This morning on NPR, I heard Rachel Martin interview Elisa Albert about her book “Human Blues,” a fictional story about a musician struggling to get pregnant and her interactions with the fertility industrial complex.
Elisa describes Aviva Rosner’s desire to have a child as being influenced by
“Equal parts cultural programming and epigenetic programming and ancestral voices, and you know all of it in a big, complicated stew in her head. I think part of it is physical. She just feels that desire. She wants to bring forth a new person from her body.”
Rachel adds,
“I was 38 when I had my first kid, and I remember someone once told me when I was pregnant for the first time that now I would know what it’s like to be a woman. Like before, I was just a failed version of a woman, but now you’re gonna get it.”
Later in the conversation, Elisa asks,
“What if you’re someone who very much wants a child but can’t get pregnant, and what if you find when you search your soul that you can’t, in good faith, engage with this industrial complex? You know, what if you’re fluent in all the ways historically that the medical Industrial complex has enacted a lot of harm, especially with regard to the quote-unquote, ‘female body,’ and especially with regard to the female reproductive body. And what if you’re someone who’s willing to try and kind of connect those dots for yourself. That’s, that’s where Aviva is coming from.”
Listening to Rachel and Elisa this morning made me think about the complexity of fertility, namely, how it defines womanhood. Their conversation centered on motherhood in the context of pregnancy.
Flawed
It is crucial for women and society to know that there is no single route to motherhood. Some will become mothers via pregnancy. Some will become mothers through marriage or as stepmothers. Some, like me, become “moms” because of the love and support we’ve shown.
Given the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, which overturned Roe v. Wade, there will likely be an increase in the number of children available for adoption. Therefore, some will become mothers via adoption.
As the voting season approaches, conversations about who we should vote for to protect abortion rights and access will be noisy. My recent opinion article for Bloomberg suggests that focusing our efforts on North Carolina, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Virginia is vital for increasing abortion rights and access. You can read the article here.
Rhonda V. Sharpe is the president and founder of the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race. Her research focuses on gender and racial inequality, the diversity of STEM, and the demography of higher education.