Pregnancy as Punishment and the Misguided Worship of Motherhood

 I have never in my life wanted children. I never played with baby dolls. I never wanted a baby doll. My dolls were Madame Alexanders, and later, Barbie, who was a stewardess and a nightclub singer and a nurse. Yes, all of Barbie's careers were "acceptable" female careers, but my Barbie never had children.

In college I wrote a paper for a "Marriage and the Family" class called "Voluntary Childlessness in Marriage." The professor was a former pastor, and I expected a bad grade, but instead I got an A-minus, the minus only because he wrote "Well-researched, well-argued. I do hope you will change your mind someday." 

I never did. Oh, there were times when I assumed I would have children someday because it was what people did, but my vision of parenthood was sitting in a rocking chair in the dead of night trying to settle a colicky baby. I ha

I don't know why I never wanted children. It could be just that I'm wired differently. It wasn't that I was what we then called a "tomboy." I was lousy at sports, I hated playing outside, I hated getting my hands dirty, I was afraid of everything. But I wanted a Kenner Bridge and Tunnel Building Set more than I wanted a new doll. At the same time, I loved fashion. I made paper dolls with clothes copied from the fashion spreads in Life and Look magazines. I made dollhouse furniture out of construction paper but had little interest in putting actual dolls in the houses. The indications that motherhood was not in my future were always there.

I don't know how much my own mother had to do with it. She always told me that she'd really wanted babies, but I never felt she particularly enjoyed motherhood. It's clear when I look at old photos that not only was my parents' marriage already pretty much over by the time I arrived, but that she was not exactly nuts about the homely, cranky baby that had come out of her the second time around. She always told me that I'd screamed nonstop until I was four, but I have to wonder who exactly was doing the screaming, because my early childhood memories are not of fun times with Mom, but of parental fights and my mother drinking endless cups of coffee and smoking endless cigarettes. 

Mom worked as a legal secretary for as long as I could remember. It's not that she loved being a secretary, but she was good at it and liked feeling competent at something. I think she knew that she was lacking something in the mothering department, for all that she always defended herself later on as being better than most mothers (which if true is kind of scary). In some ways she suffered from 1950s young adult woman syndrome, but she was also a victim of her own mother's lack of mothering skills.

Mr. Brilliant, who apparently came from a similarly dysfunctional home, also never wanted children, and for 30 years, 27 of them married, we had a satisfying life without children. After he died, some people (showing the customary tactlessness people use with the bereaved) asked me if I now regretted that I hadn't had children. Of course my answer was "No," and it was the truth. I would have been a terrible parent, and so would Mr. Brilliant. We both would have passed on our own baggage onto yet another generation, and it is a blessing for the world and for the children that never happened that we did not. I have had to live in my head for 66 years, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, never mind my own children.

I've never understood, or even cared to understand, why I'm missing that motherhood thing. I'm capable of deep love and caring for pets, but I have NO patience for children. Perhaps it's because pets are animals and I don't expect them to be rational, but as I saw my friends have children and deal with their tantrums and their screaming that the same soup they eat for lunch every day was somehow different today, I realized that children are not rational and I do not have the patience for them.

I'm not a "childfree" activist, for all that I DID resent that the workplace is far more forgiving of the needs of pregnant people and new parents than it is of someone who has to care for a sick spouse. I'm fine with paying taxes for schools because it's part of being in a community. I don't have to prove that my decision is right for everyone, unlike those who need to write articles about how many parents regret having had children or that some would tell their friends who are on the fence not to bother. I know I'm an outlier.

I'm all for people who want children and have the emotional tools to parent them well to have them. I know some of these people and they amaze me. But I can tell you from experience that a life lived as the product of someone not equipped to be a good parent can be pretty damn hellish. Yes, there is therapy, but that doesn't get rid of that critical parent for whom you were never pretty enough, talented enough, good enough. You can grow up and know it's because that parent was so damaged, but you're left to survey the wreckage and try to rebuild yourself as an adult as best you can, with every day being a battle to keep that long-dead voice from taking over your head. 

We need to trust women who do not want children to know what they're doing. And while we're on the subject, having children so  you have someone to care for you in your old age is a terrible reason to have children. Imagine having to live up to a contract you never even had a chance to read, but that someone forged your signature on. I can't imagine anything more selfish than doing that to a child. I at least have to be a cold, hard realist and recognize that unless I am phenomenally lucky, I will be cared for by strangers in my final days, and my hope is that I will be kind to them, and they to me. I don't have the luxury of deluding myself that I will die beautifully in a cozy bed, surrounded by people who have uncomplicated love for me. It doesn't always work that way.

I regret nothing, at least not where that's concerned.

