RE-FRAMING ABORTON: SEX, POWER, MONEY & FEAR OF THE SACRED
BY SUZANNE ARMS
PART 6 of 9
DEAR READER – THERE ARE 9 PARTS TO THIS LONG ARTICLE. I’VE ALREADY PUT OUT 5 OF THEM ON THIS PLATFORM CALLED BUTTONDOWN. YOU CAN READ THE OTHER PARTS ON MY PAGE OF BUTTONDOWN.
I’m not going to try and synthesize the prior 5 parts. I believe this also stands on its own. And, of course, I welcome your feedback:
Please write to me at: suzannebirthing@gmail.com
To any baby in the womb, their mother is the universe. Every baby has an implicit expectation that their mother will meet all of their needs and protect them from harm. When those needs are not met, there is hurt and unconscious anger, the result of trust betrayed. That is no small thing. Researchers, educators, and parents alike used to believe that trust is something we learn as babies. Not true. Babies, from conception, trust until or unless that trust is betrayed. And it often is, by we parents trying to do our best and failing because we are doing it alone, without necessary support!
It’s been said that the nuclear family is a construct of patriarchy. I now believe it true; it is implicitly unfair and unsustainable. I reckon most of us living in post-industrial societies built around the small “nuclear” family didn’t get our needs met at the start of life, as our brain was rapidly developing, along with our sense of ourself and the world/our mother.
Researchers in the field of attachment have found that half of us did not experience full healthy attachment with those who raised us. I’d say the figure is even higher in the U.S., where there is no guaranteed, universal, paid maternity/paternity leave, where most births include drugs that get to the baby’s brain, mother-infant separation after birth, and limited or no breastfeeding.
I believe maternal deprivation, along with maternal anxiety and/or depression, is the norm today and has been for many years. I will go out on a limb here and state that it is a form of “normative abuse”, something we accept because it is the norm (what we grew up with and see all around us). Normative abuse is built into our so-called “health care” system and especially evident in maternity care, workplace practices and also family life. The consequences of babies and young children not having their needs for nurturance – trait of the Feminine that is partly induced by hormones but partly learned – are there for all to see.
We live in a culture built around fear and defense, where individuals engage in rampant competition and aggression, abuse themselves or others, and allow a public policy which declares war as necessary. The “war on cancer”, the “war on drugs”, the “war on poverty”.
“The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” And for most of us, it was an enfeebled hand.
We need to stop believing that it’s women who are the problem with unwanted pregnancies. As a society, and in our religions, we still place the primary responsibility for conception on the female and believe they – regardless of her age, means or circumstance – should be able to prevent unwanted pregnancy, and should be required to keep a pregnancy if and when it happens, because “It’s not the baby’s fault.”
We also believe, whether or not we say so, that the woman/person in the female body ought to provide most of the nurturance an infant’s and partner’s needs and do most of the housework and cooking, even when they are working full time at a job outside the home. As most women today do.
Yet the male is always the one who caused the pregnancy: no sperm, no baby.
I’m so tired of women (and men) buying into the lie that we/they don’t know what’s best for us, or our children, or our country. It’s amazing that we/they continue to listen to men in positions of authority and power and bow to their wishes about parenting, even when they display ignorance regarding:
1) whether or not to circumcise our precious newborn baby boy,
2) whether to sleep with or alongside our infant,
3) whether to breastfeed or to delay weaning until our child is at least two-and-a-half, (which is how long research shows babies benefit from breastfeeding and breastmilk,
4) whether to pull our child from a classroom where bullying is going on or the teacher is shaming the kids, or
5) whether to raise a storm if our LGBTQ child is being maltreated. The list goes on and on and it ends up in parents who betray their kids at the polling booth.
I know this from experience because I’m still someone who, when asked at a doctor’s office to remove my clothes, put on a paper gown, and lie down on a table on my back, immediately drops into my little girl self: pliable, wanting to please the big adult.
Most adults today, I observe, living in a culture that does everything to separate our body from our emotions, mind and soul, as well as from each other, allow outside “authorities” to make decisions for us and our children. Where does this come from? It’s rooted in what psychologists and child development researchers today term “learned helplessness.”
