PERSPECTIVE ON THE FAMILY : Motherhood Hits the Bottom Line : Pregnancy has become a business issue, counting mostly as a liability. This cultural turnabout bodes ill for our society.
Not since Lucy became pregnant with Little Ricky in 1952 have television viewers been so concerned with on-air pregnancy. Nearly a dozen television celebrities--including Deborah Norville, Maria Shriver, Connie Chung, Meredith Vieira and Katie Couric--tell us that they are pregnant, hoping to be pregnant or have had a baby.
In the intimacy that television now fosters between celebrity and viewer, one supposes that this would be happy news. Yet Chung, Norville and Vieira met with criticism and ridicule from network executives and other Establishment voices. These high-profile conflicts reflect what is happening in the ordinary workplace, where pregnancy and motherhood are considered distasteful problems, not achievements worthy of respect and celebration.
Today, an unprecedented number of women are both pregnant and employed; 71% will work during the last trimester. This trend is particularly strong among baby-boomer professional women now in their 30s and well-established in their careers. Between 1983 and 1986, the birth rate among all women over age 30 increased by 25%.
As on-the-job pregnancy increases, so does on-the-job discrimination. Last year, the Equal Employment Commission received 2,823 maternity-related complaints.
Legal actions represent only the tip of the iceberg. Pregnant workers frequently experience subtler forms of workplace discrimination: lost promotions and raises, less-challenging work assignments, patronizing or resentful co-workers and behind-the-back slurs about lack of professional commitment.
What do these trends tell us about our society? For many feminists and family policy advocates, the answer is obvious: Women still face discrimination on the job; and business and government must adopt new policies to promote and empower women in the workplace. This is the familiar answer, and there is much truth to it.
But these trends also point to another, perhaps deeper, social dilemma: the new degradation of pregnancy in America; our society simply does not favor or like pregnant women.
Among the most fundamental values of our culture today, especially among elites, are personal autonomy and marketplace achievement, accompanied by the idea that there is not, or at leastought not to be, much significant difference between men and women. Quite simply, pregnancy is a biological insult to these values.
Historically, pregnancy has been a matter of dependency, family obligation and sexual difference. Expecting a child has been almost exclusively a family event, separate from the marketplace. Today, pregnancy is becoming a workplace event, mediated by the money world. The new attitude toward pregnancy, then, reflects a still broader change: the cultural tilt away from a family-based ethos and toward an employment-based ethos.
Consider the meaning of this shift. The family perspective understands pregnancy and childbirth as the central event of family life, to be welcomed with ceremony, thankfulness and celebration. It is a blessed event. The labor force perspective understands pregnancy as a workplace disruption that weakens employees’ attachments to their jobs, increases absenteeism and reduces productivity. In the workplace, pregnancy is legally defined as a temporary disability, like a broken leg. It is less a blessed event than an economic problem. Even media stars are not exempt.
To understand this shift, imagine 10 grandmothers in one room, 10 corporate managers in another. Ask each group which words first come to mind when they hear the word pregnancy. The grandmothers will say words such as expecting, happy, baby shower, baptism, excited, nursery, announcements, layette. The managers will think of words such as problem, productivity, staffing, benefits, absenteeism, unprofessional, disruptive, undependable, bottom line .
The grandmothers’ view used to be dominant in our society. Today, the business view is ascendant. Even expectant mothers are likely to view their condition with mixed feelings. Gone are the days when pregnant women exchanged secret smiles on the street. Now pregnancy itself is the big secret, as many women seek to hide their “disability” as long as possible, fearful of the reaction of bosses and co-workers.
This new cultural understanding of pregnancy carries profound social consequences. If you want to know how a society views children, find out how it views pregnant women. In celebrating pregnancy, a society stacks the deck in favor of children; it reinforces the mother’s submission--and the father’s--to the claims of the helpless child. If we weaken these cultural leanings, we promote an adult-centered society that is indifferent to the well-being of children. We cannot both love children and dislike pregnant women.
As we come to define pregnancy primarily as a career drawback and a drag on employee productivity, we worsen our already impoverished thinking about families and children. We call for the government to “invest” in children, yet we disinvest in children by devaluing parenthood as a vocation. We bemoan teen suicide, child obesity, innumeracy and falling test scores. At the same time, we don’t fight for generous family-leave policies, not even for time off to confer with teachers during the school day. We call for a well-trained future work force to meet the challenges of the new century. But we continue to create pressures and incentives for parents, our society’s most important teachers, to spend more and more time away from their children.
