The Mother's Bill of Rights
Over at my other blog, where I reposted Sunday's adoption post, a commenter asked,
what exactly do calls for society to "do more" mean?
Excellent question. What *should* society do, if we wanted (crazy feminist pipe dream, but bear with me) to live in a world where pregnancy and motherhood were recognized as simple facts of life, rather than as abnormal? In other words, where we granted women full humanity?
Lots of things. But since I'm not writing an encyclopedia here, let's focus specifically on some of the things that directly affect pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering young children.
First, let's decide that birth control is absolutely the responsibility of *all* heterosexually active people of whatever age. If you do not want children, and you are a man, you are responsible for using birth control. If we, as a society, *really* believed that, you damn well know we'd have a lot more birth control options for men than we do now. Shit, people, the only reason anyone talks about condoms is because of AIDS. Condoms sure as hell weren't on the radar before then. And if we really believed that sexually active people should be responsible for birth control, then we wouldn't even have these fucking arguments about whether or not we should tell young people about it or make it available to them.
Second, let's also recognize the corrolary: that if sexually active people are responsible for birth control, then they are *also* responsible for deciding if and when they don't want to use it. And that this, along with the fact that no birth control is 100% effective, means that women will get pregnant if they are sexually active--not all women, but some women, of all ages, and from all walks of life. And that since this is the case, scolding women for being pregnant "too young," or "too poor," or "when they're not ready" according to us, or because they're addicts or alcoholics or crazy or "unfit," in our minds, will simply not happen--because if sexually active people are responsible for using, or not using, birth control, then it is NONE OF OUR FUCKING BUSINESS if they don't.
Third, we would recognize that human beings (1) *will* be sexually active, and (2) *will*, therefore, get pregnant. Because human beings are living creatures, and one of the essential qualities of being "alive" is being able to reproduce. So reproduce we will. Reproducing is not a moral issue, or an occasion for passing judgment; it is a simple fact of life.
Fourth, because of this, we would structure our world around this basic fact and the things it involves: pregnancy, childbirth, and the demands of caring for young children. We wouldn't expect young women to quit school if they got pregnant; we would acknowledge that sometimes young women *will* get pregnant before they are finished with their formal educations, and we would accommodate this: schools would have nursing rooms and changing tables, we would provide daycare and allow young women and men with children to bring them to class (if they weren't disruptive), to step out (when and if they became disruptive), and to schedule their classes around elementary school hours--which would themselves be based on research in child psychology and development, rather than on agricultural seasons or the "9 to 5 workday." If this meant that young parents took a little longer to finish high school, college, or graduate school, that would be just fine, and there would be no sanctions for not finishing in the "average" amount of time (which would probably be higher than it currently is, since young parents would be better able to stay in school).
Fifth, the 9 to 5 workday wouldn't exist. Work would be reconfigured, since we'd recognize that "the worker" wasn't a 19th-century factory worker who needed to be physically present in the factory in order to take his place on the assembly line; instead, we'd define work in terms of projects, tasks, processes, and results. Where work required one to be in the same physical place as other people at the same time, we would of course provide workplaces for that to happen, and when it was better to have the material aspects of work (paperwork, hardware, merchandise, etc.) in one place, employers would build those things or rent space. But when a job didn't require that, we'd let people do the work when and where they were able--at home, in the workplace, wherever. Perhaps employers would subsidize employees renting private or shared office space under some conditions, in order to shorten their commutes, make their work time more efficient, and save money on infrastructure. Employers would certainly provide changing tables and nursing rooms in official workplaces, and taking children to work would be just fine--again, as long as doing so was safe and not disruptive. Where it wasn't, we'd set up formal and informal daycare arrangements of all types: private centers in high-density work areas; employer-provided daycare for very large employers who required many or most of their employees to be in the workplace much of the time; public daycare and preschools; round-the-clock availability when this was cost effective, some kind of economic support (like medicare will pay for hiring a private nurse) when it wasn't.
