In the booklet Listen: your baby’s life before birth, which I received as part of a pack of free samples from various companies, there’s a page devoted to the way hormones cross the placenta, allowing the unborn child to experience, in its own way, the mother’s emotional reactions. It goes on to warn:

Repeated maternal stress should always be avoided during pregnancy, as it may alter the baby’s patterns of sleep and activity on a permanent basis.

That passive construction makes me suspicious. Who’s responsible for avoiding maternal stress? Is it simply saying that we should, as a society, avoid putting pregnant women under too much stress? I could heartily endorse that position. Or is it suggesting that pregnant women, along with everything else we expect of them, have a responsibility to their unborn babies not to get stressed out?

The second half of the sentence isn’t promising either. In my experience of repeated maternal stress, the baby’s sleep patterns are the smallest problem. Stress can make a pregnant women vulnerable to all kinds of health niggles, some of which can turn into serious health problems if they’re not picked up. Stress can lead to depression, to lack of interest in preparations for the baby’s arrival, to dark thoughts of whether it’s too late for abortion. Repeated maternal stress should be avoided because it’s bad for the mother, not just because it could be bad for the baby.

Before I was pregnant, I thought “woman, what woman?” was an attitude held only by fairly extreme pro-lifers who had never come into contact with a pregnant woman in all their sheltered lives. But to my surprise, I keep seeing a very similar attitude from people who provide health care to pregnant women on a daily basis. They talk to me, they look me in the eye, they ask me how I am, but under the surface, I get a distinct impression that they see me as an incubator. The baby is all that matters.

My health visitor - a trained midwife charged with making sure new families have all the support they need - asked me during a routine check-up whether I was eating well. I replied that I was doing my best - a flared-up infection had left me with a low fever, aching joints and no desire to do anything but sleep, and had disrupted my eating patterns for a few days - and got a lecture about how my best wasn’t good enough. I had to eat a perfectly healthy diet at all times because the baby needs nutrients.

A pregnant woman needs to eat well for her own sake, not just the baby’s. Iron-deficiency anaemia is especially common in pregnancy, and makes any tired, lethargic feelings even worse. More seriously, if her diet doesn’t supply enough calcium for her needs and the baby’s, Mother Nature harshly dictates that the baby comes first. If the price of strong bones for the little one is erosion of the mother’s teeth, too bad for the mother’s teeth.

Why didn’t my health visitor remind me of these health issues? Why did she concentrate instead on the harm an inadequate diet could do my baby? I think the answer lies in a belief that goes deep in our society: a pregnant woman is a womb first and a human being second. Because I’ve chosen to have this baby, many people assume I’ve also chosen to put my personality to one side for at least nine months and think about nothing but the baby, all day and all night.

Sometimes I do put the baby’s needs before my own wishes - when I switch to orange juice after the first beer rather than run the risk of damaging the baby with my pre-pregnancy alcohol consumption, for instance. And sometimes, knowing I’m helping my baby as well as myself gives me the courage to stand up for things I wouldn’t otherwise stand up for. But other times, I’m just myself; the same self I was before I was pregnant. I oversleep and skip breakfast. I walk a couple of miles to take in a football match. I grieve for the bits of my past that didn’t stop hurting just because I have a new life inside me.

I don’t believe I’m unusual in any of this. I guess most women who are pregnant by choice and looking forward to having the baby will want to do the best they can for their child, but I don’t imagine anyone can support nine months of being nothing but an incubator. We all have to balance the baby’s needs against our own - “Yes, it’s better for the baby if I eat wholesome, home-cooked meals, but tonight I’m too shattered to do anything but shove a frozen pizza in the oven” - and sometimes the balance we strike won’t be easy for onlookers to understand.

Women’s choices - especially when it comes to motherhood - come under intense scrutiny from society. I feel as if I need to defend myself against the charges of skipping breakfast, thereby depriving my baby of vital nutrients; of letting myself get stressed, thereby disrupting my baby’s sleep patterns; of being unfit to be pregnant in the first place, thereby forcing my baby to develop in a sub-standard womb. The world throws advice at me from all sides, and I have neither the experience nor the confidence to sort out the vital from the trivial. I defer to the greater experience of medical professionals, but they invariably err on the side of protecting the baby from every possible harm.

In the early days of my pregnancy, I became concerned that the vitamin C tablets I was taking for my own health and comfort had an advisory on the packaging that they shouldn’t be taken during pregnancy without medical advice. I checked with my doctor; he told me not to take them. He couldn’t point to any specific danger to the baby, but there was “no point” in taking them. He could have informed me of the risks and allowed me to decide for myself whether the benefits outweighed them, but he didn’t.

Treating pregnant women as incubators with no needs or wishes of their own isn’t just anti-feminist, it’s probably also counter-productive. If the medical establishment doesn’t seem interested in meeting my needs, I’m going to start trusting it less. This is fine if I can simultaneously develop my own robust sense of what risks are acceptable - like my mother, who by her fourth child had a very good idea of how much alcohol she could safely consume during pregnancy - but I could all too easily come to dangerously wrong conclusions. Disregarding the advice that there’s no point taking vitamin C probably won’t do much harm; disregarding the advice that headaches and blurred vision are grounds for an immediate trip to the hospital could be fatal to mother and child.

Pregnant women are as capable of making their own decisions as any other segment of the population. We know what’s right for us, and if we’re given enough information, we can co-ordinate that with what’s right for our babies and strike a balance. But society - and given my defensiveness I’m inclined to consider myself part of the problem - needs to stop brushing our needs aside as trivial and start trusting us to make those decisions.

The “unauthorised reproduction” bill from Indiana bothers me for one very specific and personal reason, as well as a whole host of more general political reasons that have been well covered elsewhere. Preventing unmarried women from conceiving by any means other than sexual intercourse can only encourage those unmarried women who, like me, badly want a child to conceive via sexual intercourse - in other words, to do what I did.

I’ve alluded only vaguely to the circumstances that led to my becoming pregnant, but the short version goes something like this. A long-term relationship came to an end, and the manner of its ending made it very clear to me that making plans that depended on my having a partner would only set me up for more disappointment. If I wanted to achieve any of the dreams or ambitions I had - including the dream of becoming a parent - I would have to do it alone.

