Blog Post #4

As has been pointed out in many blog entries before me, the idea of artificial pregnancies or even introducing pregnancies to males is a rather controversial idea. Doing so challenges the established notion of “motherhood” as it requires us, as a community, to reexamine the roles we’ve historically associated with women – be nurturing and morally obligated to raise children. Whenever I visit my hometown in India, I notice how very often, the women there directly associate motherhood with marriage, as if one is required to be the direct result of the other. Although this mentality has changed somewhat in recent years, having children is seen as something that every woman must aspire to – an endpoint. This is a direct result of centuries of women having to physically devote large portions of their lives after deciding to have a child. Another direct result of having women bear the physical consequences of a pregnancy are arguments by many feminists that women should have complete say in whether or not they get to carry out that pregnancy to term (or get an abortion). After all, it is their bodies which go through nine taxing months of exhaustion before the painful experience of giving birth to another human being. So why shouldn’t they be able to decide whether or not they want to go through with it?

If the idea of artificial pregnancy comes to fruition, it can offer a future where women would no longer be physically required to give up large chunks of their freedom if deciding to raise children. Nevertheless, reconditioning our society to move away from literally millenia of directly associating childbirth with women would be difficult, but I still believe, years down the line, that it could be possible. In a perfect future, a woman should be able to decide whether or not she wants to carry a pregnancy (physically give birth) before the pregnancy should even arise. If this were the case, I think many women would agree to opt for an artificial pregnancy.

And this is where the notion of male pregnancy comes into play. Even though many women would want to have the pregnancy carried out artificially – through a machine host elsewhere – I’m convinced that in the case of two people who actively decide to have a child (say a married couple), they’d rather host the pregnancy themselves. Which one of them hosts it is an interesting question – the male or the female? This is also a question which probably comes up frequently whenever lesbian couples talk about having a child through artificial insemination. In those discussions, one of the chief argument points again probably feeds off of that “nurturing mother” mentality: whoever is more mother-like or “feminine” should be having the kid. In many ways, if same-sex couples are also forced to have these talks, we – as a society – could move away from these “feminine” stereotypes. And more relevant to today’s policies, males would have a better understanding of why the right to have an abortion should be unequivocally be given to the person physically going through with the pregnancy.