M. Ali Abdi
Probably some of you have read the article “California octuplets raise worries for family” in The New York Times last week. That is the story of a 33-year-old middle-class single mother, named Nadya Suleman, who, while having six children, has given birth to octuplets (two girls and six boys!) at the Kaiser Permanente hospital in Bellflower fifteen days ago. According to the article all of the children are safe and sound, resulting in a new place for them in the record books as the “longest surviving octuplets” in the United States!
The article has raised a number of points, including the reaction of public media to this news, the use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) by Suleman to give birth to her octuplets, the possible role of donation organizations and support groups for financial compensation, the commodification of children, the irresponsibility and “huge ethical failure” of the doctor who had accepted Suleman as a patient and made it possible for her to have octuplets and etc. Each of the raised issues is potentially an essay topic. But in this one I will focus on two points that I find the most interesting.
First; I will have a deeper look on the assumptions embedded in the two admiring comments, made by Suleman’s publicist and by a medical receptionist, about Suleman and her ability to give birth to eight children. They have depicted Suleman as a “wonderful woman” whose productive ability is “blessing”. I will argue in this essay that these comments are not consisted of arbitrary words coming from the-middle-of-nowhere, but rather are parts of dominant discourses concerning women’s most remarkable role to be that of mothers through the past centuries.
Second; it’s interesting for me that the article has referred to the sperm donor(s) as father(s). Besides, it has taken the singleness of Suleman for granted, by not making any comment or doing any interview about it. I will argue in the second part that the use of the term “father” by the author to refer to the sperm donor is problematic. In fact ARTs, beside multiple other factors, have not only helped women to be mothers out of wedlock, but also led to the re-definition of parenthood. If I have the chance of grabbing your attention to follow my article through the end, I will show that the use of ARTs have also challenged the traditional link between fatherhood and family formation as well.
These parts are interrelated; as I will argue the high value given to mothers by the dominant discourses, and also the emergence of ARTs, have both played important roles in providing the opportunity for women to be single mothers. Women do not necessarily need to experience intercourse or to have any form of physical contact with men in order to get pregnant and give birth. This opportunity for women has further consequences including posing a challenge to the conventional role of men in making families.
Who is a Wonderful Woman?
Suleman is a middle-class psychiatric technician living in a 3-bedroom flat east of Los Angeles with her parents. She cannot afford the costs of caring for 14 children, as a bioethicist implied in that article. If you do a simple search on Google yourself, you can find that the cost of raising a child until the age of 18 in the West of US is $16100 a year, and for fourteen children that is more than $220,000 annually.[1]
Besides, there are existing discriminations against women and specifically working mothers in the labor market which are awaiting Suleman. Statistics and researches show that generally working mothers cannot reach “upper-middle management”, the money they receives for their part-time jobs is less than that of full-time ones, they do not have enough time to participate in training programs to promote their position, the schedule of work-time is not flexible enough, and the employers tend to hire childless people because, like Suleman, mothers have to stop working at some point because of their children, resulting in the loss of better salary and job opportunities. For a college-educated woman like her, this “mommy tax” can be more than $1 million (Crittenden 2001: 88, 93, 97-99).
So one might ask, concerning Suleman’s condition, what has actually pushed Suleman’s publicist to portray her on a live program on ABC as a “wonderful woman” who is “joyful for the miracle of life and the babies”? And what has caused a medical receptionist, who was interviewed by The New York Times’ journalist, to believe that 8 simultaneous children is a “blessing”? And what have been the possible motivations/assumptions behind the fertility clinic doctor’s acceptance of Suleman for fertility treatment? Aren’t these people aware of the potential sufferings of this family and the hard time waiting for the 14 children? I want to have a deeper look into these comments and assumptions.
In fact giving a high privilege to mothers has been a constant discourse through the past centuries. In the pre-capitalist era, when the family itself was a commodity producing unit, mothers were “economic assets” because of working beside their husbands and producing children to help the extended families survive (Crittenden 2001: 46). Then, the spread of “cash economy” and the emergence of public and private spheres after the American and French Revolution, devalued women’s work at home as mothers. But women were again encouraged to be mothers in order to produce the “citizens of the new republic” or, as Theodore Roosevelt said, mothers were like “military service” for producing soldiers of the nation (Crittenden 2001: 48; Blum 1999: 19, 22).
