Eternal apology is not the toll women are duty bound to pay in exchange for making a basic healthcare decision. We certainly don’t owe it to the world’s misogynists to self-flagellate over our choices – choices that, when discussed free from the bogus rhetoric of regret and enforced grief, most of us are happy to reveal we made with unqualified relief. It’s no secret that women’s bodies and choices are considered to be held under the jurisdiction of everyone who isn’t them, but that doesn’t mean we actually have to tolerate that. Fuck those guys who try to make us feel guilty about putting ourselves first. Fuck those religious zealots who gather outside clinics waving photoshopped propaganda in our faces and telling us we’re going to hell. Fuck all those people who think that the body of a living, breathing, actual human is of less value and importance than something smaller than a thumb.
There is an important point to be made here about the dialogue around abortion. You may have noticed that I swing between referring to ‘people’ and ‘women’ when I discuss pregnancy. This is in recognition of the complexities around bodies, trans inclusivity and biological make-up. Not all cisgender women can become pregnant. Not all women have vaginas. Some people who seek abortions are trans men with uteruses. Some identify as gender non-conforming. The body and identity is a wonderfully diverse thing. So when I say ‘biological make-up’, it is absolutely not my intention to create a barrier between cis and trans women. It is merely to acknowledge that the definition of womanhood and biology is far more nuanced and complex than mainstream society considers it to be.
However, in discussing the specific attacks levelled on abortion clinics and the rights to access termination of pregnancy, I think it’s unwise to move completely away from a narrative which centralises the word ‘women’ and into a broader ‘people’ based one. While it is absolutely true that not every person who chooses abortion identifies as a woman, the vast majority of people accessing these services are cis women. More to the point, the reason abortion is so heavily policed is precisely because of archaic, binary notions of gender and reproductive labour. The anti-choice conservative is unlikely to even believe in basic gender diversity let alone acknowledge how broadly it can be defined. Their motivation to protest abortion isn’t just to save ‘innocent little babies’. I’d go so far as to say that it’s actually not really about babies at all. Their motivation is to reinforce their personal idea of what women are and should be – to wit, cis women with the capacity to bear children and who thus need to be indentured into the kind of gendered domestic servitude that supports male power in a patriarchy by feeding it, clothing it and cleaning up after it. Capitalism plays a helping hand here by positioning the domestic sphere as something women are uniquely capable of controlling – think of all the hapless husbands and dopey dad advertisements you’ve seen over the years. These are not, as Men’s Rights Activists frothingly argue, evidence of a society that is anti-man. Rather, they are tiny tools employed in the fight to maintain the status quo. Such an idea is issued in a double whammy:
1. Men are hopeless around the home, and that is why they need to dominate in the less difficult task of being Masters of the Universe.
2. Women can’t compete in the workplace or in leadership, but that doesn’t matter because they are Boss of the Home.
A significant driver of opposition to abortion is the social construction of the Ideal Woman. In a culture that rarely, if ever, allows women simply to be people, value is ascribed based on a woman’s relation to something other than herself. A woman on her own is like a bit of driftwood floating in the ocean. She is a broken object with no purpose, waiting either to wash up on the shore and be put to use as part of something else, or to sink and be forgotten forever.
A woman’s life only finds meaning when it becomes defined by another person’s. Her value increases once she becomes a wife, because finding a man to love her publicly forever is the goal that society, pop culture and history have conditioned most little girls to aspire to. For what are we without a man to not only love us but transform us from invisible peasant girls into princesses adored by all the kingdom? (This is also why one of the go-to, bet-a-million-dollars-on-it-happening, I-hear-it-at-least-once-a-day insults used against women from anti-feminists and angry men especially is the time-honoured ‘You’ll never find a husband with that mouth’ or the more aggressive ‘No wonder no man wants to fuck you, good luck being single and alone forever’. They always seem so confused when I tell them that being single forever sounds amazing and certainly a lot more financially rewarding.)
After being validated by a man’s love, the next step for a woman towards nominally recognised personhood is to bear his children. Note that they have to come in this order – a woman who has a child before finding a husband isn’t a beatific vision of feminine power in the eyes of society. No, she’s an irresponsible wench who ‘got herself pregnant’ and is now probably sucking on the teat of the welfare system and cheating everyone out of their hard-earned tax dollars. There’s no shortage of irony in the fact that the same people who argue that abortion is the act of selfish sluts who can’t keep their legs shut will often express opposition to supporting single mothers (especially those further disadvantaged by youth, race or class status) because ‘if you can’t afford children, you shouldn’t have a baby’. Pregnant women who don’t want to have children shouldn’t be allowed to have an abortion because it’s selfish murder, but if you get pregnant and have a child don’t go sticking your hand out for benefits because you should have thought of that before you gave birth. (Look, logical thinking has never been the strong suit of people who think terminating pregnancies in the uterus is the evil murder of God’s children, but bombing the shit out of brown babies in the Middle East is necessary to preserve our way of life.)
