Miscarriages and Blame

There are 600,000 miscarriages annually. Many women expierence more than one miscarriage if they experience one at all. 10-20 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriages. 1 in 200 women will have a repeated miscarriage, meaning they will experience more than one. With miscarriages being so common it almost feels as if a part of being pregnant is the risk of miscarriages. As if an inherent part of possessing a pregnant body is running the risk of doing everything right and still not being able to keep your pregnancies.

     The women in Langston’s book Toxic Bodies certainly feel that having a miscarriage is an inherent part being pregnant. “… For women on the reservation have taken meticulous care of their health during their pregnancies, yet they still have high rates of pregnancy loss” (1). Sadly in their instance it doesn’t seem like there is much for these women to do, as the problem likes in environmental factors and not individual choices.  The chemicals causing the miscarriages also seem to still be around through generations and can affect women two generations removed from the original women who was affected by these environmental toxins. It has also been proven that even very low levels of these toxins can interfere with the life of a fetus. Yet these toxins have yet to be completely eliminated.

     In Borodo’s “Are Mothers Persons?” it is pointed out that recently fetuses have almost been granted super-subject status, as the right to a future life has taken priority over the mother’s right to her current full-fledged life. Mothers are villianized for wanted to make their own choices over doing everything they possibly can to avoid anything that might remotely harm the baby, even though the mother is a person with her own life and her own morals and the fetus has not yet born. Together these two ideas seem to conflict. In the one the very real and proven possibility of a toxin killing a fetus is not enough to get rid of the toxin. But the idea that a mother might do something even remotely dangerous to the health of the fetus is enough to make her into a villain.

     I think this discrepancy exists because in both cases if something goes wrong it comes back to hurt the mother, and can be blamed on the mother. With the toxins, despite the fact that they are known to be harmful there is also always the chance that when a miscarriage occurs it could have been caused by something the mother does. I think in our society we tend to believe that because some women are genetically designed to carry a fetus, the health and well being of that fetus are always in the hands of the mother. Because it exists in her body and relies on her for life, if anything goes wrong the blame lays with her.

     However, the mother is not allowed to act as if the fetus is a part of her body, she is not allowed to treat it as if she has control over it. If she starts to treat the fetus as if it is just another part of her body, and a part that she has autonomy and control over she is seen as incorrect and heartless as this fetus could become a child. When it comes to birth and pregnancy, the second a woman wants to take control over her body, she is met with resistance.

     I think there is an inherent double bind when a woman becomes pregnant. In society she is no longer a woman, but a mother, and immediately held to higher standards. Suddenly her life is not as important as the potential one she carries. She is no longer a person, but a mother and it becomes common and expected for her to do as she’s told and put the fetuses well being in front of her own. If she does not it is regarded the same as if she harmed or abused her own fully formed child. This directly links to women feeling upset and guilty after a miscarriage. Because they are so often place with all of the responsibility for anything that happens to the fetus they carry, when something does go wrong they are the ones that take blame.

     Many women also think that miscarriages are far and few in between and when they do have a miscarriage believe that is it a personal defect and that they are one of the few women to ever have a miscarriage. However, this is not true, not only are miscarriages more common than we are generally lead to believe, that are so many factors that can cause a miscarriage it is unrealistic and unfair to believe that the blame lays with the mother. Despite the fact that pregnancy is a common and encouraged part of life basic knowledge about pregnancy is rarely common knowledge. As this Huffington Post article explains, most women believe a lot of myths about pregnancy.