I considered various means of fulfilling that dream, such as adoption or conception via a sperm donor, and realised most of them would be made unavailable to me - fertility treatment was beyond my budget, and I had a sneaking suspicion that my gender dysphoria would disqualify me as a potential adoptive parent. I finally settled on the old-fashioned method of having unprotected sex with willing men, in the belief that this was the simplest method.

Perhaps it was the simplest of the available options, but it was far from simple. To begin with, my desire for a more or less anonymous sperm donor led me to have sex with the kind of men who have unprotected sex with women they’ve just met and ask no questions. I put myself - and my baby - at risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and although I’ve since tested negative, the guilty awareness that I was one of the lucky ones will not leave me. Not every woman who takes this route will be as fortunate.

Finally, I abandoned my pursuit of anonymity and turned instead to a trusted male friend. I got pregnant at the first attempt, but that was only the beginning of the difficulties. When I said, “I want to get pregnant,” he understood, “I want to move in with you and submit to your authority on all child-rearing matters,” and became frustrated and angry when my behaviour didn’t bear this out. The wrangling over this destroyed any chance of a continuing friendship between us, but worse, he is legally entangled in my life despite neither of us desiring this. Had I used an official sperm donor, he would have remained forever anonymous and legally unconnected with me and the child; since I did not, my baby’s father has a legal obligation to pay child support and a legal right to turn my life upside-down by applying for custody of a child he’s repeatedly told me he doesn’t want.

It’s hard to say whether I regret the choices I made. I certainly don’t regret the pregnancy, and I’m still looking forward to the birth of my baby. Is it regret to say that I would have preferred a clean, safe encounter with a turkey baster to the current tangle of uncertainties? Is it regret to counsel any woman in the position I was in last spring to think long and hard about the disadvantages of this supposedly simple route to parenthood?

I don’t know whether anyone, married or single, has a right to a child. I don’t know whether some barriers to parenthood are justified in the interests of the child, or who should have the authority to decide what’s in a child’s interest. But I do know that some people are desperate for a child. If one possible route to parenthood is blocked, they will switch, as I did, to an unblocked route, even though it might be more dangerous for them and for any children produced.

You might believe that a straight married couple make the best possible parents for a child. But that isn’t the question you should be asking. Single women and lesbian couples will be parents whatever you try to do. The question is whether they would make better parents if they were free from HIV and untroubled by legal entanglements with the biological father. Which do you think is in a child’s best interests?

Some of you may have wondered why I haven’t put any posts up here in a while. The short reason is that my personal life has exploded in several dozen directions. The long reason has to do with the personal, the political and the etiquette of guest blogging.

I could tell plenty of stories about feminist issues. My brush with the fear of rape that my nominal male privilege has thus far protected me from. Being centre stage at a slut-shaming. How violently irritating it is to hear racist or classist jerks talking about poor (mainly black) women “squirting out babies”. The way people who would unhesitatingly class themselves as pro-woman slip almost without realising it into treating a pregnant woman as a walking incubator. And, as of last night, how it feels when your ex-boyfriend seems to have taken a deep draught from the fountain of Men’s Rights idiocy.

I could tell all these stories, but I don’t know if I could make them about anything more than “this happened to me, and it sucks”. I used to pride myself on being able to turn my personal experiences into essays about more universal truths, but these stories are too new, too raw for me to manage that. And I want to have something to say: I don’t want to turn Amp’s excellent blog into a forum for my woes.

So I’m trying to work out whether my experiences, written out as calmly as I can manage, are something worth saying. If they’re not, I’ll have to go on hiatus until my life is sufficiently stable that I can relate my experiences to a coherent philosophical outlook; if they are, I’ll gladly stay and share them.

Save-the-sperm nutcase Dawn Eden is outraged that Planned Parenthood are offering their services in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Let’s pretend they don’t employ anyone with any transferrable medical skills whatsoever. Let’s pretend that they don’t offer a wide range of women’s health services that might be useful to some of the victims. Let’s pretend the only thing Planned Parenthood have to offer these people is abortion and contraception.

Being outraged that they make the offer is still the wrong response.

“These people need food and water; they don’t need contraceptives.” Non-sequitur. Needing food and water doesn’t take away any need you might have for contraceptives, and unless Planned Parenthood are telling the Red Cross, “Hey, no need to bother feeding these people, we’re giving them contraceptives!” the need for food and water is irrelevant to the question of whether Planned Parenthood are doing the right thing.

Planned Parenthood don’t have experience in providing food and water, but they do have experience in providing contraception, and some people do need contraception. The young girl in the shelter who’s just been raped needs emergency contraception so she doesn’t have the fear of pregnancy added to everything else she has to suffer. The couple who’ve lost everything except for each other need contraception so they can have the basic comfort of a good fuck and start feeling like human beings again. The woman who’s reached safety but lost her birth control pills along with the rest of her possessions needs replacements so she can begin putting her life in order. If you sincerely believe that these people’s needs are so wrong that attempting to meet them is worthy of outrage, I have doubts about your humanity.

Amanda Marcotte, outraged at a particularly inhuman response, vented her feelings:

Just to spite your sorry ass, I will worship the Disco Ball, say “goddammit” loud and often, commit a dozen or so acts of sodomy, consume way too many alcoholic beverages and if I was pregnant, I would get an abortion just to spite you.

I would make the same pledge out of solidarity, but I’ve put too much effort into growing my baby to consider having an abortion for anyone’s sake. Instead, I’ve done the next best thing by donating what little I can to Planned Parenthood’s relief efforts. Anyone who’s outraged at the save-the-sperm outrage, I urge you to do the same. I found it extremely therapeutic.

I’ve lost count of how many posts and comments I’ve read about that New York Times article. I’ve been by turns fascinated and amused by individual stories, shocked by the level of vitriol and misunderstanding, intrigued by the various side-tracks that come up and baffled at how many people miss the point of the outrage.

