Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This weekend, we’ll talk about what it means to be a mother.
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Pregnancy brings complicated emotions. There’s the excitement of something new. The fear that you might lose the baby or might not be prepared to be a mother. It’s something all mothers feel the moment they find out they’re pregnant, but the beauty is that all of these emotions eventually work themselves out one way or the other.
The New Yorker recently published a cultural piece about pregnancy in which the author reacts to biological anthropologist Kate Clancy’s new book, “Pregnancy Interrupted.” The New Yorker author, Apoorva Tadepalli, claims that “there are a seemingly infinite number of ways that pregnancy can be misunderstood, mislabelled, or oversimplified, whether because of deceptively binary tests or cultural narratives that tell us pregnancy is a linear experience.”
The premise of the piece is that an at-home pregnancy test can’t be accurate because there is a possibility that you miscarry. In her view, a baby that is never fully formed or born alive is not a real pregnancy. She, of course, uses language like pregnant people instead of women or mothers, and she refuses to call the life growing inside their wombs a baby, but rather a fetus or embryo. She even mentions a “woman’s right to choose,” which is a flowery euphemism for abortion. It’s easy to roll your eyes at her. The way she talks about pregnancy is cold and disconnected, even though she very clearly wants a baby.
She admits in the piece that she has been pregnant five times. She lost four of her babies before term. She is now pregnant and about to deliver her first of five pregnancies. When I was able to ignore her genuflecting to left-wing language, I actually began feeling sorry for her. Losing even one child is hard, but going through it four times is definitely devastating. I understand the emotions that made her write the piece, but she wasn’t being honest.
Pregnancy is, in fact, a linear experience: you are either pregnant, or you aren’t. You can have a miscarriage or lose the baby in some other terrible way, but from the moment of conception you are a mother. This has been true since creation and will remain true long after our generation dies. But our modern world tells us a different story.
Women are told they can kill their baby because it’s an inconvenience or has a defect. We are told that a baby isn’t real until it’s delivered out of our womb. The reason is actually quite simple. The more distance our world creates between a mother and her child, the easier it is to explain away evil. Just look at the Lindsey Clancy trial or the women marching in the street for their supposed right to commit infanticide. It’s the same ideology just under different circumstances. Women applauding other women who killed their children.
