Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (45 page)
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Authors: Susan Bordo
section. The family, acting in proxy, claimed certitude that this would have been her wish. My point here is not to challenge their interpretation. It is striking, however, that
no one
did. In the local newspaper the case was reported purely as a technological achievement, with no suggestion that there might be any sort of ethical conflict involved. Throughout the piece the braindead woman was described simply as a
body:
"Aubry said the woman's body probably would go into labor on its own"; "It would be better to deliver before the mother really deteriorates"; etc. (Amber Smith, "Braindead Pregnant Woman Kept Alive So Her Baby Could Be Born,"
Syracuse HeraldAmerican,
Nov. 3, 1991, p. 1.) My strong suspicion is that even if the family had made their case without reference to the woman's wishes, their request would still have been viewed as morally unproblematic.
Compare this to the highly publicized controversy occasioned in 1989 when Martin Klein (acting in concert with his wife's family) sought a court order appointing him guardian of comatose Nancy Klein, in order to authorize an abortion for her (an abortion doctors deemed necessary to the recovery of the seventeenweeks pregnant woman, and after which she did indeed regain consciousness). In the face of
that
family's claim, right to life activists created a national furor and initiated legal proceedings (which ultimately failed) to stay Klein's court order ("Court OKs Abortion for Comatose Woman," Syracuse Herald Journal, Feb. 11, 1989, pp. A1A4. Later that year, a father easily won an order—passionately contested by his wife's family—to sustain his braindead pregnant wife's life for seven and a half weeks; she was disconnected from the lifesupport system immediately after the delivery. In that case, unlike the more recent one, the woman's wishes were not even an issue for the father's case; his claim was argued simply on the basis of
his
desire that the baby be born. I am not suggesting that he had no moral argument. What I
am
pointing out are the dramatic inconsistencies in our moral responses to proxy actions and interpretations affecting the lives of the comatose and the braindead. Because the fetalincubator construction is so normative within cultural attitudes, treating a pregnant comatose woman as mere body simply does not rouse the moral qualms that other such cases do (see also note 11, above).
Guidelines for Legislation on LifeSustaining Treatment,
National Conference of Catholic Bishops Administrative Committee, November 10, 1984, as reported in "New York State's Health Care Proxy Law: A Catholic Perspective," pamphlet produced by New York State Catholic Conference, Albany, n.d.Nelson et al., "Forced Medical Treatment," pp. 75657.
Eileen McNamara, "Fetal Endangerment Cases on the Rise,"
Boston Globe,
Oct. 3, 1989, p. 1
.Ellen Goodman, "Pregnant and Prosecuted,"
Finger Lakes Times,
Feb. 9, 1990.Robb London, "Two Waiters Lose Jobs for Liquor Warning to Woman,"
New York Times,
Saturday, March 30, 1991, p. 7.
Cal Thomas, "Watch What You Say to a Pregnant Woman,"
Syracuse Herald Journal,
April 18, 1981.Rhoden, "Judge in the Delivery Room," p. 1959.
"Two Waiters Lose Jobs," p. 7.
Often waiting lists for drug treatment programs are as much as six months long, and a 1989 New York City survey found that of the existing seventyeight treatment centers, 54 percent did not accept pregnant woman and 87 percent would not treat pregnant women on Medicaid addicted to crack cocaine ("Fetal Endangerment Cases on the Rise").
Katha Pollitt, "Fetal Rights: A New Assault on Feminism,"
The Nation
(March 26, 1990): 410.Robert Pear, "The Hard Thing About Cutting Infant Mortality Is Educating Mothers,"
New York Times,
Sunday, Aug. 12, 1990, p. 5.Discussed in Pollitt, "Fetal Rights," p. 415, a "duty of care" has been proposed by fetal rights advocates as ethically justifying the obstetrical and lifestyle interventions they argue for.
Quoted in Gallagher, "Prenatal Invasions," p. 58.
Michael Harrison, "Unborn: Historical Perspective of the Fetus as Patient,"
Pharos
(Winter 1982): 1924, quoted in Ruth Hubbard,
The Politics of Women's Biology
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 17576.Hubbard,
The Politics of Women's Biology,
p. 176.See Rosalind Petchesky, "Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction," in Michelle Stanworth, ed.,
Reproductive Technologies(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 5780, for an extremely insightful and balanced discussion of this issue.