Consider the conclusion of the article:

Women may want to consider the risks as they invite their partners to watch them bring new life into the world. For some of the passion that binds them together may leave their lives at the very same time.

The responsibility for considering these risks lies with the women. If the passion leaves their lives as a result, that’s something over which their menfolk have no control. Women have to decide whether they want to take the risk of asking their partner to support them as they bring into the world the child they created together.

Either you think there’s a problem with attitudes like that, or you don’t.

Thanks to a commenter on the thread about feminism and the murder rate, I found some interesting discussion about Latoyia Figueroa’s murder (scroll down about two-thirds of the page). Criminologist Jack Levin addresses the horrifying fact that the most common cause of death among pregnant women and new mothers is murder by speculating about the cultural pressures that might drive men to kill women who are carrying their children:

We glorify, we romanticize fatherhood but there are many men who don’t want it. They see the baby as an obstacle to their success.

Of course, there’s more to it than that: some men who don’t want to be fathers take the responsibility for avoiding fatherhood onto themselves, while others expect their girlfriends to bear all the responsibility. The ones who think murdering your pregnant girlfriend is an appropriate response to an unwanted pregnancy push the sexist, women-are-to-blame thinking to its extreme, but the difference between believing you have the right to kill her and believing you have the right to compel her to have an abortion is one of degree and not kind.

It’s true that one of the ways our culture contributes to crimes like this is by putting pressure on men that some cannot live up to. But the other side of the coin is the image of motherhood and femininity as subservient to male control that makes these men consider their partners as objects for them to control and, if necessary, destroy. Both are cultural pressures, both are factors in crimes like that, and I’d prefer to see more attention paid to the one that directly affects women than to the one that could be read as excusing men.

But at least Levin is focussing on the actions of the criminal. Criminal profiler Pat Brown picks up this social pressure and runs with it into blame-the-victim territory:

I think we also have women out there who are not picking men who want to be fathers. It’s a simple solution for the women. Don’t get pregnant by men you do not trust and absolutely think want to be in a relationship and want to move into fatherhood.

Such a simple solution. Don’t want to be murdered? Don’t marry a murderer. Don’t want to be raped? Don’t let yourself be alone with a rapist. Don’t want to be used as a sexual object and then discarded? Don’t associate with sexist jerks. Not to say that victims of murder and rape are to blame for what happens to them, of course, but we know there are predators out there and it makes sense for women to take these few simple steps to protect themselves.

It falls to Levin to point out the flaw in this plan:

Not all of these guys…in fact some of them are the last person you’d suspect and that’s part of the secret of being a sociopath and getting away with murder. So you know sure, let’s use warning signs and common sense, but it doesn’t always work.

Until men who see women as expendable objects start wearing labels to distinguish them from the rest of the male population, “don’t get involved with a jerk or a sociopath” isn’t a solution at all. There are men who appear to be wonderful, caring people as eager for parenthood as the women who fall for them, but who, at the first sign of things not conforming to their fantasies, blame the women and expect them to fall immediately into line. When the man who is genuinely trustworthy and the man who is only trustworthy as long as he gets what he wants look the same to the naked eye, what’s a girl to do?

Whatever filters women set up to screen out the jerks and the sociopaths, they lose. No filter is perfect: it will either underblock and let undesirables through or overblock and screen desirables out. If the filter underblocks, you could end up with someone who thinks murder is an acceptable form of birth control, and the likes of Pat Brown will suggest that it’s your fault for not realising who you’d tangled with. And if it overblocks, you’re an evil misandrist who thinks all men are rapists and won’t give a nice guy a chance.

But given that the stakes are so high, why do “nice guys” deserve a chance before they’ve produced solid evidence, as opposed to unreliable assertion, of why they should be trusted? Outside of feminist discussions, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the question asked. Nice guys deserve a chance because they’re nice guys, and because deep down, a woman really needs a man and won’t be happy without one. Male privilege and the myth of subservient femininity, all packed into one unexamined assumption.

I’ve been reading a lot of pregnancy and parenting magazines lately. The occasional piece of advice on what I can do now to make labour easier almost makes it worth wading through the rest: relentless pressure to buy Stuff and soft-focus images of a family life I know I can never achieve. Then I turn to the advice page and find a real slap in the face.

I’m six months pregnant and my partner refuses to be at the birth. I feel so let down - will I really have to go through labour on my own?

I’m not a trained advice columnist, but I do know a bit about how it feels to be facing labour without a partner’s full support. If this woman came to me for advice, I’d reassure her that she doesn’t need to go through it completely alone, but there’s something else it’s just as important for her to hear. She’s allowed to feel let down; she’s allowed to feel that her partner has left her to face what may well look like a terrifying ordeal with no support. If she hasn’t already done so, she should talk to her partner about how she feels - women often feel pressure to keep their feelings under wraps, to deny them in the interests of “avoiding conflict” or because asking to be listened to might be seen as “selfish”.

But what’s the first thing the trained advice columnist recommends? She suggests trying to see it from the partner’s point of view, followed by a string of reasons why fathers-to-be are afraid of labour. Some are valid, like the fear he’ll let his partner down by fainting when she needs him most; others less so, like the fear that witnessing the birth will put him off sex. All of them miss the point.

It makes no difference to this woman why her partner doesn’t want to be present. She’s the one going through labour, he won’t support her, she feels let down. That’s the problem she’s asked for advice about, and the advice to see things from his point of view is suspiciously close to telling her that her feelings aren’t as valid as his.

Chances are, she’s already tried to see it from his point of view. Women are schooled fairly hard at “seeing it from his point of view” - I managed to skip most of my female-socialisation modules, but empathy was one of the ones that stuck. A tendency to look for the other fellow’s motivations stood me in good stead when it came to creating characters in my novels, but it also led me to cut manipulative partners far more slack than they deserved and to make concessions to people who had no intention of making concessions in return.

Empathy is an essential ingredient in a healthy intimate relationship, but it has to come from both sides. If her partner tried looking at it from her point of view, he might behave differently. He might recognise that whatever fears he has about labour, hers are likely to be worse because it’s her body that’s involved. He might see that after everything she’s gone through already in the course of this pregnancy, supporting her during labour is the least he can do in return. And even if he concludes that he cannot face the delivery room, he can understand how let down she feels and possibly support her in other ways so she knows he’s still there for her.

