Not Trying: Infertility, Childlessness, and Ambivalence

8. From Mandate to Option

( 168 ) FROM MANDATE TO OPTION Procreative freedom has to encompass all women to be any freedom at all. To be freely chosen, motherhood and nonmotherhood must be attractive, acceptable options for all women. Fertility monitoring and treatment are not just about women having more choices; these tools are also constantly emerging means for social control. In the interest of true procreative selfdetermination , it is important to question how we use medicine on women. Sure, the current state of affairs requires advocacy for equitable access to medically assisted reproduction and adoption, but we have to be careful about assuming access is always desirable. And we need to understand that women’s real lives ought to shape changes in how these institutions operate. The simultaneous liberating and oppressing effects of assisted reproduction (and its fallback cousin, adoption) occur on multiple levels. ARTs and the like liberate infertile and involuntarily childless women from “spoiled identity” (Greil 1991): they can become mothers after all and fill the expected role; yet they must admit their failure and submit to sometimes risky, and always rigorous, heavily surveilled medical regimes. Even the happily childfree come to be viewed as closeted infertiles. Those who do not wish to mother are often treated with disbelief or viewed as slightly pathological when they claim to want a childfree life (Agigian 2008; McQuillan et al. 2011; 8 ( 169 ) FROM MANDATE TO OPTION Morell 2000). Single women and lesbians can become mothers without men as partners—but they usually must trade one form of patriarchy for another as doctors, psychologists, social workers , intimates, colleagues, and even casual bystanders scrutinize their fitness for motherhood. At the same time that motherhood is opened up to more women, the notion of motherhood as the pinnacle of womanhood regains strength. Assisted reproduction and adoption help normalize those women who cannot become mothers in the conventional way. Women from all backgrounds are generally expected to address their infertility or childlessness despite systematic barriers to the available interventions. And many of these same women tout the motherhood mandate for others while exempting themselves on the basis of what they see as their intrinsic difference from most women. These options that ameliorate infertility or childlessness for some women also, at the same time, challenge essentialist ideas about motherhood as a whole. The assumption of motherhood as sacred, natural, normal—and biological and genetic—gets destabilized . However, codifying familial relationships and kinships, a continuing legal maneuver in the light of the complex relationships engendered by medically assisted conception, sometimes ends up denying integral social relationships. The kinds of informal mothering arrangements practiced most often in minority communities represent a mode of resistance to dominant meanings of womanhood, motherhood, infertility, childlessness, and family. These need to be recognized and allowed by schools, medical authorities, and the legal system. The disruption by ART of the historic linearity in kin relationships (though originating among the white middle class) can actually help by contributing new imaginings of relatedness (Strathern 1992). Fertility clinics and providers extol the ethical and businessgrowing benefits of serving singles and lesbians. Yet, predicated ( 170 ) NOT TRYING on legal risks, a fear of HIV, the value-added quality (read: eugenics ) of ARTs, and a cultural turn toward greater medical control of women’s bodies, the once-empowering turkey basters are being left to Thanksgiving duties in favor of the expert’s syringe and powerful medications. Increased choices can lead to increased control in some respects and also, unfortunately, to the dangers of treatments gone awry (hyperstimulated ovaries and births of multiples are not rare and the increased risk of breast cancer and ovarian cancer—though purposefully downplayed by fertility consultants—is particularly worrisome). Adoption has the potential to liberate, to create transfamilies . Transnational, transracial, multilingual, multicultural, two-mother, two-father, and queer families are more common than ever before (Child Welfare Gateway 2008). Adoption transforms the meaning of families by changing the way families look and the way family gets experienced. Motherhood and parenthood in general are set free from biologic and genetic roots, from pregnancy and childbirth, from looking like one’s young, even from beginning mothering at the child’s infancy. The need to mother supplants the need for following the traditional , linear route to motherhood. A childless woman is normalized as a mother (read: a true woman) through adoption at the same time that her actions expand the definitions and discourses of motherhood and mothering (Park...