Nick Kiddle (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ksej) wrote,@ 2008-04-22 00:53:00 |
|
More on sexism and ableism
Yet more things to piss me off. The comments here are pretty uniformly dreadful, but this one set a new low:
I don't think anything that leads to massively increased shaming of pregnant women who don't live up to the other people's standards of fetal care could ever be described as a very happy day.
When I was pregnant, I took a couple of multivitamins one day. My motive was, ironically enough, to make sure I was getting enough folic acid that I wouldn't have a disabled baby, but I'd forgotten that multivitamins also contain vitamin A, and excess vitamin A is badbadbad for the fetus. I worried, on and off, for the rest of the pregnancy, that I'd done something horrible to my baby. I didn't fully relax until Andrea was a couple of days old.
There were two parts to the fear. One was pretty much ableist: Oh my god, I might have a disabled baby! How would my child cope in an ableist society? How would I cope with the "burden" of looking after them? (Scare quotes because seeing disabled people as a burden is a pretty hefty dose of ableism in itself.)
The other part was guilt. ...and it would all be my fault! It's a strange feeling, to know that everything you do to your body is having an effect on another person. I believe very strongly that a pregnant woman1 has value other than as the container the fetus is developing in, but on the other hand I wasn't finding it easy to value myself that way. Not to mention, plenty of people were happy to reinforce the guilt.
So, yeah. If we discovered that by doing some supposedly-simple thing, pregnant women could make sure no more disabled babies were born ever again, this would actually be a sad day on at least two levels.
1"or trans man" being understood here.
Yet more things to piss me off. The comments here are pretty uniformly dreadful, but this one set a new low:
Should we learn tomorrow that an ever-so-slight alteration in maternal diets - say having a cup of tea every day at breakfast - would eliminate congenital deafness (or blindness or intersex conditions or low-functioning autism or Downs' syndrome or.....) that would be a very happy day indeed. Precision tea-drinking would quickly become a more-or-less mandatory feature of pre-natal care. It would be widely praised for its salvific effect on abortion rates, and 'Hippies' who insist on having tea-unsystematized 'natural' pregnancies would be widely condemned. Consider the flack pregnant women currently get for having so much as a cup of coffee or a glass of wine while pregnant, then exponentiate it.
I don't think anything that leads to massively increased shaming of pregnant women who don't live up to the other people's standards of fetal care could ever be described as a very happy day.
When I was pregnant, I took a couple of multivitamins one day. My motive was, ironically enough, to make sure I was getting enough folic acid that I wouldn't have a disabled baby, but I'd forgotten that multivitamins also contain vitamin A, and excess vitamin A is badbadbad for the fetus. I worried, on and off, for the rest of the pregnancy, that I'd done something horrible to my baby. I didn't fully relax until Andrea was a couple of days old.
There were two parts to the fear. One was pretty much ableist: Oh my god, I might have a disabled baby! How would my child cope in an ableist society? How would I cope with the "burden" of looking after them? (Scare quotes because seeing disabled people as a burden is a pretty hefty dose of ableism in itself.)
The other part was guilt. ...and it would all be my fault! It's a strange feeling, to know that everything you do to your body is having an effect on another person. I believe very strongly that a pregnant woman1 has value other than as the container the fetus is developing in, but on the other hand I wasn't finding it easy to value myself that way. Not to mention, plenty of people were happy to reinforce the guilt.
So, yeah. If we discovered that by doing some supposedly-simple thing, pregnant women could make sure no more disabled babies were born ever again, this would actually be a sad day on at least two levels.
1"or trans man" being understood here.