Sixth, we'd recognize that some people, because of physical or mental disabilities, personal preference, dangerous or neglectful behavior, and even death, would not be able to be their children's primary care providers. Where they were willing and able to provide *some* of their children's care, we'd prioritize their doing so, but we'd accept, encourage, and where necessary provide supplementary care, preferring (in order): extended family members, friends and acquaintances, and--where absolutely necessary--strangers. When these accommodations needed to be made, we'd provide supplemental caregivers with training, material support, and social services if those things were needed.
Seventh, we'd recognize that even primary care providers cannot--and should not--be solely responsible for their children's welfare, because children, too, are human beings, social animals, and by definition members of society. So parents, too, would receive supplemental services when they needed them. Also, children would be accepted in all public and private venues, and we'd accommodate their needs and limitations just as we do those of people with disabilities. Recognizing that they need adult supervision, that childhood is (in part) a process of socialization, and that the developmental, psychological, and physical needs of children are different than those of adults, we would of course provide alternate forms of entertainment for them where appropriate, sympathetically excuse them (and their parents or supervising adults) from situations where they became disruptive, and be patient with their social lapses. Being supportive of primary caregivers would be a basic social expectation, like holding the door open for someone carrying a heavy package; this would mean that all sorts of rare politenesses would become matters of course: correcting misbehaving children ("young man, you should listen to your mother"), lending a quick hand ("let me help you get that stroller down the stairs"), and providing public amenities that recognized that children are members of the public (low toilets and sinks, family restrooms, barriers between walkways and streets). Breastfeeding, it should go without saying, would be a perfectly acceptable and unremarkable public activity.
If we did these things, then it would be a lot easier to raise children, and most of the "special" burdens of motherhood would be ameliorated or erased--and where it wasn't possible to do this, we'd consider them human burdens, and take them into account, rather than scolding, judging, or punishing women for having to bear them.
A Bitch_PhD can dream.
Rethinking Adoption: Birth Mothers are People, Too
I've just finished reading a book called The Girls Who Went Away, which is about "the hidden history of women who surrendered children for adoption in the decades before Roe v. Wade."
Adoption's an issue I'm interested in for a lot of reasons. I know people who were themselves adopted, and women who placed children for adoption. And I'm well aware of the argument that anti-abortion people often make that women with unwanted pregnancies should "just" place their children for adoption--an argument that, after watching a couple of people go through that process, I'm inclined to think is one of those offhand remarks that people make without actually thinking about what they're saying.
For instance, listen to what "Nancy," whose story is one of those told in the book, has to say:
It's hard to convince others about the depth of it. You know, a few years after I was married I became pregnant and had an abortion. It was not a wonderful experience, but every time I hear stories or articles or essays about the recurring trauma of abortion, I want to say, "You don't have a clue" I've experienced both and I'd have an abortion any day of the week before I would ever have another adoption--or lose a kid in the woods, which is basically what it is. You know your child is out there somewhere, you just don't know where. It's bad enough as a mother to know he might need you, but to complicate that they make a law that says even if he does need you we're not going to tell him where you are. (My emphasis.)
Or "Karen":
The only way to heal from this is to be accepted by your child and for the public to know the truth of what's really happened. And understand it's the truth. Instead of always pushing adoption as this loving, wonderful, rescuing thing. Yes, that may be the case for people who adopt. It is not the case for us. You never are whole. Never. It's a hugely damaging thing. It's an enormously injuring, painful, fracturing amputation of families. . . .
We were not criminals. We're mothers. The difference was I was not an authenticated mother. I was an illegal mother. I was a denied mother. And I had to come home and live my life after being robbed of my child. It's as if I was an unwilling accomplice to the kidnapping of my own child. So you have to live with the trauma of losing your child and then you have to live with the trauma of knowing you didn't stop it. How do you do that? (Emphasis in original.)
Moreover, the years between 1950 and 1980, which were the high point of formal adoptions of white babies in the U.S., were atypical in ways that discussion around adoption (and abortion) usually fails to acknowledge. In 1950, 66 percent of Americans were married; in 1960 it was 68 percent. But
in 1980 the percentage of the population that was married was the same as in 1900: 54 percent. In the U.S. Census for 2000, the percentage was also 54 percent.
Also,
the median age at first marriage in the 1980s was the same as in 1890, roughly age 22 for women and 26 for men. However . . . (in) 1950, almost 60 percent of women between 18 and 24 years of age were married.