Anyway, after marriage comes a baby and the women who follow this prescribed step are allowed to become their authentic selves. These two things are assumed without question to be the pinnacle of female desire – for what could we possibly want other than to become somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother? This is evident in the way unmarried women over a certain age become the objects of ridicule. Sad, desperate, shrivelled-up old things who’ve missed the boat on love and are therefore destined to roam the earth in a perpetual state of misery. Think about the money tabloid magazines have made from writing about Jennifer Aniston over the years. Poor, lonely, barren old Jennifer Aniston – a woman who actually had managed to ‘land’ a husband, only to have him leave her, childless, to run off and start breeding prolifically with someone else. He also managed to avoid public criticism of his actions because stories of the catfight between Aniston and Angelina Jolie – pathetic women fighting over a man – were way more saleable than that of a cad husband.
Think about the derision and suspicion levelled at women who are open about their lack of maternal aspirations. ‘I’m not interested in having kids’ is rarely met with enthusiasm or even grudging acceptance. Instead, the women who say this (and who are never respected enough to know their own minds or breadth of emotional history) are told that they’ll change their minds one day or end up regretting it. ‘But who’ll take care of you when you’re older?’ people ask. ‘You’ll end up lonely and alone!’
Haha! As if anyone cares about old women.
If women in general are already considered to be a social afterthought, old women especially are framed as irrelevant nobodies. Once a woman has passed marriageable and reproductive age, what’s the point of her? Who’d want to spend time with an old woman when they didn’t have to – apart from the children who are obliged to? It says a lot about how these people see women that they can’t conceive of a rich life for them, one that’s full of friends, intellectual stimulation and no children, beyond the age of fifty.
All of these expectations can be traced right back through the purpose of women in history. While men are busy exercising their right to run the world, women are expected to stay busy providing them with comfortable homes
, a sense of respectability and a male heir to keep the family name alive. The thrill of supporting a man with our bodies, our children and our unpaid labour is not only supposed to make us happy but is offered as some kind of vital ingredient in the world’s evolution. It’s why absurd, insulting platitudes are thrown around to appease us, platitudes like ‘behind every great man there is a woman’. I prefer to think of it like this: ‘behind every well-respected man, there’s a woman who probably does his washing.’
Of course, the reality is that women are human beings with just as many aspirations as men. For every woman who might regret not having a child, there is a mother who, in her heart of hearts, wishes she had chosen to remain childfree and single. Why is it that men who prioritise adventure and independence over family are called ‘committed bachelors’ and ‘wanderers’ who just can’t be tied down, but women who similarly pursue a life free from burdens are called ‘spinsters’ and ‘cat ladies’ and are viewed as pitiful cautionary tales? It’s because men are given the complexity to be fully rounded individuals while women are still treated like plants in need of a man’s attention to fully bloom.
But the possibility that women might exist in their own right didn’t really become a problem for patriarchal order until the advent of the contraceptive pill. As pregnancy became more preventable in the upswing of the sexual and feminist revolutions (and as abortion became safer and more accessible), women’s options rapidly expanded. They no longer needed to rely on men to provide for them financially and they certainly didn’t need to bear their children if they didn’t want to. The Independent Woman was born – and to some people, she was terrifying.
Rebecca Traister references this fear in a 2014 article published in New Republic. In ‘Let’s Just Say It: Women Matter More than Fetuses Do’, Traister addresses the insidious tactics of the anti-choice movement and how, seemingly with the permission or at least acquiescence of pro-choice lobbies, it has managed not only to centralise developing fetuses over the fully formed humans who carry them, but also establish them as more valuable and important. She writes:
After [US Supreme Court decision on abortion] Roe was decided in 1973, the varied experiences of mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, friends and selves suddenly seemed drained of their value. It was as if in gaining rights, not just to abortion, but also to greater professional and economic and sexual opportunity, women lost any claim to morality – a morality that had, perhaps, been imaginatively tied to their exclusively reproductive identities.
What rose up instead was a new character, less threatening than the empowered woman: the baby, who, by virtue of not actually existing as a formed human being, could be invested with all the qualities – purity, defencelessness, dependence – that women used to embody, before they became free and disruptive.
The idea of a baby as the symbol of perfect innocence has resonance with many people. Most of us are at least somewhat invested in the idea of protecting the children who can’t protect themselves, even people who aren’t particularly sold on having children themselves. Where things become dangerous is when the word ‘baby’ becomes automatically synonymous with everything that happens throughout the process of gestation. While characterising what happens from conception as a ‘baby’ might satisfy those invested in maintaining the false narrative of abortion as murder, it’s not scientifically true. If life begins at conception, it’s only in the sense that cells which divide and grow are alive, and it takes a few more steps than doing the boudoir hokey-pokey to create what we could reasonably identify as a baby. Of course, none of that matters to the mostly male legislators who persist in trying to equate the ‘life’ of a blastocyst with that of an actual fully formed human-being woman person. Science? Psshhhht.
