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6. Choice
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Choice “Choice” is the key word in Gloria Steinem’s explanation of why single mothers represent a threat to conservative forces as we enter the twenty-first century. On an Oxygen channel documentary on single mothers, Steinem says, “Positive choice is new. It would be OK if those women had been cast aside—left, widowed, divorced. It’s OK for women to be victims. It’s not OK for us to affirmatively choose what we want to do.” The documentary follows a support group for women who have already become or who want to become single mothers. What is striking, however, is the lack of choice they feel, from the attempt to become pregnant to the work of raising a child alone. The frustration prompts intense emotions, from Janet, who cries when she can’t get pregnant through arti ficial insemination, to Karen, who is sad that her daughter’s father doesn ’t want to be part of her life. Lori gives up on artificial insemination and adopts a baby girl from China, happily so, but then struggles as the doctors discover a tumor on the baby’s leg. At one point, all the women sit around discussing whether their children will feel a loss at not having or knowing a father. There is one dispassionate voice: the doctor, who warns about the risks that fertility hormones might cause ovarian cancer. None of these single mothers or mothers-to-be seems to be exercising much of the choice that Steinem celebrates. Instead, the road to mothering is arduous and filled with obstacles that many women could not overcome . Still, by the end of the documentary, each woman is pregnant, has had a baby, or is on the verge of receiving an adopted baby. Feminism has helped make single mothering a respectable choice. Given the history of demonization of single mothers precisely because they seem to have made the choice not to marry, this is a considerable achievement. It corresponds with other Second Wave demands for the freedom to control one’s body and future, through the choice of where to 6 206 work, who or whether to marry, and whether to have a baby. Yet there are problems with hinging a politics on choice: What about women who can’t choose? And who does really choose, in the unfettered and autonomous sense in which the concept is often invoked in the United States? Reproductive freedom for much of Second Wave feminism meant the choice to have sex without having a baby. Now we might say that reproductive freedom includes the choice to have a baby without having sex. Assisted reproductive technologies and adoption deessentialize motherhood and fatherhood, distancing these roles from the realms of biology that, as we saw in the last chapter, still seem so powerful in determining the lives of single mothers and their children. The potential of reproductive technologies was recognized by Shulamith Firestone in her 1970 The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, in which she called for the development of birth technologies such as ectogenesis (babies in test tubes, to be reductive) that would free women from the “tyranny of reproduction.” What if sexual procreation were no longer the basis for family? The more technology is used to assist reproduction, the less one thinks of birth as natural, grounded in gendered and sexual essentialisms. As anthropologist Marilyn Strathern describes the potential of assisted reproductive technologies, or ARTs: “Procreation can now be thought about as subject to personal preference and choice in a way that has never before been conceivable. The child is literally—and in many cases, of course, joyfully—the embodiment of the act of choice” (1992, 34). The issues raised here extend beyond the family, beyond the question of whether to have children or not. They encompass the boundaries of the cultural imaginary and the basis of social relations, so much of which are structured around the idea that “family” is inevitably determined. “If till now kinship has been a symbol for everything that cannot be changed about social affairs, if biology has been a symbol for the given parameters of human existence, what will it mean for the way we construe any of our relationships with one another to think of parenting as the implementing of an option and genetic make-up as an outcome of cultural preference ?” (Strathern 1992, 34–35). Single mothers who use ARTs thus become domestic intellectuals who offer new, nonbiological conceptions of family...