I remember the years before Roe v. Wade. I remember the girls in high school who developed poochy bellies and were suddenly "visiting grandma for a while." They'd come back with flat bellies 9-10 months later and never talked about it. I remember the crying college girls bargaining with God to please let their periods come. And this was in the days when even small colleges had clinics where the women could go to get free condoms, contraceptive foam, and diaphragms. Women of reproductive age don't remember the days when girls "had to get married," or went through a pregnancy and then gave their babies up for adoption, because being a teen mom meant dropping out of school and a ruined life. I remember around 30 years ago, during one of the many challenges to Roe that have come up over the years, seeing a young woman on the news blithely say, "Oh, they'll NEVER make it illegal again." Well, here we are. Except now it's going to be worse.

At least in my lifetime, for all that abortions were illegal, women who were fortunate enough to have one done by a medical practitioner weren't prosecuted. The doctors weren't prosecuted as long as they were discreet. Abortion happened but no one talked about it. Even when women without access to underground "safe" abortions ended up crouched dead on the floor bleeding out with a coat hanger still protruding from their vaginas, it wasn't talked about. My own mother had one before she was married. It was done by a physician and my father's mother cared for her afterward. Today, if it were Texas, my grandmother could have been sued by any Christofascist freak who wanted to. 

That is just one reason why today is different. Abortion has always been with us. Perhaps the relative lack of availability of safe abortions and the corresponding likelihood of women who have them, or attempt to self-abort, being "punished" by injury or death, made these pre-Roe "under the table" abortions acceptable.

Roe allowed for the availability of safe abortions and codified a woman's right to full, complete personhood, with the rights of the fetus only coming into play at such point as it is no longer dependent on being in the uterus to survive. As vague and even sometimes increasingly problematic as this is, given advances in neonatal technology, it at least attempted to strike a balance without ever turning women into mere vessels. 

You need not dig very far to realize that the evangelical-dominated anti-abortion movement has NEVER been about the sanctity of human life. Randall Balmer wrote in Politico in 2014 about how the evangelicals didn't fuss about Roe until Jimmy Carter sought re-election in 1979, promising an expansion of school desegregation. As with just about everything that causes conflict in this country, even the fetophile movement (which is what I call them), stripped away of all its veneers, has as its origin story the Fear of a Black Planet, and as its core, misogyny and theocracy. Frank Schaeffer, whose father was a founder of the Christian right, warned us of this just the other night:

This week, Texas passed two laws, both of which are fundamentally at odds with the so-called "sanctity of human life." One of them allows anyone to carry any kind of gun in public without a permit or even training, and the other one puts bounties on the heads of women who dare to seek to end a pregnancy via threat of lawsuits of anyone who even talks to them about how to do it. And this in a state where the governor who signed both into law has opposed ALL efforts to control the spread of COVID-19. Can there be any doubt that race and misogyny are at play here, and the relentless march of old white men towards a theocracy that will entrench patriarchy in our society and government forever?

The right to choose not to have children, whether a permanent choice as mine was, or a temporary choice because one is only ten years old, or was raped, or was simply not ready for a child, or another child, is a vital part of every woman's life. ANY law which says that a woman ceases to be a human being with the human right of self-determination at ANY point in her life is an existential threat to ALL women.

And here we go again

This time her name is Christine Blasey Ford.  This time she wasn't harassed on the job, she was sexually assaulted while in high school, by yet another man seeking to ascend to the high court partially so that he can reassert government (male) control over women's bodies.

Speaking publicly for the first time, Ford said that one summer in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and a friend — both “stumbling drunk,” Ford alleges — corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County.

While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.

“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”

I don't know many women to whom something like this has NOT happened.  It happened to me.  I wrote about it any number of times at the old place, but for those who don't know, here it is:

It was the fall of 1974.  I was doing a lot of partying at frat houses at a nearby college.  I was never stumbling drunk, because in those days, most of what was available at frat houses was beer, and I really did not like beer.  But I would get tipsy enough to get flirtatious and when I got flirtatious I ended up in bed with people I might not have otherwise.  Or maybe I would.  After all, I was not one of the pretty girls to whom the guys flocked.  There was a boy at my school who had already branded me as "The Evil Troll" for no good reason at all. So yes, there was a certain amount of nihilism in what I was doing -- "If that's how the game is played, that's how I'll play it."  I was hanging around with other girls who were doing the same, so I did it too. 

I had met the boy in question the summer before at a bar my friends and I used to go to.  He was attractive, went to said nearby school, drove a cool sports car, and he offered to drive me home, which I accepted.  He drove me home, and was a perfect gentleman.  I don't remember if I went on a date with him, I might have.

