Erased from the dialogue
At Feminist Current, Susan Cox interviews Mary Lou Singleton.
Who gives birth? The answer used to be: females. Today, it’s considered politically incorrect to say that it is women, specifically, who get pregnant and become mothers. Thus, in the name of inclusivity, a number of women’s reproductive health groups are changing their terminology in order to degender the language of birth. Several organizations now refer to “pregnant people,” “pregnant individuals,” and “birthing parents” instead. Feministing writer Jos Truitt recently demanded we “Stop saying and stop thinking that abortion is a women’s issue.”
Well, okay then! Degendering women’s issues — I mean, “people’s issues” — is way progressive. But what are the costs of doing that? What are we losing in erasing women from the language of such a fundamental aspect of female bodily reality?
Mary Lou Singleton, midwife, feminist, and reproductive sovereignty activist recently addressed this question, along with many others, in an open letter to the Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA). The letter asks MANA to reconsider the revision of their core competencies to remove all references to women and mothers. I recently spoke with her about these events and her upcoming actions at MANA’s annual conference.
It’s ironic, or something…The problem used to be that all women were assumed to be mommies or wannabe mommies, now the problem is that women are tactfully concealed from the whole child-bearing thing.
Susan: Is there a history of women and women’s anatomy being erased from language and the conceptualization of sexual reproduction?
Mary Lou: Absolutely. I mean we can look at the anti-abortion movement since the 70s — possibly even longer, since the women’s liberation uprising in the late 60s/early 70s that clamored for abortion rights, then with Roe v. Wade saying that abortion was legal and between a woman and her doctor — whenever women won abortion rights, the right wing began a huge campaign to erase women from language and focus on the fetus. They focused, instead, on the fertilized egg, the embryo, and the fetus, which they called the “baby,” when obviously it’s not actually scientifically a baby until it’s born. There’s a great Stop Patriarchy chant: “A baby’s not a baby till it comes out. That’s what birthdays are all about.”
But to the anti-choice crowd a fertilized egg is a baby, an embryo is a baby, a fetus is a baby. All of their literature is about these pictures of fetuses, these pictures of embryos saying, “I have a heartbeat at this many weeks.” “I have fingerprints at this many weeks.” And the woman is completely erased from the dialog. The only time the woman might be mentioned is when they use infantilizing terms like “mommy” — “Mommy don’t kill me!” Or sometimes they will call the pregnant woman a mother, when she’s not yet a mother. She’s a gestating female and she’s in the process of deciding whether or not to stay pregnant and she’s deciding whether or not to become a mother. Yet she’s put into this societal gender role of “mother” and this fetus is a “baby,” and never ever ever is the word “woman” mentioned. So there is an absolute erasure of women in the abortion debate on the right.
It was very much a calculated move on their part to erase women from the language of pregnancy and put their focus on “saving babies”… “Saving babies” by treating women like incubators, that is. “Saving babies” by forcing women to go through all the full physical and emotional risks of term pregnancies against their wills. “Saving babies” by enslaving women is the part of the conversation that’s never mentioned. And even in the liberal press, nobody calls them on that. The question isn’t: When does a fertilized egg become a human being? The question is: When does a woman stop being a human being and become a state-regulated incubator? So even on the left there isn’t a whole lot of advocacy for women as full human beings — full citizens with the right to bodily autonomy.
The whole thing is a tight unbreakable circle. Women are enslaved because they’re the ones who have the babies, and they can be enslaved this way because they are women – second class, subordinate, inferior – lesser, lower, slavish, thing-like, property. That’s why I think it’s a bad mistake to erase women from the politics of abortion and contraception rights: it’s because it’s political, and it’s political as the class of men subordinating the class of women.
Susan: This more current erasure of the role of women in reproduction reminds me of the way it’s been done throughout history, all the way back to antiquity. For example, Aristotle said that men provide the seed for reproduction and women are merely the soil. The idea being that the man’s sperm does everything to create the baby and the woman is merely the space in which it occurs — an incubator.
MaryLou: And isn’t that just what we’re still saying? By saying that life begins at fertilization, we are essentially saying that life begins at ejaculation. That a baby is something a man ejaculates into a woman.
Oh zing – so it is. I hadn’t made that connection before. I knew the Aristotle claim, and have cited it, but I didn’t connect it with the “life begins at conception” mantra.
MaryLou: Yes, they’re saying that it’s not something a woman creates with close to 10 months of physical labour — that’s what a baby is. A baby is a new human being that a woman creates over the course of 10 months of physical work. Life-begins-at-fertilization is saying that a baby is something that a man ejaculates into a woman and that woman is then obligated to bring that baby to term, because it’s a full human being at ejaculation. So… we haven’t progressed since Aristotle! [Laughs]
Susan: It’s as if men want to take credit for birth.
But Singleton goes on to say things I don’t agree with.
MaryLou: Yes, and women’s labour is made invisible all over the world. I mean, the world runs on the uncompensated labour of women. And that’s part of sex-based oppression. We have to be able to discuss that. In midwifery this is so important because midwifery is a place where women have authentic power. This is a woman’s tradition. It’s women’s work to give birth. You can’t think of a more woman-centered profession and reality than the place where we focus on gestation, birth, and early mothering.”
