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On Labor

Jill

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes a perfect piece about the work of pregnancy and childbirth:

For reasons beyond me, childbirth–in the popular American mind–is swaddled in gossamer, gift-wrap, and icing. Beneath the pastel Hallmark cards and baby showers, behind the flowers, lies a truth encoded, still, in our wording, but given only minimal respect–the charge of shepherding life is labor. It’s work. And you need only look to the immediate past, or you need only look around the world, or you need only come close to losing the love of your small, young life to understand a correlating truth–pregnancy is potentially lethal work.
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This is the era of internet intellectuals, mostly dudes, who excel at analogizing easily accessible facts to buttress their points. It’s a good skill to have, and one I employ myself. But it isn’t wisdom. Like most people, I have deep problems with the termination of life–and that is what I believe abortion to be. Still a decade ago, I learned that those problems were abstract, and could not stand against something as tangible and imposing as death.

My embrace of a pro-choice stance is not built on analogizing Rick Santorum with Hitler. It is not built on what the pro-life movement is “like.” It’s built on set of disturbing and inelidable truths: My son is the joy of my life. But the work of ushering him into this world nearly killed his mother. The literalism of that last point can not be escaped.

Every day women choose to do the hard labor of a difficult pregnancy. Its courageous work, which inspires in me a degree of admiration exceeded only by my horror at the notion of the state turning that courage, that hard labor, into a mandate. Women die performing that labor in smaller numbers as we advance, but they die all the same. Men do not. That is a privilege.

Read it all.

28 thoughts on On Labor

  2. Oh, absolutely. And in an early time, not all that far removed from our own, women died in childbirth routinely.

    My own great-great grandfather had, I think, four wives. Three of them died in childbirth, though I think the man probably had at least twenty children between all four. One can probably count on two hands the number of children he sired who either died within days of delivery or died as infants.

  3. This is why the “adoption answer” to abortion has always put me off. I have nothing but respect for the majority of adoptive parents. What they do is wonderful. Pretending, however, that adoption is somehow the opposite of abortion ignores the physical and emotional demands of pregnancy. These demands are, in the best of circumstances, pretty significant and, in the worst, deadly.

  4. Thank you for posting this, Jill.

    It’s nice to see nuanced opinions about abortion; too often we (pro-choice) get typed into said Rick-Santorum-as-Hitler naysayers and that’s the extent to which our political logic goes. We (as a society, Americans in the United States particularly) tend to assume that pregnancy is nine months of getting fat, whining, having strange cravings for food, and being unreasonable in attitude or demands. There is little talk of the real strain that pregnancy puts on your body and mind.

  5. Brilliant. This brought tears to my eyes — of course, I am giantly pregnant so weeping is status quo. As are incredibly strong feelings and opinions about who tells me what to do with this body. The easiest pregnancy puts an incredible strain on a woman’s body. And that is the best case scenario.

  6. All of this, the bearing of children, the raising of them, is labor. They should known and acknowledged as value in and of itself…happiness, keep society wealthy in healthy, happy contributers, etc, etc…

    And just as certain, we should explicitly resist the concept of money value for that labor. Women and parents in general should be “paid” in valuable social structures, things like careers waiting for parents, both of them, things like quality daycare (and removing the concept of schools being free daycare), things like non-ridiculous working hours (and discouraging workaholics, who are poison in certain context). Things like that…

    Not, here’s a $5000 tax cut for having a kid.

  7. This is why I cringe when the work involved in pregnancy and childbirth is dismissed as a simple choice women make and nothing to be given credit for. Its an immense sacrifice, whether you make that sacrifice by choice or not to lend your body, health and sometimes LIFE to another potential person so that they may have the chance to live it deserves far more recognition than the acknowledgement that someone made a choice.

    I think once we see that choice AND sacrifice for what it is and give it the respect that its due we can be in abetter position to negotiate better lives for women who choose to make that sacrifice to become mothers AND women who choose not to. As stated before, we don’t force people to donate blood or organs, not even in death to save another person’s life- not even if they are the reason the person needs blood or an organ donation. But we want to force women to risk their lives and health, to sacrifice their bodies and nutrients every single time their fertility works against them.

  8. Like most people, I have deep problems with the termination of life–and that is what I believe abortion to be. Still a decade ago, I learned that those problems were abstract, and could not stand against something as tangible and imposing as death.

    What the…?

    1. I don’t have a problem with recognizing that abortion is the termination of life — that doesn’t have to be incompatible with being pro-choice.