I ran into him at a frat party that fall, and agreed to go to his room.  Had I been more savvy, or less nihilistic, I would have realized that a guy whose frat house bed is on a raised platform with a desk underneath, and at one end of the bed was a full bar, and along the wall was a high-end stereo system, was not just inviting me back to listen to music.  I might have had sex with him anyway.  But I stupidly climbed up into the loft bed, and the next thing I knew I was being held down, pinned by my shoulders, and told that I was either going to "put out" or my clothes would be torn off and thrown out the window.

He wasn't joking.  So, like most women who are assaulted, I put my mind someplace else until it was over.  I wasn't about to challenge him.  I knew someone who had gotten drunk the semester before, gone off with a guy she had a crush on, and woken up naked in a frat house bed.  All of her clothes were gone except her coat and shoes.  She walked back to our campus in the dead of winter wearing nothing but her coat.  I think the coat was dark green. 

I was not about to follow in her footsteps.

After it was over, I gathered up my clothes and drove back to campus.  I remember thinking "That was a really stupid thing to do."

I did run into the boy again, at another frat party -- the last one I ever went to, because I heard "whispers" when I walked into the room.  I remember walking up to the boy and smacking him HARD across the face (not an easy feat, he was about a foot taller than I was), then turning around and leaving.  As I left, I heard laughter and knew it was not directed at me.

I never went to a frat party again.

The following semester, I met someone at my school and was with him until I graduated.  He was a year behind me and I broke off with him after graduation.  The relationship had grown stale by that time and it was the best thing for both of us.

I went on to live a normal life, including a normal sex life.  I know that seems like TMI, but it's important.  I met Mr. Brilliant when I was 28, and the rest is history.

For me, it was an unfortunate incident partially caused by my own incaution, an incident from which I learned that the sleeping around I was doing was NOT satisfying, it was NOT empowering, and I was getting what in 1974 was known as "a reputation."  It may have been 1974, but it was a provincial area of Pennsylvania, and the "double standard after the fact" was in full flower.  I never thought of it as a sexual assault until much later.  I thought of it as something dumb that I did.  The thought of "pressing charges" would never have entered my mind, and if it did, what would have happened?  I went to the boy's room willingly, and that would have been all anyone needed to know. 

I've been hard on Certain Bloggers who decades later insist on defining themselves as "survivors of rape."  I have never, and still don't, define myself as a "survivor of rape."  I don't have "triggers" -- at least not about an incident that happened 44 years ago.  It really didn't affect my life all that much.  Perhaps I was just more resilient than some people, or perhaps even with my lousy self-esteem, I recognized that a jerk in a frat house didn't define me.  Or maybe it was the slap.  I don't know.  I don't care.

Now if I heard that the boy in question was a Supreme Court nominee, would I feel an obligation to come forward?  Hell yes.  Would I have the guts?  I don't know.  What I do know is that what happened to Christine Blasey when she was 15 happened to me, with a different perp, when I was 17.  And I'll bet it's happened to one hell of a lot of women. many of whom have gone on to put it aside and go on with their lives. 

I don't know how many girls/women that boy went on to assault because of his feeling of privilege, that he had a right to stick his dick into any woman who came to his room,  I suspect I was not the only one.  I also suspect that he went on to get married, have a career, have kids, coach his son's little league team, take his daughter to soccer practice.  Maybe he's still married.  Maybe he became a drunk and had affairs.  I don't know.  Here's what I do know:  I know that sexual assault is not the natural order of things.  I know that even then there were boys who recognized that no meant no and that a girl can go to your room to listen to music.  And that is why it matters.  That is why what Brett Kavanaugh did in high school matters. It also matters because this is a man who detailed graphic sexual questions he thought Bill Clinton should have to answer.  This is a man who has called contraceptives "abortion-inducing drugs."  This is a man who kept a 17-year-old girl from having an abortion EVEN AFTER she had fulfilled all the legal requirements.

I don't know if Brett Kavanaugh still assaults women.  But his documented track record sure tells me that he'd still like to.

When right-wing evangelicals don't have legal abortion as their punching bag, what then?

July, 2022: 

It's the middle of the second year of Donald Trump's second term.  The US is now allied with Russia and North Korea, and there is a cold war with the rest of the developed world.  Thanks to Russian manipulation and outright hacking of the 2020 election, the GOP now controls the state houses of 48 states, with only New York and California still being marginally held by Democrats.  Poll taxes have been restored throughout the south, and ID cards that are not drivers licenses are no longer valid for voter ID, not that it matters, because the groundwork is being set for permanent Trump family rule, with Ivanka Trump taking on an ever larger role, as her father is now prone to memory lapses and the kind of rages consistent with early stage dementia.  With an overwhelming GOP majority in both houses of Congress now, the legislative branch now served simply as a rubber stamp for Trump family decisions and policies.