No, I don’t buy that. It’s too “essentialist” for my taste – too close to agreeing with the old idea I just mentioned, that all women are mommies or wannabe mommies, and that if they’re not there’s something wrong with them. It also excludes men, when the healthier approach is surely to involve fathers as much as possible. I think it makes sense to involve men in the birth process, but I think it does not make sense to delete the word “women” from the politics of abortion.
Please pardon this brief derail:
Mary Lou is my sister-in-law!
Well small world!
I do think pregnant person is a good compromise especially when it comes to talking about abortion. The main point about abortion is that people should have control of their bodies. Calling someone a uterus bearer does erase the person. And chest feeding is just ridiculous.
Abortion will be always be a woman’s issue but it can also be a transgender issue. thinking about it, abortion is an issue for everyone. Anti-abortion people come with all sort of reasons to be against abortion. But we can criticize and sometimes yell at these people for supporting the patriarchy, for fetishizing the fetus over the living thinking person.
… reproductive sovereignty activist …
Hadn’t heard that one before.
Does Singleton intend to co-opt the right-wing rhetoric of “sovereign citizens”?
If so, why?
As a trans man who has gestated and given birth too (whilst in stealth mode), I agree that we can’t give recognition to people like me by erasing women. The only reason that reproductive rights for women are in any way controversial is because they are for women.
I would prefer to say “Women, and other people with female reproductive systems’. So what if it’s longer? Since when did we get so lazy that we couldn’t speak, write, or type enough words to make ourselves clear?
I’d like to say to these people “Stop erasing women and then claim it is on behalf of people like me. I don’t appreciate it, and you’re making people like me look like jerks.”
“Pregnant person” is not a compromise, because it erases women. Erasing women is not a compromise.
These arguments actually support why including people with female reproductive organs who don’t identify as women in the abortion debate does not come at the expense of women.
Women being erased from the abortion debate happens by focusing on the fetus, not on “non-women” who might carry a fetus. Saying “pregnant person” puts the focus back on the already existing human being whose rights and bodily autonomy the whole thing is about. As you put it, Ophelia, “second class, subordinate, inferior – lesser, lower, slavish, thing-like, property” are exactly the associations evoked by the word “woman” for many anti-choice people, so wording that emphasises her personhood is a good thing.
Yes, it says something about the shitty state of the world when you have to point out “hey, we’re talking about an actual people here” in a debate that’s mainly about women, but refusing to acknowledge this is not helping anyone.
The clear humanising effect of using “people doing X” or “X people” instead of the group designation has been recognised in various fields, and it really makes a difference. There’s a good reason why cycling lane proponents say “people on bikes” instead of “cyclists”, or why we’re talking about “people with a disability” instead of “the disabled”.
Well, no. That’s a nice idea, but it’s not what’s going on here.
Yes, precisely! Using “pregnant people” instead of “women” is just the start of a very slippery slope. Pretty soon the whole world will either forget about the fact that women exist or they will forget the fact that abortion and reproductive health actually does involve and effect women. It’s like these people want to hide these two facts and they think they can do that by changing the language to obscure them.
In the name of supposed inclusiveness, they seek to completely erase women from any discussion of abortion and reproductive health.
Is it any surprise that the people pushing for this erasure of women (the transcabal) just happen to have been born as males? Not only do they want to co-opt womanhood by claiming the right to “transition” but they want to go further and erase women from the discussion entirely. It’s not enough that they be allowed to live and identify as one of us, they want us erased too.
They want the tail wagging the dog. Glad to see there are people standing up to this nonsense.
Well I don’t think there’s any chance that the whole world will actually forget about the fact that women exist. I think the danger is that the political nature of the war on abortion rights will be obscured – that it will be seen as more random and arbitrary than it is.
Of course, the very word ‘midwife’ is going to be attacked. The etymology is from ‘mit-weib’ or ‘with woman.’ The ‘wife’ is the person assisted, not the assistant. Men can be ‘midwives’ though it hasn’t been common for a looooong time.
So ‘mid-person in labor’ or ‘mid-pregnant person’ are going to be suggested soon?
People who say that the statement “if men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament” is TERFy, I think are missing the point, which is to say that if it were men who had to face the inconvenience and risk to life of pregnancy as a consequence of having sex, societal attitudes to abortion would be different.
As for removing women’s nomenclature, it occurs to me to wonder if the terrible way trans-gender people (both men and women) are treated is because of their association with womanhood:
Trans men are really just women who want to join the boys’ club, which is quite understandable since men are so much better, but the trans men will never really make the grade – the best they can do is pretend to be men, but deep down they will always be women, with all the inferiority that entails. Trans women are even worse: They are naturally men, but choose to throw away their male birthright to become inferior. They will always be considered failed men, and they will never be accepted as true women, but their attempts at womanhood will taint them.*
*I would hope I do not have to say this, but just to be perfectly clear: Nothing in the preceding paragraph represents my own opinion.