Lily admires how cute the infant is and tells her mother, “I hope I get assigned to be a birthmother,” (Lowry 21). Then her mother replies, “Don’t say that. There’s very little honor in that Assignment,” (Lowry 21). In their society, childbearing is not a natural occurrence; instead it is a career or “Assignment” that is given to an adolescent at the Ceremony of Twelve. Lily explains that she heard about how well the birthmothers are treated during their pregnancies. Lily’s mother responds how birthmothers have three births and then “they are laborers for the rest of their adult lives until they enter the House of the Old,” (Lowry 22). In our society, childbearing can be controversial based on the way the child is conceived and the circumstances of each situation. However, we also have the free will to deliver children as long as our bodies function properly. People in The Giver society did not have a free will to choose whether they would birth children or