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On the Pressure to Bear Children
Opinion: Recent US abortion laws are based on messianic beliefs
Once upon a time, when I was still in my 20s, a woman who was very angry at me shouted, “Your mother should have aborted you!” And while that was a pretty terrible thing to hear, what’s stayed with me all these years is not so much the insult or even how much it hurt in the moment, but what the insult actually implied: that my mother should have aborted me because clearly (to this woman, anyway) I was a mistake.
On this Mother’s Day, I want to talk about what lies behind the motherhood ideal, and the bizarre need to treat women’s bodies as nothing more than vehicles for breeding, and what I think really lies behind the pro-life stance on abortion.
Since I was about 13 years old, people have been telling me that I should have children. That has morphed over the course of my life from “you will make a great mother someday” to “why don’t you have children?” to “you really should have children!” to “I can’t believe you don’t have any children” and, occasionally “it’s not too late!” I have never made my desires to have children publicly known beyond my immediate friends and family; meaning, I do not voluntarily share my views on having or wanting children with random strangers. However, that has never stopped anyone — men and women —…
