When reading Susan Bordo’s “Are Mothers Persons?” I immediately thought of Ohio’s so-called Heartbeat Bill. Professor Shaw brought it up briefly in class today, but I’ve been thinking a lot about it this past week, as it was believed it would enter the Ohio Senate sometime this week (and, as it turns out, it indeed came into debate in the Ohio Senate today.) Essentially, if passed, the bill would make it so that personhood is given to a fetus the moment a heartbeat is detected, which sometimes is early enough in a pregnancy before a woman would even know she was pregnant. The issue here is an exact real life example of Bordo’s argument that “… pregnant women are not subjects at all (neither under law nor in the zeitgeist) while fetuses are super-subjects.” (88)
The newspaper articles I’ve read over the last two weeks concerning the Heartbeat Bill all seem to go hand-in-hand with everything that Bordo is trying to point out in the reading. The sad truth, as we’ve pointed out in class, is that society is focused on the fetus that mothers’ rights, and therefore her personhood, is so undermined and practically ignored that she seems to be blotted from existence once she becomes pregnant. Any personal thought or feeling is expected to reflect a positive attitude towards her baby and she is expected to neglect her own wants for the greater good of the child.
The problem with this is that mothers are nothing more supernatural or sacred than simple human beings (of course, this is not to say that moms aren’t important, because from personal experience, I think they’re pretty awesome!) Mothers are human beings with the same human qualities that make up everyone else and they shouldn’t be forced to deny those qualities simply based on their being pregnant.
The problem, therefore, with the Heartbeat Bill (which makes up everything Bordo is arguing against) is that it too, denies pregnant women their rights. By placing personhood and the importance of it on the fetus as soon as a heartbeat is detected, the woman is completely denied her right to choice. She is, for nine months, an afterthought with no agency.
My question, however, when combining the Heartbeat Bill and Bordo’s piece with “the Black Stork” by Harriet A. Washington is who is the audience that the Heartbeat Bill and Bordo’s piece are directed towards? Because, as Washington points out, African American women who had involuntary fertilization forced upon them, were essentially denied the right to have children based on their race. However, Bordo shows that the opposite is forced upon women seeking abortion: they are denied the right to not have children without serious societal backlash. So, what is the importance of putting these two articles side by side? It seems to me that the current abortion debate (and the mother as a person debate) points to middle class, white women in particular. All efforts to end abortion seem to be focused on bringing to term white babies, whereas women of color have been forced to limit the amount of babies of color brought into the world. It seems to me that the audiences that the two pieces are writing to are an important aspect of the overall abortion debate.
I agree in that the main audience for the abortion argument is middle-class white women. I think we live in a racist culture, and the birth of babies and arguments for abortion are no different. I think, if passed, (and according to Bordo’s argument in the Black Stork), the heartbeat bill will be strictly enforced upon white mothers.
ReplyDeleteI think the pieces that we read were important to read together because they discuss how the woman’s body becomes an incubator and pregnant women lose their personhood, but then we see that black women have been encouraged and forced to give up their abilities to carry children. I think that this further shows that we are a racist society, and that many of these practices follow the ideas of eugenics.
I personally think that the heartbeat bill is extremely unfair to mothers. Especially because sometimes a heartbeat can be detected extremely early, and maybe even before the woman knows that she is pregnant. I think it will cause extreme problems, and maybe even force women to go back to back-alley abortions that are unsanitary and extremely unsafe for the mother, and could be done wrong and not fully abort the fetus creating even more problems later on.
You pick up on an important difference between the two readings, audience is key. White women and colored women have very different contexts in the 'abortion debate'. Washington calls into question something Bordo does not, the inability to choose between what pro life constructs as going full term or having an abortion. Forced sterilizations are just one example of the limited control black women have over their bodies, this plays out as 'Reproductive Justice', having access, options and choices in the first place etc.
ReplyDeleteMost of what your mentioning covers a good portion of the conversation that we held in class about a woman's choice versus her forced obligation to carry out her pregnancy. What I think is very important to bring up, which is something we came across in class, is the curcumstance at which a woman should certainly have a choice to abort or carry on with her pregnancy. In some pregnancy may be a product of rape or an abusive relationship, something which certainly not considered when society tends to deem women negatively when they choose to abort their children. I think although there is a huge contradiction i nthe way our society stresses the obligation to a nuclear family structure and the stress our society places on women to birth a child if and when she has no partner to help her raise that child. Its interesting how our society deems women for conceiving when she is not married but then almost taking away her right to not have a child if she is not married.
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