if the state loves babies, it should prove it
Since Politico leaked the Supreme Court’s medieval intent to overturn Roe, many questions have swirled through my mind as I know they have in yours. But as I was reading “Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change,” a book where Angela Garbes argues for the work of raising and caring for children to be fully public and funded by the government (which means a Universal Basic Income for all caregivers and parents) one specific question was imprinted in my brain:
If motherhood was universal and paid for by the state, would the government be this obsessed with trying to make it mandatory? In other words, if the hard work of raising children that is done by mothers and caregivers would be properly remunerated and have a price tag associated with it, would it lead to different different policy-making?
It’s clear that a lot of the guys making these anti-woman laws have no idea what motherhood actually entails. This week we heard from countless non-uterus owners who work in our government, who are willing to criminalize IUDs on behalf of their indefatigable love for babies and yet none of them seem very interested in the laws that would actually enhance the lives of those babies, or their mothers. Republicans after all, are arguing for forced-birth while we’re amidst a major shortage of baby formula and while their Congressional delegation voted against the Child Tax Credit bill. It’s too dystopian to even process. Maybe if right-wing lawmakers weren’t so busy thinking about imaginary babies that haven’t been born yet, they’d have come up a solution for parents who can’t feed the children who are currently alive.
If the state loves babies, it needs to prove it. Just take it from Margaret Atwood, who wrote a book that was supposed to a fictional escalation of patriarchy, which Republicans seem to have used as inspiration for bills that throw women who have abortions in jail. “If the state is very fond of babies, why not honour the women who have the most babies by respecting them and lifting them out of poverty?” Atwood wrote in The Guardian. “If women are providing a needed service to the state – albeit against their wills – surely they should be paid for their labour. If the goal is more babies, I am sure many women would oblige if properly recompensed.”
If the labor of motherhood was properly valued and paid for by the state, abortion bans would literally come at a price. If every mother was paid to do their mothering and if the people who do childcare were compensated by fair wages, maybe the state wouldn’t be that interested in them anymore. And conversely, if mothers weren’t completely left in the dust, more women would probably want more babies!
With their opposition to parental leave, universal health care, and child care, Republicans have created a hostile environment for anyone wanting to have children in the US. Their only other option, it seems, is to force us to have them. As Atwood put it, “enforced motherhood is slavery.” Abortion being legal simply means that women get a choice. “No one is forcing women to have abortions. No one either should force them to undergo childbirth. Enforce childbirth if you wish but at least call that enforcing by what it is. It is slavery: the claim to own and control another’s body, and to profit by that claim.”
The state can’t even make medical decisions on behalf of a dead person, so why would they be allowed to do it for women?
Given how timely her new book is to this conversation about reproductive rights and motherhood, Angela Garbes has agreed to share an excerpt of her book with our community. It’s collection of some of the best snippets of her book. I really enjoyed it and I highly recommend that you read it too!
CARE IS EXPECTED TO BE cheap the world over, in part because the global economy doesn’t have the ability to properly value care work; conventional economic measures—concepts such as supply, demand, and markets—fall woefully short. But the failures of imagination that have led to this moment don’t have to dictate that care work not be assigned monetary value going forward, or that we shouldn’t try. If mothers and care workers were to withhold their labor, whole countries and economies would grind to a halt.
How might we properly value care? It requires a new way of seeing the work and the world, bringing forth a new vision. We need to question our entire system of values. Productivity, efficiency, and hustle must share the stage with wholeness, health, stability, and self-regard. We must start by acknowledging mothering as highly skilled work that deserves respect and compensation.
No woman, regardless of race or class, is safe from the expectation of reproductive labor. Even for the richest white women who are able to outsource all the work—when, say, the support system they have built and hired vanishes amid a devastating years-long global health crisis—the work still falls to them.
What would happen if those of us who mother insisted that our bodies and our work be fully visible and valued? Mothering can no longer be considered supplementary or inferior to wage labor. If we reframe domestic work as essential labor and insist upon its centrality in a global labor movement, we create opportunities for solidarity among caregivers, mothers, and all workers. Unity can exist across gender identities, international borders, and disparate industries, rooted in any work that exploits an invisible labor force. When we insist on the monetary value of mothering, we do nothing less than redefine work. We redraw the image of workers to be more inclusive, to consider people’s health and humanity. We proclaim that care, maintenance, and a sustainable pace of life are essential to our labor.
Redefining the workplace, as so many of us have done during the Covid-19 pandemic, advances this vision. Work, we all now know, has never been confined to the office or the field or the factory. It was always happening in the kitchen, garage, and backyard. Domestic spaces—our hallways, sofas, and dining room tables—are much more than places where families gather. They are where essential workers broker wages and terms of employment, which often have international consequence.
As Argentinian theorist and activist Verónica Gago writes, our homes are “spaces of practical internationalism where global care chains are assembled, where reproductive labor is negotiated.” We have been trained to view our houses and apartments as private refuges, but they must also be seen for what they are: job sites where millions of dollars of the global economy are directly exchanged. Those of us who demand respect and recompense for mothering are, in Federici’s words, “seen as nagging bitches, not as workers in struggle.” I want to believe that Federici is writing squarely about a past, one we will never return to.
Because we are no different from ride share drivers, sanitation workers, welders, teachers, physicians, nurses. We are no different from our nannies and childcare workers and the people cleaning our homes.
It makes white women uncomfortable to think that they are no different from their hired help. What they chase—and have been given—is validation, acceptance, and success, but only on terms set by white men.
Proximity to power, however real that feels, is a simpler choice than solidarity. True allyship lives in relationships, true solidarity requires giving up some comfort, material resources, and power—and sharing it with others. To confront your own internalized misogyny and racism is humbling, destabilizing. Can white women do this? Can they acknowledge and own their whiteness and its accompanying entitlement? Can they get past themselves and get on our level?
And before I go, I want to let you know that this Saturday, May 14th, is a NATIONAL DAY OF ACTION FOR ABORTION ACCESS all over the country. To find a rally near you, click here. If you are in New York, join us at Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn at 12pm. From there we will march across the Brooklyn Bridge to Foley Square where you will be welcomed into the movement with calls to action and volunteer opportunities. Wear green! Bring pots, pans, whistles, drums, noisemakers!
Well done! I would add that along with the demoralizing and abhorrent treatment of women, the US has a history of ignoring and abusing children. Ironic.