The Answer to the Abortion Debate, Birthrate Decline and Income Disparity is a Universal Mother Income.
The simple answer to the abortion debate is to give prospective mothers real and true choice by incentivizing motherhood as much as we do abortion.
Mothers control humanity’s future and are humanity’s gatekeepers. But society works hard to hide their extraordinary collective bargaining power from women.
The political party that recognizes mothering as a payable job will gain the mothers’ vote and win the abortion debate by cutting demand rather than cutting access. Yet both sides of the abortion debate avoid validating mothers.
Why?
REGULATING MOTHERHOOD
Motherhood is a first principle, a universal necessity. Our one common cord through our millennia of existence is that we all come from the bodies of mothers who risk their lives to give us life. Yet the human right to motherhood is subsumed into the “fundamental right to procreate,” recognized by the Supreme Court similarly for men and women, 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 crumbling, cultural structure of patriarchy. Humanity now teeters over the cracks.
For the past six to ten thousand years, humanity organized into patriarchies. Patriarchy robbed mothers’ socioeconomic value and assigned it to contracted fathers. Then paternity tests, birth control and artificial inseminations divorced sex from procreation. Men no longer depended on maritally acquired and safeguarded wombs for heirs. Patriarchy collapsed. The chaos of post-patriarchy replaced it.
Patriarchy was an effect of the agrarian revolution, which organized humans in settlements run by militarized bureaucracies. Patriarchy reprogrammed human mating habits around patrimony. Patriarchy confiscated the means of reproduction, erected a legal wall between mother and fetus, and then blackmailed men into buying the loot. Patriarchy charged men for access to legitimate heirs. Men had to rent a womb for life in order to buy its rights to children. By attaching the promise of permanence (of wealth, identity, legacy) to patrilineage, patriarchy kept men indebted and working to pay their dues. The adoption of borders, money, monoculture and the economic institution of slavery deepened men’s dependency and inspired ingenuity. By applying extreme unnatural restrictions and stressors on humans, patriarchy moved humans from a subsistence to a growth economy, thereby eventually outgrowing its necessity.
Post-patriarchy was an effect of the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization ended the necessity for slavery. Multinational corporations and economic migration ended the necessity for borders. DNA decoding ended the necessity for lifelong monogamy. Digitalization ended the necessity for cultural monopoly.
Patriarchy funded the science that solved the mystery that had motivated the patriarchy: the knowledge of paternity. Commercial products like IVF, sperm banks, egg donors, fetal tests and surrogacies released humans from their reproductive imperative and from the cultural obligation of marriage. Post-patriarchy undid traditional familial, communal bonds so its individual citizens could focus on work and consumption, making money the highest of values. Devoid of their past necessity, patriarchy’s mores and standards became performative. The only remaining power of patriarchy is patri-inheritance. Patriwealth and new money keep the societies going. Post-patriarchy counts on personal fiscal self-interest to prop up a declining society.
Because industrialization made autonomous employment more profitable, post-patriarchy stopped honoring the right of one person to own the body of another. This delegitimization of slavery also reaffirmed the expectant mother’s right to her reproductive body, which logically included her fertilized uterus and her unborn (and, judging by surrogacy law, her newborn). The goal of full employment made abortion free and easy. But post-patriarchy did not make motherhood free and easy, because it did not serve the goal of full adult employment and did not serve the one patri-system that post-patriarchy kept sacrosanct: the patri-generational wealth feed.
Preserving patriarchy’s wealth flow and expanding it by maximizing female employment is the two-headed reason why the “right to choose” does not guarantee “the right to mother” and why family law still obligates fathers to pay child support long after serial and same sex marriages should have made that duty obsolete. To patriarchy’s stay-at-home motherhood, post-patriarchy added the option of mothering while holding a full-time job. Outside reproduction, women’s lives now have nothing in common with their foremothers’. Marriages are no longer required, prearranged and lifelong. Women choose whom to marry, if anyone, and how many children they want, if any. Daughters can now inherit family wealth, which releases women from financial dispossession, and the current wealth transfer from baby boomers benefits women. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/01/16/women-economic-power-demographic-shifts/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socia The one patriarchal organizational structure that post patriarchy upholds is the marital contract, by which prospective mothers license their uteri to intended fathers in the money-for-procreation trade that was the engine motoring patriarchy. Patriarchy’s unjust social hierarchy of nonprocreators controlling procreators remains intact. Post patriarchy’s default state is nonprocreation. Procreators still inhabit a system built by and for nonprocreators. Nonprocreators built patriarchy in their image. Procreators can fit in society as long as they function as nonprocreators. But mothers threaten it.
