Monday, March 6, 2006
To Be a Mother
BY HILDE LINDEMANN
...The justification for this vicious piece of misogyny seems to be based on the following notions: (a) a woman is a mother from the moment a fertilized egg begins to grow in her body; (b) mothers are morally obliged to take care of their children at any personal cost to themselves; and (c) it is the state’s responsibility to force reluctant mothers to meet their moral duties to their children. I won’t waste my breath upbraiding the South Dakota legislators for their apparent indifference to the social context in which women are assigned these duties--a context where there is unrelenting violence against women, much of it perpetrated by husbands or boyfriends; where rape and lesser forms of sexual coercion are widespread; where mothers, not fathers, are almost solely responsible for hands-on childcare; and where social institutions and practices are systemically rigged to favor the interests of men over those of women. These points have been made many times before and I haven’t the heart to repeat them. Instead, I’m going to plead for a revised understanding of what pregnancy is. It’s when we think of pregnancy as something that happens to a woman rather than something she does – when we think of pregnant bodies as flowerpots, ovens, or incubators – that the awfulness of the particular kind of wrong about to be done to South Dakota women escapes our notice.
As I write this, my daughter is thirty-two weeks pregnant with her very much wanted first child. Like any human pregnancy, hers is not simply a biological process but a purposeful activity in which she is creatively engaged. For starters, she’s had to manage some pretty unrelenting nausea by learning, through trial and error, what foods she can tolerate and how often she needs to eat; this requires her to take packets of cheese, crackers, almonds, and so on to work with her so that food will be available right when she needs it. In her twentieth week she developed high blood pressure, so she bought an exercise machine and has been forcing herself to use it regularly. In her twenty-first week, she also developed gestational diabetes, requiring her to revamp her already restricted diet, prick her finger four times a day to check her glucose levels, and give herself a shot of insulin every night before bedtime. She goes to her doctor every two weeks to be monitored for these and other possible complications.
And then there is the ongoing work, which she shares with her husband and intimate others, of calling her fetus into personhood, weaving love and welcome around it, making a place in the social world for it to occupy as soon as it is born. My daughter does not think she was a mother the moment she conceived. She believes she is making herself into a mother as she brings her baby to term, and doesn’t expect to feel completely like a mother until a good month or two after the baby is born. Her view may be wrong, but there are no publicly available means of showing that it is wrong. Certainly, the South Dakota legislature is in no position to prove that it is wrong.
My daughter and her husband wanted this baby and conceived it intentionally. The hard work they are doing to bring their child into the world is a labor of love. But suppose her husband had walked out on her when he learned she was pregnant? Or suppose he was abusive and her contraception failed? Or she had an illness whose treatment involved powerful drugs that would cross the placental barrier and damage the fetus? For that matter, what if the fetus were anencephalic or had some other serious deformity? And what if my daughter had no health insurance, no family or friends to help her, no education to speak of, and no money? It’s pure happenstance that she is glad to be pregnant and is in a position to care for the child when it comes. Yet the State of South Dakota proposes to treat all pregnant women as if they were as lucky as she is. The thought that the state could force my child, irrespective of happenstance, to manage her food intake, exercise daily, self-administer insulin, and take up an attitude of hospitality and love toward her fetus revolts and angers me. <more>
http://www.bioethicsforum.org/
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