Not a baby-machine
Long ago I promised a rant about how a mechanistic view of women's bodies and reproduction misinforms attempts to legislate control of women. At the time I was writing about a Virginia legislator who wanted to force women to call the cops if they had a miscarriage while not under a doctor's care. But the rolling shitstorm of pharmacy zealots, other ridiculous bills and Alito's track record has me thinking about women as baby-machines again. This phrase from the Virginia debacle, carried over from an earlier bill, stuck in my craw:
When I first read it, I thought, fetal death usually occurs in the mother's body. Why does the conveyance matter? If you lose a pregnancy while rolling down the hall in your office chair or going over your fields in your combine harvester, the state needs to know?
This requirement, my friends, is a flashing red light signaling ignorance. It's based on the notion that pregnant women are simple machines that pop out babies. If the pregnancy ends, the machine must surely just spit out the failed product, right? Won't you smell a fan belt burning or something? You're up in your hot-air balloon, your pregnancy fails, it'll be over in a matter of minutes, all nice and neat and ready for the police report?
No. A woman will not automatically know if her pregnancy is over just because she starts bleeding on the bus. Bleeding might go on for hours before the pregnancy ends. Bleeding might go on for hours before the pregnancy continues. Some women seem to have their period while pregnant. The pregnancy might end with no symptoms at all, making removing the fetus from its death car challenging at best. Sometimes just getting it out of the woman is a nightmare. It depends.
It's easy to regulate machines, and if you don't think there's a large segment of the population that -- consciously or not -- sees women, especially pregnant women, this way, ask around. Talk to the expectant father who can't believe that his wife will pass blood and amniotic fluid and shit during delivery instead of just a clean pink baby, the father of two who is surprised to learn that tampons don't go in the urethra, the legislator who presumes to mark the exact time and place of fetal demise. (None of these men is Hombre, by the way. He asked me to make that clear.)
It is easy to regulate machines. They follow schedules and yield constant results. Their parts and processes are standardized, documented. And now, at the risk of being morbid and gory, I offer some very personal evidence that pregnant women are not machines.
I've been pregnant six times that I know of. I may have had other early miscarriages. My doctors and midwives said many women do and never realize it. So there's your first item:
Pregnancy can be a fleeting, unrecognized condition. Ain't no windows on a uterus. Even if there were, you'd never see the tiny blastocyst form and then fail to implant or fall apart. Maybe it would show up on a pregnancy test, maybe not. You'd never know for certain. And as of now there's no police-state system set up to monitor your reproductive tract. Although with these fancy RFID chips, I guess it could be in the works. Just put one in every egg!
Anyway, let's see how I fared as a baby-making machine. Pregnancy 1: Textbook. Test comes back positive, Cletus the Fetus and I grow apace, I squeeze stubborn baby out the day before his "due date." Due dates are in themselves misleading and quasi-fictional, an attempt to schedule the unpredictable, but let's leave that aside for now. Rocketboy is born. You put in the sperm and, sure enough, out pops a baby.
Pregnancy 2: The test is positive, but the pink line gets lighter with each test until the big bleed begins. I would've never known if I hadn't been testing early. I would've just thought Flo was being extra curse-y. If a machine failed at the outset of a process, someone would try to fix it. But according to my obstetrical crew, this happens 50% of the time or more and that's just the way it is. In our society, any machine with a failure rate that high would be junked. Unless it was a voting booth.
Pregnancy 3: Easy-peasy, except for trip to ER with excruciating blood clot in my leg. Cletus II and I grow along nicely until one day late in the pregnancy when I realize he's not moving. There are hours of phone calls, hurried check-ups, sonograms and whispers before we learn that he's dead. It's four more days, including a solid three of induced labor, before I get to hold baby D and learn why he died. In the ensuing months I learn that my experience is, sadly, not uncommon.
I gestated D for 33 weeks. I learned to identify his elbow, foot and butt as they protruded from my abdomen while he wriggled. I did hippy-ass self-hypnosis to focus on the life within. And I still couldn't tell for certain when he stopped moving, what time he died or even that he was dead. No idiot light. My perinatologist said even if I'd known the exact moment his cord had tightened up, nothing could have been done in time to save him. No control. My doctors couldn't tell me when the induction (a brutal affair involving repeated manual insertions of Cytotec tablets behind my cervix coupled with enough Pitocin to fell an ox) would finally get my son out. No troubleshooting manual. Not an industrial process, just a disaster wrapped in living flesh.