How?
WHAT IS A MOTHER?
At conception, every expectant mother ceases being an individual and becomes a polyhuman, a multiperson. A mother doesn’t fit culture's individualist mold. Her embodied plurality exposes the inadequacy of the mother-exclusive system. The mother shares her life with the emergent beings in the natural laboratory that she is. As a representative of nature in a culture that denies and defies nature, the mother is the uncontrolled Other. To mitigate this threat, post-patriarchy denies mothers’ difference in identity and output and keeps births hyperplanned around patri-wealth.
Our discourse lacks signifiers for procreative modes of existence. We lump together people with fertilized eggs and people without. Gender equality, however, is procreatively impossible. People have equal control over their bodies only when they are not procreating. This blind spot perpetuates patriarchy’s intellectual separation of mother and child, which was invented to colonize the uterus. When cultural arbiters like the NYT editorial board opine that, “The principle is clear: women and men should have equal control over their own bodies,” they omit the fact that biological men are not fertilizable. When they describe pregnancy as “protracted invasion, debilitation and deadly hazard,” they assign a nonprocreator’s consciousness to mothers. Conflating women with mothers is what enabled the linguistic gamesmanship exhibited in the Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade. In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito cited 1974’s Geduldig v. Aiello decision to explain determining that, because not all women are mothers all the time, pregnancy discrimination is not sex discrimination. Alito dismissed the equal protection clause, arguing that abortion rights no longer affect gender equality, and altered the Court’s earlier decisions on the basis that “women are not (no longer) without electoral or political power” and that “unmarried pregnant women” now have access to pregnancy discrimination protections, “guaranteed” medical leave “in many cases,” and medical costs that are “covered by insurance or government assistance.” By using the word “unmarried” in the context of post-patriarchy, Alito upheld patriarchy’s old definition of a wife as the vessel of her husband, echoing his 1991 dissent on Planned Parenthood v. Casey where he argued that a potential father should have the legal right to veto an abortion.
In the current US political landscape, liberals advocate only for nonprocreative rights, limiting women’s reproductive freedom to the freedom from reproductive work On social media and mass media, in doctors’ offices and classrooms, children learn that abortion is healthcare. Conservatives advocate for the rights of the unborn as if the life the unborn is a part of were dead, and liberals advocate for the rights of Moms as of the second heart beating in their bodies were dead. In her oral dissent to Dobbs in December 2021, Justice Sonia Sotomayor used this argument to compare a fetus to a brain-dead person, citing that a fetus reacts to prodding as a brain-dead person does. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/sotomayor-compares-fetus-brain-dead-person-fetal-movement-consciousness Comparing the living body in the mother’s body to a body on “artificial life support” devalued the natural wealth produced by the mother’s labor.
In reality the pregnant mother is the only one of the interlinked living beings she is who has consciousness and thus agency. Since our laws guarantee rights only to sentient beings and define life as the ability to engage in commerce, and a fetus has no self-aware personhood, she alone represents the interests of the life she spawns. The fetus is a continuum of the mother, as is her newborn crowning out of her canal in search of her lactating breasts. Therefore, the two are one.
At a time when activists propose wildlife property rights that grant nonhumans the right to own their homes and bodies, mothers still don’t own their pregnant bodies. Both law and semantics find sense in a man saying that a woman is having “his” baby, yet to a procreator that statement is nonsense. Mothers have the option to give shared custody in exchange for financial support precisely because a child is only a mother’s to give. Both abortions on demand and abortion bans support post-patriarchy’s effort to solidify patriarchy’s legal separation of mother from her uterus and her fetus. Thus, abortion is controversial only because it confirms that a mother owns her fertilized uterus in a legal environment that otherwise upholds patriarchy’s financial control of the womb and sustains patriarchy’s view of the mother as an empty vessel for hire.
