Not Trying: Infertility, Childlessness, and Ambivalence

2. Conceiving Stratification

( 19 ) C0NCEIVING STRATIFICATION And when Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, give me children, or else I die. —Genesis 30:1, King James Bible Procreation is a fact of life. Actually, it is the fact of life. Infertility , then, can be confounding, albeit in different ways. For example, the stigma of infertility is so strong in Ireland that couples stay silent on the matter, making it seem as if the condition does not even exist (Allison 2011). Poor Egyptian brides find themselves outcast and prey to those who would sell them snake-oil cures if they do not give birth to a son soon after marriage (Inhorn 2000). In China the one-child-only rule morphs into a virtual one-child mandatory policy for women dealing with infertility (Handwerker 2000). And it could mean the “infertility treadmill” of repeated failures of IVF treatment for middle-class American women faced with the life-course disruption of infertility (Harwood 2007). Infertile and childless women arrive there via unique pathways based on their individual lives. But the historical, political, social, and cultural context always colors the experience. In the United States, as in most of the world, motherhood is assumed to be part of the normal life course, and this assumption deeply 2 NOT TRYING ( 20 ) affects infertile and involuntarily childless women (Pfeffer 1993). At the same time, childlessness is an allowable choice with many proponents. Whether or not childlessness is voluntary may not always matter to the experience of it (see McQuillan et al. 2012). The ever-expansive reach of medicalization, with the monitoring and manipulation of women’s procreative bodies in particular (Turner 1995 [1987]), however, reinscribes the old motherhood mandate with a new twist. Infertility, advancing age, or lack of a male partner need not stop a woman from making babies; there are always improving treatment options as well as alternatives like surrogacy and adoption. Marginalized women experience this pronatalism differently, depending on their positions, in ways both oppressive and surprisingly emancipatory. Getting the Message The views, attitudes, and behaviors of marginalized women with infertility or involuntary childlessness reflect different histories (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Greil et al., “Race/Ethnicity,” 2011; Lewin 1993). American pronatalism has its roots in patriarchal Abrahamic tradition and an agrarian past. Infertility among the Puritans was seen as a punishment for religious lapses, and worldly interventions like herbal remedies were not permitted (May 1995). The pathologizing of poor women’s motherhood, by contrast, already existed in colonial times, as servant women could be turned out of the household for becoming pregnant. Beginning with the late-eighteenth-century Revolution and continuing into the era of Manifest Destiny, American whites— rich and poor alike—contributed to the project of nation building by having many children. The idea that an important reason to have children was to bring happiness to their parents grew in popularity at this time (May 1995). The “cult of true womanhood ” characterized women as rightfully dedicated mothers (Welter 1966). ( 21 ) C0NCEIVING STRATIFICATION But true womanhood was only meant for some. Native Americans suffered from the genocidal result of westward progress and the loss of children to assimilation projects like the “orphan trains” that stopped at frontier outposts to supply childless white families with workers/heirs. Enslaved African American women were valued less as mothers than as breeders and as capable nurses and caring “mammies” to white children, sacrificing their opportunities to mother their own children (Davis 1981). Meanwhile, Chinese women, first brought overseas to serve as prostitutes or house slaves—known as Mui Tsais—were treated as commodities, forcibly sterilized, and often prevented from marrying or reuniting with their spouses (Silliman et al. 2004; Yung 1995). Dramatic social change in Victorian times up until World War II included the rise of the companionate family, responsible for “fulfilling the emotional and psychological needs of its members,” replacing, for the middle class at least, the kind of traditional family that was tasked primarily with providing education, economic security, and social welfare (Mintz and Kellogg 1988, 108). Among whites, having children was considered a civic virtue and children were greatly sentimentalized. Despite the “race suicide” panic that called on white Protestants to stop shirking their civic duty and propagate their race, 20 percent of women in 1920 were childless, the highest rate ever recorded. Attempts at social engineering—which included outlawing abortion for fear that...