mom's the word

except when it isn't

There’s a bill (HB 813) moving through the Louisiana Legislature that, in its current posture, would criminalize abortion, making it a homicide punishable by life without parole, along with banning certain IVF treatments and contraception, including hormonal birth control pills and IUDs. 

So, just to recap: the author (old white dude Danny McCormick) wants to classify women who undergo abortions as murderers and throw them in jail for life after also greatly restricting ways to NOT get pregnant.

It passed the House Criminal Justice Committee by a vote of 7-2—a vote straight down party lines with unequivocal Republican support.

It’s scheduled to be voted on by the entire House today (Thursday, May 12). And in my first draft of this essay, written yesterday (Wednesday) morning, I said: “My guess is that it’ll either fail or be substantially amended. But only because it fucks with peoples’ right to choose to have babies, not because it fucks with peoples’ right to choose to not have babies. Which, I mean, a win is a win, but it’s still bullshit.” And then before I could even finish the glass of Sancerre that I was drinking at the Houston’s bar as I wrote, I got a notification that House Republicans were planning to heavily amend the bill. 

It's being reported that they are going to basically substitute ole Danny’s bill for another anti-abortion bill by anti-abortion darling, Democrat Senator Katrina Jackson—one of the five women in the Louisiana Senate, all of whom are anti-abortion. According to interviews with Republican lawmakers, the amended bill would include penalties and prison time for abortion providers, not receivers, and would exclude any restrictions on fertility treatments and birth control.

Again, I’m not surprised. The bill received a lot of blowback, including from anti-abortion activists, who—to their limited credit—generally try to avoid criminalizing the abortion receiver. Although I assume they mainly acted, as widely reported, “…fearing it could create a backlash to other abortion bans locally and nationally if it isn’t scuttled.” 

But I would bet the main reason for the changes is that, despite the fact that a lot of Republican legislators called the bill “extreme,” they don’t like to vote against anti-abortion bills—especially an anti-abortion bill that fucks with anyone’s options to get pregnant. So, by removing repercussions for those undergoing fertility treatments—or “infertility warriors” as they were called this week when spurred to take action against this bill—these changes allow Republicans to only fuck the people who don’t want to get pregnant, not the people who do. 

So, yeah. A “win” is a “win.” But I still think it’s bull shit. Because no matter what happens with this bill (that is STILL exceedingly harmful btw), nothing will change the fact that it SAILED through committee with a clear majority. And what that clear majority said was that selfish women who don’t want children deserve to be locked up for the rest of their lives.

I sincerely hope that our brave coalition of infertility warriors does not dissolve now that in vitro is safe. Because the implication of that clear majority’s decision affects all of them, too.

Because this is my question: have you ever thought about why our society places a higher value on women who have kids than women who don’t have kids? Have you ever thought about why single and/or childless women (or those who wish to remain childless) are stigmatized as selfish and self-absorbed? Have you ever thought about how it might be so easy to criminalize a woman who doesn’t want to become a mother?

It’s because, in order to firmly subjugate and oppress women, the powers that be (read: old, white dudes) conveniently conflated being a woman with being a wife and a mother in our nation’s cultural conscious AND in its laws. 

Meaning, they sold the dream that being a mom and a wife was everything—and also the standard—for women and then they neatly fold those women into legal institutions (marriage) and normative practices (motherhood) that kept them in the domestic sphere and greatly restricted their autonomy along with their economic, political and social power—not to mention kept them birthing the “domestic supply of infants.” All of which let the old white dudes keep all that power and money for themselves.

BUT the ones who DIDN’T follow along—the ones who said they could be women without being wives or mothers, the ones who said they were still just as valuable without dedicating their lives and bodies to others—really fucked up the whole plan. They were just out there, living in the world, fully independent, belonging to nobody but themselves and amassing wealth for nobody but themselves. 