Pregnancy 4: Goes smoothly. At my first ultrasound, I learn that the embryo has been dead for days. Surprise! Machines sometimes make funny noises to let you know when something's gone wrong. But women don't. Because they're not machines.
Pregnancy 5: It's there, but maybe it's not there. It might be a little behind schedule, or it might be about to come apart at the seams. Time -- a few days to a week -- will tell. All medical science can do is pat my hand and send me home. They know they have no control over what's going on in my uterus. It's not a machine. These things aren't predictable.
Pregnancy 6: I swear going in, this is the last time. I may not be a baby-machine but I feel like I'm turning into a slot machine. Luck is not usually a factor in machine processes, but it is with pregnancy. A bleed turns out to be no big deal. The placenta scoots away from its previa position. The same kind of knot in the cord that helped kill baby D gives Hurricanehead no trouble. He makes it out alive. We take him home, send Hombre for the big snip, and marvel that we managed to win one last game for the team.
I think about all this in the context of pharmacists presuming to tell women whether they can prevent a pregnancy or not, of legislators trying to ban "unauthorized reproduction," of Sam Alito and all the other conservatives who want women to answer to men about what's going on in their own bodies. And I say this: You have no idea what you're trying to control, no right to do it and no way to do it to your misguided satisfaction anyway because women are not machines and reproduction is not an industrial process. Pregnancy is unpredictable, carries infinitely variable risks, and is so private that it is in many ways a closed book even to the woman herself. If she and her obstetrical team can't shoehorn it into neat, predictable processes, why do you presume you can? No one has the right or authority to compel any woman to go through what I chose for myself, and no one has the right to judge any woman for choosing not to do so.
If you want to control an organic process, brew your own beer. If you want to protect babies, tell Bush to pony up for the UN Population Fund. If you want to preserve respect for and dignity of men in our society, work to stop the government-sanctioned torture that diminishes us in the eyes of the world and endangers our troops.
You want to regulate my uterus? Step off, and take your simplistic hubris with you.
[Blogger note, 3/10/06: This post is nominated for a 2005 Koufax award for best post. You can see the list of nominees in this category here -- all good reading.]
If a fetal death occurs in a moving conveyance, a fetal death report shall be filed in the registration district in which the fetus was first removed from such conveyance.
When I first read it, I thought, fetal death usually occurs in the mother's body. Why does the conveyance matter? If you lose a pregnancy while rolling down the hall in your office chair or going over your fields in your combine harvester, the state needs to know?
This requirement, my friends, is a flashing red light signaling ignorance. It's based on the notion that pregnant women are simple machines that pop out babies. If the pregnancy ends, the machine must surely just spit out the failed product, right? Won't you smell a fan belt burning or something? You're up in your hot-air balloon, your pregnancy fails, it'll be over in a matter of minutes, all nice and neat and ready for the police report?
No. A woman will not automatically know if her pregnancy is over just because she starts bleeding on the bus. Bleeding might go on for hours before the pregnancy ends. Bleeding might go on for hours before the pregnancy continues. Some women seem to have their period while pregnant. The pregnancy might end with no symptoms at all, making removing the fetus from its death car challenging at best. Sometimes just getting it out of the woman is a nightmare. It depends.
It's easy to regulate machines, and if you don't think there's a large segment of the population that -- consciously or not -- sees women, especially pregnant women, this way, ask around. Talk to the expectant father who can't believe that his wife will pass blood and amniotic fluid and shit during delivery instead of just a clean pink baby, the father of two who is surprised to learn that tampons don't go in the urethra, the legislator who presumes to mark the exact time and place of fetal demise. (None of these men is Hombre, by the way. He asked me to make that clear.)
It is easy to regulate machines. They follow schedules and yield constant results. Their parts and processes are standardized, documented. And now, at the risk of being morbid and gory, I offer some very personal evidence that pregnant women are not machines.