The like discourses continued in the 20th century. In fact, when I read Suzette Franklin’s (a medical receptionist) comments to depict the event as “a miracle” or “a blessing”, it instantaneously resonates for me the voices of physicians and what-the-historians-call the maternalists of the early twentieth century who were saying that motherhood is a “sacred” duty and a “privilege” for women so they should preserve their reproductive power by remaining “uterine” women rather than “mental” ones! (Blum 1999: 19, 24; Morrell 1994: 72, 73) Since Suleman has endangered her own and her children’s lives by placing 6 embryos in her womb,[2] she might not be an ideal symbol for maternalists whose one of primary goals was to decline infant mortality rate, but she is definitely praised by them because of being “obsessed with having children”, the phrase used by her mother to describe her.
If Suleman is depicted as a “wonderful woman” by popular TV shows in the 21st century in US, similarly she would have been awarded the title of “Heroine Mother” if she had been living in Romania during Ceausescu’s regime in 70’s because of fulfilling her “most important social role” and conceiving the “nature’s law”, that is to say delivering more than ten children! (In fact if she really wanted to be awarded, she had to raise her children properly as well!) But even in Romania, despite benefiting from early retirement, childcare possibilities, long maternity leaves, and financial assistance for having too many children, Suleman could not have survived, based on my simple calculations on the costs of her living on a piece of paper and comparing it to Ceausescu’s generous incentives! (Kligman 1997: 73-81)
It’s interesting to note that even discourses surrounding feminist literature do not necessarily reject Suleman’s decision. Not all the feminists believe in “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” literally, but there are some “maximalists” or believers of “difference feminism” who argue for “modern maternal mythology” which admire females’ particular qualities in bearing and nurturing children. There are many feminists in the third-wave of feminism who, unlike their predecessors in the mid 60s and 70s, do “long to give birth to a child”, linking it to a “healing orientation” and “cooperativeness”, and propose that motherhood is “the deepest knowledge a woman can experience” (Rebecca Walker 2007: 8; Morrell 1994: 74-76; Crittenden 2001: 62).
Although the same dominant discourse doesn’t exist everywhere (you may think of China’s one-child-policy discourse which has emphasis on the “quality” of children rather their quantity (look at Anagnost 1996)), the reproductive behavior of Suleman to have 14 children is less criticized and challenged than that of a child-less woman who is actually questioning the “naturalness” of women’s desire to be mothers. Childless women are under a constant pressure of normative discourses against which they have to use various “verbal responses” to explain their “nonconformist” behavior (Morrell 1994: 60).
So the validity of Suleman’s choice is “assumed, understood, and ratified by convention, norms, and accepted bounds of respectable discourses” for many centuries (Morell 1994: 69). That is to say, the passionate words used to depict Suleman and her reproductive power as “wonderful woman” and “blessing” respectively, and even the decision made by Suleman’s doctor to let her put 6 embryos in her body, must be seen and analyzed within a broader framework of discourses encouraging the hegemonic concept of “compulsory motherhood”: a woman “must want to become a mother … it’s a critical part of her value to society” (Hertz 2006: 4-5).
In the next part I will shed light on another aspect of this story: Suleman is a single mother, the father is believed to be a sperm!
Sperm Fathers
If motherhood is normative, singleness is not. It’s a “discursive category” constructed and shaped in a particular way by a network of power relationships. Single women are asked to explain their choice constantly because it’s regarded a “deficit” or a “social exclusion”. They have to “negotiate their single identity” because normative discourses, including psychological and psychoanalytical ones, assume that femininity needs connection with a man, and woman’s “well-being” is maintained through constructing a heterosexual family and bonding intimate ties with her husband (Reynolds and Wetherell 2003: 490, 491, 497).
