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, April 20th 2015

Gaslighting STEM

Gaslighting Duo Ceci and Williams are at it again. They’ve published another piece saying there is nothing to worry about in STEM in terms of institutional climate that might be limiting women’s careers or progress. Rather than link to their own op-ed or not-exactly-hard-hitting pieces in mainstream media, I’ll point my readers to dissenting perspectives offered by several smart colleagues:

The Myth About Women in Science? Bias in the study of gender inequality in STEM by Dr. Zuleyka Zevallos at Other Sociology

Be careful saying “The Myth About Women in Science” is solved by Dr. Marie-Claire Shanahan at Boundary Vision

“A Surprisingly Welcome Atmosphere” by Dr. Matthew R. Francis at Slate

#StillaProblem II: academic science is (still) sexist, Storify curated by Dr. Karen E. James

 

Thursday, April 10th 2014

Stag Parties: Awareness and Elegant Solutions

Kiddo spills her milk. We lock eyes, and she dissolves in a puddle of sadness, crying about how it’s all her fault and she feels SO BAD.

“Kiddo, honey, it’s really okay. Let’s get a towel and wipe it up together.”

But she can’t stop crying. I comfort her for a while, being patient with her feelings and wanting her to process what’s going on. But at a certain point, the crying feels like a rehearsal of bigger things. So I say, “I notice you are crying a lot about the milk, but I’m not mad at you. Why are you still so upset do you think?”

“I’m just a sensitive child!” And back she goes to crying.

At this moment, I feel anger at myself for having too many conversations about kiddo in her presence while she listened and internalized grownups’ thinking about her. But there is a little part of me also feeling mad at kiddo. Anger that she accepts the label and, to me, seems to be using it to say something permanent and inflexible about herself.

So, I went to the person I know with the most insight into this issue: my daughter’s kindergarten teacher. I explained to her my predicament.

She thought for a moment. “Ah, see we grownups have all moved on to the next developmental step. We have awareness of kiddo’s sensitivity, and are already thinking of the ways she can grow and learn from it. But kiddo herself has only just hit the awareness stage.”

And suddenly it made sense. The couple of weeks of “But I’m SENSITIVE!” sounded, in retrospect, like a child figuring out something about herself for the first time, not an entrenched position. When someone is at the awareness stage, they don’t yet know what to do about it. They just know they’re there.

* * *

A dear colleague and friend, Dr. Pablo Nepomnaschy, contacted me to see if I would write a blog post informing our colleagues about his upcoming conference, “Evolutionary Aspects of Child Development and Health,” taking place this June at Simon Fraser University. A quick glance at who the email was from and the title of the conference, and of course I said yes.

Days later, when I looked up the materials for the conference to write my post, I saw the list of invited speakers. Only two of the fourteen were female, in a field that is absolutely dominated by senior and junior women. In fact, Pablo and I were in a special working group on evolutionary medicine and reproduction just a few years ago that was run by two women and had at least fifty percent female representation. While the invited speaker list was excellent, I could not comprehend how a list skewed in such a way could have happened. Balanced gender representation should have happened naturally.

When I brought this up with Pablo, he was horrified at his error and of course wanted to make this right (and gave me permission to write this post about it). Pablo, like many of us in the sciences, has just hit the awareness stage. It’s that moment when we get caught in our own biases and have to acknowledge that everyone has them, from the most sensitive ally to the most brazen bigot. Plenty of research bears this out. So for instance, while male-only leadership (as with this conference) has been shown to lead to gender disparities in symposia speakers (Isbell et al., 2012), there is work also demonstrating that both women and men carry stereotypes that lead to gender-biased hiring decisions (Moss-Racusin et al., 2012).

Getting to the awareness stage is revelatory, and hard, and kind of sticky too. Awareness can feel like a label or a permanent problem.

It’s exciting to think about the ways in which it is not. Pablo – and perhaps also the rest of the organizing committee, and the speaker lineup – have a chance to unstick here. There is always an elegant solution for people invested in creating an academic science environment that lifts up all of its excellent scholars, appreciates diverse perspectives and approaches to our common questions, and makes active, intentional progress towards parity.

 

References

Isbell LA, Young TP, Harcourt AH. 2012. Stag parties linger: continued gender bias in a female-rich scientific discipline. PloS one 7(11):e49682.

Moss-Racusin CA, Dovidio JF, Brescoll VL, Graham MJ, Handelsman J. 2012. Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109(41):16474-16479.