The point here is that
Even though marriage and child-rearing norms of the time (are) seen as characteristic of traditional American family life, in fact they were abnormal in comparison with marriage and childbearing patterns throughout the twentieth century.
And part of that abnormality was a serious punishment of (middle-class, particularly white) young women who got pregnant out of wedlock. Homes for unwed mothers, which had previously focused on helping young women find stable jobs and social support to keep and raise their children, started becoming baby factories where young women were pressured into giving their children up to married couples who "needed" a child to fulfill the new nuclear family "norm", and told that they were unfit mothers because, being unmarried, they *didn't* fit this model. There was a very, very strong--and abnormal--image of the "proper" family, one that caused a lot of grief to women who didn't conform.
This kind of thing is implicit in any argument about what constitutes a "good" mother, whether or not people "should" have children if they're "too" poor/young/single, and in the flip side "pro-family" pressure that everyone "should" have children and "should" behave in particular, narrowly-defined ways once they do.
And there's a lot in this book to demonstrate the results of this kind of thinking--panicked parents who beat or ostracized their daughters for becoming pregnant, parents who colluded with adoption agencies to coerce women into signing blank papers, girls who were talked into placing children for adoption so they could "get on with their lives" only to find that the emotional trauma of the adoption made doing so impossible, women who lost jobs when their adoptions were found out, women who went to their graves never telling their siblings, parents, husbands, or children about having once placed a baby for adoption.
Crazy, crazy shit. An absolute must-read if you're adopted, if you're thinking of adopting, or if you know someone who is having to think about the options for an unwanted pregnancy. And highly recommended, really, for everyone.
Bitch_PhD isn't anti-adoption. But she can't imagine losing her child, and thinks that calling adoption a "gift" implies that children are the equivalent of, like, a hand-made pair of socks or something.
Choice and Class
A pretty good--but not perfect--editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle about choice, class, and the so-called "Mommy Wars":
The debate over whether mothers of young children should . . . opt out, (or) choose to stay home -- reveals its bias: It assumes that all mothers can make a choice that, in actuality, very few mothers are in a position to make.
For most mothers, working full time is not a choice to be weighed against having a family; it's a necessity in order to support a family.
....
It's easy to open a newspaper and get the impression that parenting is a challenge faced only by upper-middle-class people. . . . Should children enroll in science or soccer camp?
....
for low-income mothers, summer brings a different set of challenges: finding a new means of child care now that the days aren't filled with classroom instruction.
As the article points out, this kind of thing is a feminist problem--
The recent obsession with the Mommy Wars and its out-and-out refusal to consider these differences in an area where socioeconomic class makes a huge difference has been puzzling to many feminists. It's 2007. The idea that class matters in, well, matters of class, is not exactly the complex syllogism it once was.
Or perhaps it is. The Mommy Wars' blatant disregard of its impact on lower-income mothers has resulted in something worse than a reversion to second-wave feminism of the 1970s, which favored a simplistic focus on giving women a choice without considering economic and cultural differences.
....
In essence, it's an onslaught of negative third-wave feminism, which assumes everyone has the financial security to make a choice and tells low-income and poor mothers that this doesn't concern them
--but it's a false feminist problem. That is to say, the media portrayal of "women's issues" as exclusively belonging to (mostly) white, upper middle class women is not something that comes from feminists (and no, not even "third-wave" feminists, who are well aware, thankyouverymuch, that class and race matter). It's something that comes from sexism. The only women who "count" are women who have the money and hence the collective power to affect advertisers. Poor women? If we pay attention to them, they're "the poor"--issues specific to women either get ignored or get presented as the results of "poor choices" (interesting use of the word, no?) like having "too many" kids "too young"--which presumably means before landing that six-figure-earning husband. Women of color? Oh, racism no longer exists, didn't you know? Immigrant women? They shouldn't have "chosen" to cross the border illegally.
It's not a coincidence that the overblown hype about the "Mommy Wars" only serves to convince people that feminism is trivial (after all, what's more trivial than being a mommy?), self-involved, and at best a hobby of privileged women. But if you go around and read what self-declared feminists actually write about, you'll find a whole 'nother picture.