But no. All these things are beyond him because he’s just a man. Men aren’t expected to show any empathy, especially not when there are women around to show enough for two. She has to see things from his point of view in order to relieve him of the burden of seeing things from hers.

When empathy is a one-way street, it becomes all about his feelings. He doesn’t want to be there when she gives birth, and she is expected to understand and respect that. She wants his support, but he is under no obligation to understand or respect that. In fact, she shouldn’t even mention how much she wants him there: “It’s better if you don’t put him under pressure.”

Why offer such lousy advice? I understand that the advice needs to concentrate on things the woman can do, rather than things her partner ought to be doing, but there’s still plenty of advice that can be offered that doesn’t involve making her feelings subordinate to his. Being honest about her feelings means risking conflict and cutting her losses to make birth plans that don’t include him may make him feel left out, but neither of these things will cause the same long-term harm as convincing herself that her feelings don’t matter and her only option is to understand and support his.

Or are women always responsible for looking after men’s feelings? Even when they’re pregnant, and even according to other women? If I wasn’t already a feminist, that would be enough to convert me.

Amanda Marcotte fisks an offering from Not a Desperate Housewife that veers between the risible and the disturbing - a letter to a young woman from her vagina. Although the notion of a literate vagina invites mockery, it strikes me as a perfectly reasonable framework on which to hang advice: the problem only arises when the advice boils down to “save me for your future husband and all will be well”.

So I’ve shamelessly stolen the format, widened the focus so that the letter is from the whole body rather than just one part, and present my own version, possibly just as risible but hopefully not nearly as disturbing:

Greetings!

From what you read and hear, you might be forgiven for thinking that I belong to advertisers, or the government, or to your hypothetical future husband. I don’t. I belong to you and to you alone. Sometimes you need help or advice from other people about what’s best for me, but if you listen to me, you will understand me in ways no-one else can ever hope to understand me, and you must never let someone else’s opinion of what’s right override your own experience of me.

Don’t be in too much of a hurry to share me with the rest of the world. I’d like us to get to know each other first, just the two of us. We can have lots of fun together, and all the while you’ll be learning about me and what I can do for you. When the time comes to share me, you’ll enjoy the experience far more for everything you’ve learned. Have the courage to use all that knowledge to make us both happy: anyone who tries to make you ashamed of knowing what you like is not someone you should be sharing me with.

Remember that you don’t have to share me with anyone who asks. Sharing me with one man doesn’t mean you have to share me with every man, and sharing me with a man once doesn’t mean you have to share me with him every time he wants me. And if you find you’d rather share me with women than with men, you don’t have to try out any man who thinks he can change your mind. No-one has an automatic right to me except for you: you always have the final say on how and with whom you share me.

Take care of me so that I can stay healthy and useful to you for years to come. Information about diet, exercise and so on is easy to come by, but when it comes to sexual health you’ll find yourself surrounded by myths and misinformation. Until we’ve got to know each other, I can’t tell you exactly how you should go about protecting us, but as a general rule, when there’s someone besides the two of us involved, latex is your friend.

The time may very well come in the future when you want babies. We’ll go through every step of it together, and you’ll get to know me better than you ever did before, but remember that making a baby is hard work. Please don’t think you have to go through it until we’re both good and ready. There are many ways to keep yourself from getting pregnant when you don’t want to be, and I trust you to choose one that works for us both. Don’t let anyone tell you that pregnancy is my job - I have many jobs, most of them quite unrelated to child-bearing.

I’ll do my best to be everything you want me to be, but remember that I have my limitations. Please be patient with me when I can’t do what you want straight away, and don’t be frustrated that I don’t look the same as the women you see in the adverts. It’s sometimes hard to love and accept me the way I am, especially in the face of pressure from the rest of the world, but if you can do that, we’ll both be happier than if you try to force me to be what I’m not.

I can’t make decisions on how to run our life together, so I’m trusting you to do that. Believe in yourself and remember all the lessons we learn together, and you shouldn’t go too far wrong.

Thank you

Your body.

This is an edited version of an essay that first appeared on The Iron-On Line

Although my baby’s still a few months away from eating anything other than amniotic fluid, my midwife has already asked whether I’ve decided how I’m going to feed him or her when the time comes. Knowing several mothers who fully intended to breastfeed but found they couldn’t, I’m not willing to carve a decision in stone until I have experience to draw on, but I’ve made my provisional decision. It’s at once straightforward and complicated: unless it proves physically impossible, I’m going to breastfeed.

Of the many benefits of breastfeeding, the one that sways me most is the amount of equipment I could then manage without. Bottles, teats, sterilisers, bottle brush - on my budget, anything I can cross off my shopping list is one less thing to worry about. By contrast, I already have the equipment I need to breastfeed, and it seems wasteful not to use it.

Convenience is also a factor. Making up a bottle sounds as though it needs a great deal of care and precise measuring, which is not at all my strong suit. Breastfeeding, once you’ve mastered the technique, doesn’t require any preparation, and your body adjusts the supply without conscious effort. And if I want to continue with activities I’ve enjoyed pre-parenthood, my baby carried along in a sling, I don’t need to haul the full bottlefeeding kit everywhere I go. I just need to find a comfortable place to feed, preferrably out of sight of people who are offended by the sight of a breast being used for the purpose nature intended rather than to sell deodorant.

The complications only come in because of my gender identity. I don’t enjoy having larger breasts that can’t easily be hidden, but the swelling is a result of pregnancy, whether I choose to breastfeed or not. Now they’re swollen, I can put them to good use, or I can have them sitting uselessly on my chest. Not the most difficult decision I ever made.

Other people insist on seeing difficulty there. I can understand why breastfeeding is seen as such a female thing, but men can breastfeed too. Breast tissue is pretty much the same in both sexes, so with the right hormones, anyone can theoretially produce milk. I know most men would be disgusted if they lactated, but how much of that is simply down to the fact that breastfeeding has “girl cooties”?

