Matriarchy

Originally published May 26, 2017

When I called my Mom on Mother's Day we spent the first few minutes of our conversation talking about a news story she had read about the rise of maternal mortality in the United States. The article said that it was partially due to doctors not paying enough attention to the mother in favor of taking care of the baby. The particular story she had read on the NPR website was about a neonatal nurse who died at the hospital where she worked. Since the doctors and nurses were so focused on the baby, they didn't notice the signs of preeclampsia until it was too late.

This is some insidious patriarchal bullshit. It's the kind of thing that can slip under the cracks, unnoticed as a trend until too many women have died. It's the kind of thing that one can, and many will, argue is not related to sexism at all. I can already hear men who will whine why does it always have to be about that?

But one can, and should, draw a through-line from anti-abortion rhetoric to maternal mortality from negligence to the potential of a full-on Handmaid's Tale women-as-wombs world. Anti-abortion rhetoric argues that women should not have the ability to control what happens to their own bodies, physically and psychologically, and to decide whether or not they consent to the traumatic and potentially life-threatening experience of childbirth. Anti-abortion activists and law-makers love to focus on the fetus, the potential life, at the cost of pregnant person. The real, breathing, not-potential person. And what if that fetus that anti-choicers care so much about is born, and grows into a real-life woman? Then, suddenly, she has less autonomy than any fetus inside of her body. She becomes, in the eyes of some, a vessel.

A baby is not a fetus, of course, and the nurse who my mother read about was a willful participant; she had made the choice to remain pregnant and to go through childbirth. She was probably not expecting to die from a treatable condition at her own hospital, though. I am not saying that the baby shouldn't have been attended to, I am just saying that the mother's life was just as important. Women are more than their wombs.

Perhaps what I am trying to write about right now would come more easily if I had ever been pregnant. I have no desire to be at the moment, not the least because I would have to give up espresso and weed for nine months, but I imagine that the experience would allow me to write about the physicality of it more intimately. I imagine what it would be like often, not because I'm secretly dying to procreate, but because I am fascinated by the experience. It is an experience that takes over ones entire body, is emotionally and psychologically overwhelming, and is, of course, the only reason why any of us are here. For how intensely personal it is, it is both public (it is hard to hide a pregnancy from the world), and absurdly political.

Here is what I know. Only women, or people with female anatomy, can be pregnant. It is physically and psychologically demanding in a way that those who have no experience with it cannot possibly imagine. There is no equivalent experience in a man's life. Pregnancy is (currently) the only way to make new people. Both the physical burden and the potentially rewarding experience, are out of men's control. This, then, is the reason for the politics. It is men scrambling for control over pregnancy, and by extension, society, by attempting to control women and their bodies.

Men are used to being in control. They control everything from Congress to the superhero movies we are all forced to talk about every summer. But men cannot be pregnant. Men can barely imagine what it would be like to be pregnant, which is perhaps why so many of them appear to have so little empathy for the experience, but they know that they owe their existence to a woman who undertook this huge job. Men used to sit in the waiting rooms, worrying and waiting and lacking control, while their wives created new people. Now, you might run into some enlightened young dudes who, along with their female partner, like to use the phrase "we're pregnant." That's cute, I guess, but completely inaccurate. If that phrase is a way to signal to the world that the man is a supportive partner and on board for his share of childcare, more power to him. But he's not pregnant, and everyone knows it. That experience doesn't belong to him, and he is as out-of-control as a cigar-smoking man in a waiting room, or a law-maker trying everything he can to police pregnancy. Men can't be pregnant, and so they pass laws to limit access to birth control, abortion, overall reproductive health, maternal paid leave, and childcare. It makes them feel in control, I suppose, to make women's lives as hard as possible. So here we are. It's a man's poorly governed world.

Have I gone off the rails? Have I started feminist ranting again? You can thank my mother, who bought me feminist children's books and wouldn't ever let me watch Grease because of the terrible messages for young women. (Men, would you please stop trying to control women by telling them they need to fundamentally change themselves and wear leather body suits to be worthy of love? God, she was so right about that movie.)

I was born, via my mother's body and hard work, in a basement apartment in Honolulu, Hawaii. I used to marvel at this choice, thinking that in her apartment with a midwife sounds so much harder and scarier than at a hospital. But after talking with her on Mother's Day I have started to understand the choice. My brothers were all born in hospitals, but my mother told me that she had a doula with her both times, a woman that until that conversation I had not realized was a professional, and not just her friend. It's not that my mother doesn't trust modern medicine (she's a biologist) or individual health care professionals who work hard to ensure women's safety everyday, but perhaps she is wary of the systems that men create, especially those surrounding pregnancy and childbirth. She needed someone there for her, as all women need and deserve.

I will call my mother again soon. I only see her a couple of times a year, at most, and I miss her. I will ask her to tell me more about her pregnancies, and we can talk about the long, creeping arm of the patriarchy. If I ever become pregnant, she's the first person I will want to talk to about it. Whether or not I do ever undertake that, and as I navigate patriarchal systems everyday, be they cat-calling men on the side-walk or the misogynists in the White House, I will be forever grateful for my mother.