Small Strokes Big Oaks

When this post showed up in my inbox, I was drawn to it for a few different reasons.  First and foremost, Diego, the author of this post, is a long time friend of mine from undergrad.  We met around the time I met The Undomestic Goddess, in fact, as we were all on the staff of the campus literary magazine at the time.  Diego and I quickly became close friends for many reasons – we were very much alike and had very similar interests.  We were even in the same undergrad English/Creative Writing program.  We used to sit around in our dorm rooms or in coffee shops and discuss the problems of the world, perhaps trying to solve them or perhaps just trying to understand the weight of them as we began to embark on the rest of our lives.

After graduation, as we went our separate ways, Diego and I still kept in touch and my respect for him only grew over the years.  He recently graduated from an MFA program at Rutgers, and has since moved back to Chicago.

I was drawn to this post, also, because many of its points hit home for me.  Tim and I have discussed adoption at length as a way to expand our family – in lieu of having our own children, even if we can.  As teachers, we do see children who are going through/have been through the foster system or who become orphans at some point, and the results are sometimes heartbreaking.  It’s difficult to think of conceiving our own child when faced with the reality that there are babies born and unwanted to whom we could give a loving home.  There’s also the idea that I don’t particularly want my body/fetus/baby to become the subject of public scrutiny (“Are you gaining enough weight for the baby?” “Are you sure you should be eating that?  Think about the baby.” “You DRANK a glass of WINE?! Haven’t you ever heard of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome?!” “You’re over 30 having this baby – do you know the risks involved?!” OMG WHAT WILL YOUR BABY’S LAST NAME BE?!?!?!?!”) which makes adoption an even more attractive option.

But enough of my ranting.  Tim and I have decided to take on one thing at a time at this point – we’ll get through the wedding and then start really talking about children at some point after that.  However, the thoughts in this post are definitely something to consider for us as we go about planning our family, and perhaps for you as you think about feminism and its many manifestations and, not only what it means to be a feminist and have relationships, but what it means to be a feminist and have children.

Diego has expressed a wish to receive comments and thoughts on this post, so please do comment.  We’re both anxious to hear what you have to say on the topic!

As per many of this blog’s posts’ titles, I wanted to try to pair “Feminism” with some other topic or arena of discourse to think about something that bothers me. But when I started thinking about the ways the former intersects with “Eco-Friendly Family-Planning,” I ended up with way more than my buffalo nickel’s worth. Here’s why:

I hold what strike me as two contradictory opinions. On the one hand, I don’t think anyone has any business making babies (save MDs and midwives, but more on that), because, depending who you ask, the world is either already overpopulated or quickly approaching an apocalyptic tipping-point. Plus the number of orphaned, homeless, abandoned, abused, or otherwise qualified candidates for adoption means no one should procreate; everyone should adopt. (Obviously this isn’t an option for everyone. Financial issues and simple logistics aside, religious proscriptions and personal preferences prevent many people from even beginning to consider adoption as a way to create what the IRS understands as a family household.)

The problem with this position is that even a radical reduction in the world’s net population -let’s say all of a sudden population growth nose-dives or flat-lines, or at least drops dramatically in a very short time (à la Children of Men starring Clive Owen in a role he seems increasingly to play and thentofore not-much-filmed Clare-Hope Ashitey as Mother of said Men [Men of course here used to you guessed it mean “humans”])- that just because we humans discontinue to procreate our planet won’t still suffer the environmental impact of our race anyway -that oil rigs won’t still explode in the Gulf, or Amazonian logging won’t slash even greater CO₂ output worldwide- this idea that human population growth at anything other than continued par for the course will result in disaster or salvation is basically baseless; there’s so much more to it than that. So already I have to acknowledge the Manichean encouragement of widespread childfreedom is way out there and radical and pretty much useless to address everyday life. But I need to keep this ideal in play to show how it conflicts with what starts out as another kind of problematic absolute…

Because on the other hand (and this may be the more contentious claim), I believe women have the right to experience the full potential of their bodies’ reproductive capacity. Contentious, because I don’t mean to say that every woman has the right to bear children (think of the clinically unwell or women without the resources to raise them), and the system already in place that determines who’s well or well-off enough tends to privilege certain kinds of people over others (think now of why and what conditions produce women unfit [plus according to whom?] to bear children). Which means our beliefs about human (here, women’s) rights are very much products of the culture within which they’re understood. This shouldn’t be news to anybody. The reason it’s worth mentioning here is because the qualities we tend to use to assess a mother’s fitness frequently surface only after the fact. Consider the woman screaming at her toddler in the supermarket. Kids in the kinds of torso-leashes you see mostly at Wal-Mart. A single mother with her stroller on the Green Line. All of which seems unfair and biased, and means rights aren’t as absolutely applicable as maybe I’d like to believe.