Post-patriarchs seek to control the means of reproduction so as to control the means by which generational wealth is passed down, thereby controlling humanity’s future. They make parenthood a perk for the rich, who can hire the global poor as surrogates or substitute-parents, and disincentivize parenthood for everyone else. Parents who purchase eggs and sperm own the living embryos rather than the mothers who carry them in their bodies, incentivizing humans to replace parenthood-for-love with parenthood-for-hire. The mental health crisis among young populations who live alienated from their bodies accelerates as more mothers become breeders. Rich aberrant mothers like Britney Spears are sent to psychiatric institutions or placed under conservatorship. Because no one articulates the rights of mothers, the economy of the post-patriarchy perpetuates patriarchy’s rape culture which pays unwed young women for sex but not motherhood. It is common for wealthy men to fund reproductive rights and pay to have safe sex with thousands of girls.
In a patri-society where everyone must have money, skilled women experience motherhood as a loss of identity, independence, status and income. They thus often subcontract their mothering work to unskilled workers, since it is impossible to pursue careers, earn salaries and be hands-on full-time Moms. The effect of mass absentee motherism on social cohesion is devastating as mothers are the people who pass on the nuances of civilization, and in effect recreate civilization for each generation.
The term “working mother” is a misnomer. In post-patriarchy, workers get paid to pay attention, to ignore what they are not paid to do, and to ignore nature for culture. A full-time mother cannot hold a full-time job. A baby can send a new mother into poverty. As a result, women who want to have children are forced to wait until their finances improve. Because a woman’s procreative peak in her early years coincides with a nonprocreative person’s intellectual and career peak, her readiness resembles a man’s and that is reproductively too late. As a result, more and more women seek artificial fertility and hormonal treatments or have no children. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/19/growing-share-of-childless-adults-in-u-s-dont-expect-to-ever-have-children/ Forgoing marriage and parenthood has a bigger payoff for American women than men. Women who stay single and don’t have kids are getting richer. It is how working women are catching up financially with men. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-31/women-not-having-kids-get-richer-than-men?embedded-checkout=true. As China, S. Korea, and Sweden found out, telling women to have babies in exchange for tax benefits, cheap housing, one-time cash payments, or free postpartum care center stays is ineffectual. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/upshot/china-population-decline.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/28/world/asia/south-korea-joriwon-postpartum-care.html#:~:text=At%20centers%20like%20St.%20Park,massages%20and%20child%2Dcare%20classes. So are proposals like universal preschool education, child tax credits or nationalized child care that force mothers into the workforce and pass control of their toddlers to the state. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/business/china-birth-rate-2023.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes In post-patriarchy, motherhood, and abortion, are financial choices. Because post-patriarchy is a plutocracy, it must recompense mothers. Only when motherwork earns the equivalent of a comparable job will mothers-to-be have real choice.
For now, post-patriarchy supplements its population needs with marital immigration, importing brides and grooms from trad patriarchies. This repopulation fix will taper off as the developing world becomes post-patriarchal and prosperous. Post-patriarchs expect that synthetic wombs and brain-dead wombs for gestational donation will be available for purchase by then to those who can afford the rising costs of disembodied parenthood. The growing demographic crisis terrifies nationalists and traditionalists. An enforced violent return to patriarchy in the West would spark a global conflict between patriarchists and post-patriarchists. Even without a backlash, war between these two factions may become inevitable. Any transition to disembodied uteri would destroy humanity’s cohesion and could usher in a new dark age that would trigger old dehumanizing behavioral patterns.
Cultures depend on strong common bonds to evade dissolution and devolution. The collapse of patriarchy has put the civilization that it built over thousands of years at risk. Driven by short-term profit, post-patriarchy counters both the laws of nature and the mores of patriarchy. By replacing religion with scientism and ethical values with monetary values, post-patriarchy alienates humans from each other. The gain in material wealth post-patriarchy has generated has come at a loss in human wealth. For society to evolve out of this social chaos, it needs to build new systems of trust.
Where do we start?
