The Political Geographies of Pregnancy

6. Social Controls and Reproductive Politics: Punitive Monitoring of Pregnant Women

136 6 Social Controls and Reproductive Politics: Punitive Monitoring of Pregnant Women Motherhood has always been, and continues to be, a colonized concept—an event physically practiced and experienced by women but occupied, defined, and given content and value by the core concepts of patriarchal ideology. —Martha Fineman, “Images of Mothers in Poverty Discourse” The female body is easily deconstructed into its culturally significant parts and pieces, particularly when the womb is a metonym for the whole female body. The objectification of the pregnant body, as Anne Balsamo points out, “also supports the naturalization of the scientific management of fertilization, implantation, and pregnancy more broadly” (1996: 81). Colonized geographical areas, whether encompassing terrains of the earth or the terrain of a woman’s body, place decision making and control in the hands of outsiders. Colonized people do not control their own resources; their indigenous resources are extracted, exported, and expropriated for the benefit of the colonizers. Controlled from outside, the space of human reproduction has been overlapped with the space of public interest. Thus, as Nathan Stormer argues, “regulation of abortion and the biomedical knowledge that has been used to specify Social Controls and Reproductive Politics 137 such regulation has liquidated boundaries between the family, the state, and the bodies of women” (2000: 111). State manipulations of women’s reproductive choices are important issues in politics and feminist scholarship. Individual rights, women’s legal rights and responsibilities compared with men’s, and the power of state interference or restrictions in such intimate and private areas as reproduction should trigger concern by scholars and policymakers monitoring reproductive rights and the roles of an increasingly intrusive and often punitive state. Framing: Fetus as Patient Modern women are often surveilled during their now public pregnancies . Our “magical thinking” about reproduction results in the following , according to Balsamo: (1) a pregnant woman is divested of ownership of her body, as if to reassert in some primitive way her functional service to the species—she ceases to be an individual defined through recourse to rights of privacy, and becomes a biological spectacle. In many cases she also becomes an eroticized spectacle, the visual emblem of the sexual woman; (2) the entity growing in her, off of her, through her (referred to variously as a pre-embryo, embryo, fetus, baby, or child), has some sort of ascendant right (to produce pain, to be nourished properly, to be born) that the maternal body is beholden to; (3) that the state of being pregnant is so “wondrous”—or, variously, thrilling, fulfilling, and soulfully satisfying— for a woman that she would endure any discomfort, humiliation, or hardship to experience this “blessed event.” (1996: 80) With the increased medicalization of pregnancy, the contentious politics in this country concerning abortion, and the now visible fetus, often pictured as separate from the woman within which it exists, social control of pregnant women is apt to increase (Woliver, 1989a, 1989c, 1990c, 1998a, and 1998c). One legal scholar noted that as early as 1986, the law “conferred rights upon the fetus qua fetus” (Johnsen, 1986: 599). Antismoking discourse aimed at pregnant women, for example, makes fetuses everyone’s business and frames the issues in terms of not women’s health but their obligation to fetuses (Oaks, 2000). Pitting the fetus against the woman in so-called cocaine-baby situations is an example of the punitive means with which the “pregnancy police” drive wedges between women, their bodies, and pregnancies. Often these women’s health is so poor, from their poverty, homelessness, violent partner situations, the illegal drugs they are taking, their use of alcohol and tobacco, or all of 138 The Political Geographies of Pregnancy these in combination, that they menstruate irregularly, if at all. Many of them believe they are infertile. When they discover they are pregnant, they are often “very far along,” and it is a big surprise to them (S. Murphy and Rosenbaum, 1999: 52–53). The lack of prenatal care for all poor women is well documented in this country. For poor pregnant women who also need drug or alcohol treatment and who might also be HIV positive, homeless, or in an abusive or chaotic relationship, treatment facilities are usually not available (Chavkin, 1992: 197). Many drug treatment facilities categorically exclude pregnant drug abusers. Waiting lists, lack of child care, and prohibitive transportation problems, among many other issues, make treatment for these women a bitter and cruel “catch...