Choice & Excess

This weeks reading is centered on “pregnancy as a choice and excess”. I found it interested how the reading explored whether women do indeed choose to become pregnant or not. Even if a woman wants to get pregnant and has sex to become pregnant there is no guarantee that she will become pregnant, which therefore suggests there is always an unpredictable element to pregnancy. Furthermore, the reading also delves into how societal pressures can influence a woman’s “choice” to become pregnant whether she realizes it or not. Moreover, tabloids that remind women, especially older, career-driven women, that their biological clock is running out could lead to “baby hunger”. Baby hunger is described as an excessive craving to have a child. This is contrasted against the depiction of fertile myrtles who conceive with ease. 

Furthermore, this reading also touches on the intersections between women’s issues and issues of race and class. It is not everyone that can put off having babies; moreover, it is not everyone that is portrayed by the media as delaying pregnancy. On television, it is typically white middle class women that want to have babies at a later age. Whereas, women of color are seen as fertile-myrtles, that probably live in poverty and receive welfare. On television, women of color are portrayed as not having the option to choose when they get pregnant. In addition to this, films about women of color that accidentally become pregnant usually start off on negative note and continue on a negative note. Whereas, stories of white women accidentally becoming pregnant may start of negatively, but they usually end on a positive note. This ties in with Hewlett’s disgusting comment that “white women have a duty to produce babies because they will produce better babies than uneducated nonwhite women”. This implies that who is giving birth influences the eugenics view of whether that birth will improve the human population or not. When women of color give birth, or even before they give birth, they are criminalized as these demonic figures set out to destroy the economy through signing up for welfare. Furthermore, reading this has made me reflect on the fact that in California, between 2006 - 2010 around 150 women were forced to be sterilized in Californian prisons. Reports have indicated that there was a racial component to whether women were selected to be sterilized or not (in California women with Spanish last names were sterilized at a higher rate than women of any other race). In this case, these women had the choice of whether they wanted to become a mother or not taken away from them. 

Also, I was made to think of Dispossesion when I learnt about the “fetal paradox”. “Two in one” is viewed by some as “excessive”, which leads to either the mother, or the baby being dispossessed. Typically, if the fetus is shown then the maternal pregnant body is not shown - the mother is displaced from an image that she is essential to.