The story of being a single mother is not as simple as writing “Suleman divorced in 2008” and now “she lives with her parents.” In fact there is a controversial history which lay behind today’s opportunities for some middle-class women to be single mothers by adopting a child, intentionally “chancing pregnancy” by sleeping with a man or a boy friend, or, like Suleman, using assisted reproductive technologies (Hertz 2006: 40-43). Suleman’s current choice has a history behind its feasibility:
First; the emergence of liberal political system and the capitalist economy, within which we live today, has made it possible for women to conceive their bodies as their own “properties” and have legal rights over them, preventing any form of men/state intervention. The legalization of birth control and abortion is a result of this private and individual ownership (Rothman 1989: 41-44). The establishments of these rights together with the recognition of the rights of out-of-wedlock children, the changes in the family law, and passing adoption laws, resulted in challenging the authority of men within marriage on the one hand, and providing the opportunity for women to be mothers without entering the marriage contract (Hertz 2006: 12 ,13);
Second; the emergence of financially independent single mothers who were able to nurture and raise their children properly, the rise in divorce rate and in the number of children who were living with one parent, the impact of feminist and gay movements on public discourses concerning single parents, and the existence of the dominant discourse of compulsory motherhood, all contributed in transforming the “moral boundaries” surrounding single mothers (Hertz 2006: 13, 14). The ARTs quickened the speed of this transformation. Before the presentation of new reproductive technologies, including IVF, Suleman couldn’t give birth to her octuplets.
But who is the father of these 14 children? Is there just one? Or are there multiple fathers? And what does the term “father” mean here? We know from the article that “her ex-husband is not the father of any of the children” (emphasis added). The term father(s), used by the authors of the article, is in fact an indication of sperm donor(s) with the help of whom Suleman managed to become pregnant. So the authors have presumed that the one who donates the sperm is the one who holds the position of the father as well.
But is it true? If the donators do not take the responsibility of the family to which they genetically belong or if Suleman herself made it clear in the contract that no further claim could be made by donators in term of having familial relationships with children or holding legal rights over them, then can we still address the donators as “fathers”?
At least Carroll Stack doesn’t agree with it. Drawing on the examples of the communities in The Flats, a poor black community in Chicago, she argues that parenthood is a “social position” rather than a biological one. She explains that what actually determines the eligibility of a person to be entitled to assume each social position is the acquirement of those distinctive “behavior patterns” needed for that social position. Since, in her own words, “more than one person can occupy the same social position at the same time”, the rights in these children belong to a network of kinsmen (Stacks 1974: 82, 83). In other words, biological reproduction cannot be the only “kinship signifier” anymore (Mamo 2007: 92).
Similarly, Suleman’s parents, who are members of Suleman’s support community, or her boyfriend, or any other person, might be the ones who assume the social role of her 14 children’s fathers. The ones who donates sperm to Suleman, despite of having biological ties with the produced babies, are not the future fathers of the children but rather are what I call their sperm fathers; that is to say, there is difference between donating and parenting (Mamo 2007: 99);
Both of these examples, the example of The Flats and the case of Suleman and her use of in vitro fertilization, reveal that although “genetic paternity or maternity” and being a dad or mom are understood to be identical, some cracks in this widely accepted assumption are beginning to show (Hertz 2006: 45). The emergence of ARTs has questioned many patriarchal assumptions: two opposite-sex parents are not necessarily the only possible way of making a family, a child is not necessarily an “extension” of a man, intercourse is not necessarily needed to produce a child, biology is not the crucial requirement for “relatedness”; in other words, to say it more frankly and directly, the “entire man is replaced by his gametes” literally (emphasis added) (Mamo 2007: 95; Rothman 1989: 45; Hertz 2006: 40).
What are the possible consequences of this replacement? How do the future families look like? Are the new definitions of parenthood, resulted partially from ARTs, leading us to the isolation of human beings or is the fragmentation of parenthood, again resulted from ARTs, leading us back to the time of extended families in terms of more belongingness? Suleman was just an example of these changing patterns of life and their complexities which are awaiting us.
[1] http://www.babycenter.com/cost-of-raising-child-calculator
[2] The reproductive medicine society recommends no more than two embryos for women under 35 years old and no more than five for women over 40. http://www.asrm.org/