  9. He said that he had problems with the “termination of life,” but that those problems could not stand against something as “imposing as death.” I thought his statement was incoherent. For what is death, if not the cessation of life? How can he have problems with the “termination of life” that do not also apply equally to “death”?

    1. Because we can recognize that there are complex moral issues involved with life and death. A fetus is a life, but it’s not a life that can survive on its own without using a woman’s body — her nutrients, her organs, etc. Given that, it’s her prerogative to decide whether or not she wants to do the physical labor of gestating that fetus until it can survive on its own.

  10. Oh, I see where the confusion is coming from now! You think that I am pro-choice, and that my first comment was intended to express my disgust with what I perceived to be Coates’ disloyalty to the pro-choice movement. Well, that couldn’t be further from the truth. I am pro-life, and was expressing my confusion at Coates’ “deep problems with the termination of life” that were somehow inapplicable to “something as imposing and tangible as death.” Can’t you can see how what he’s saying really doesn’t make any sense?

    1. Actually it does make sense if you have the intellect and moral reasoning skills of something greater than a gnat. Kind of how self-defense is justified, even though it still kills someone. The world isn’t black and white.

  11. OK, but his article really made no sense at all. His argument was basically “abortion is bad, but death is worse.” Why does calling his argument absurd commit me to the view that the world is black and white, i.e. that the correct view of the issue he’s writing about is as simple as “life is good and death is bad”?

    I recognize the complexity of the issue. In fact, I invited you to discuss one of the more complex aspects of the issue, but you had quit monitoring the comments on that post and so you never responded.

    If you’re so fully aware of the complexities of the issue, maybe you can tell me what the difference is between an infant inside the womb and an infant that has been born. And if I may be allowed to make a prediction: the criteria you provide will only amount to differences in the way that someone else (read: the woman) experiences infants, and they will not describe any sort of actual differences between infants who have been born and those who have not. “The infants themselves are the same,” you will tell us, “but since the dominant class experiences them differently, they are different.”

    Just watch.

  12. “maybe you can tell me what the difference is between an infant inside the womb and an infant that has been born”

    Let’s see. An infant that has been born has far less chance of being cared for and advocated for by “pro-life” republicans than does a fetus?

  14. maybe you can tell me what the difference is between an infant inside the womb and an infant that has been born.

    Yeah, I didn’t think so. Later.

  15. An infant that has been born is no longer part of the mother’s body and has legally become their own person with rights. An infant does not rely on his/her mother’s body to survive (even if said infant is breastfed if need be that same nfant can be given formula for sustainence). The existence of an infant doesn’t threaten the life of either parent, the existence of a fetus in someone’s womb is a threat to the person who’s womb that fetus occupies, the level of said threat varies with every woman but it exists for EVERY pregnancy.

  16. I love TNC’s level of getting it. The comments on his site raise the fact that few abortions are actually done for the health of the mother, which I think is missing the point; the point is that legal abortion lets women not get to that point. It lets women say, “I somehow think that I am not up for going through a pregnancy which will be physically strenuous, potentially lethal, and have incredible social and economic ramifications right now.”

    Because by the time a woman is experiencing life-threatening complications in the last stages of pregnancy, or in childbirth, the real point of the abortion argument is already moot.

  17. Azalea: An infant that has been born is no longer part of the mother’s body and has legally become their own person with rights.

    This is the distinction. the real issue is not when does life beginm, but when does individuality and personhood begin. It’s not an issue in societies that value the collective over the individual, but it is in ours. Our emphasis on the sacredness of individual is a cultural construct, a social consensus. And the rest of that consensus is that the point when that begins is birth. There are fuzzy areas in the law – two counts of murder if the victim is pregnant versus one – but overwhelmingly birth is the line that the law and social consensus recognizes.

    Azalea: This is why I cringe when the work involved in pregnancy and childbirth is dismissed as a simple choice women make and nothing to be given credit for. Its an immense sacrifice,

    In Aztec society this sacrifice was a woman’s equivalent of a mn’s going to war, and both were considered essential to the continuity of life. Your standing in society was based on how well you did whichever you were suited to. (The captives that warriors brought back for sacrifice fed the gods and kept the world in existence.)

  19. Sorry to quote myself, essentially. This is a paragraph from a novel I’m writing. It’s said by a character, but it’s my personal philosophy as well.