The Chronicle's right that the problem is the assumption that "everyone" has enough money to "choose" to do the right thing. An assumption that contains an unstated premise that even those of us who are comfortably middle- to upper-middle class often have bad luck or make "bad choices"--but since we "matter," our choices are cushioned by the ability to refinance, to borrow in emergencies, to take out student loans, to ask mom or dad to help us find a job or loan us a little bit to tide us over, to coast on our husband's or wife's health insurance, to pay for a babysitter, to join a gym, to see a doctor. Even knowing that things like student loans are available is a privilege of the middle class: think about how much of the stuff you know about money and getting by is stuff someone else told you about, or someone you know did before you.
The Chronicle concludes by saying that "The Mommy Wars can be won when we redefine victory." It's not the mommy wars that are the problem though: the real problem is a media-manufactured class privilege that relies on hidden classism, racism, and sexism. The "war" will be won when people start realizing that most people, mommies and parents especially, do their damn best. And that therefore any problem you can generalize about is not simply a matter of "good" or "bad" "choices."
Bitch_PhD passes in public as a soccer mom, and can't decide if that's funny or terrifying.
Book Review: Promises I Can Keep
Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage is a rare kind of book: a great read, academically sound, emotionally and intellectually compelling, and genuinely groundbreaking. The authors, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, spent five years living among and interviewing poor single mothers, mostly very young, in Philadelphia in order to understand how these women think about motherhood and marriage.
Everyone has a theory about single mothers, especially young ones: Edin and Kefalas provide actual evidence about why the women they interviewed got pregnant, why they didn't opt for abortion or adoption, why they didn't marry their children's fathers, and whether they regret their choices. Because the authors are both sociologists and ethnographers, they treat their interview subjects with real respect, but they also make their own observations and compare what they find to the existing research and theories about the rise of single motherhood among poor women in the last fifty years.
For a sample of some of the work that went into Promises I Can Keep, see the authors' article, "Unmarried With Children," an extremely readable academic article they published two years ago in Contexts, a journal of the American Sociological Association (by the way, the current issue's cover story is "Why Do People Get Tattoos?" -- and you can get a free sample article, or even a full issue, through the "content" link on the main page).
There's No Conspiracy Against Women or Mothers!!!
Who gives a rat's ass about women's or children's health? Not the US.
Apparently the FDA thinks it's reasonable to commandeer 30% of dedicated women's health funding for general use.
The FDA intends to withhold $1.2 million of [a budgeted $4 million], apparently for use elsewhere in the agency. Because the remaining $2.8 million has already been spent or allocated for salaries and started projects, the office must effectively halt further operations for the rest of the year, according to a high-level agency official with knowledge of the budget plan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official is not authorized to speak publicly.
Oh well, that's okay after all, the money will get spent on other things that benefit women, right? Not so fast. The Office of Women's Health
funds research on male-female biological differences to ensure that women receive the most appropriate drug doses and treatments. It also produces heavily requested health information about menopause, pregnancy, birth control, osteoporosis and other topics. . . .
[It] was created in 1994 amid growing evidence that some sex-based differences in biology warranted special regulatory attention -- and a recognition that other offices within the FDA did not have the time, money or expertise to focus on women's special needs.
Like, oh, say prenatal care and reproductive health issues. But we don't really care about that shit, either: the feds are planning on restricting funding and eligibility for the Children's Health Insurance Initiative (which by the way, has in the past
granted waivers . . . to cover parents and even some childless adults. . . . [since] covering adults increased the likelihood that their children would stay on the rolls.
We gotta spend more money on the war, you see. As for women and kids, well,
Bush administration officials . . . said individual children did not have a legal entitlement to benefits. Michael O. Leavitt, secretary of health and human services, said he would work with Congress to find a short-term solution for states exhausting their allotments this year. He said states could avoid shortfalls by managing their programs better.
In his experience as governor of Utah, Mr. Leavitt said, when we were out of an allotment, we just discontinued enrolling people until we had room. Likewise, he said, states could cover more people if they provided less comprehensive benefits.
But hey. It's not like, a deliberate conspiracy or anything.
Just a failure to give a shit.