And in any case, I’m hardly a typical man. I’ve considered taking hormones to make me look and sound a little more male, but I never wanted surgery. I was born with a female body, and no matter what surgery I undergo, it’s never going to be capable of all the things a male body can do. I’ve made my peace with that fact, and I can appreciate all the female things it can do as a kind of compensation. If it weren’t for my female parts, I wouldn’t be getting this baby, and I happen to believe that being able to feed said baby using just my own body is a skill worth having.

Other people, of course, will see me differently. When they look at me, they’ll see a classical picture of mother and child, a symbol of femininity and motherhood in action. And within their own heads, they’re perfectly welcome to see that. It’s only if they start forming expectations of me based on that image or getting angry because I fail to live up to those expectations that there’s a problem, and I see it as their problem rather than mine.

Deciding how to feed my baby shouldn’t be a big deal. I shouldn’t have to explain myself to psychiatrists who can’t break out of the pink-box/blue-box view of gender for long enough to understand that gender dysphoria is not incompatible with a healthy pregnancy. There shouldn’t be any suggestion that my gender identity and the best interests of my baby are somehow in conflict. That the suggestion recurs so often makes me both angry and sad, but I see it as a problem with the world and not with me.

For myself, and for my baby, I know which way I want to go. And at least for the time being, that’s good enough.

One of the things I love about blogging here at Alas are the insults. Wholehearted agreement is pleasant, but nothing strokes the ego like the knowledge that you’ve made such an impression on someone that he wants to hit back any way he can.

And insults are such good sparking-points for new essays. Consider this screed:

“I don’t know what more I could have done without sacrificing my self-esteem…”
And there’s another issue - you’re so stuck up your own rear-end you can’t see beyond your own nose. Other people are less important to you than your ’self esteem’. “Hey hunny, I just had a real hard day at work.. I’m ready to flake out, could you make me a drink please?” - “Hell no, that would lower my already oh-so fragile self-esteem, and I’m not here to bow to your patriarchial demands of coffee-making, you chauvinistic bastar…”

I suspect this comment was born out of hostility towards all feminists - or maybe all women - directed at me simply because I made a convenient target. But beyond the inflammatory phrasing, notice the way I’m quoted in a misleadingly selective manner. Notice how a general comment is extrapolated to a situation completely unrelated to the situation I was discussing. And above all, notice how the mere mention of “self-esteem” serves to light the blue touch-paper of this guy’s hostility.

The full sentence of mine that he partially quotes is “I don’t know what more I could have done without sacrificing my self-esteem and my plans for the future on the altar of his personal convenience.” My plans for the future are immediately dismissed as unworthy of consideration, perhaps because they don’t arouse the same fury as my self-esteem. After all, intelligent people can make plans for the future, but only silly, selfish women care about their self-esteem.

I used the ill-defined term “self-esteem” to stand for a whole host of wishes and desires that would have unbalanced the structure of the paragraph if I’d listed them in full. My desire to explore my gender until I can find an expression of it that seems honest. My desire to express my emotions without being told I was “too intelligent to believe that”. My desire to enjoy my favourite foods and drinks without being made to feel as though I was committing some bizarre kind of self-abuse. Little things which, taken together, make me the person I am as opposed to a robot or blow-up doll.

I haven’t always seen my self-esteem as important. Many times in my life, I ranked it below the approval of others, hiding who I was or giving up what I wanted for no better reason than that friends, family or society in general felt it was inappropriate. It’s only after this last year of hardship and introspection that I’ve come to see that what I am and what I want matter: that my self-esteem is not something to be sacrificed lightly.

It struck me, while contemplating that hostile comment, that self-esteem isn’t a word the privileged need to use. If you have the power to impose your desires on those around you, with society’s seal of approval, your desires aren’t a matter of your self-esteem, they’re simply the natural order of things. It’s only if your desires are minimalised and brushed aside by those around that you need a word to stress the importance of being yourself.

If a man wants sex with a woman, if he wants to decide for her whether she should continue or terminate a pregnancy, if he simply wants her to attend to his wants before her own, he doesn’t use the language of self-esteem. Instead, he states outright or, like the commenter above, implies, that he deserves this, that he’s earned the right, that it should be that way. If the woman wants to assert herself and claim back the right to make these decisions for herself, the language of “rationality” won’t serve her. She falls back instead on the language of self-esteem.

So it’s hardly surprising that someone so openly hostile towards a woman who claims those rights would be filled with contempt for self-esteem. It’s in his interest to undermine it and make it appear frivolous and without value. For if we’re allowed to start believing that self-esteem is something worth defending, something too valuable to sacrifice to the convenience of others, his power starts to crumble. I must be put in my place, mocked and accused of rank selfishness lest anyone begin to take my self-esteem seriously.

I’ve been thinking about rape prevention advice lately. Not the transparently nonsensical stuff, like “don’t dress slutty” and “don’t be alone with dodgy men”, but the superficially reasonable advice like “stay aware of your surroundings” and “act as if you’re nobody’s fool”. It won’t stop someone who’s decided to rape you personally as payback for some imagined slight, but it might make you slightly safer overall.

It reminds me of the advice we got during Freshers’ Week at university. I went to university in Liverpool, which has a reputation for all manner of crimes. Although I was living in an all-female hall of residence, I don’t remember any advice specifically about avoiding rape. There were some tips about not getting mugged, and advice about buying drugs (”You might have bought drugs safely in your hometown, but it really isn’t worth the risk round here”), but what sticks best in my mind is the bicycle theft paranoia they managed to instill in me.

We were told stories of bicycle thieves who roamed Liverpool with bolt-cutters and vans, sweeping up any bikes that were left unlocked, or secured with only a flimsy chain, or locked wheel-to-frame. It made such a deep impression on me that I never leave my bike unless the frame is secured to a fixed object with a solid lock.

These precautions don’t make my bike impossible to steal. The lock can still be picked or cut through, by someone who’s set his heart on stealing my bike. But as a theft-prevention strategy, it works because most bicycle thieves aren’t after my bike specifically. They want any bike they can get, and it’s easier to take that one over there that isn’t locked, or that one by the wall that’s only locked wheel-to-frame. Some poor sod is going to get his bike stolen, but with a bit of care I can make sure it isn’t me.

