"When will you give birth?": How women are deprived of the right to their own body

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-13 00:26

Motherhood should be an informed and voluntary choice, not the result of reproductive abuse.

This article is part of the Auto-da-fe project. In it, we declare war on everything that prevents people from living and becoming better: breaking laws, believing in nonsense, deceit and fraud. If you've come across a similar experience, share your stories in the comments.

Being a mother is not a woman's only role

A woman can be anyone, but society stubbornly imposes on her the role of a mother from kindergarten. Countless times she will have to hear: "You have yet to give birth." But this is not pronounced out of a desire to take care. A woman is a valuable reproductive material, the feelings and desires of which many do not think about.

From a certain age "When will you give birth to a baby?" sounds a little less often than "How are you?". Moreover, this is not always said by close and interested people. Sooner or later, the question turns into a categorical "It's time to give birth!" You can hear this anywhere, from a dentist's office to an interview. Of course, everyone knows better what to do for a woman who has come to install a seal or head a branch of a company. And if she suddenly picks up the courage and declares that she does not want to have children, manipulations of various kinds are used.

1. You are selfish

As if there was something wrong with that. It's okay to take care of yourself. But the interlocutor bites the woman, because she does what she wants, and not what he wants. Who else is an egoist here?

2. Then you will regret

It will be much worse if a woman gives birth and regrets. So it happens "I regret that I gave birth": why women want to return everything back, although it is not customary to talk about it. The voices of such mothers have only recently begun to sound, and they are condemned. But keeping it quiet is dangerous, because this approach creates a misconception about motherhood.

3. We need successors of the family

If the family did not have Einstein or Kulibin, then the need to continue the family is somewhat exaggerated. The absence of heirs in this case for humanity is likely to go unnoticed.

4. Humanity is dying out

No, the planet is overpopulated Population: UN information. The task of degenerating a certain group of the population is initially hopeless. And shifting responsibility for humanity onto a specific woman is stupid.

5. You just haven't met the same man

“From the very same one, you would immediately want a child,” say “caring” people. Apparently, they expect that the interlocutor will go to prove that the man is the one. Sometimes it works.

6. But what if mom decided not to give birth to you?

Nothing would have happened, no matter how harsh it sounds. To have children or not is the choice of parents. To impose on a child a sense of responsibility for this is very strange. He really didn't ask him to give birth.

I am 31 years old, I am not married, I have no children, and it is not planned in the near future. Family gatherings are not exactly hell for me, but definitely not a favorite pastime. At every birthday, wedding or memorial service, at least one relative or relative will ask when I'm going to have children. Elderly neighbors and mom's friends and girlfriends also love to ask this question.

And it turns out that my family has no idea what kind of person I am. They think that they know me only because we have known each other for many years, we have similar pieces of DNA and one of them kept me on their knees in childhood. They don't seem to see or hear me. We're having a fake conversation. Nobody cares about my arguments. After all, this is not an exchange of equal opinions, but from the height of their years they teach me, an unreasonable one, to live.

When I am indignant, they tell me that they are worried about me. But this is not true. They don't care how I'm going to live with the child. Some of them stupidly want to get me back in line. That I do not live like everyone else! Part thinks he loves me. But you can't love someone you don't know at all. They love the idea of me, not me. And no one seems to be ready to look at the real me and believe that I am able to dispose of my body and the future.

My family says: "We want you to be happy." But not one of them, in all 30 years of my life, has ever asked what, in fact, makes me happy.

There may be many reasons why women choose not to have children. But there is no point in discussing them, because this would be an attempt to rationalize someone else's “I don’t want”, to find an explanation for this. Although it is one and quite simple: this is not our business. Someone else's “I don’t want” when it comes to their lives is a sufficient argument.

The decision of a particular person not only does not concern anyone, but also has little effect on humanity as a whole. Because most women choose to give birth. Many of them are warned of possible risks and still decide to take this step. But the constant imposition of the role of the mother as inevitable, on the contrary, can have consequences: a woman gives birth against her will and is trapped for many years.

Past motherhood is shrouded in myths

You can shake the air as much as you like with grandiloquent phrases about female destiny and talk about how modern customs have changed the world. But there have always been people who did not want to have children for various reasons, otherwise where did the methods of primitive contraception come from.

The biblical Onan, for example, after sex poured the seed into the ground, for which he was punished. Coitus interruptus is still used as a method of contraception, but it is ineffective, as well as other methods of natural contraception. However, men have always had a way to avoid an unwanted child - to escape.

In this regard, it was more difficult for women to control the birth rate. Contraception did not work, and there was a penalty for abortion - primitive and very dangerous. They gave birth to many children, not because they wanted to, but because there was no choice. Their number was regulated only by the presence or absence of sex, but even here the woman had little leverage: the culture of rape, including in the family, did not emerge yesterday.

Leafy pictures about love and prosperity in huge families are best left to propaganda. The wealthy delegated the care of their offspring to numerous nannies. In the peasant life, extra working hands were welcomed, but an extra mouth was not very much.

The first is still expected more or less joyfully. The father, of course, is expecting a son. For a mother, it is more or less indifferent who will be her first. The father is completely indifferent to his daughter. The same attitude, however, is shown to the second and third son. Mothers usually begin to feel burdened by their third child. If a woman often begins to give birth, then in the family, of course, they are disapproving of this, do not hesitate to sometimes make rude comments on this matter.