"A lot of doctors," says George Annas, "identify more with the fetus than with a woman who is different from them" (quoted in Lewin, "Courts Acting," p. B10). Especially interesting about this identification is its apparently greater significance than, for example,
racial
"differences" between fetus and doctor, which pale (so to speak) beside deep psychic sources of sympathy with the fetus's state of helpless dependence on the mother.Stefan Semchyshyn and Carol Colman,
How to Prevent Miscarriage and Other Crises of Pregnancy
(New York: Macmillan, 1989), p. 5.I hasten to emphasize here that this criticism is not directed against women who choose to take such risks, but toward the discourse that effaces or minimizes those risks.
See Nelson et al., "Forced Medical Treatment," pp. 73245, for an excellent discussion of these changes.
Dietrich v. Inhabitants of Northhampton, 138 Mass. 14 (1884).
W. Prosser, quoted in Nelson et al., "Forced Medical Treatment," P. 733. 54. 65 F. Supp. 138 (D.D.C. 1946).
55. 31 N.J. 353, 157 A.2d 497 (1960), quoted in Nelson et al., "Forced Medical Treatment," p. 734.
And this is not to mention the disparity between the respect afforded fetuses and grown women: in Minnesota, the same state that has ordered numerous medical procedures sanctioning the unconsentedto invasion of living women's bodies, a law went into effect in 1990 requiring hospitals and clinics to bury or cremate already dead fetuses, to preserve their "dignity" ("Law Says Cremate or Bury Fetuses,"
Syracuse Herald Journal,
Oct. 1, 1990, p. 2.Terence Monmaney and Kate Robinson, "Doesn't a Man Have Any Say?"
Newsweek
(May 23, 1988): 7475."Big Win for ProLifers: Pennsylvania Passes Strictest State Abortion Law,"
Finger Lakes Times,
Nov. 15, 1989.Peggy Orenstein, "Does Father Know Best?"
Vogue
(April 1989): 314.Aeschylus,
Oresteia,
trans. and intro. by Richard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), quote from
The Eumenides,
p. 158.James Hillman,
The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology
(New York: Harper and Row, 1978), p. 218.See the introduction to this volume for a discussion of these representations.
Aristotle,
The Basic Works of Aristotle,
ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941),
On the Generation of Animals,
trans. Arthur Platt, 729a 25, p. 676.To be fair, there was another version of preformation and emboitement (the "ovist" version), according to which God placed the animalcules in the woman's womb when she was created. This version, however, was far less widely accepted than the official animalculist version. In any case, in both versions the woman functions as container.
Quoted in Brian Easlea,
Witchhunting, Magic and the New Philosophy
(Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1980), p. 148.428 U.S. 52 (1976), quoted in Patricia Hennessey, "On the Rise: Men Make Claims in Abortion Suits,"
Conscience
9, no. 4 (JulyAug. 1988): 4.Transcript of "Nightline" show "Abortion Rights," July 22, 1988, Journal Graphics, New York, N.Y.
"Embryo's Rights Upheld,"
Syracuse Herald Journal,
Sept. 21, 1989, p. A12."Doesn't a Man Have Any Say?" p. 74.
In the Matter of the Unborn Child "H," No. 84CO1 8804 JP 185 (1988), quoted in Hennessey, "On the Rise," p. 4.
It could be argued that what is required is to bring the social and legal system into line with the treatment of pregnant women, not the other way around. That is,
everyone
(not only pregnant women) should be required to be Good Samaritans toward those who require our aid. It is beyond the scope of this essay to evaluate such an ideal beyond suggesting that those for whom such a transformation is genuinely the goal (and is not merely being paid lipservice to, with the covert goal of justifying current inequities) need to demonstrate their good faith by requiring some social care and
sacrifice from sources other than pregnant women. A good place to start would be with a national health system that would give poor, pregnant women the care
they
need.
