Monday, June 27th 2022

Passive metaphors of pregnancy, and what it means for abortion

I was on Facebook after the Supreme Court’s Roe decision. Bad idea, right? Yet it was more heartening than I expected; friends and acquaintances with whom I’d never discussed abortion were posting memes and thoughts about how enraged they were. There was shared grief, problem solving, organizing.

Then of course there were the comments.

Anti-abortion commenters were crowing below these posts about how great it was that now more deaths would be prevented… as though abortion does not save lives. The more I read, the more the wording got to me. One commenter on a high school friend’s post insisted that the fetus is “a separate person connected to your body. You can choose for your body but not for a separate little person.”

That’s the comment that pushed me over the edge.

I know anti-abortion people do not care about the truth of how abortion is necessary healthcare; this is not an information deficit issue but a power one. I want to point out though that the way we often teach and talk about pregnancy is part of what allows anti-abortion people to imagine this separateness between the parent and fetus, and to dehumanize and limit the rights of pregnant people.

As an example, in Dr. Rene Almeling’s book GUYnecology, she interviews a range of men about their understanding of pregnancy. Many of them began their descriptions with what is still a common framing: that the sperm is active, the egg passive (not accurate but that’s for another time). About half of the sample eventually arrived at an egalitarian description after some initial fumbling, but half were still staunch believers that the uterus is a “baby basket” or that “you come from your father.”

Many others have written of this problematic framing (most famously, perhaps, Dr. Emily Martin’s article “The Sperm and the Egg” and her book The Woman in the Body). There is also a longer conversation to be had here about the extent to which this framing comes from the expectations of normative white femininity and is therefore rooted in white supremacy (if ever there was a plug for my upcoming book, it’s this!). But today I want to explain the consequences.

When you see a uterus as, at best, a parking space for a car, it’s not just that you miss out on all the glorious, interconnected things that the uterus does in conversation with the parent’s brain, heart, lungs, ovaries, their stress hormones and other chemical signals… though you do. Trophoblasts, placentas, and eventually fetuses need biofeedback from the parent to receive information from the parent about the world outside – from the way the parent’s heart slows or races, how their breathing changes, what hormones they excrete. The reason extremely premature babies have a high death rate and tend to have a number of health issues is not that our external incubators in NICUs are not good. It’s that incubation only achieves the barest minimum of what a living, breathing, thinking, pregnant person does for a fetus. “Separation” is a myth.

The consequence beyond how we gloss over the science is that without understanding that interconnection you miss how much it means to be pregnant – by thinking of a uterus as a parking space you miss the costs of pregnancy. You miss the way autonomy is built into the system and how that system protects the parent over the fetus. You dehumanize the incubator.

Scientists used to think that undernourished pregnant people would put all available resource into the growth of their fetus, so any scrap of extra food went straight to the fetus – Professor Meredith Reiches at UMass-Boston calls this the “infant priority model.” We now know the pregnant person’s body does the opposite, and rather than beefing up a fetus extra calories go to that parent. The extra calories might become additional energy available for activity, they might become fat reserves, and in fact in natural fertility samples (people who do not use medical or barrier contraception) this extra energy does not make babies bigger but shortens the interval between births. It improves that parent’s chances for further reproductive success with more babies, rather than shunting more energy into a bigger baby so that individual baby has a stronger start.

The pregnant body does incredible things to provide resources and information to its fetus. And it also creates firm boundaries to ensure the fetus doesn’t overdo it and take more than it can give (which by the way, if you’ve been pregnant, you know is still a freaking lot). The idea of a baby basket, a parking space, an incubator, whatever passive metaphor you want to use breaks down when you know how pregnancy works. And it lays bare the terror of having to do all this work to care for a fetus when someone does not want to, and/or when something has gone wrong in the process (e.g., ectopic pregnancy, infection).

Again, I know anti-abortion people do not care about the truth. I also know a scientific justification for abortion is not necessary to support abortion – simple respect for every person’s bodily autonomy should actually be enough. But if we could change the metaphors – if we could talk differently about how pregnancy works and what it does and the role of the whole pregnant person – we at least wouldn’t be doing some of the work for them.

References:

Almeling, R. (2020). Chapter 5: Sex, Sperm, and Fatherhood. GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health, University of California Press.

Martin, E. (1980). The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston, Beacon Press.

Martin, E. (1991). “The egg and the sperm: how science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles.” Signs 16(3): 485-501.

Reiches, M. (2019). “Reproductive Justice and the History of Prenatal Supplementation: Ethics, Birth Spacing, and the “Priority Infant” Model in The Gambia: Winner of the 2019 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship.” Signs 45(1): 3-26.

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Monday, February 23rd 2015

What is your problem?

Recently, I got back a manuscript rejection with very constructive reviews, which, looking back, were more generous than I deserved. The manuscript suffered from some common problems: multiple well-meaning authors with their own ideas of the main point, a desire to include these variable perspectives in a single paper, and an anticipation of issues reviewers may raise. What resulted was a muddled argument, vague nods to all the different theoretical perspectives we thought might be relevant, and no resolution of our expert opinion to guide the reader.

It was, to be kind, a piece of crap.

As I started to go through reviewer comments to create a revision action plan (do you do this? I do so hope you do this), I realized that in my effort to include every piece of insight and every theoretical contribution, and yet not offend anybody, I had forgotten the first rule of writing I teach my students. The very first sentences of your paper or grant proposal should tell the reader what your problem is, and why they should care.