I don’t know how much of that analysis applies to rape, how many rapists choose their victim based on who she is and how many choose based on the fact that she looks like an easy target. But even if the fit is perfect, if the majority of rapists are just looking for an easy target and making yourself look less of a target is a way to keep yourself safe, it’s a depressing way to see the world.

Some poor girl is going to get raped, but with a bit of care you can make sure it isn’t you.

Being raped is a good deal more traumatic than having your bike stolen. That’s why I can accept that my bike lock relies for its effectiveness on someone else being an easier target but can’t do the same for rape risk. If walking tall and staying alert can keep me from being raped, it’s only because someone else who didn’t walk tall enough or stay alert enough gets to suffer instead. That’s not a solution I’m comfortable with; it’s not a world I want to live in.

Walking tall and staying alert is good advice, but we need more than that. I don’t have all the answers, but it would be nice to see a justice system that punished rapists effectively and protected their victims from painful intrusion into their private lives. It would be nice to see a culture that didn’t treat rape as a suitable subject for humour, a slightly off-colour subset of sex.

And it would be nice to walk tall without wondering who is making an easy target to buy my safety tonight.

The more I hear men’s rights activists fulminating about the unfairness of child support, the more I wonder how typical my situation is, and whether there are any general lessons to be drawn about expectations of men and women when it comes to child-raising.

My relationship with the father of my child ran into difficulties before my pregnancy was even confirmed. Initially, we hoped to live together, but it quickly became clear that there were too many barriers, both logistical and emotional, for this to be a viable possibility, at least for a few years. I did some research into the rights and obligations of a non-custodial parent and found that although I would be entitled to a certain level of support as a custodial parent, I wasn’t legally obliged to demand it.

I had no desire to take him for every penny I could get: he was someone I cared deeply about but couldn’t live with. Since bearing and raising a child would affect my ability to work, and since I hoped he would want to see his child well cared-for, I envisaged a compromise whereby he made voluntary support payments and was in other ways an active father.

I reckoned without his stubbornness and commitment to traditional family structures. He informed me that it would be better for the child if he was in no way involved, since this would free me up to find a stepfather I could live with and build an approximation of a traditional family. That I have emotional problems that would make the search for a stepfather the worst possible fate I could inflict on myself or the child did not enter into his thinking: the child needed two parents who lived together, and since we couldn’t provide that, he didn’t want to be involved.

Later, he tried to soften that approach by saying that we lived too far apart to make visitation practical. If I lived closer to him, he suggested, it would be far easier to work something out. When I finally ended the relationship, he said that he’d hoped we would be able to find a solution, although I’m not sure what that solution should have been. I can only assume it would have involved my seeing the light and moving halfway across the country to live close to someone who had proved himself incapable of respecting anything about me that he didn’t agree with.

When I look back over the uglier arguments, I’m struck by how often he tried to put both blame and responsibility on me for the fact that he’d fathered a child without being ready for fatherhood. My explanation that I hoped to get pregnant was rendered meaningless by my statement that I’m committed to a woman’s right to choose. That I told him I wasn’t using any birth control wasn’t enough: I should also have told him the date of my last menstrual period. He believes that a child needs a father figure on the spot, therefore I had to enter another relationship despite my own understanding of myself.

I’ve also been told by family members that I’m not being fair to him and should have done more to make the relationship work. I don’t know what more I could have done without sacrificing my self-esteem and my plans for the future on the altar of his personal convenience, but I suspect that is a sacrifice I was expected to make. Not for him, of course, but for the child. It would be equally reasonable to expect him to move halfway across the country to be closer to me, but no-one is demanding that. Because I have no job to leave? Because I’m a woman? Because all my reasons for not wanting to move have been sifted through the mesh of rationality and found wanting?

The bottom line is that we both made a choice when we engaged in unprotected sex, and that choice has consequences for both of us. I go through the discomforts and dangers of pregnancy and childbirth and have the joyful but heavy responsibility of a child at the end of it. He has to pay a percentage of his income to support the child.

And yet he’s the one who feels treated unfairly.

(This is a slightly edited version of a post that first appeared on The Iron-On Line)

Complete the following: “A mother is…”

a) An embodiment of what it means to be feminine.
b) Someone who gives birth.
c) A female parent.

Depending on the context, b) or c) could be the appropriate response. c) includes adoptive mothers, which I think makes it a better fit to what we usually understand by the term, but it’s not hard to think of a context where b) would be a better fit.

I’m very suspicious of a). The linking of motherhood and femininity is so intrinsic in some people’s minds that it seems insane to question it, but I’m questioning it. Motherhood as an ideal is only linked to femininity as an ideal because our culture has defined it thus. And therein lies the danger.

Some of the most painful emotional abuse I’ve suffered in relationships has come from men who see their mothers as goddesses on lofty pedastals. They respect women only to the extent that these women match the divine example set by their mothers. Any deviation from this, and the respect vanishes.

That’s the harm on an individual scale. On a cultural scale, the idea that any woman who is a fit mother will automatically be classically feminine hurts every woman who struggles to fit into the mould. Women who choose not to become mothers are seen as denying their femininity, hence the ubiquitous question, “But aren’t you worried you’ll be unfulfilled?” Women who are incapable of bearing children are objects of pity.

For those who choose motherhood but reject classical femininity, the world’s judgement can be even harsher. If a woman raises a child alone, whether through choice or acceptance of necessity, she cannot be classically feminine enough to satisfy certain groups. “Children need fathers” not just to provide them with positive male role models, so the logic goes, but also to protect their mothers from having their femininity - and therefore their motherhood - eroded by adapting to the practicalities of life.

And why is it so horrifying to consider a lesbian having a child by artificial insemination? Or even - God forbid - a trans man giving birth? It attacks the link between femininity and motherhood; it calls into question whether this link is really as intrinsic as it once seemed. And that’s an uncomfortable line of thought to go down; far easier to say that “those people” shouldn’t be allowed to have children.

