I wondering what good it would do for me to write yet another article on the urgent issue of pregnant women being treated as baby vessels. A woman in Utah was actually charged with murder because she refused medical advice and delayed her cesarean, giving birth to still-born twins. Women are routinely incarcerated on the charges of felony child abuse for drinking or doing drugs during pregnancy.
Check out advocatesforpregnantwomen.org for the facts of countless stories, and activist opportunities.
Spending time in a Israel this summer, a place where women receive free fertility treatment from the government, while having to go before a committee of three in order to be granted permission for an abortion, I cannot help but search for the common links between free fertility treatment in one small part of the world, and criminalization of women’s bodies in another rather large part of the world.
To begin with, the abortion committees, the fertility treatment, and the incarceration of pregnant women are all policies that are largely supported by the extreme religious folk in both America and Israel.
However, even that link does not run deep enough, because it does not answer why religion has become a repository for conservative perspectives (I believe religion at some point may have been a radical force for progress), and second of all why does everyone else go along with it? In the liberal circles crack mothers have little support as well.
This issue fascinates me to no end because more then anything other issue the rights of women when it comes their reproducing bodies or the lack there of, is the epitomy of gender injustice, because to a large degree arguments for gender difference/ inequality stem from the reproducing bodies of women. This being the case, there cannot be feminism without women having complete control over their reproducing bodies. But according to the prevailing model the pregnant body becomes the exception to women’s rights. (Women generally, have rights, except when they are pregnant.) In such a system, women cannot, by define have rights, because for the majority of their adult life, that can at anytime become pregnant, and rights that can be removed at anytime, are not rights to begin with – rights by definition do not get taken away by the state.
However, there is a powerful argument that can be made for the “rights of the fetus.” After all, doesn’t my right to swing my fist end at your nose? So too, it ends at my “fetus’s nose,” says the rights of child ideology. Thus women’s rights are sublimated to the rights of the fetus, which of course is not a problem considering that women are expected to sublimate themselves to the needs of their family and children, so why not start early, before the child is even born, and we might as well make it the law.
Pretty much all inequality for women stems from their role as baby machines (women are nurturers, aka unqualified to public life and serious careers where competition and hard work is required. (I say “baby machines” on purpose, because I speak of an ontology that sees women’s essential rule in society as reproducers – objects, this is a universe away from an individual women’s right to be mothers on their own terms).
Today gender inequality persists because women are still “baby machines.” The laws that makes this happen are not surprising, they are inevitable in society such as ours. Often these law are perpetuated by the extremely religious, because religion in its tradition manifestations is based on law and order that is constructed through predetermined and clear-cut roles for all members of society. Women’s primary role is motherhood within this mapping of reality. And thus “fetus rights” becomes away to continue a system that actually has nothing to do with rights for anyone and everything to do with predestined roles (aka what is socially constructed is absolute and inevitable.)
This perspective is absolutely bad for women! and frankly everyone else, if you ask me.