UMI
At their first campaign rally in Virginia on Jan. 23rd, President Biden and Vice-President Harris framed the 2024 election as a referendum on abortion. Joe Biden, referencing the line in Justice Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs that “women are not without political or electoral power,” said, “Republicans don’t have a clue about the power of women in America. But they’re about to find out.” https://19thnews.org/2024/01/biden-campaign-trump-abortion/#:~:text=Biden%2C%20referencing%20a%20line%20in,re%20about%20to%20find%20out.%E2%80%9D In response, Republican spokesperson Kellyann Conway condemned infanticide, extinction and the “anti-science” view of fetal nonpersonhood on Fox News. Birth control and abortion, especially chemical abortion, are common established practice. Abortion can only be disincentivized. Americans can’t be expected to unlearn the myriad medical bodily interventions that have come on the market in the past sixty years. One in four women in the U.S. has an abortion by the time she is forty-five https://www.guttmacher.org/news-release/2017/abortion-common-experience-us-women-despite-dramatic-declines-rates and dodges up to twenty-nine pregnancies in her reproductive years. Rather than expect mothers to give their bodies over to pregnancy for ten months, then tear their bodies open through the rite of passage that is birth, and then hand their living guts to paying strangers, our society can valuate motherhood.
The alternative to abortion is a Mother Income. A Mother Income will codify a mother's right to provide food, shelter, time, attention, care and education to her propagation. A Mother Income will codify a child’s right to mother, food, shelter, time, care and learning. A Mother Income will guarantee a woman’s right to motherhood and offer real reproductive choice. A Mother Income will elevate the living conditions of all mothers and alleviate the economic plight and/or the financial dependency of mothers. A Mother Income will credit mothers for bearing and raising children. A Mother Income will give mothers real freedom, dignity, respect, equality and self-esteem. By monetizing motherwork, we will stop devaluing mothers.
Mothers are a stochastic, not a permanent, category: women go in and out of motherhood. Mothers are second class citizens who have no economic rights and do not get paid for their work. Full-time mothers are the only productive segment of humanity still kept outside the paid labor force. Society owes mothers the rights and advantages it gives other employed people. Mothers have been deprived of independent personhood for six millennia. Women are now given it as nonmothers. Mothers everywhere are deprived of their natural rights to their children and to their reproductive bodies, and of the economic value of their maternal labors. Mother work is the only unpaid, unvaluated essential job in the world economy.
Society can base the monetary value of mothers’ output on the median income it now pays to surrogates and substitute mothers. For the first six years of every child’s life, every qualifying mother who applies will receive a monthly salary as well as health and social security benefits similar to those earned by employees who nurse, nurture, raise and mentor other people’s children in the numerous skills required for modern adulthood, as well as the one-time fee paid to mothers who gestate and birth other people’s children in the unregulated private procreative economy. Motherhood includes incubation, pregnancy, birth facilitation and child-rearing. A Universal Mother Income is a basic measure of every mother’s social productive value.
Since motherwork is a stochastic essential job, mothers will also receive scholarships like those offered to those enlisting in the Armed Forces that will help them earn accreditation, college degrees and guidance to post UMI employment paths. The cost for this can be met by the Defense budget, redirecting some Corps resources to a Department of Mothers led by a Secretary of Mothers, thereby balancing the War Department with a Life Department. Long-term the cost will be supported by individual donors through voluntary payroll contributions, one-time donations and tax credits and other incentives, including UMI paying child-supporter credentials.
A Universal Mother Income will standardize the substantive value of motherwork, heal economic disparities and raise subreplacement fertility levels. It will enable mothers and fathers to redefine couple dynamics and renegotiate family units, separating parenthood from the drama of romance and erotic intimacy. It will release children from the trap of nuclear family antagonisms and power struggles that leave them scarred. It will free fathers to father free of financial obligation and will free humans to pursue parenthood on its merits. After six to ten millennia of dispossessing mothers, society needs to valuate mothers’ substantive work and reward motherwork as distinct from sexwork. A mother's work compensation at fair market value based on the recognition of mothering as a job recompensed at fair market value will incentivize the work of mothering, protect those most vulnerable, heal economic disparity, and re-educate humans to value things differently than patriarchs did.
Mothers produce, forge and preserve humans. It is time we account for them.