But plus the more difficult question of what constitutes “capacity”. Do infertile women have a right to fertility treatments? (financial limitations notwithstanding? [that is, should the State or something like it subsidize artificial insemination?]) Probably not. Take Nadya Suleman a.k.a. Octomom e.g., a pretty strong case against IVF offered gratis. If women have a right to experience their reproductive capacity, the right to enhance or expand that capacity seems outside the scope of whatever I’d like to get at eventually. But if we treat IVF like a luxury (which means fertility treatment isn’t so different from plastic enhancement or Viagra; technology that enables the otherwise dis-), then when we consider that many women can’t conceive naturally, even the ability to do so seems less like a right than just an ability, something some people possess and others don’t, like mathematic proficiency or a helluva jump shot. Childbirth seems then more up to chance and less something to which one’s entitled. (And what’s odd also is that, unlike other, published Rights, this isn’t one “to be exercised,” but rather experienced, with tangible, autonomous end-results, but more on that.)

So on this same hand’s palmar side it seems like a woman’s right to conceive shouldn’t include the right to artificial impregnation. But then on the flip(per) side, do ridiculously fertile (and too often Catholic or conservative Christian) women have the right to birth a brood of ten or twenty? If they possess adequate financial resources, your free-market economists might say, sure. (But plus you’d like to believe only if they have also the emotional reserve and disciplinary fortitude, but more on that.) Take the lovable Duggars, the subject of TLC’s series “19 Kids & Counting,” in which a patriarch who resembles slightly a young Jimmy Carter and his wife’s resilient uterus star. Despite their ridiculous numbers and what I have to believe would be a gross and uncomfortable homogeneity, the Duggars seem to be able to support themselves. So who’s to say they shouldn’t continue to force more mouths to feed into the world?

But here’s where the first hand’s topic conflicts. Because if anyone should care about sustainable human population, or the planet, or just people in general other than themselves, it has to be mothers-to-be. Because women (again, not all) are equipped with the capacity to increase the world’s population according to their ability and desire, this particular issue of rights and entitlement becomes a question of control. The same way a woman in Octomom’s position needs to consider seriously the ramifications of artificial insemination, so too should women blessed with great fertility exercise a kind of mindfulness re the size of their nuclear families. This consideration I think best approximates what I maybe should’ve appended to the second big statement above, that the right to bear children is only a right “within reason”. I realize this language is dicey and so par for the course, but what I mean it the same way “consideration” or “accountability” assume a woman’s accounting for not just her own best interests and desires, but also those of the planet’s at-large, and esp. her child-to-be.

It’s the conspicuous lack of accountability that makes the two examples above so the opposite anything measurably “within reason”. It’s not just the headcount that seems most unreasonable about the Duggar’s TLC series; it’s the “& Counting,” as if why even stop for a minute to think about how many fucking people they’ve introduced to the planet. In the first case, Octomom’s alter ego was in no way prepared (financially or mentally) for the demands of motherhood, and even supposedly received plastic surgery to resemble another well-known matriarch and mother many times over, which doesn’t exactly advertise a fitness for motherhood.

And here’s where this ramble starts to circumambulate back into conversation.

Because it’s the actual Angelina Jolie, a woman with means who chose both to adopt and bear children, who I think best exemplifies what I mean by exercising reproductive rights with a great deal of reason. Considering her situation, she might have chosen to have 20 kids, or if she couldn’t, to receive fertility treatments (in either case she could afford it), or not to have any at all. Any of which I suppose would be fine, unless of course she’s interested in “saving the planet” and the people on it. It seems to me that, according to her means, Jolie made a reasonable, and responsible, series of decisions. Which isn’t to say there aren’t millions of women who have done the very same; I think many mothers do. But to speak of rights and responsibilities and try then to reconcile sometimes radical opinions in the interest of being mindful albeit in a different kind of way, maybe invites circuitous and discursive thinking and of course certain concessions. But I think it’s important to assert the fundamental difference re this particular right of exclusively women.

Because like many things we understand to be human rights, a woman’s right to bear children implicitly requires a whole lot of work and a lifetime’s responsibility. But unlike other rights -to the pursuit of happiness, to life and liberty- the right to bear children is one of those freedoms that’s not exclusively individualistic, the way so many of our Bill thereof are written. Because the end result of “a woman’s reproductive capacity” turns out to be another human entirely, dependent and weird and totally bestowed with whatever rights its culture sees fit to endow. Or, it might result in miscarriage, or termination, or fatal complications. All of which are really intimidating and scary, considering how many people take it upon themselves to risk procreating anyhow. And this uncertainty, this not knowing, should be part of the appeal.

Diego Báez contributes increasingly less frequently to Barrelhouse and HeaveMedia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO, Flatmancrooked’s Slim Volume of Contemporary Poetics, and Granta (online). He lives and writes in Chicago.

This was a guest post in a series on feminism and ______. If you’d like to submit a guest post for this series, see the guidelines here and submit your post to samsanator(at)gmail(dot)com.