Pregnancy, Politics Collide in Boston

Angry that the pregnant governor held a key meeting by speakerphone from her hospital bed, a group of Democratic lawmakers asked the state’s highest court Thursday to rule whether Jane M. Swift can legally conduct critical state business by phone.

Swift, the Republican acting governor who is expecting twins June 15, entered the hospital Tuesday after experiencing contractions, and doctors ordered her to remain there until the babies are born.

On Wednesday, Swift set off a furor here by presiding over a Governor’s Council meeting from the maternity ward.

“This was not a duly constitutional meeting,” Council member Edward O’Brien, a Democrat, said Wednesday.

William F. Galvin, the Democratic secretary of state, said Thursday that both the governor and the commonwealth “would be better served” by an in-person meeting. Galvin said the way the governor staged the meeting cast “a cloud” over the Governor’s Council, an elected board that approves judicial appointments, gubernatorial pardons and bond issues. All eight members are Democrats.

Under state law, Galvin would become acting governor if Swift declares herself incapacitated--or is found unfit to govern by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court. Galvin has expressed interest in running for governor next year.

Swift’s chief of staff, Peter Forman, blasted the whole dispute as “political gamesmanship.” Swift has said she will continue to work and that, after the twins are born, she will carry out her duties from her home in western Massachusetts.

While the partisan bickering accelerated, social scientists embraced the pregnant governor’s situation as a living laboratory for work-family issues and questions of gender equity. Faulting a chief executive for working in the final days of pregnancy, they predicted, could backfire on the male politicians issuing the salvos.

“If this was a guy having a vasectomy who called in from his hospital bed, would anybody care?” asked Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers, co-author of “He Works/She Works.”

Like executives, elected officials teleconference constantly, Rivers noted. But Swift is only one of five female governors--and the first to be on the verge of delivering twins while holding office. The male legislators who yell “inappropriate” to Swift’s off-site meeting probably are just uncomfortable with the whole package--including having a female leader at all, Rivers said.

The uproar over Swift’s “working maternity leave” soundly illustrates how “out of touch the political world is from one of the most urgent issues that everyone in this country is facing,” said Brad Googins, director of the Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College.

“The work/life issue is an absent issue in the public policy arena--i.e., among politicians,” Googins said.

Accommodating the needs of a pregnant governor is “a boundary that has never been breached,” said Elizabeth Sherman, director of the Center for the Study of Women in Politics at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

Swift, first elected to the state Senate at 25 and now the nation’s youngest governor at 36, challenges a norm that has excluded “young women and especially young women with children,” Sherman said.

“I think people have a hard time wrapping around the idea of a woman governor to begin with, but to have one who’s pregnant with twins, that’s almost beyond the pale,” she said. Throw in the question of whether or where the governor will pump milk for breast-feeding after the babies are born, Sherman said, “and you have total and complete cognitive dissonance.”

In coming under attack from the Governor’s Council, Swift “was very fortunate in her adversary,” said Ralph Whitehead Jr., professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The council dates from the time of the Pilgrims and is, Whitehead politely said, “considered to be a little bit peripheral to the main business of state government.”

Swift became acting governor last month when Gov. Paul Cellucci was confirmed as U.S. ambassador to Canada. A governor pregnant with twins made for a wholesome story but hardly, he observed, a tale of great political significance.

“You had to ask, what are the political stakes here? Who’s against motherhood?” Whitehead said. “Well, the Governor’s Council is against motherhood. Who’d have thought?”

No date has been set for the Supreme Judicial Court to rule on the motion by the Governor’s Council. In the meantime, the council voted to allow the Ma Bell meetings to continue pending a court decision or the governor’s release from the hospital.