The Real Issue Is Life--and Who Controls It : Pregnancy: Woman, once a second-class citizen, may soon rank third, a mere container for the more valued fetus.
The debate about abortion has deflected attention from a growing political problem concerning its counterpart, pregnancy, and from the larger meaning of reproductive technology in general. When childbearing was unduly glorified, women were valued for their reproductive abilities and little else.
But today’s views of motherhood may be worse for women. Now that childbearing has been reduced to a technological achievement, and reproductive abilities are commodities that can be bought, women are even losing their value as childbearers. Because there is a market for (white) babies today, the fetus is increasingly valued, while the women in whom it resides and grows are increasingly devalued. The law is beginning to regard them as mere containers for the really precious commodity, the fetus.
Barbara Rothman, a sociologist and author of “Recreating Motherhood,” fears that pregnant women are fast becoming viewed as unskilled workers on a reproductive assembly line. They are blamed for producing “flawed products,” that is, fetuses with defects or damaged newborns. “America is developing a legal and medical system to monitor pregnant women, control them, keep them in line with ‘fetal-abuse’ statutes,” she says. In the meantime, people conveniently overlook the cause of most “flawed fetuses”--the appalling lack of prenatal services for millions of women.
Many people, heartened by recent advances in prenatal technology, are sympathetic toward the “fetal rights” movement. Shouldn’t the fetus be protected from a mother who cannot or will not take care of it properly? Shouldn’t doctors get a court order to force a diabetic pregnant woman who does not seem to be taking care of herself to stay in the hospital during her pregnancy?
Before you say yes, consider this: Who will care for the other children of that pregnant diabetic? Should doctors have gotten a court order, years ago, to force a pregnant woman to take thalidomide, or to lose 20 pounds (when it was mistakenly believed that pregnant women should not gain “too much” weight)? Moreover, where would you draw the line? If you can incarcerate a pregnant woman who takes cocaine, should you incarcerate one who drinks? How much does she have to drink? One wine spritzer a day?
I am not denying the rage and horror one feels at seeing the tragic births of so many drug-affected infants. But why is society’s reaction always the punitive one? Addicted mothers need treatment, not jail. We must not legislate solutions that are as dangerous as the problems they hope to solve.
Rothman argues for our developing a woman-centered way of looking at motherhood and reproduction. In such a perspective, she suggests, we would realize that pregnancy, like abortion, “takes its meaning from the woman in whose body the pregnancy is unfolding.” That is why for one woman, an abortion is a minor inconvenience; for another, or even for the same woman on another occasion, it is the death of a baby. It is not a contradiction that women take motherhood seriously and yet may have abortions casually. The relationship between motherhood and abortion is like the relationship between marriage and divorce: In societies that take marriage most seriously, the divorce rate is highest, because people must have a way out of their most important commitments.
The current focus on abortion therefore obscures the larger issues of reproduction in general--and who controls it.
The evidence of this assertion is clear from the majority of anti-abortion groups that work as fervently to deny women birth control as they do to deny them abortion.
These groups have also succeeded in preventing the United States from giving aid other nations that are trying desperately to limit their starving populations.
This is not a controversy about when life begins. It is a controversy about woman’s place: at home with children, or participating in the public sphere? It is not a debate about whether women should or shouldn’t have abortions, since they always have and always will. It is a debate about female sexuality and whether women may be permitted to enjoy sexuality without fear of unwanted pregnancy. It is not a debate about the “right to life,” since many anti-abortion groups would condemn fetuses to die slowly, after birth, of hereditary diseases, famine or malnutrition. It is a debate about who may make decisions about life--the mother’s life as well as the fetus’.
If women and men do not confront these larger issues, society will continue down its current path, moving toward a chilling invasion of privacy into women’s bodies and a relegation of women’s rights to third place--after men and fetuses.
A far more humane path would permit diversity and choice, both for women who do not want to be forced into motherhood and for women who do not want to be forced out of it.