When I first started to explore the question of gender identity in my fiction, I was drawn to the idea of an amazon-mother, a woman so masculine that her motherhood becomes masculine by contact with it. It has always fascinated me, and I’m sure it will continue to fascinate me as I move up into this category myself. Come November, barring miscarriage or other disaster, I will be a mother in sense b). To the extent that I’m female, I’ll also be a mother in sense c), although I probably won’t be in a hurry to pin that label on myself any more than I use any other female-specific label.

I will not be a mother in sense a). For the sake of my sanity and the sake of my baby, I’ll save my energy for the tasks that are not futile from the outset.

Via Brutal Women, I found some fascinating information about “Jane”, the Abortion Counseling Service which helped women obtain abortions in pre-Roe days.

What struck me most was the way women working for Jane could be emotionally and philosophically disturbed by the human appearance of the fetuses they removed, could consider abortion to be some kind of excusable homicide, and could still be so committed to letting women make the choice themselves that they were willing to break the law to make it possible.

Those who believe in a woman’s right to control her own reproduction are rightly afraid of those who believe that fetuses deserve the same legal protection as born children, but these are not the only enemies of choice. More insidious is the opposition from “pseudo-choicers” who believe abortion should be available - when they think it’s appropriate.

Just as Henry Ford reputedly offered his customers “any colour you want, as long as it’s black”, these “pseudo-choicers” support a woman’s right to choose, provided she makes a choice of which they approve. They agree that abortion is not murder, and they agree that the decision to end a pregnancy can be difficult - so difficult, in fact, that a foolish, hormonal woman cannot be trusted to make it alone.

My ex-boyfriend was a willing, even eager partner in the act that led to my baby’s conception, but afterwards began to have second thoughts, especially given that the burden of supporting me and the baby would fall mainly upon him. When the pregnancy was confirmed, after the first shock had worn off, he suggested that “now you know you can get pregnant, have an abortion and try again when it’s more convenient.”

I didn’t even consider abortion, because I very much wanted to be pregnant, but just in case this didn’t seem like sufficient reason, I marshalled others. He thought becoming pregnant was easy, but I’d tried and failed several times before I met him. And I didn’t know how an abortion might affect my chances of becoming pregnant in future. Most importantly, I had this chance to have a child, and I didn’t find convenience a compelling reason to throw it away.

I explained my reasons to him without making any impression. For him, there are two classes of women: those who can become pregnant easily and those who experience more difficulty. My pregnancy proved that I fitted into the first category: case closed. When I tried to argue, he became impatient. “I’m just trying to be rational,” he said.

The implication was that I was being irrational because my analysis led to a different result than his. Rationality doesn’t work that way: the conclusion depends on the premises. His disinclination to pay child support was no more rational than my disinclination to undergo surgery I didn’t feel I needed, but he couldn’t see that. His feelings were perfectly rational; mine were irrational, emotional and (dare I say it?) hysterical.

Luckily he had no power to compel me to accept his definition of rationality. If I’d been less certain of my own wishes, he might have been able to persuade or coerce me, but all he managed to do was convince me that for all his fine words about supporting my choice before we knew whether I was pregnant, he didn’t believe the choice was mine to make. That realisation marked the beginning of the end of our relationship.

If the right to choose means anything at all, it has to include the right to make a choice that is incomprehensible to others. A woman’s decision to end or continue a pregnancy doesn’t need to make sense to anyone other than her; she is often the only person with all the information - knowledge of her own personality and wishes - necessary to understand it.

Believing that affluent women in stable relationships should choose pregnancy and single women on benefits should choose abortion is not pro-choice. It is paternalism, with a hefty dose of classism and more than a nod in the direction of eugenics. Believing that a woman’s decision is not or should not be the final word in the debate is anti-choice, whether it’s expressed in terms of rationality or in terms of the rights of the fetus.

Rationality, to me, suggests that since the woman is the one who must live with the consequences of her decision, she should be the one to make that decision without having her competence called into question. The line between offering advice and passing judgement may be narrow at times, but no-one on the outside can tell which decision is the right one. Those who would tell a woman that her choice is wrong, selfish or irrational are not, whatever else they may be, pro-choice.

I’m 23 weeks pregnant: almost two-thirds of the way through. So far, I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy a normal, complication-free pregnancy.

Which means that I suffered two weeks of feeling vaguely sick during every waking moment, unable to face any food apart from crackers and chopped apples. I vomited at the sight of blood for the first time in my life. I had days when exhaustion overwhelmed me and I couldn’t do anything but sleep. For the whole of the first trimester, hormones sent my emotions so far out of whack that a DIY show could reduce me to floods of tears.

I’ve given up or cut down on favourite foods and drinks that, although harmless to me could do untold damage to my baby. I had to take a vile-tasting liquid medicine for a recurring condition rather than the usual straightforward tablet, which contains an ingredient that could harm the baby.

My nipples became so tender that I had to wear a bra even in bed. By the time that had stopped, my breasts had grown large enough to make me uncomfortably self-conscious. A visit to the bank manager is now torture because my waistline has thickened so much that none of my smart clothes fit. I have to take exaggerated care whenever I lift anything that it doesn’t press against my stomach.

These are all minor niggles compared to the joy of knowing that I’m having the baby I always longed for. And when November comes and the oxytocin works its magic, none of them will bother me again. But it has had one effect on me: what patience I ever had with the argument that “if you don’t want the baby you can just put it up for adoption” has vanished forever.

Women who want an abortion don’t object to the fetus, they object to the pregnancy. If the technology existed to remove a fetus unharmed from its mother and transfer it into an artificial womb, with no more complications than an abortion presents, abortion would disappear. Putting the baby up for adoption doesn’t solve the problem: the woman is still forced to act as a life-support system for nine months.

I want this baby passionately, and I still wish it was possible for me to take a break from being pregnant every now and again. Just pop the baby into an artificial womb for a couple of hours and do my own thing without having to worry about how it might affect the baby. And if I feel like this with a wanted pregnancy, how much worse would a woman feel who became pregnant as a result of contraceptive failure and remains pregnant because she’s been denied access to abortion?

