Rhetorics of Motherhood

Notes

131 Notes 1. Theorizing Motherhood in Public Discourse 1. The candidate’s ethos and opposition to abortion were further reinforced by daughter Bristol, at the time a pregnant and unmarried high-school junior who would follow in her mother’s footsteps and give birth in a difficult situation . Palin’s onstage interactions with Trig and Bristol, therefore, provided conservatives with good reasons for supporting her candidacy and convinced many voters of her moral fiber and fitness for office. 2. Although my opening example focuses on Palin, men also employ maternal means of persuasion, as was apparent in the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling on the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, a controversial law that prohibited the late-term abortion procedure known as intact dilation and evacuation (intact D&E). Defenders of the ban argued the procedure was “gruesome,” “inhumane,” and unnecessary while critics countered that it was medically mandated in certain cases in order to safeguard pregnant women’s lives (“Supreme Court Hears Abortion Arguments,” n.p.) After six federal courts supported the latter position and struck down the law, an appeal—Gonzales v. Carhart—reached the Supreme Court. The High Court overturned the previous federal rulings by a 5–4 majority (that included John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, and Thomas Scalia), upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and handing antiabortion forces “a major victory” (“Supreme Court OKs Abortion Procedure Ban,” n.p.). The majority opinion, drafted by Chief Justice Roberts, displayed evidence of appeals rooted in the motherhood topos. For instance, Roberts presumed that a loving mother/child relationship began at the moment of conception, and he praised the Ban Act for protecting that relationship by obstructing a woman’s “choice to abort the infant life” she had “created and sustained”: It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form. (Gonzales v. Carhart IV: A, legal citations omitted) The chief justice identified the pregnant woman as a mother and the fetus as an infant life, unborn child, and child assuming the human form, lexical choices Notes to Pages 8–10 132 that equated the unborn with born children and suggested rights to equal protection under the law. He also depicted the Ban Act as a necessary safeguard, protecting unborn children from ill-informed pregnant women and mothers from themselves. The Gonzales v. Carhart decision, then, reveals five male justices appropriating discourses about motherhood in order to defend a law that limits pregnant women’s medical options and potentially puts them at risk. The impact of the Court’s opinion indicates why it is imperative to investigate rhetorics of motherhood and their capacity either to circumscribe or shore up women’s reproductive rights, a topic I explore more fully in chapter 4. 3. Weaver argued the importance of grounding ultimate terms in clearly defined, eternal truths; otherwise, god and devil terms might too easily lead the unwary “down the roads of hatred and bigotry” (232). I, too, believe in the persuasive capacity of language that “sound[s] like the very gospel of one’s society ” but modify Weaver’s rhetorical theory by positing god and devil terms as socially contingent and, therefore, mutable, a postmodern interpretation that would undoubtedly elicit protest from him. With that modification in place, I find the integration of god and devil terms with cultural scripts, values, and codes a powerful lever for unpacking the construction of gender difference and motherhood. 4. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s observations regarding the construction of difference also help to unravel the hierarchical relations between the Woman and Mother outlined here. Power, she argues, clusters around identity categories (such as gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and so on), privileging some groups while subordinating others. Although power is “exercised simply through the process of categorization,” its real impact circulates in the values associated with particular categories, values that foster hierarchy and shape social and material conditions (1296–97). Echelons operate, I argue, not only across but also within gender categories (in other words, between men and women and also among women); further, they provide rhetors with contrasting categories —such as Woman and Mother—that are useful for praising or blaming women. As Crenshaw notes, uncovering categorical constructions...