The Mueller probe was ended in early 2019, when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision,  decided that a sitting president could not be indicted for crimes committed before taking office and that state laws that attempted to supersede federal laws could not do so.

Soon after the 2020 election, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suffered a recurrence of pancreatic cancer.  She valiantly held on for one more Court term, but after the election, she succumbed to pneumonia after being hospitalized in December of that year.  Now part of an intractable right-wing Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Breyer, now 83, decided that he did not want to spend the last part of his life writing dissents and he retired in April 2021.    The Democrats offered their customary objections to the inevitable hard-right nominees, but after the disastrous 2020 election, which saw the Kirsten Gillibrand/Kamala Harris ticket fall with the worst electoral result since the George McGovern debacle of 1972, taking dozens of downticket races with it, no one, not even what was left of their own party, takes them seriously anymore. 

The new court's order of business was a Florida law that had been stopped by a circuit court which would declare every fertilized egg a full-fledged human, would require police investigations of all miscarriages, and make an abortion of any kind, even removal of an already-dead fetus, a capital crime with both doctor and woman at risk of the death penalty.  After a contentious debate, which saw Justices Kagan and Sotomayor failing to convince their colleagues that such a law could make a menstrual period a capital crime, since up to 40% of fertilized eggs never implant.

Once the Florida law was upheld, Roe v. Wade became moot in all states except New York and California, because state legislatures elsewhere rushed to implement their own Florida-type laws, knowing that the Court would be friendly to their cause for at least another thirty years.

Following the Florida law's upholding, conservative legislators then set their new goal as repeal of Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized contraception.  Despite heavy advertising by the pharmaceutical industry, the new Court, in an opinon written by one of the new Trump appointees, Amy Coney Barrett, declared that since religious faith supersedes man's laws, and that pregnancy represents God's will, that any attempt to prevent it is against the will of God.  Justice Elena Kagan wrote a passionate dissent invoking the establishment clause, but with a majority of the Court being conservative Christians who believe that the Founders intended this to be a Christian nation, the religious argument prevailed.

The decision was hardly a surprise, since the Court had already upheld a North Carolina law, that had failed to pass the state legislature in 2013, but was revived successfully in 2020 with the new composition of the Supreme Court, declaring Christianity as that's state's official religion.

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Returning to July 2018:

Donald Trump is motivated by one thing and one thing only:  adulation.  In the evangelical community, he has found the perfect all-you-can-eat buffet for that kind of adulation.  This community has forgiven him the same sexual peccadilloes for which they had pilloried Bill Clinton 20 years earlier.  They forgive him his greed, his thievery, his enrichment of his family coffers at the taxpayer's expense -- all because he has promised them that he will end abortion once and for all, and gone even beyond Saint Ronald Reagan in that he has said that there should be some sort of punishment for women who have them.

Abortion has been the low-hanging fruit for GOP politicians since the late 1960s.  Most of them have given lip service to opposition to abortion, but until Trump came along, with his insatiable appetite for a constantly-replenishing plate of worship, they all knew that legal abortion was their best friend -- because it gave the so-called "values voters" something on which to focus besides the massive transfer of wealth from those very voters up to people like, well, Donald Trump.

The scenario above could very well happen.  The laws mentioned have already been attempted in various states.  The North Carolina legislature really DID try to get Christianity declared as the official state religion in 2013.  So-called "personhood" laws have been attempted in a number of states.  Ruth Bader Ginsburg can't go on forever.  Neither can Stephen Breyer, who is 78 this year.  It is entirely probable, even likely, that the Democratic Party WILL decide to nominate a Gillibrand/Harris ticket in 2020.  There is no way that such a ticket can win, not with white women in the south and the flyover states unbothered by Trump's misogyny, and especially not when Russian election interference is still going on in 2018.  So it is very plausible that Donald Trump may get to name FOUR Supreme Court justices.

So what then?  With abortion being THE right-wing issue for over forty years, what happens when they get what they want?  What happens if they even get capital punishment for abortion providers and women?  Obviously more women will die from back-alley and self-abortions.  More unwanted children will be born and live miserable lives with parents who don't want them and have no social safety net to provide things like basic nutrition.  Those are the social and public health costs.  But what of those evangelical voters?  Abortion has been their signature issue, and often their sole focus, ever since Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973.  When they get what they want, and when they even get Griswold v. Connecticut repealed, and all of the most-used contraceptives are deemed to be abortifacient (even though they are not), and when young women, their heads shaved to better adhere the electrodes, are shown on Fox News led off to their executions because fertilized egg was found upon microscopic examination of their tampons, what then?  What do the evangelicals want next?