Pro-lifers often brush this question under the carpet. There’s no admission that pregnancy is a process, and one that uses up a woman’s physical and emotional resources, sometimes alarmingly. They treat pregnancy as a passive state, purely a question of not having an abortion.

That’s not how it is. I may not be consciously controlling the progress of this pregnancy, but I’m not waiting passively for my due date either. I’m not the same person, physically or emotionally, as I would have been had I not become pregnant. For me, those changes are worthwhile: a small price to pay for my baby. But to insist a woman accepts them against her will, despite being by her own admission not ready for motherhood, is neither fair nor reasonable.

Edit: When I said that artificial wombs would eliminate all need for abortion, I thought I was stating the majority pro-choice position. Turns out there’s a lot more to the question than I believed. For “disappear”, please read “be enormously reduced”.

In the comments to Pro-choice and pregnant, Robert said

Oh, and congratulations on the baby. I’m glad you’ve decided not to kill it.

Ignoring for the moment the question of whether that was intended as deliberate provocation, I wanted to address the question of whether it’s even accurate. I’m not sure it is.

“Decided not to…” implies that the possibility has been given some consideration, however fleeting; I might say, for example, “I thought about buying the Kaiser Chiefs album but decided not to.” If the option hasn’t been consciously considered and rejected, it doesn’t really make sense to imply a decision has been made. I wouldn’t say that I’ve decided not to move to Milton Keynes, become a chartered accountant or take up underwater basketweaving, and nor would I say that I’ve decided not to terminate this pregnancy.

Before I became pregnant, I spent a long time considering the possibility of having a baby. I passionately wanted a family, and although I don’t believe there’s anything special about biological, as opposed to adoptive, parenthood, I decided the simplest way to have a baby of my own was to give birth to one. So to say that I “decided not to adopt” is completely reasonable: I considered the possibility and rejected it.

The decision to become pregnant was less positive: the timing never seemed to be quite right and I wasn’t sure I had the right to inflict myself on a child. I hesitated, and circumstances came together to help me decide. I had the opportunity to have unprotected sex at the appropriate time of the month. I took it, and three nervous weeks later a blood test confirmed my pregnancy.

Abortion never entered my mind as a possibility. Pregnancy was something I’ve longed for, hoped for and occasionally put myself at risk in search of for most of my adult life. Now that I finally have what I always wanted, why should I consider throwing it away? If the pregnancy had been especially difficult or scans had revealed a problem with the fetus, I might have had to examine the option, but so far everything has gone smoothly and I’ve had no reason to consider abortion.

So why does Robert think I “decided not to kill” my baby? Does he believe that every woman, pro-life or pro-choice, who sees a pregnancy through to the end has decided not to have an abortion? If it’s unreasonable to say that a woman at the farthest extreme of “fetuses are people too” pro-life philosophy has decided not to kill her baby, what makes it more reasonable to say it about someone who made a deliberate choice to become pregnant but respects the choice of other women to avoid pregnancy?

There’s another distinction to be made here, as important as the one between a wanted and an unwanted fetus: the distinction between wanting to do something yourself and supporting the right of others to do it. I am pro-SSM, but I wouldn’t even consider marrying a woman. I believe in free speech, even speech that I personally consider repugnant. And I am pro-choice, despite the fact that my choice was made long ago.

Why do I support a right I have zero desire to exercise for myself? All sorts of reasons. People I care about may well make a different choice, and I want it to be open to them if they need it. I don’t want to live in the kind of world where women can be forced to sustain a pregnancy against their will to satisfy someone else’s idea of morality. I want the world to know that I’m having this baby because I deeply and passionately want it, not because I couldn’t get rid of it.

Being pro-choice doesn’t mean you think abortion is wonderful. It doesn’t mean that when the doctor’s receptionist confirms a very much wanted pregnancy you immediately think “of course, I could always have an abortion”. It simply means you believe the decision whether to become pregnant or the decision whether to continue with a pregnancy is the woman’s to make as she sees fit.

There are some cells in my uterus at the moment that aren’t usually there. I call these cells “my baby”, and spend much of my time planning the future that they may have, once they’ve finished developing into a human being. Other women, with similar cells, plan how to remove the cells as quickly and painlessly as possible.

A favourite pro-life argument is to seize gleefully on the similarities between the two groups of cells and demand how you can possibly justify the vastly different ways of treating them. If the fetus has no value, they ask, why do pregnant women often feel a close bond with their unborn babies? If it’s nothing more than a bunch of cells, why can a miscarriage be so devastating? Tempting as it is to dismiss this as so much irrelevance, it’s worth exploring the apparent contradiction for the insights it can offer into what pro-choice really means.

My baby is not yet a human being. Even with special care, it is very unlikely to be capable of surviving on its own if it were removed from my body. It needs my bloodstream and my uterus to have even a chance of becoming a human being. Although it’s genetically distinct from me, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to view it as a part of my body. A part that could, given the right conditions, become a separate person, but until that happens a part of me.

We all see our bodies differently, and we all give different values to different parts. Some people welcome body hair because of the cultural value it has; others remove it for much the same reasons. A transsexual man could be delighted at the removal of his breasts; a woman with breast cancer is more likely to feel mutilated. The same body parts, but very different reactions.

The cells inside the uterus are just another example. I give mine a very high value and watch their development with delight; other women give theirs a low value and can’t wait to be rid of them. The belief that we both have the right to assign value to our own bodies for ourselves is the essence of being pro-choice. If a woman places a high value on her fetus, removing it against her will is just as unacceptable as forcing a woman to retain, against her will, a fetus she gives a low value to.

This is partly why miscarriage can be so devastating. A woman who anticipates with joy the time when her fetus becomes a fully-fledged human being invests those cells with a great deal of value. If they are destroyed, she’s lost a part of herself that she loved and welcomed, and will naturally feel a degree of grief. The pain could well be made worse by the attitude that women are walking incubators, but that’s another question entirely.

The contradiction turns out to be no contradiction at all. I care passionately about my baby; every sign of movement brings me a little extra joy. But it wouldn’t bring joy to every woman, and those for whom it would mean nothing but discomfort should be able to make a different choice.