Tonight
I walk into the kitchen to clear and clean some dishes. My eye is caught and held by a picture
of myself and my two children. We’re in the little sanctuary
at my daughter’s preschool. In the picture, I’m holding
two unique individuals, small beings who are absolutely themselves.
I squint and try to discern who these babes really look like: over
the recent holidays, I watched old films of my husband— my
son doesn’t have his brown saucer like eyes from the same
age or the same straight hair, a legacy of American Indian genes.
My father in law is large, square, blonde, and blue eyed. My little
girl reflects some of him, blonde, with greenish eyes like mine
and her brother’s. In as much as my children do not have a
look that belongs to me, or even to us as a couple, they are their
own persons, entirely their own. I did not create them from myself
only. I feel deeply that they are links in a chain that stretches
further back and further away than I can see. I glance again at
their image and know they carry the past and the future within them.
They came through me, but are not entirely of me. I consented. I
let them pass. I gave them life.
So there must be some accord, some understanding— that as
mothers, we convey something that is not ours, that doesn’t
belong neatly to us, yet we bear responsibility to and for it. That
we consent at any time feels surprisingly like a miracle. What comes
through us absolutely needs care, and that care is absolutely valuable
and should be seen not as just some dreamy commitment but as an
agreement to do— well, a job, a contract of sorts.
Bearing children requires an affirmative “yes,” from
us— even more so because this being is not of us, is not entirely
ours. We have to consent to it or else be offended by it. Right
of way, of passage, of transit, must be granted for the relationship
between mother and child to be what it needs and should be: nurturing,
willing, healthy. Otherwise one life trespasses upon the other.
The relationship suffers. Everything on earth, to flourish, needs
a land that it can cling to for its life. Life itself wants to be
wanted, cared about— noticed. We need to be able to say that
what comes through mothers, though not entirely ours, is ultimately
of us, ours to have and to hold, to protect. To do this, we
need to be able to pave the way, both as a culture and a society,
for mothers.
This, I think, is the fertile common ground mothers on all sides
of the debate about abortion can embrace: a world that prepares
the way for mothers— that recognizes that what comes through
us requires work that is real, work that needs to be supported by
society. A world of respect for mothers, of equal pay, of good jobs,
of sufficient child care and economic security makes way for mother and child. Such a world would reduce the urge to see a
fetus as “other,” impossible to nurture. I think I could
be “for” this kind of world, one that elevates the possibility
of life into a real, sustainable life by vowing to care for the
true economic, social and emotional circumstances of the mother.
Envision this on your bumper– “Make Way For Mothers.”
Freeing mothers to live free lives, lives that have the underpinnings
of equality, I believe, would greatly reduce the need for abortion.
Women who are empowered to live full lives, who have access to their
own bodies, their own wealth, to social networks and economic well
being are far less likely to terminate a pregnancy. That is the
challenge— the mother I saw with the bumper sticker views
abortion as an either/or choice: you are either for life or against
it. Wouldn’t “I Support Mothers” be a better place
to begin?
Life is so much more
than a fertilized ovum, an embryo, a fetus, a baby; raising children
is so much more. Giving life is what happens as you raise the child,
as it gains breath and shapes itself to an environment largely dependent
upon the mother. I would argue in line with the Catholics. Without
the basic right to life, without the basic right of every woman
to construct a whole life of her own, there can be no end to the
war we have with each other. The other rights accorded to us as
human beings don’t matter and are blind theology. Without
a way prepared for the child in the life of the mother there is
no way to advance the goals conservative thinkers seek. You cannot
focus on the sex, or the termination itself. The ideology of sin
has overshadowed the mother. She is authentic in all the particulars
of her existence. She can exercise judgment over her life. She is
a full person with the basic right to control her body and her life
in a manner that is equal to men. The emotional appeals in bumper
stickers sing loudly, signals of a culture at war with itself. Justice
sets the world right for mother and child. It could rush down like
a stream to remove the things that divide us, one mother from another.
mmo : february 2005
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| Eva
Rae Henry has been a daughter, sister, girl, young woman
and mother. Each role taught her something about the ways women are
put at a disadvantage in a man’s world when they attempt to
care for their children. When she had her own children, she awakened
to books like those on the MMO reading list and began her support
of the mother's movement through writing and working to raise awareness
among the mothers she meets wherever she meets them.
She would like to add that certainly, much
of our social beliefs about motherhood pivot on how women
are viewed, as either independent beings, interdependent, or dependent
upon men for survival. The cult of “life” surrounding
the abortion debate obscures the lives of real women, real girls,
real mothers, as well as their right to make decisions about themselves.
Throughout the authors’ life, she’s observed that women
are not always in control when it comes to sexual activity. We just
don’t live in that kind of world.
“This essay is
a challenge to those who believe abortion is murder to create a
more just society, to put down their hatred and learn to love their
neighbors as themselves, to end abortion by their deeds of loving
kindness on behalf of all life. To those who believe that abortion
is not an act of loss or obliteration of possibility, this essay
is a challenge to feel and see that life does move through mothers—
is carried by them to an uncertain future. Abortion is a tool of
last resort, a tool that ends one opportunity while preserving others.
The flow of life, the resource we call life, blossoms from the hand
and body of the mother. Abortions, like the poor, will always be
with us unless we act to eradicate the underlying causes of them–
and they are not housed in the textbooks of sex education, or the
television shows rife with wanton sex, but in our relationships,
our own families, in our workplaces, in our policies about sex and
birth control– and in our unwillingness to acknowledge this
reality.”
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