Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic

This excerpt is from Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity. Copyright (c) 2024 by Nadejda Vladimir Williams. Used with permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com. Endnotes have been changed to in-text citations. 

Devaluing Childbirth: Abortion as Healthcare

Once upon a time, sometime in the fifth century BC, there was a doctor in the Greek-speaking world named Hippocrates. Well, we think that he existed, although in reality, the figure of Hippocrates is as murky and uncertain as that of Homer, the supposed author of the greatest epics of Western civilization, who also may never have existed. But the debate over Hippocrates’s existence and his authorship of various texts that have survived under his name is really not that important for the argument at hand. What matters, rather, is that preserved as part of the Hippocratic corpus is a curious oath that doctors already in the classical Greek world took. Up until fairly recently, so did their modern counterparts. Swearing by Apollo the healer and his son Asclepius, they promised, as part of a list of basic precepts, that they would not perform surgery (surgery originally was a different profession from the work of doctors). And, most relevant to our argument at hand, they promised that they would not carry out an abortion.

I noted in the introduction that one of the key contrasts that this book investigates is the antilife ethos of the ancient pagan world and the pro-life ethic of the early church. But it is more complicated than that. Even while the ancient world did not value people’s lives unconditionally, a revulsion about abortion appears to have been common, at least for doctors. The Hippocratic oath provided for centuries an ideal of morality in medicine, a sort of gold standard on which all doctors could agree.

Of course, the original oath’s connection to the pagan gods required reconfiguring it in the Middle Ages as a Christian document, but allowing for this culturally necessary modification, the oath was still recited by doctors up until the twentieth century. Lydia S. Dugdale, a physician and ethicist, recently asked in a poignant article in Plough what is lost now that the oath no longer is a foundation for the medical profession (Lydia S. Dugdale, “Bring Back Hippocrates,” Plough Quarterly (Autumn 2022): 22‑27). In a nutshell, Dugdale shows that this loss of a standardized medical oath across the profession means that there is no longer a commonly shared ethical understanding of the goals of medicine. Medical students may know how to perform certain procedures, but they cannot explain why some or others of these procedures may or may not be ethical in any given circumstances. And in few (if any) areas is this demise of medical ethics as salient as in the case of abortion, now redefined as a bona fide medical procedure and, furthermore, a fundamental part of health care. The repeal of Roe has only made the state of affairs more difficult, as procedures that were never even considered bona fide abortions—for example, treatment of ectopic pregnancy—became militarized, as some doctors have ironically refused to perform this procedure for risk of being accused of performing illegal abortions (For example, see Frances Stead Sellers and Fenit Nirappil, “Confusion Post-Roe Spurs Delays, Denials for Some Lifesaving Pregnancy Care,” Washington Post, July 16, 2022). To be clear, these necessary medical procedures, traditionally not considered abortions, are not the ones I am condemning. My concern, rather, is with abortion on demand being categorized as health care.

Even as statistics grimly rank the United States first in the industrialized world for infant mortality and maternal delivery deaths, the slogan “abortion is health care” has continued circulating in the past few years, as national conversations leading up to the repeal of Roe grew only more heated (Joshua Cohen, “U.S. Maternal and Infant Mortality: More Signs of Public Health Neglect,” Forbes, August 1, 2021). This choice to prioritize conversations about whether abortion is a form of health care, instead of directing further resources to support expecting mothers and their babies, is a dramatic statement about our society’s undervaluing of babies and mothers, regardless of where one stands on the political spectrum.

Congress considered the Abortion Is Health Care Everywhere Act in 2020 and 2021. While in both cases it failed in the Senate after securing approval in the House, both the name of these bills and the philosophy behind them are telling. Instead of presenting abortion as the killing of an embryo, these bills presented the procedure rather as routine health care that should be supported and covered by health insurance as casually as if it were an annual wellness check or a flu shot. To be sure, there are emergency situations, such as ectopic pregnancy, in which the embryo must be removed, since a sure death awaits both mother and child otherwise. But these emergency interventions are not the scenarios that inspired the claim that abortion is health care.

Implicitly defining health and health care as the state of being not pregnant—as this slogan does—presents a specific value statement on the worth of the baby involved. There are many medical procedures that involve the removal of something from the patient’s body—whether a cancerous tumor, an embedded foreign object, or even an appendix or a gallbladder that has ceased to be useful. But none of these objects, of course, will be capable of independent life outside a woman’s body. Yet, it is to these objects that a baby is implicitly likened in framing abortion as health care. Without a mother’s desire to carry a child to term, a baby becomes nothing but a disease and a diseased object. Only once it is removed, can she be medically whole again.

