Choices Women Make: Agency in Domestic Violence, Assisted Reproduction, and Sex Work

3 Mum’s the Word: Assisted Reproduction and the Ideology of Motherhood

In 1970, Shulamith Firestone argued that reproductive technology would be the key to a radical feminist future, severing the essential conflating of “woman” with “mother.” Forty years later, new reproductive technologies have hit the mainstream, solidifying pronatalist ideals rather than severing them from the definition of “woman.”1 Indeed, perhaps even more than in 1970, pronatalism profoundly shapes gender identity development in women; what has not changed is that the material possibilities for maternity are marked by stark race- and class-based differences. Although all women imbibe pronatalist discourses, the opportunities and encouragements for motherhood differ depending on where one sits in relation to public polices and private investments in promoting—or discouraging—maternity. In the United States, both pro- and antinatalism are shaped primarily implicitly through health care, environmental, and welfare policies and cultural norms of family life and gender identity. Although there are some explicit natalist policies (such as the Family Medical Leave Act, FMLA) and religious dictates about motherhood, in the United States these tend to be weaker or more diffuse than in many other countries. As I will discuss below, the implicit nature of many motherhood norms and policies may help explain their persistence. 93 c h a p t e r 3 34# Mum’s the Word Assisted Reproduction and the Ideology of Motherhood 94 Mum’s the Word In addition to the subjectifying force of norms about good motherhood and public policies supporting or thwarting the achievement of motherhood in shaping one’s life plans, I examine the role that assisted reproduction technologies (ARTs) play in both supporting and undermining extant norms about mothering and motherhood’s place in mature female identity.2 My question here is not whether women are victims of technology but where ARTs sit in relation to norms about motherhood. I consider ARTs because of the different ways they can enter the discursive and material space within which women become normatively competent relevant to motherhood and family norms, thus not only shoring up but also reshaping those norms.3 Rather than seeing ARTs solely as exploitative of women’s bodies, or primarily as fantastic tools opening up more choices for women, I read ARTs as less agency enhancing for some women and more agency enhancing for others. ARTs can inhibit autonomy in that they serve to buttress patriarchal norms about the relationship between womanhood and motherhood , thus reinforcing the social construction of desire for biological motherhood. Yet they can also enhance freedom, opening up the material conditions within which embodied ideals are lived out. That is, they can circumvent some of the very policies that have the effect of limiting the motherhood options of women who symbolically reside outside of the “cult of motherhood” discourse that is alive and well in the United States. The problem, as I explain below, is that the women for whom ARTs offer the greatest potential for increasing freedom are the ones least likely to have access to them. I end this chapter by considering what it would mean to use these technologies to foster women’s agency in the context of pronatalism. Pronatalism and Mothering Norms Pronatalism is one of the subjectifying discourses that shapes the situation of all women in the United States. Although women grow up in a situation marked by pronatalism, the particular forms that pronatalist messages take and ideas about why and how women should mother Mum’s the Word 95 differ considerably along race, class, and sexuality lines. That is, women absorb pronatalist ideas in different ways because these imperatives take on different forms depending on one’s particular situation, but motherhood as central to feminine identity is a hegemonic norm that must be confronted to some degree by all women. As I will discuss below, for less privileged women, pronatalism exists in a situation also marked by stark antinatalist public policies, but the pronatalist cultural imperatives are still ripe within that situation. Drawing on Alena Heitlinger’s (1991) and Kristin Park’s (2002) work, I want to explore how pronatalism can operate on at least four different levels, through means both obvious and implicit, material and rhetorical : culturally, pronatalism naturalizes motherhood as central to a woman’s identity, with childlessness perceived as abnormal or suspect; ideologically, motherhood is constructed as women’s duty to the nation for patriotic or eugenic reasons; psychologically, childbearing is linked...