What Pregnancy Reveals
(Not only for women)
I’m delighted that Mere Orthodoxy ran a symposium on my The Dignity of Dependence, and I did not expect one of the three reflections to be about military history. I’m excerpting all three authors’ pieces below.
If you’d like to get the book, you should probably do it through Notre Dame Press directly, since they’re running a half price winter sale with the code “14GIVEBKS.”
“Dependent in the First Place” by Agnes Howard (author of Showing: What Pregnancy Teaches Us About Being Human)
An infant cries and wants not just anybody but the voice and the scent and the resonant shelter of the one from whose body he came. The giver gives. The recipient receives, then forgets. Dependence is our original and occasional condition. But humans, at least contemporary Americans, may prefer to think of dependence as a preparatory step we take before we turn into what we really are—autonomous self-makers. Sargeant skewers this folly. She argues that humans are frustrated to live in a society that presupposes independence and thereby makes need seem shameful and exceptional. Bodily circumstances make unjust the social expectations for women to shrink themselves to fit into a world shaped for a “model man.” Yet all humans do need help: “We depend on the echoes of other people’s need to know how we began.” That is, we are even dependent on people to show us we are dependent. Forgetfulness of what we really are figures among the reasons communities and policymakers sometimes make it even harder to help others in dependency.
A woman who bears, births, or cares for a child might find the process like an immersive intro course that equips her thereafter to meet the needs of others. Simultaneously, it teaches her how to request and receive what she needs herself. Sargeant doesn’t deny that serving others can be physically demanding. But the physical expansion of a woman late in pregnancy illustrates another important kind of growth. With the maternal body as exemplar, Sargeant shows how other occasions of dependence can bring transformation too. Being called to serve the need of another pulls me to grow in ways I couldn’t otherwise. Confronted with a need that a beloved or a suffering person puts in my path, I recognize my own inadequacy to give what is required. To do what needs doing, I become larger. I also may have to depend on someone else to serve the one who depends on me, and then we become larger together.
“The Presence of Christ in Our Dependence” by Rachel Roth Aldhizer (who recently wrote a great op-ed about how Medicaid cuts put her disabled son’s care at risk)
Today, as I was picking my son up from class, this boy’s trach tube popped out. Without a constant watchful presence, a dislodged trach tube is a death sentence for the ventilator-dependent. His nurse calmly reinserted the tubing back into the opening at his throat, so his breathing could resume. The tube that the nurse’s hands reconnected to the machine, and the machine that pumps air into his lungs, and the little mittens, and the chair all talk very loudly, although the boy himself can’t speak. They say: “Help me. I need you.”
I know, because my son has some of those things too, and they speak to me. My son hasn’t spoken to me, and I don’t think he will, but every time I help him breathe or eat or walk or change his diaper, I am talking back to him in a language of our own making, a language without words. His needs call out to me, and I answer back. I talk to his birth defects, his blindness, his brain abnormalities when I touch him and care for him. My touch says “I’m here. You are not alone.”
…“The world is the wrong shape for women,” Sargeant argues in her opening chapter. But the deeper truth is that the world is shaped wrong for us all. The space David’s body is groaning for doesn’t exist this side of heaven. The type of community that could truly meet all of his needs—or all of my needs—simply isn’t there. It’s dependence on a teleological level that reveals our humanness, not just needs in relation to the material. Our need for God is what makes us human, more than our need for others.
“What Has War to Do with Motherhood?” by Nadya Williams (author of Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic)
One of the most haunting scenes in Greek tragedy reflects on the two defining experiences of men’s and women’s lives in much of human history: war and motherhood. The protagonist of Euripides’ Medea is a foreigner and a sorceress, who sacrifices her barbarian family of birth to move to the Greek world with her common-law husband, the hero Jason. Except Jason turns out to be a faithless opportunist. Offered the chance to marry a Greek princess, he gives Medea her proverbial walking papers, although he graciously offers to retain custody of their two children. Medea’s gut-wrenching monologue in response concludes with this: “Men say that we live a life free from danger at home while they fight with the spear. How wrong they are! I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once.”
Medea’s comparison is apt, as many have recognized in the 2,400 years since this comment was first uttered to an all-male audience on the Athenian stage. Just as the most life-threatening activity in which men traditionally engage is war, so is childbirth the most life-threatening experience for women even today, Leah Libresco Sargeant reflects in her new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. But while war has historically offered men a way to exercise their strength to protect their state, childbirth for women is a time of profound vulnerability. It requires a dependence on others that will continue and even intensify after the baby’s arrival.
I’m profoundly grateful that in a time when many publications are decreasing the number of book reviews that they run,
opted for a polyphony in response to my book. I’m looking forward to seeing what sort of symposium Nadya convenes next over there.She invited me to reply to the three reviewers, which I did here:
…I make parallel arguments in my public policy work, when I advocate for expanded family benefits, especially a baby bonus paid out to families after a birth. This isn’t a matter of squeezing childless adults to subsidize families. Everyone, including people who grow up and do not have children, begins as a baby. A benefit for babies is the most universal social support we can offer. Everyone has an infancy, even if not everyone lives long enough to collect social security.
Our own origins can feel irrelevant to or alienated from our sense of self, because we do not remember our time in the womb, our long lazy afternoons at our mothers’ breast, or the unstable steps that marked a new independence. That means that to know ourselves, we must be around young children, the disabled, the elderly, etc. Their visible need and others’ love in response to need shows us what we once wordlessly demanded and hopefully received.