I've been pregnant six times that I know of. I may have had other early miscarriages. My doctors and midwives said many women do and never realize it. So there's your first item:
Pregnancy can be a fleeting, unrecognized condition. Ain't no windows on a uterus. Even if there were, you'd never see the tiny blastocyst form and then fail to implant or fall apart. Maybe it would show up on a pregnancy test, maybe not. You'd never know for certain. And as of now there's no police-state system set up to monitor your reproductive tract. Although with these fancy RFID chips, I guess it could be in the works. Just put one in every egg!
Anyway, let's see how I fared as a baby-making machine. Pregnancy 1: Textbook. Test comes back positive, Cletus the Fetus and I grow apace, I squeeze stubborn baby out the day before his "due date." Due dates are in themselves misleading and quasi-fictional, an attempt to schedule the unpredictable, but let's leave that aside for now. Rocketboy is born. You put in the sperm and, sure enough, out pops a baby.
Pregnancy 2: The test is positive, but the pink line gets lighter with each test until the big bleed begins. I would've never known if I hadn't been testing early. I would've just thought Flo was being extra curse-y. If a machine failed at the outset of a process, someone would try to fix it. But according to my obstetrical crew, this happens 50% of the time or more and that's just the way it is. In our society, any machine with a failure rate that high would be junked. Unless it was a voting booth.
Pregnancy 3: Easy-peasy, except for trip to ER with excruciating blood clot in my leg. Cletus II and I grow along nicely until one day late in the pregnancy when I realize he's not moving. There are hours of phone calls, hurried check-ups, sonograms and whispers before we learn that he's dead. It's four more days, including a solid three of induced labor, before I get to hold baby D and learn why he died. In the ensuing months I learn that my experience is, sadly, not uncommon.
I gestated D for 33 weeks. I learned to identify his elbow, foot and butt as they protruded from my abdomen while he wriggled. I did hippy-ass self-hypnosis to focus on the life within. And I still couldn't tell for certain when he stopped moving, what time he died or even that he was dead. No idiot light. My perinatologist said even if I'd known the exact moment his cord had tightened up, nothing could have been done in time to save him. No control. My doctors couldn't tell me when the induction (a brutal affair involving repeated manual insertions of Cytotec tablets behind my cervix coupled with enough Pitocin to fell an ox) would finally get my son out. No troubleshooting manual. Not an industrial process, just a disaster wrapped in living flesh.
Pregnancy 4: Goes smoothly. At my first ultrasound, I learn that the embryo has been dead for days. Surprise! Machines sometimes make funny noises to let you know when something's gone wrong. But women don't. Because they're not machines.
Pregnancy 5: It's there, but maybe it's not there. It might be a little behind schedule, or it might be about to come apart at the seams. Time -- a few days to a week -- will tell. All medical science can do is pat my hand and send me home. They know they have no control over what's going on in my uterus. It's not a machine. These things aren't predictable.
Pregnancy 6: I swear going in, this is the last time. I may not be a baby-machine but I feel like I'm turning into a slot machine. Luck is not usually a factor in machine processes, but it is with pregnancy. A bleed turns out to be no big deal. The placenta scoots away from its previa position. The same kind of knot in the cord that helped kill baby D gives Hurricanehead no trouble. He makes it out alive. We take him home, send Hombre for the big snip, and marvel that we managed to win one last game for the team.
I think about all this in the context of pharmacists presuming to tell women whether they can prevent a pregnancy or not, of legislators trying to ban "unauthorized reproduction," of Sam Alito and all the other conservatives who want women to answer to men about what's going on in their own bodies. And I say this: You have no idea what you're trying to control, no right to do it and no way to do it to your misguided satisfaction anyway because women are not machines and reproduction is not an industrial process. Pregnancy is unpredictable, carries infinitely variable risks, and is so private that it is in many ways a closed book even to the woman herself. If she and her obstetrical team can't shoehorn it into neat, predictable processes, why do you presume you can? No one has the right or authority to compel any woman to go through what I chose for myself, and no one has the right to judge any woman for choosing not to do so.
If you want to control an organic process, brew your own beer. If you want to protect babies, tell Bush to pony up for the UN Population Fund. If you want to preserve respect for and dignity of men in our society, work to stop the government-sanctioned torture that diminishes us in the eyes of the world and endangers our troops.
You want to regulate my uterus? Step off, and take your simplistic hubris with you.
[Blogger note, 3/10/06: This post is nominated for a 2005 Koufax award for best post. You can see the list of nominees in this category here -- all good reading.]
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