Here’s where I tell you a different story.
One morning late in 2015, I stood in a hotel room on the Balinese island of Nusa Lembongan and stared at a pregnancy stick. There was one solid line on it, the same single, solid line I’d seen in the three tests I’d done the day before, the day before that and the day before that. But there was something else as well, something new. A faint second line.
Did a whisper of a second line mean you were pregnant, or did it just mean the test wasn’t entirely sure so had decided to take an each-way bet?
I turned to Google, the omnipotent oracle from which I’d previously sought advice on everything from whether or not a sore leg meant I had bone cancer or if taking half a Valium with three glasses of wine would definitely cause your heart to stop.
Pregnancy test faint second line pregnant? I typed in. The search results told me all I needed to know: a second line, however faint, was almost certainly a sign of pregnancy.
I looked at the stick again, just to be sure. Two lines, one faint. Pregnant.
My grin was silly and large, spreading across my face with seemingly no input from my conscious thought. I was going to have a baby.
I spent the rest of the day sitting at a restaurant on the shore-front, chatting excitedly with some of my girlfriends on Facebook. Common theory holds that women should wait until the first trimester is over before announcing their pregnancy because the risk of miscarriage is so much higher in the early stages. It makes sense to a certain extent, but I’ve also wondered why women are expected to keep that secret to themselves. Perhaps I just lack the self-control and patience that we’re told is a virtue in motherhood, but I told five women within two hours of peeing on that stick and I hadn’t even confirmed it to my boyfriend yet. The feeling, though – the feeling was overwhelming. I was excited and terrified and thrilled and terrified and grateful and also terrified. Most of all, I was happy. This was a good result. This was a desired result. This was something I’d spent the last year dreaming of and looking forward to, floating baby names with JB and joking with him about how he’d finally be able to talk about his records with someone whose limited mobility meant they’d have no choice but to listen.
The jubilation I felt that day on the island couldn’t have been further from the distress I’d felt almost a decade earlier, the first time a home pregnancy kit told me there was something taking up residence in my uterus. Back then, all I saw in those two lines was loss and suffocation. I saw myself being landed with a responsibility I didn’t want and certainly wasn’t equipped to handle. I felt trapped and sick and scared. I also felt nothing for the thing inside me – no love, no connection and certainly no hope.
At thirty-four, seeing two lines on a stick still terrified me, but it was a different kind of terror. It was the terror that comes from wanting to do something well. It was the terror of knowing that this choice, the choice to go ahead and have a child, would divert the carriage I’d been riding in and take all three of us – me, JB and the baby – into completely uncharted territory. It was the terror of knowing that I’d spend every day for the rest of my life always being terrified – terrified that my child was safe, that they were happy, that they were making choices that were right for them, that they didn’t feel overwhelmed by the life I had brought them into just to satisfy my own craving for something different.
As fierce and deep as this terror ran, I also knew I could do it. I knew I was ready. At twenty-five, I had so many reasons for not wanting a baby, but most of them boiled down to the fact that I barely knew who I was. If I’d had a child, I would have become completely defined by them. Everything about me would be about them. Having a child before I was ready would have sent me hurtling along a path that took me far away from the life I lead now. Would it have derailed my life completely? No. I’d have managed. But it would have been hard. I would have been mostly alone and definitely unqualified. Every day would have been a struggle to earn money, to pay bills, to live and breathe and carry on and just keep going.
Crucially, I wouldn’t have been able to pursue a career as a writer. That might not mean much to others, but it means a lot to me. With a baby and then a toddler and then a child in what would likely be a single parent household, I wouldn
’t have been able to focus on the topics that have consumed my life for the last few years: things like rape culture, men’s violence against women, women’s poor representation in governance and leadership, the ways we are taught to hate ourselves, the intense hatred some men seem to have for us that partly manifests in online abuse and harassment – in short, the things that I discuss in this book, which is the culmination of all those years of work.
I don’t think it’s arrogant to believe that one can make a difference in the world. And I believe that the work I’ve been able to do because I have been able to throw myself into it wholeheartedly has made and is making a difference. My life has mattered. The choices I’ve made, including the choice to end two separate pregnancies that came at the wrong time, have been worth it. But because I’m a woman, I’m expected to not only defend but also apologise for those choices in ways that men just aren’t.
Life, if we can help it, should be about more than simply carrying on and keeping on going. If we are lucky enough to have the opportunity to shape our lives, we should grab it with both hands. For some women, that involves embracing an unexpected pregnancy at twenty-five and funnelling all their love into that child. That’s wonderful. Good for them. I am truly happy to know that there are women who can make it work. But there are a shitload more women who can’t, and who do it either because they believe they have no other options or because legislated misogyny means they literally have no other options. These women carry on and keep on going. They love their children – of course they do. If you ask them, they’ll say they can’t imagine their life without them. Because this is their life now, and we make the best of what we’ve got. We have to find joy in our lives, otherwise what’s the point?
Fight Like A Girl Page 10