Olga Semyonova-Tyan-Shanskaya "The life of" Ivan ": sketches from the life of peasants in one of the black earth provinces"

And the mother does not have so many worries about the baby. First, he "gets into a dirty cradle, where his mother's old dirty ponyva serves as a bedding." And then, if he has an older sister, he goes under her wing: the mother needs to work in the field and around the house. Over the years, the amount of maternal work in caring for children has multiplied, and now one child takes more time than the notorious seven in the shops. Therefore, giving examples of how people used to give birth in the field every year is possible only out of ignorance. Moreover, the number of births is not equal to the number of children.

As a result of this (the young age of the newlyweds. - Ed.), The first children will be born weak (the first two or three children) and usually do not survive. This sometimes comes from the still complete inability of a young mother to handle a small child. Young mothers also very often "fall asleep" their children, that is, strangle them inadvertently in their sleep. A good half of the women "slept" in their lives at least one child - most often in their youth, when they sleep soundly.

Olga Semyonova-Tyan-Shanskaya "The life of" Ivan ": sketches from the life of peasants in one of the black earth provinces"

Now infant mortality is 5.1 Russia: preliminary demographic results of 2018 (part II) per 1,000 live births, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries - 34 A. G. Rashin Population of Russia over 100 years. As the child grew up, the dangers did not diminish, because no one looked after him 24/7, as now. So the image of the blooming Madonna and child is extremely far from the harsh reality.

The 20th century brought effective contraception and the right to abortion. As soon as there was a real opportunity to control the number of children, women did it. At the end of the 19th century, there was an average of 5, 93 per woman in the Russian Empire. Yanson Y. E. "Comparative statistics of the population" of a child, now - 1, 6 Russia: preliminary demographic results of 2018 (part I). And this is eloquent evidence that motherhood is not at all a universal type of happiness.

Lack of information poisons the lives of women

Although the happiness of motherhood is not universal, this does not mean that it is rare. Most women truly love their children and consider them to be one of the most important achievements in life. Many factors work for this, for example the attachment hormone oxytocin and constant intimacy.

But to justify everything by maternal instinct is not worth it. The human structure is somewhat more complicated. Much in his behavior depends on the norms accepted in society, social roles and a specific personality. As a result, it turns out that a woman can love all babies in the world, or love her own, and cannot bear the rest, or be indifferent to children, or treat her offspring differently. And this does not mean that something is wrong with her.

Such a list could exist as a warning so that the woman can make her own choices. It will be fair to say that women are not eager to work in many specialties from the list - just like men, by the way. Nobody chooses hard, dirty, harmful work if it can be avoided. It all comes down to money.

For example, in St. Petersburg, a subway train driver is promised the salary of subway drivers after training, a salary of 58,000 rubles or more - and this is a profession forbidden for women. The salary of the person on duty at the reception and departure of trains is much more modest - from 37 thousand. Urban trolleybuses, which are usually owned by unprofitable municipal enterprises, are often run by women. But the more profitable intercity buses are not allowed to operate.

Now they intend to reduce this list. The Ministry of Labor has proposed to reduce the list of professions prohibited for women, but not to destroy it.

It is not the first year that it has been proposed to withdraw abortions from the compulsory medical insurance system to the State Duma. Doctors are encouraged for being dissuaded. During a week, Kamchatka doctors were able to dissuade 16 female patients from abortion from abortion. How exactly they do this, unfortunately, is unknown. It is possible that they are being threatened and intimidated. All this will obviously put women from the poorest segments of the population in a vulnerable position. Because the defenders of embryos do not really care what will happen to the mother and child next.

But we know: further there will be an allowance of 50 rubles and stories from the Director of the Department of Youth Policy to children: "The state did not ask your parents to give birth to you", that "the state did not ask you to give birth."

It's time to stop climbing into someone else's womb

The problem with many advisers is that they do it not out of malice, but simply without thinking. Although there is something to think about. For example, why is a woman first condemned for not having children, and then because she has. Not a day goes by without someone on Facebook getting upset by noisy children on the plane or in a cafe.

If you really care about the quantity and quality of a country's population, social and economic pressure on women is a bad way. Conscious procreation will show much better results.

To do this, you need to accept that motherhood is a voluntary choice.

Not having a child does not make a woman bad or inferior. If she decided on pregnancy and childbirth, she should have complete information about possible problems in order to minimize them. But there is also a group of women who do not dare to become a mother, not because they do not want children, but simply soberly assess their capabilities. They could be helped by the elimination of punitive gynecology and labor discrimination, long-term support for motherhood (and not an allowance of 50 rubles).

Help in escaping social isolation would be invaluable. During maternity leave, many women find themselves tied to the baby, and then most of the responsibility lies with them. Mothers sometimes want to talk to people of their own age, and outside the playground.

Much of this is the concern of the state, but this does not mean that the common man is powerless. At the very least, you can stop pestering a woman with the yardstick of an ideal mother, rolling your eyes if a man goes on maternity leave. Finally, remember that around the womb there is a person with his own plans and desires, who should not be justified for his choice.