Abortion is a Right, But So Should Be Motherhood.
In Post Patriarchy, “Choice” is A Financial Choice.
The simple answer to the ongoing abortion debate is to give prospective mothers actual choice by incentivizing motherhood as much as abortion. The political party that recognizes mothering as an actual job will win the abortion debate by cutting demand rather than access. Yet both sides of the abortion argument systematically invalidate mothers.
Motherhood is a universal necessity. The right to motherhood is neither well defined nor well defended in our society due to the traditional systemic erasure of mothers’ socioeconomic value. The human right to motherhood is subsumed into the general “fundamental right to procreate,” and into the right to bodily autonomy, which enshrines abortion rights. That mothers’ rights are neither defined nor defended is the result of the mass maternal subjugation that is the foundation of the vast, now fallen, structure of patriarchy. Our society needs a right to motherhood, distinct from the right to procreate, which is claimed alike by people who conceive (procreators) and people who do not (nonprocreators).
In the 20th century, industrial societies superseded the conditions of patriarchy. But they did not redefine and reevaluate our reproductive roles and rights accordingly. This caused the current confusion regarding everything from gender to abortion.
The question “What is a Mother?” remains unasked because post-patriarchy’s default state remains nonprocreation. Procreators inhabit a system built by and for nonprocreators in their image. Procreators threaten it. A mother is not a typical individual. At conception, every expectant mother ceases being an individual and becomes a polyhuman, a multiperson. A mother doesn’t fit culture's mold. Her embodied plurality exposes the inadequacy of our mother-exclusive system. The mother shares her life with the emergent being-s in the natural laboratory that she is. As a representative of nature in a culture that denies nature, the mother is an Other. To mitigate this anomaly, post-patriarchy denies mothers’ difference in both identity and output. So it pretends that the fetus is a separate individual. But the expectant mother is the only one of the interlinked beings she is who has consciousness and agency. A fetus has no conscious personhood, and society guarantees rights only to sentient conscious beings.
Gender equality is socially possible but procreatively impossible. People have equal control of their bodies only when they don’t procreate.
This is why NonProcreation has been the default direction in which Feminism has led potential mothers (procreators) in pursuit of social equality—by advocating for birth control, abortion, and other non mothers rights. Feminism defines reproductive freedom as freedom from reproductive work, and reproductive choice as the choice not to undertake the unpaid work of mothering. It lumps people with fertilized eggs with people without, perpetuating the intellected separation between mother and her body, which stems from patriarchy’s past colonization of the fertile uterus.
What patriarchy did was confiscate the means of reproduction and force fathers to buy the loot it colonized, erecting a legal wall between mother and child in order to assign her property rights to the paying fathers. Patriarchy denied mothers the right to personhood and entrapped fathers by charging them for the reproductive functions of women. Through the invention of patrimony and patrilineage, patriarchy kept men indebted to it for any access to a genetic future. Wealth sustained the patrilineage that sustained the patriarchy. Patriarchy declined in the industrial age with the rise of global economic migration, technological progress and female employment until science solved the mystery that motivated patriarchy, the knowledge of paternity. A DNA test made lifelong monogamous domestication unnecessary. Men no longer had to buy exclusive womb rights to acquire heirs. Commercial products like birth control, IVF, sperm banks, surrogacy etc. caused changes like serial marriages, same sex marriages and gender reassignments. Society became a post-patriarchy.
In post -patriarchy, mothers choose how many children they want, if any, thereby determining our civilizational future. But mothers still experience their occupation as a loss of status, identity, independence, as the loss of dignity, freedom, equality. Being only a mother shames the modern woman who finds it impossible to pursue a career, earn an income, earn a degree, and be a full time Mom. Women who stay single and don't have kids accumulate wealth.
Birth rates and cultural cohesion will continue to decline as long as the standard of living rises and mothers remain unpaid.
Money is the means by which our culture prioritizes what we do. Whosoever controls the means of reproduction and the generational wealth that is passed down through reproduction controls populations.
It is time we build new systems of trust. Our trust in our systems of truth is broken.
We can begin by recompensing mothers the equivalent of what they would earn if they raised other people’s kids rather than their own and what they would be paid to incubate and birth other people's children if they rented out their reproductive labor and bodily autonomy in the unregulated privatized economy that perpetuates the old hierarchy of non procreators controlling procreators.
By monetizing the value of motherwork, we can stop devaluing motherhood. Mothering is hard and essential work. If a society wants children carried to term, it should pay mothers.
A mother's right to raise her own children with dignity is as important as her right to abort. A pregnant person's right to choose should include her right to the substantive, formative value of her motherwork. A mother income will codify her right to provide food and shelter, time and care, attention and education to her children.
A mother income can standardize the intrinsic worth of mother work, address extreme economic disparity outside the monopoly of patriarchy, remedy sub replacement fertility levels, and allow mothers and fathers to redefine family dynamics and renegotiate family units beyond patriarchy’s constrictions, freeing men and women to pursue parenthood on its merits.
Reproductive rights must include mother's rights.
Having children is a sacrifice by the individual for the collective. Mothers produce people. Mothers’ output is necessary to a civilization and a species
So what is a mother's work worth to us?