Here are the types of questions I ask my students, before their first draft and usually still after the first revision or two. These frame your introduction but also your paper’s argument. Since I can’t always seem to remember these questions, I’d like to think it’s because this is actually difficult to do well, and, in some cases, difficult to keep in sight when revising.

  • What problem do you face?
  • Why is it a problem (e.g., is there a gap in the literature, is it a new or emerging problem, is it that you are finding a problem others haven’t noticed because you are putting different ideas together)? Explain the gap or other issue, don’t just say there is one.
  • Why should anyone care? This should come from the theoretical context of your work – so in biological anthropology we frequently speak of responses to environment, life history theory, genes x environment, evolutionary theory, or sometimes feminist or other humanist/social science theories. Don’t muddle things with too many different theoretical contributions, because the introduction needs to focus and inspire the reader.
  • Now do a better job answering the above question – why should anyone care in a real, grounded way? Why, in relation to your particular problem and set of interests?
  • NOW you get to tell the reader, how are you going to solve it? What is your hypothesis/main argument?
  • What background information will the reader need next to evaluate your problem and the way you plan to resolve it?
  • How will you test your hypothesis? In a manuscript you also briefly tell the reader at the end of the introduction what you found. In a grant proposal the order of some of these last bullets will change.

Then, the discussion needs to reflect these problems and the theoretical framework. Often I find over the course of a revision I completely rewrite what the problem is, why anyone should care, and which background information the reader needs. But you won’t know the final version until you write a first version. So ideally you get to the discussion and need to do a little more work:

  • Restate the problem your paper seeks to address and the way you did it (whatever models you may have introduced into the methods and results, whatever specific hypothesis you have since described). Is there a way you might say it differently now, as the reader now fully knows how you did it and what you found?
  • What do each of your results contribute to the broader literature? This is your chance, if there were some neat side papers you wanted to talk about in the introduction, to talk about here. And this is where many like to employ a sandbox metaphor: if you imagine your discipline is actually a giant sandbox where everybody is playing together, you can imagine your contributions to mirror how kids play. I like this metaphor because it reminds us that many scholars are our friends and colleagues, and that when we are engaging with their work it always helps to be generous.
    • Are you tearing down a friend’s castle by challenging a scholar’s claims?
    • Are you admiring your friend’s castle by allying yourself with existing work and reaffirming their findings?
    • Are you adding a new tower to your friend’s castle by adding something to a scholar’s existing argument?
    • Are you tearing down one tower from your friend’s castle to add another, thus revising a scholar’s argument?
  • What are the limitations to your conclusions? None of us get to carry out our research exactly as we want due to limited resources. What are the things you want to say here to demonstrate you are conscientious and aware of what you can and cannot say?
  • What do your results, perspectives, and/or limitations help us understand about a way forward? What exciting new directions does your work offer the reader? How can you leave the reader thinking they wish they had performed your research? I have found myself worrying less and less about a bang-up conclusion sentence these days, because I think good conclusions emerge from answering these questions.

When you can answer these questions, even poorly (remember how important it is to write crappy first drafts), you have an outline or even a full draft. Then you often have to go through, once you see how it all looks together, and completely change whatever you thought was the main point, the supporting literature, and the way forward. This may depend on collaborators, or the journal you choose, or a new paper that came out while you were writing.

But you’ll never get there if you don’t start. You’ll never start if you don’t plan and schedule your writing. And you’ll never finish if you don’t commit to writing every day (yes, every day, a la Dr. Kerry Ann Rocquemore’s Faculty Success Program). So get off the internet and do it!

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Monday, October 6th 2014

We Talked, They Listened (Mostly), Then They Made Things Worse

A list of things in my house, in approximate descending quantitative order. I may have left a few out, and the list may be biased because I did a free association where one thing led me to think of another. But! It’s a list!!! And, well, if you have any issues with the accuracy or inclusiveness of my list, I’ll just make a longer one, with more stuff that I find important, using possibly worse and less inclusive metrics to determine it as I did the first time.

  1. Microbes: oh I don’t know, a whole whole lot
  2. Dustmites: also a whole whole lot, but probably a bit less than microbes
  3. Face mites (thanks Ed Yong! I know this makes it looks like you gave them to us, but I’m going to leave this parenthetical comment as is): I don’t want to think about this, but I know it’s a lot
  4. Legos: many, many, many
  5. Books: this is a family that likes to read
  6. Socks: we also like to wear socks
  7. Fleas (thanks to our collie and no thanks to the completely useless Frontline Plus!): almost eradicated, but they persist in this one dog’s fur
  8. Issues of National Geographic: over one hundred
  9. Pieces of unfolded laundry: under one hundred
  10. Underpants: under one hundred but more under than the laundry
  11. Chocolate chips: just made cookies so less than usual
  12. Children’s hair clips: oh dear god they hurt almost as bad as a lego when you step on them
  13. Green tomatoes from the garden because we were about to have a frost: yum
  14. Baby carrots: one bag
  15. Issues of Runners World: we recently culled them, so fewer than in the past
  16. Rolls of toilet paper: about a dozen
  17. Overdue library books: less than a dozen
  18. Humans: three
  19. Cats: two
  20. Dog: one