But framing the removal of a baby from the womb as health care is, of course, also a statement on motherhood. A healthy woman, by this definition, is one who is not with child. And just as the opposite of health is sickness, so is wellness the opposite of pregnancy. What does this mean for our secular society’s perception of motherhood? A logical interpretation is a pitying and condemning view of mothers as those who have willfully chosen to engage in something that will make them terribly, horribly, and irreversibly sick (and poor!) for a long time—pregnancy and then motherhood. They were warned repeatedly—just look at the obstetrician office posters!—but chose to ignore these warnings, just like smokers who continue to ignore the surgeon general’s health warnings. The science is there, but they just will not listen. So, just as a two-pack-a-day smoker or a drug addict who keeps taking in dangerous foreign substances that erode her very body and mind over time, a woman who chooses to remain pregnant and become a mother engages in dangerous and unhealthy behavior, whose effects and repercussions will last a lifetime both for her (bad!) and for the society into which she brings a child (even worse!) (Such assumptions have been the driving force behind the work of Sophie Lewis in her books Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family and Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. In addition, this is the assumption underlying the TurnAway study: What happens to women who are denied an abortion? The presumption is they are worse off, especially financially. See Diana Greer Foster, The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion).

Whether a woman chooses to become a mother or not—and the societal emphasis is, of course, on this choice—she is affected by these expectations that openly glorify a world that pretends to have no children or mothers within it. Indeed, this is the damage that the sexual revolution, made possible by the birth control pill, and the more recent rhetoric of choice surrounding motherhood have wrought (For an overview of the devaluing of women more generally since the advent of the pill, see Mary Eberstadt, Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, and Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution). By glorifying personal, individual choice, ironically, our society has devalued motherhood by making it just one possible choice, and a choice made by one person (the woman), as opposed to valuing personhood within the context of a larger family, community, and society.

As Erika Bachiochi notes in documenting the history of this language of choice in the latter half of the twentieth century, the greatest damage that the culture of choice and the related discourse around a woman’s right to privacy has done is to provide a woman with no choice other than the right to choose (Bachiochi, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, 258‑59). As a result of the lack of any support structures for motherhood, ultimately every message around a woman’s right to choose silently screams: the correct choice is to forgo motherhood altogether, except under perfectly curated circumstances, or erase all of its traces from her body.

Devaluing the Maternal Body: Erasing Motherhood and Family

Few have gone as far in their argument against motherhood, parenting, and even family altogether as social scientist Sophie Lewis. Dedicated to presenting what she terms a queer, feminist, cyborg, transhumanist, and most of all antifamily stance, she argues for the abolition of motherhood and family altogether as the only way to eliminate the injustices that, she argues, these concepts have historically encouraged and perpetuated (See, in particular, Lewis, Abolish the Family.). I will examine Lewis’s arguments in greater detail in chapter four—they are important for understanding how the world around us has made such arguments seem not only plausible but decisively persuasive for some. But in the meanwhile, I conclude this chapter with a consideration of cultural messaging in popular media culture about erasing all signs of motherhood from a woman’s body and life. This cultural messaging also highlights what happens in the absence of another key for human flourishing—the virtues for character formation and for healthy relational bonds, both in the family and in society at large.

What if a mother gives in to the societal messaging devaluing the maternal body and lifestyle after she has already birthed children? As it happens, one of our best primary sources for this phenomenon has been unfolding in reality television. A number of enormously popular shows about housewives have depicted women in their thirties, forties, and older aiming to look significantly younger, turning to plastic surgery and extreme dieting to make their bodies fit into a decidedly unmaternal mold. Of course, their behavior merely takes to the public sphere what my OB/GYN office was advertising for individuals living a more private life.

In his book The Housewives: The Real Story Behind the Real Housewives, self-described Real Housewives anthropologist Brian Moylan analyzes the train-wreck franchise, showing the intricate ways in which media attention has only contributed to heightening the drama of the show’s subjects while shaping the minds of viewers—clearly and undoubtedly, we may conclude, even if Moylan does not, for the worse (Brian Moylan, The Housewives: The Real Story Behind the Real Housewives). Things can and do, however, get more problematic once motherhood is more expressly brought to the fore for the sake of entertainment.

Image by nuzza11 and licensed via Adobe Stock.