The Lies of Motherhood
"The sanctity of motherhood not only limits women’s freedom, it also absolves women of abusive behavior towards their children – forced motherhood deprives children of loving and safe environments."
By Jahanvi Rao
Compulsory motherhood is a rubber band. It snaps us back to square one in our fight for liberation regardless of any progress we make. Despite debates about women’s relationship to motherhood stretching across centuries, feminists still struggle to think of a life without this role for women. So far, the ground we’ve gained through feminist organising has given women agency over when they decide to have children (although even this right has been revoked and come into debate over the past few years), not if. The unspoken thought and widely held perception is that abortion and birth control are just tools to delay the inevitable. Some poststructural feminists, such as Julia Kristeva in her piece Motherhood Today, have come full circle, where they have regressed to positing maternity as sacred by saying “motherhood is imbued with what has survived of religious feeling.” It’s natural to ask, why do we struggle to disconnect women from the role and functions of motherhood? And most importantly, why should we? It is necessary to unravel childhood socialization, insidious misogyny in socialist groups and scientific communities, as well as the obfuscation of the physical dangers of maternity to serve patriarchal agendas.
It is not covert knowledge that the upbringing of girls is heavily geared towards preparing them for motherhood. Toys for girls such as baby dolls and cleaning games as well as jobs like babysitting are just a few of the various forms of attrition that wear girls down to internalize servitude and sacrifice. Girls are also taught to be tolerant of unfair behavior from others; mainly, girls are taught to suppress all instinct for self-preservation because their bodies don’t actually belong to them but to larger society. The singular message brow beaten into girls, whether subliminally or overtly, is that they do not have ownership of their own bodies. Their body is a means to their community’s end, first as an incubator for a baby, before fully sacrificing their identity and wellbeing to care for and put the baby’s needs before their own. The word ‘baby’ can also be used interchangeably with male partner.
With a lifetime of this conditioning, it isn’t surprising that women are afraid to assert their needs and identities. It is surprising how often collectivism—which is the basis of most leftist ideology—is weaponized against women who attempt to assert their individual needs. Women are chided for bringing up their desire for freedom, branded by the labels of ‘individualistic’ and ‘selfish’. These criticisms employed by the leftists in the Global North are very frequently used in the Global South to suppress women: women are commonly asked to sacrifice every part of themselves – physically, mentally and emotionally – for their communities. This dilemma, of being made to choose between oneself or one’s community, is very prominently played out in the struggle against racism, where Black and other racialized women are made to choose between the struggle or their own personhood. The burden of promulgation of society to combat genocides of their races (i.e, the compulsory sterilizations of predominantly Black women from the 1930s to 1960s) is placed upon nationally oppressed women, where they are forced into motherhood at the expense of permanent life-altering physical changes to their bodies.
During this time, resistance to motherhood was portrayed as a position exclusively taken by white women, even though the CDC’s abortion data reveals that abortions are overwhelmingly chosen by Black women and racialized women. Although systemic poverty and the lack of societal support is a partial cause behind the higher rates of abortion by marginalized women, it is also degrading and ignorant to assume that all women, given unlimited money and time, would even want to be mothers at the end of the day. This is a retrograde myth that is still propagated to convey that women who don’t choose motherhood are just denying or suppressing natural urges. Even more alarmingly, in Feminist Perspectives on Motherhood and Reproduction, Gerda Neyer and Laura Bernadi reveal that “Post-structural feminists no longer rebuff motherhood in order to overcome power structures, but they seek for means to overcome power structures in order to allow motherhood [because] the emotional, intellectual and often spiritual rewards of motherhood are stressed and the desire for caring and mothering is seen as a strength which women should try to re-legitimize in their life rather than deny it,” (de Marneffe, 2004).
When society promotes motherhood, the reality of being a mother is never talked about. The taxing physical, mental and emotional burdens are heavily suppressed; instead, we are sold a picture of an ebullient woman with obedient babies. Abstract and maudlin terms like joy, love, and connection are used excessively and repeatedly on popular media concerning motherhood. This language is nauseatingly positive and almost Orwellian in its attempt to avoid acknowledging the common negative experiences of motherhood. By concealing these negative experiences through the baseless sentiment that every woman feels a magical and scientifically inscrutable connection to her newborn, women are being scammed into motherhood. This is further explained by Sunna Simonardottir in Constructing the Attached Mother in the “World’s Most Feminist Country”, expanding on how the relationship between mother and child is made to seem biologically determined and not socially constructed and historically specific.
Attachment theory is used to justify forcing women into the role of primary caregivers. Attachment theory is defined in The Importance of Attachment in an Infant and Influencing factors, an article published in the National Library of Medicine (the largest global medical library operated by the US federal government), as “a pattern of interaction and communication established and developed between mother and baby. For the growth of mentally and physically healthy individuals, the mother is expected to create a suitable attachment starting before the birth and to maintain it afterwards.” The lack of gender neutral terms and the blatant imposition of gender roles where the woman is expected to constantly be looking after her baby is appalling.
The misogynistic foundation of attachment theory is clear: the framing of the human dependency of newborns as a problem only women can solve operates as a way to keep women confined to the labor sphere of motherhood and limit their participation in public life. Thus, with the popularity of attachment theory, the thought of not rearing a child after giving birth is still very taboo, leading to extreme crucifixion of the biological mother on perceived or real abandonment, despite numerous studies showcasing the benefits of non parental care. This is shown in There is a Better Way to Parent than a Nuclear Family, where Vicki Dodson advocates for nonparental care, explaining that “if child rearing became more of a communal obligation, all children, whether subject to disadvantaged socioeconomic background or bad parenting, would benefit. Having numerous caregivers would expose bad parenting earlier and help mitigate it.” The so-called sanctity of motherhood not only limits women’s freedom, it also absolves women of abusive behavior towards their children – forced motherhood deprives children of loving and safe environments.
What feminists have achieved so far is a compromise at the cost of total agency. Women are allowed to have a career or participate in a public life–as long as they give birth to children. What motherhood really is, is a bargain – we are allowed to exist in exchange for total sacrifice of our identities and bodies.
While we explore alternatives to our current reproductive relations that exploit female labor in pregnancy and child-rearing, it is essential to separate birthing with care-giving. Governments that demand population booms should provide institutions and spaces that completely take over the responsibility of caregiving. Products and messaging that promote mothering to girls should be restricted and girls should receive special education that empowers them with total awareness of their rights and ownership over their body. The goal isn’t just to resist motherhood as a form of protest, the goal is for women to be able to define themselves outside of traditional gender roles and reject the delegation of motherhood. Rejection is about destroying compulsory motherhood and gaining full ownership over our bodies. There is no true liberation without destroying society’s entitlement over women, our bodies and our labor.
Beautifully written
https://thequillandmusket.substack.com/p/the-immutable-laws-of-parentingfrom?r=4xypjp