The phrases in quotes are from bell hooks's discussion of the reclamation of "black subjectivity," a discussion that is applicable as well to the reclamation of other marginalized and desubjectified identities, including women's reproductive identities: "Contemporary AfricanAmerican resistance struggle must be rooted in a process of decolonialization that continually opposes reinscribing notions of 'authentic' black identity. This critique should not be made synonymous with a dismissal of the struggle of oppressed and exploited people to make ourselves subject. Nor should it deny that in certain circumstances this experience affords us a privileged critical location from which to speak. This is not a reinscription of modernist master narratives of authority which privilege some voices by denying voice to others. Part of our struggling for radical black subjectivity is the quest to find ways to construct self and identity that are oppositional and liberatory. The unwillingness to critique
essentialism on the part of many AfricanAmericans is rooted in the fear that it will cause folks to lose sight of the specific history and experience of AfricanAmericans and the unique sensibilities and culture that arise from that experience. An adequate response to this concern is to critique essentialism while emphasizing the significance of 'the authority of experience.' There is a radical difference between a repudiation of the idea that there is a black 'essence' and recognition of the way black identity has been specifically constituted in the experience of exile and struggle."
(Yearning
[Boston: South End Press, 1990], pp. 2829.)Emily Martin,
The Woman in the Body
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), PP. 13965.Davis,
Women, Race, and Class,
pp. 2021.Iris Young, "Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation,"
Journal of Medicine and Philosophy
9 (Jan. 1984): 4562.I used to argue that this issue should be avoided, insisting that the fetus's status is not simply
there,
"in nature," awaiting an accurate reading, but is a matter of human decision, shaped according to the conventions of particular communities. I still believe all this. But I no longer believe that such metaconsiderations remove the responsibility to participate in the public process of shaping those conventions. We retreat into the disembodied haven of metadiscourse only at great risk. For whether or not we choose to engage in the process, cultural determinations and imaginations of the fetus are being made, and currently they have begun to endow the fetus not merely with human status but (as I have shown in this essay) with superhuman status.As Nancy Miller insists: "[T]he postmodernist decision that the Author is dead . . . does not necessarily work for women and prematurely forecloses the question of identity for them. Because women have not had the same historical relation of identity to origin, institution, production,
that men have had, women have not, I think, (collectively) felt burdened by too much Self, Ego, Cogito, etc. Because the female subject has juridically been excluded from the polis, and hence decentered, 'disoriginated,' deinstitutionalized, etc., her relation to integrity and textuality, desire and authority, is structurally different." ("Changing the Subject," in Teresa de Lauretis, ed.,
Feminist Studies, Critical Studies
[Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986], p. 106.)
This essay grew out of shorter piece, "How Television Teaches Women to Hate Their Hungers," in
Mirror Images
(Newsletter of Anorexia Bulimia Support, Syracuse, N.Y.) 4, no. 1 (1986): 89. An earlier version was delivered at the 1990 meetings of the New York State Sociological Association, and some of the analysis has been presented in various talks at Le Moyne and other colleges and community organizations. I owe thanks to all my students who supplied examples.
Journalist Beatrice Fairfax, quoted in Lois Banner,
American Beauty
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 136."Starvation Stages in Weightloss Patients Similar to Famine Victims,"
International Obesity Newsletter
3 (April 1989).Jean Baudrillard,
Simulations
(New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), pp. 13; quotation is on p. 2.Geneen Roth,
Feeding the Hungry Heart
(New York: New American Library, 1982), p. 15.See Helena Mitchie,
The Flesh Made Word
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), for an extremely interesting discussion of this taboo in Victorian literature.Quoted from
Godey's
by Joan Jacobs Brumberg,
Fasting Girls
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 179.Mitchie,
The Flesh Made Word,
p. 15. Not surprisingly, red meat came under especial suspicion as a source of erotic inflammation. As was typical for the era, such anxieties were rigorously scientized: for example, in terms of the heatproducing capacities of red meat and its effects on the development of the sexual organs and menstrual flow. But, clearly, an irresistible associational overdetermination—meat as the beast, the raw, the primitive, the masculine—was the true inflammatory agent here. These associations survive today, put to commercial use by the American Beef Association, whose television ads feature James Garner and Cybil Shepard promoting "Beef: Real Food for Real People." Here the nineteenthcentury link between meat aversion, delicacy, and refinement is exploited, this time in favor of the meateater, whose downtoearth gutsiness is implicitly contrasted to the prissiness of the weakblooded vegetarian.Mrs. H. O. Ward,
The Young Lady's Friend
(Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1880), p. 162, quoted in Mitchie,
The Flesh Made Word,
pp. 1617.Quoted in Mitchie,
The Flesh Made Word,
p. 193.