Homologizing pregnancy and motherhood: a consideration of abortion.

• Author: Hanigsberg, Julia E.

Introduction: Mothering and Mattering

The abortion issue has been the subject of an enormous legal literature.(1) The contours of its legal analysis in the United States are, by now, relatively well known. The right to abortion has been protected under the rubric of the right to privacy guaranteed by the Substantive Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and in the "penumbras" of the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.(2)

In this essay I reconsider abortion in order to bridge what initially seem to be two opposing frameworks: first, the conception of abortion as an issue of women's bodily integrity and liberty, and second, the acknowledgement of the existence and meaning of intrauterine life.(3) The abortion choice is indeed deeply and necessarily tied to women's bodily integrity. I will discuss how taking away women's ability to control their decision not to become mothers can be severely damaging to their very sense of self, for this denial of decisionmaking divides women from their wombs and uses their wombs for a purpose unrelated to women's own aspirations. By interfering in unique ways with women's bodily integrity in the guise of regulation of procreative decisionmaking, law both facilitates and justifies that violation of bodily integrity. Because bodily integrity is necessary for the formation of selfhood, it is essential that law recognize women's subjectivity in its construction of women's procreative lives.(4) The legal regulation of procreation, in this sense, defines women's very boundaries.

By suggesting a connection between mothering and abortion, however, I seek to highlight that a strict bodily integrity framework is incomplete because it does not acknowledge intrauterine life. Pro-choice considerations of the abortion issue have largely failed to account for intrauterine life and the meaning that life has,(5) while anti-abortion accounts are insufficiently concerned with women. The rhetoric of both sides - "choice" vs. "life" - oversimplifies the complexity of the abortion issue: the language of "choice" suggests that mere legalization of abortion will provide women with real choices without accounting for structural inequalities that curtail such autonomy;(6) the adoption of the term "pro-life" both suggests that those who favor legal abortion lack concern for life and obscures the fact that the "pro-life" movement has been consistently more concerned with "the unborn" than the conditions of living women and children.(7) Thus, this paper will stand back from both sides of the abortion debate in an effort to provide a complex articulation of the nature of abortion, and to elucidate why this issue is, from both a legal and political perspective, enormously difficult to regulate. It is perhaps useful at this point to note that my project is not, first or foremost, to find a compromise position to unite opponents in the abortion debate. Indeed, I suspect that such compromise is unlikely, particularly given the current political and ideological bent of the "pro-life" movement in the United States as it is presently constituted and largely controlled by the extreme political and Christian right.(8)

I posit the view that abortion, and indeed all procreative decisionmaking,(9) is about mothering in its broadest terms, and it is thus that I will make use of the term mothering decisions throughout this article. Even when a woman decides to have an abortion, she is still making a mothering decision. I will discuss at some length why I think this is the case, but at the very least, it is because restriction of women's access to abortion forces women to bear children - to become, at least, biological mothers.(10) I will also show how attitudes toward mothers are crucial to the way that North American law and culture defines women, and therefore that the way motherhood is regulated is significant to all women regardless of whether they ever do bear, or even are capable of bearing, children.(11) This significance is even greater because of the phenomenon that I call homologizing. I use this term to refer to the way that pregnancy and motherhood are treated as though they are corresponding states of being. By a legal, political, and social process, pregnancy and motherhood are made to resemble each other. There are two sides to this process. First, in a benign way, women making procreative decisions, including the decision whether or not to abort, are making mothering decisions. These mothering decisions include calculations about what would be best for the woman, the intrauterine life, and others. Second, in an invidious way, even women who are merely pregnant are subject to regulatory frameworks inspired by viewing pregnant women as already being mothers.

It makes sense at the outset to try to explain why the regulation of motherhood and the ideological underpinnings of this regulation have broad significance for all women, not just mothers. First, regardless of women's individual choices or capacities, society includes them within the category of "mother."(12) A woman's position in the work force can be altered because of her presumed fertility and its ramifications and social signification.(13) Two examples are instructive. Employers act on a presumption that women are likely to leave their jobs in order to bear and raise children at some point in their work lives.(14) Therefore all women, regardless of their actual intention of having children or whether they ever do leave the work force for child rearing reasons, become burdened by the mere possibility of their becoming mothers.(15) Employers respond to this presumption by tracking women into jobs that accord them less respect and fewer opportunities for advancement than their male colleagues.(16) Women thus face "statistical discrimination"(17) based on the presumption of fertility and its social consequences and thereby are disadvantaged in the wage labor market.(18) A second example is the illegal attempt by employers to ban fertile women from workplaces that are allegedly dangerous to fetuses regardless of whether the female employees were pregnant or even had any intention of becoming pregnant. The Seventh Circuit, in UAW v. Johnson Controls, Inc.,(19) accepted the company's argument that its exclusion of "women who are pregnant or who are capable of bearing children"(20) from working in areas of the factory where lead levels reached a certain concentration was justified as a bona fide occupational qualification.(21) Although the judgment was overturned on appeal,(22) it reflects how women without children, without even the intention of ever bearing children, can be affected socio-economically by their presumed ability to become mothers.(23)

Second, significant social stigma may attach to women who choose not to mother. Such women continue to be viewed through the lens of motherhood: their decision not to mother is itself considered deviant antimaternalism.(24) Third, large numbers of working class women and women of color have a unique position with respect to mothering because their economic labor is often in the area of motherwork - that is, paid labor with a significant child care component. Therefore, even if they choose not to become mothers, they may still be mothering in a broader sense of the word. For example, studies have shown that more than ninety-five percent of child care workers are women, and among those more than one-third are black or Latina.(25) Women also constitute the vast majority of workers in occupations that require caregiving.(26)

Fourth, for African-American women, motherhood includes the legacy of the control of their procreativity under slavery. Female slaves, in addition to performing work expected of men, bore the burden of reproduction of the slave workforce, domestic labor of White owners, and wet-nursing - all, once again, motherwork.(27)

Fifth, all fertile women are potentially subject to unintended motherhood either as a result of rape(28) or incest or because of the fallibility of even the most reliable birth control.(29) Finally, of course, many women do mother their own children, in the more traditional sense of the word, albeit in a variety of domestic relationships often outside of the nuclear family, and through forms of impregnation not limited to heterosexual intercourse.

Norms about mothering affect all women, but these norms do not have the same significance for all women, nor do all women similarly experience mothering. For example, most White mothers do not experience the pain of raising Black children in a racist society.(30) Nevertheless, because "[a]ll women are, at least to some extent, judged as 'Woman,'" all women can be said to have an interest in collaborating on issues with a gendered implication in their lives.(31) Such an understanding does not require the privileging of any one oppression or a belief that racism or patriarchy(32) is dominant.(33) Rather, racism and patriarchy are "mutually supporting systems of domination.(34) It is this reality of gender and race that makes the forging of alliances across differences, albeit shifting and impermanent ones, both possible and necessary.(35) This essay thus positions itself in a zone of tension: on the one hand I have already asserted grounds to suggest the importance of motherhood for all women, yet at the same time, considerations of diversity - of race and socio-economic status - should not be a convenient way to force others into a fixed paradigm. Therefore, although we must be wary of feminist theory's tendency to homogenize women's experience, it remains both possible and useful to talk about "women" and "mothers," and to bear in mind that control of women's reproduction is fundamental to race and class oppression.(36)

I take the position that mothering matters to all women because of the variety of ways in which motherhood is imposed on women's experiences because...