    “The Greeks had it wrong. The payment is not to the ferryman when you die; dying is easy. The payment is made by your mother, to make you live. And if a woman cannot bear the price of converting unthinking tissue into a person with a soul, I should not gainsay her, nor should you, or anyone else. Every woman must choose for herself whether she can pay the price. “

  22. Sperm are also “life”, human life. So are cell cultures. People have elaborate hierarchies of what human life has what kind of moral value. The notion that this is black and white is just silly.

    Here’s an interesting thought experiment to prove this. This woman died in 1951, and is buried, sadly, in an unmarked grave. However, scientists took a cell culture from her cervix before she passed, and it turned out to be the most fruitful cell line in human history. It grows at tremendous speed and is incredibly durable. The cells—called HeLa—have grown so much that 20 tons were created. The amount of living, genetic “Henrietta Lacks” outweighs the person Henrietta Lacks by about 2,000 times.

    Question: Is Henrietta Lacks dead?

    I say yes. I say it’s an insult to her memory to say otherwise. I say a person is someone who thinks and feels and has consciousness. I think the person who could hug her children, eat a sandwich, feel the sun on her face, is dead. It doesn’t matter that gazillions of cells with her DNA are out there. She is dead. Her cells are “life”, but if you toss them out, you aren’t killing Henrietta Lacks.

  23. Jim: This is the distinction. the real issue is not when does life beginm, but when does individuality and personhood begin. It’s not an issue in societies that value the collective over the individual, but it is in ours. Our emphasis on the sacredness of individual is a cultural construct, a social consensus. And the rest of that consensus is that the point when that begins is birth. There are fuzzy areas in the law – two counts of murder if the victim is pregnant versus one – but overwhelmingly birth is the line that the law and social consensus recognizes.In Aztec society this sacrifice was a woman’s equivalent of a mn’s going to war, and both were considered essential to the continuity of life. Your standing in society was based on how well you did whichever you were suited to. (The captives that warriors brought back for sacrifice fed the gods and kept the world in existence.)  (Quote this comment?)

    I want to break this down the way you did but I didnt want to make a mistake and cause confusion so..

    Many other societies that place the collective over the individual would allow a few hostages to die because they’d simply be collateral damage. *You* no longer matter, it’s all about what’s best for the group even if it’s fatal to you.

    I don’t agree with charging someone for double murders where a pregnant woman is involved because only one person has been murdered. Had her child been born and killed- that’s another story. I used to agree with these laws until I saw the hypocrisy in them.

    Well in Aztec society wasn’t it essential to have warriors to protect you against neighboring societies? A country without a military is vunerable to attack and our militia risk their lives for others as a sacrificial choice as much as pregnant mothers do. Last I checked military personnel who died in duty were not only honored but revered nationally. Mothers who die in childbirth are merely viewed as part of a statistic. Add to this the fact that its now LEGAL to allow a pregnant person to die if your conscious wont allow you to save your life yet doing the same to a soldier in theater would get you court marshalled(sp?).

    Without someone with a uterus who is willing and able to gestate to term, the human race begins to end. We can survive , vunerable as it may be, without a military for as long as we can either defend ourselves or remain at peace. But no matter how great the military if women stopped getting pregnant and giving birth it’s all over.

  24. Azalea, you capture the reason that collective-valuing socities are problematic. China and Chinese culutre and Chinese history document what is wrong with valuing the collective over the individual. Of course the inverse is true for opur cultures. So it’s a judgment call.

    I totally agree with you on the double murders. The situation as it stands is absurd. it makes a pregnant women inot half of a conjoined twin, and that is also absurd.

    Azalea: Last I checked military personnel who died in duty were not only honored but revered nationally. Mothers who die in childbirth are merely viewed as part of a statistic.

    Believe me, the reverence is all lip service and is completely impersonal, and when it isn’t, it is typically just exploitive flag-waving. See also State of the Union Addresses, year after year after year.

    I do think it would be nice to engrave the names of mothers who die in childbirth on memorial walls. They don’t get that, and they should get some kind of wider recognition.

    You capture very nicely the complimentarity and integrality of mens’ and women’s contributions in that last paragraph.

    “Well in Aztec society wasn’t it essential to have warriors to protect you against neighboring societies? ”

    Yes, because 1) you stood a chance of having your men kidnapped for sacrifice, and if you lost them, you lost your agricultural base and you starved, 2) you needed your warriors to kidnap other men for sacrifice to feed the gods and keep the universe going.

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