We’ve learned early on that our needs and desires were not going to be met by those closest to us. We weren’t breastfed, had to sleep far apart from our parents, often weren’t responded to sympathetically when we cried or were presented with an angry parental face and body language.
Our learned helplessness(i.e. passivity) forms a pattern that runs counter to nature’s blueprint for creating thriving humans. And it is part of what some of us in the field of child development and parenting call “normative abuse”. That is the treatment of children (adults too) that is not in alignment with what nature asks for, but which is the societal norm, acceptable because it’s what we see all around us.
Remember how often you heard a big adult tell you, “If you continue crying, I’ll give you something to cry about!” or “You should be ashamed of yourself!” Those statements are "normative abuse".
What I’ve discovered and rediscovered over and over again is that parents – especially mothers – who opt to be pregnant and decide to move to a cheaper, smaller place (maybe near a bus stop, so they won’t need a car) and to cut work hours or get a low-stress job so they can have a calm, slow-paced pregnancy, are making difficult decisions that aren’t supported by the culture. When they choose to put their career on hold in order to be a fulltime parent for the first years, or go for a “natural” childbirth with a midwife at home or in a hospital, and who become parents who pick up and comfort their crying child even when friends and relatives tell them they’re “coddling”, they’re judged harshly.
Yet these are the very kind of parents every child needs. They make decisions according to what their inner voice – their internal nature – tells them. They’ve learned (usually re-learned) to trust themself – their body and their children, if they choose to be a parent.
The issues surrounding childbearing, including contraception, of which abortion is a part, are replete with other people and institutions shaping our values. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that so many women, as well as men, have come out strongly against abortion and call themselves “pro-life”. In my book Immaculate Deception: A New Look at Women and Childbirth (published 1975, with 2 later editions), I examined the erroneous beliefs/deceptions that underly modern hospital-based childbirth practices. One is that women don’t know what is best for them but outside authority figures – doctors – do. This myth lies at the root of every male-created and male-dominated system, including organized medicine and religion, even when most physicians in many medical fields, and more and more ministers and rabbis are now women.
The dominator model that wrested control of birth from wise women herbalists and midwife neighbors, and which has women sit separate from men at orthodox religious services, still prevails.
Today’s strenuous fight to prevent sex education, limit family planning and contraception, and outlaw abortion are examples of patriarchy at its most toxic, whether it’s practiced by someone in a male body or a female body. The results are suffering and trauma for women and for the most vulnerable of us – babies and children.
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Rampant hatred of and fear of women – misogyny – still permeates our society, as deeply as racism and classism. Boys are still for the most part raised with a sense of superiority and entitlement, especially white boys. That is a key component of the elevation of all things male and white and desecration of all things feminine and of color. It’s not just men who carry this belief.
How many of us women are not living directly from a sense of our own power and feel we can’t do without the protection and/or support of a man?
Born at the end of WWII, raised in a culture where everything male was considered better, I carried this unconscious belief for many years. Both my mother and father instilled in me the notion that I could do anything I put my mind to. Yet my mother earned only 2/3 of the teacher salary my father did, despite being a “Master Teacher”. She did almost all of the housework and handled the bills. Yet she didn’t have the courage to protect us children from the man – her husband – who was abusing all of us, using the excuse that she couldn’t leave “a sinking ship”, when it was really fear and shame about being a single parent that drove her to stay with him.
That’s “learned helplessness” in action. In college all my professors were male and so were the books we read; and I never questioned that. It was simply the water in which I swam, invisible.
Why is it that we women so often vote for the tall, strong-appearing male candidate, thinking he is better able to lead? Why do most women prefer to date and marry larger alpha-type men, who appear to be powerful and invulnerable, even though we/they complain that these same men aren’t in touch with their feelings and don’t take ours seriously? Ironically, many of us were ourselves abused when we were young and vulnerable by a man, too often a man in our family or close relative.
As adults, women who vote against policies that would help children or the earth, show signs of the “Stockholm Syndrome”, which occurs when, after being abused by a perpetrator who imprisoned them for a prolonged time and then were freed go, on to defend or join forces with their abuser/oppressor. Didn’t kidnapped Patty Hearst go on to marry her bodyguard?
I will continue this in my next part, #7