And so, they disenfranchised all the single and/or childless ladies. They marginalized them and they placed them on the outside of legal institutions and restricted their rights. They made it practically easier—through increased tax benefits, etc.—to be married than to be single. And they made it easier to become a mother (although not easier to be a mother) than to remain childless through historical restrictions on birth control and criminalizing access to abortion. And then, just in case all that didn’t work, they also stigmatized them in polite society, calling them spinsters and discarding them as useless. 

All of that—and by “that” I mean the objective history of our country—means it’s easier to treat single and/or childless women as selfish citizens non-deserving of their constitutionally-mandated rights because they had the AuDaCiTy to opt out of ThE dReAm. Which does not mean that women cannot enter authentically, willingly, and lovingly into marriage and motherhood, but it also does not mean that those institutions and practices haven’t been used to maintain control over women and mold national thought to only value women if they serve in those roles.

This shit is so ingrained in our national narrative that even I struggle with it. 

I wrote David Sedaris and the Sausage Makers on a Monday‑as in it was written, edited (loosely), formatted and ready to go by Monday afternoon. But then I sat on it on Tuesday and said I would publish it on Wednesday. And then I sat on it on Wednesday and said I would publish it on Thursday. And then I had a panic attack and called my therapist and told her I was too scared to press send.

“What are you so scared of?” she asked me.

“It just seems….aggressive,” I responded.

“Do you stand by everything you wrote?”

“One hundred percent.”

She paused and looked at me. She knew exactly what I was worried about because she is also a woman raised in the South, raised in the United States.

“Are you scared of them calling you a man-hater?”

Me. The chick who screams about free bleeding all over the internet. Me. The chick who has dedicated the majority of her free time over the past three years to taking down the patriarchy as it is firmly established in the Louisiana Legislature. 

Me!

I was scared of being branded as an “aggressive man hater.” Because not only am I a woman, but I am also 39, unmarried, and without children. And the stigma of being who I am where I am is so pervasive that not even I can avoid it. Because let’s face it. I’m an easy target. According to our society, I am a selfish (childless) spinster (unmarried). I am defenseless.

“Nothing you are saying hasn’t been said before,” my therapist told me. “And think about all those women who came before you. Think about Gloria Steinem and Rebecca Traister. They’ve all been called man-haters and they keep doing the work. Nothing they say about you defines you.”

She suggested that I read Traister’s All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation to help me press send. And so, I read it. And then I pressed send with all the strength of all those women who were truth-sayers before me. Because this is what I read:

“When people call single women selfish for the act of tending to themselves, it’s important to remember that the very acknowledgement that women have selves that exist independently of others, and especially independent of husbands and children, is revolutionary. A true age of female selfishness, in which women recognized and prioritized their own drives to the same degree to which they have always been trained to tend to the needs of all others, might, in fact, be an enlightened corrective to centuries of self-sacrifice.” pg. 134

But here’s the rub. This doesn’t just apply to single and/or childless women. This applies to all women. Any effort by any woman ever to carve out a piece of herself for herself, any effort by any woman to dare to live the life she wants to live and to live it how she wants to live it, is always, in some way, demonized, criticized, criminalized, or ridiculed—AND paid for by a high price of socially inflicted guilt. This includes married women and mothers. 

Any substantial (yet still woefully insufficient) gains we’ve made for the benefit of wives and mothers within the institutions of marriage and motherhood have been hard won by the waves of feminists that came before us. 

And our single and/or childless women—especially women of color—are the barrier islands protecting those gains. 

If they fall, we all fall. 

If we allow their ability to opt out of motherhood to be taken away, then we allow motherhood to become nothing but a pawn that can be played and tinkered with in whatever ways those in power see fit. 

And do not think for one second that those in power are ever satiated in their thirst for more. Because the drafting of this horrendous bill and its easy passage in House Committee, regardless of its eventual amendment, is our canary in the coal mine. 

And so, again, I hope that our coalition of mothers and non-mothers and hopeful mothers and honorary mothers holds. Because the real dream is for all of us to live with dignity and joy, in whatever form that may come.

watch the McCormick Manifesto here