I’m pretty bad at planning ahead, and as usual I’m a step or two, and a day or two, behind the rest of the world (or the blogosphere, at least). So here is my belated entry to this year’s Blog for Choice Day, on the topic Trust Women:
First, go read Do you REALLY trust women? at FWD/Forward. I mean it. Skip the rest of this post if you only have time to read one thing right now: go read that. If this is to make any sense to you, you need to have read and understood that post.
Second (you read the FWD post, right?), an all-too-real example of the above: Kerry Robertson, whose story I linked to in Whose child is this?, has had her baby removed from her by Irish Social Services. Whether or not there is “more to the story” (there is always more to the story than what becomes public, though not always in the way people who say that mean), the fact that her learning disability has been used throughout as the public justification for these actions — blocking her marriage to her fetus’s father, removing her 4 day old breastfeeding baby from her care and her presence — is far more proof than I would ever care to have that we do not trust women, and that motherhood is a function of privilege, not a privileged status itself. Robertson made the “mistake” of being too young, too unmarried, too poor, having the wrong parents, and being disabled by her kyriarchal society: for that error, she has lost the child she chose to have.
Abortion rights are important, indubitably, indisputably. I would likely not be here if my mother had not had the right to choose when her IUD failed while she was a medical student. In my own very-much-tried-for-pregnancy, I found the knowledge that I had choice, that at any time for the first several months that I could change my mind, to be immensely, indescribably helpful and joyful. I’ve known women who are happier for the abortions they chose, and women whose lives were damaged by the abortions they wanted but could not obtain. We need 100% available, accessible, legal, safe abortions.
But there is so much more to reproductive rights, to real choice for women, than just abortion. And more than that, throughout history and throughout the world today (yes, in your country, in 2010), women who were not the “right” kind of women have been and continue to be coerced or forced into abortions and sterilizations and separations that they did not want.
My own grandmother was strongly encouraged to have an abortion — in the 1950s, in the USA — because of concerns over what the medical procedures she was undergoing at the time would do to her fetus and what the pregnancy would do to her; which is to say, because of ableism that says some babies are not worth having, and because of the misogynistic belief that women can’t be trusted to make the choice for ourselves. She was privileged enough (and obstinate enough: my grandmother did, in fact, wear army boots) that she was able to say no, to make another choice, to birth my mother, and only thus am I here today.
I am not anti-abortion. I am, it can easily be said, pro-abortion, in that I do not think of abortion as an “unfortunate necessity” or a “lesser evil”. But to be pro-choice, we need to think in far broader terms than just access to abortion, as important as that is.
“Trust women” means nothing if we do not also trust women to choose to retain her fertility (no matter how many children she has had or what gender she was assigned to at birth), to choose to not retain her fertility (no matter how many children she has had or what gender she was assigned to at birth), to choose what types of reproductive assistance to use when, to choose to carry her pregnancy to term or to terminate it, to choose to how much prenatal screening to have or not have, to choose the location and manner and attendants — or lack thereof — for her birth, to choose when and how and with whom to raise her child(ren).
We don’t have to agree with the choices any woman makes, and we damn well should work to make sure her choices are uncoerced and unconstrained by kyriarchy (classism, capitalism, racism, sexism, ableism, and so on), but we do have to trust her to make them and all the other choices that exist around reproduction if we are to claim we trust women.
Do you?
Arwyn
In my bathroom hangs a plaque with a picture of a yin yang and the word BALANCE. I can never get it to hang straight. This probably says something deep and meaningful about my life.
[...] Blog for Choice Day 2010: Trust Women – Raising My Boychick [...]
Beautiful. Thank you.
Thank. You.
I am utterly grateful for my reproductive rights on one end of the spectrum, but as a disabled parent, I’m acutely aware of my potential lack of rights on the other.
The Kerry Robertson story makes my blood boil — for several reasons. One, because I’ve been following the family courts/UK social services debaucle for over two years now, and (despite Jack Straw’s headway towards opening the family courts to the press) it shows NO signs of stopping. Kerry is one of a long line of women (primarily with mental health histories) in this situation. Two, because, unlike a lot of the other mothers, Kerry is unusual in that she is partnered with a co-parent who, by all accounts, is thoroughly capable — so the persecution appears to be widening from the longstanding “attack-the-single-mom” stance (which, of course, is deplorable in and of itself).
And on the issue of breastfeeding: the website of John Hemming, a Lib-Dem MP who champions the cause of parents’ rights, cites a case in which a mother had her infant taken into care on the basis of her breastfeeding on demand, as opposite to on a set schedule.
Truly disturbing stuff. I’m afraid to even consider relocating to the UK at this point (which I’m sure will make you breathe a sigh of relief
).
I don’t think “sigh of relief” is quite adequate to describe my reaction.
The topic of disability and parenting and partnered status is so important, but more than I feel I can really get into adequately here. But it is noteworthy 1) that it is mostly single women who are most at risk for this type of attack, and 2) that even when married/partnered, I have only ever seen stories of children being taken away if the mother is the one with the disability (unless the father is specifically seen as an active, violent threat to the child/ren).
As you say, truly disturbing stuff. I’m going to go cuddle my family now, and be thankful I’m stable enough and we’re privileged enough that this isn’t happening to me, for I’m no better than her — or any of the women this happens to — only luckier.
I completely agree. What value do my choices have
if they exist only as a function of my privilege?
You said all this much more incisively than I did Arwyn.