ABSTRACT

Pregnancy is women’s work. It is the one experience that ‘inevitably differentiates women from men’ and thus forms a ‘crucial part of our identity which we cannot ignore, even supposing we would wish to do so’ (Atkins and Hoggett, 1984: 83). The fact that most women hold the capacity to bear children, Anne Morris and Susan Nott (1995) reflect, has had adverse consequences for the treatment of women in society. The dominant ideology of reproduction positions and defines women in terms of their potential mothering role (Morell, 2000) and thereby exercises a regulatory role over all women’s lives. Nor has the increasing incidence of infertility and deliberate childlessness displaced this view. Childless life is not perceived as being a ‘viable or appealing choice’ and ‘women who purposefully do not have children are not taken on their own terms, but are measured by the idealized standard of motherhood’ (Morell, 2000: 314). While pro-natalist norms hold a powerful influence on the way that women are viewed, non-pregnant women are nevertheless assumed to have the capacity to make valid self-determining choices about their lives and destinies in a way that the pregnant women rarely are. The pregnant woman’s body is no longer her own; it labours now for another – she is not one person ‘but two – mother and foetus – and society may expect, even demand, that her freedom is curtailed in the interests of the foetus’ (Morris and Nott, 1995: 54-5). Under an ideology whereby ‘the foetus is something to be protected from its mother’ (Diduck, 1993: 471), the rational and sane mother must willingly accept treatment by medical professionals; however, ‘no normal mother-to-be’ would persist with a course that

would cause serious harm to her foetus. As a result, pregnant women are confronted with a law that speaks ‘loudly of care and protection of children, and less loudly but perhaps more profoundly, of control of women’ (Diduck, 1993: 465).