I expect Cordelia is/was socially awkward in dating situations; she's incompetent at flirting, and used to be naive about power-hungry people. (Since she has no interest in sleeping with someone to make them more malleable, she didn't notice it happening to her. And still might not.) She's still socially "awkward"--but on Barrayar, it doesn't bother her in the slightest; she doesn't care if 90% of the people she meets think she is too forward, too blunt, or unwomanly.
Since she knows she's working without an understanding of people's basic motivations ("marry a rich guy & have many children" being totally alien to her), she spends more time consciously analyzing why people act as they do. This lets her see motives that are invisible from within the culture because they're masked by "what everyone does/thinks." She gets a rep for understanding the hidden motivations, because it doesn't occur to anyone that she's utterly clueless about the mundane ones.
Bujold's anti-abortion axe was derived from other sources, I believe; interviews and whatnot. It is supported by canon, but canon doesn't require it or particularly display it--Beta, as a high-tech high-income world, doesn't have unwanted children, doesn't have deaths-of-convenience. Not even of animals; Cordelia has problems eating any meat not grown in a vat.
I expect she could understand the idea of families that don't want to deal with bastard children (although she'd be appalled), but doesn't have a frame of reference for families that don't want additional children because they can't afford them.
Cordelia's got to have some level of culture shock from dealing with the harshness of Barrayar's limited resources--the idea that children die from not having enough food must baffle her. That people die of simple infections from farming-accident wounds, ditto. I wish we had stories about her discovering what real poverty looks like, and her frustration at trying to rearrange resources to deal with it.
no subject
Since she knows she's working without an understanding of people's basic motivations ("marry a rich guy & have many children" being totally alien to her), she spends more time consciously analyzing why people act as they do. This lets her see motives that are invisible from within the culture because they're masked by "what everyone does/thinks." She gets a rep for understanding the hidden motivations, because it doesn't occur to anyone that she's utterly clueless about the mundane ones.
Bujold's anti-abortion axe was derived from other sources, I believe; interviews and whatnot. It is supported by canon, but canon doesn't require it or particularly display it--Beta, as a high-tech high-income world, doesn't have unwanted children, doesn't have deaths-of-convenience. Not even of animals; Cordelia has problems eating any meat not grown in a vat.
I expect she could understand the idea of families that don't want to deal with bastard children (although she'd be appalled), but doesn't have a frame of reference for families that don't want additional children because they can't afford them.
Cordelia's got to have some level of culture shock from dealing with the harshness of Barrayar's limited resources--the idea that children die from not having enough food must baffle her. That people die of simple infections from farming-accident wounds, ditto. I wish we had stories about her discovering what real poverty looks like, and her frustration at trying to rearrange resources to deal with it.