Over at Feministe, Jill goes to town on Ross Douthat's latest New York Times column, about what he calls "The Unborn Paradox." That is, there are women who experience unwanted pregnancies, and infertile couples who want babies, and wouldn't it be nice if we could meet in the middle somewhere on this?
As Jill notes, Douthat fails to recognize that actual women are involved here, and that pregnancies are physically and emotionally tough to go through. Douthat might think it's neat and easy for a woman to go through an unwanted pregnancy and then to supply a childless couple with a much-wanted baby, but that's only because that's the outcome he desires. Jill points out that Douthat is reinforcing social power structures here:
But his concern here isn't just for fetuses — it's also for “good” families that, in his estimation, deserve children from not-good women. The old era of adoptions, where middle and upper-middle-class families were able to adopt babies birthed in secret by teenage mothers, required not only a crackdown on women's bodily autonomy, but also a social model that deemed single mothers inherently bad, and certain families (largely white, headed by a heterosexual couple, and on the wealthier side of not) to be the only acceptable ones. It's not just about abortion. It's about a return to an idealized, gender-inegalitarian, racially divided and socially stratified time. It's about making sure women know that their place isn't just at home and in the service of their husbands, but also in the service of “better” families.
That's true of nearly every organization that wants to outlaw abortion, or organizations like the ridiculous "No Wedding, No Womb," that want to "raise awareness" about single-motherhood. Both of these ideas bemoan the passing of those halcyon days in which single mothers put their babies up for adoption or were rushed into shotgun marriages out of a sense of social propriety and familial shame, and both fail to realize what that actually meant for women. Reproductive freedom results in the fact that some people may make decisions with which you disagree, and that's the point.
-- Monica Potts
