BY LISA MACDONALD
In her article replying to Margaret Allum's "and ain't i a woman" column on biological parenthood (GLW #405), Helen Riley (GLW #408) makes some sweeping claims which demand a reply. Of greatest concern is that Riley's basic argument is premised on capitalist ideological themes that are central to the oppression of women and therefore has serious implications for the struggle for gender equality and women's liberation.
Allum correctly states, "Technological advances that broaden the options available to women in relation to reproductive choices should be supported", whether these are medical procedures to prevent or end a pregnancy, or technologies which enable infertile women to become pregnant. She did not argue that biological relatedness between parent and child is unimportant. On the contrary, she acknowledged that parents tend to prefer to have genetically related children and notes the enormous expense, inconvenience and emotional trauma that adults will put themselves through to make this possible.
However, Allum contested the idea that this drive to have children in one's own image is biologically driven. Instead, she said, this desire is a product of social relations. Riley thinks otherwise: "... the biological imperative is extremely strong". Her main evidence for this is the "bewilderment [that adopted children experience] caused by their complete dislocation from any biological connection" with their parents. Thus, she says, adoption and donor conception practices have to be veiled in secrecy and support groups are needed for children who are unable to know their biological parents.
Social imperative
But each piece of evidence Riley presents for the "biological imperative" can as readily — and more scientifically — be explained in social (as opposed to biological) terms.
The secrecy that surrounds adoption practices and donor conception is not an attempt to overcome problems flowing from a flouting of a supposed "biological imperative" to natural/genetic parenthood. It is the result of social pressures which dictate that the "best", most "natural" and most socially desirable parent-child relationship contains a genetic component.
There is no evidence that a parent-child relationship is inherently stronger if there is a genetic connection between parent and child. Abuse of children by parents is no less manifest in "biological" families than in adoptive families. A mother who has just given birth in a hospital cannot "instinctively" identify her baby from among others of similar age, size and colouring (neither can the biological father, despite his equally significant genetic connection to the baby).
Physical similarities — the product of biological relatedness — do contribute to individuals' sense of self and belonging, but once again, it is the social context that is all-important, not the genetic relationship.
For example, some studies of identical twins do indicate that there may be genetic predispositions to similar behaviours, inclinations and ideas among biologically related individuals who look alike. However, whether or not these identical behaviours, ideas, etc. have any significance (that is, whether or not they have an impact on each person's life) depends entirely on the responses from society to the identical physical characteristics.
That is, the predispositions, if they exist, amount to nothing unless they are encouraged (or discouraged) by the individuals' social environment.
Family ideology
The main problem with Riley's argument is that, in seeking the "biological imperative" in parent-child relationships, she is ultimately accepting the capitalist ideological argument that the family unit made up of paired adult male and female and their biological children is the most "natural". (As Riley herself states: "In capitalist society, biological kinship is used ideologically to support the nuclear family, inheritance and patriarchy".)
The desire to have "your own" child was created alongside the differentiation of society into those who owned property and those who didn't. As a class of people accumulated proportionately more property, they required mechanisms to ensure that their wealth remained privatised by passing it on to their children/heirs. Thus, monogamous marriage and the categories of legitimacy/illegitimacy were created to give ruling-class men (the property owners) greater surety that only their biological children inherited their wealth.
The ideology of the family as the "natural and moral unit of society" was created to justify and facilitate mass acceptance of laws which enforced the inequality between property owners and the rest, and between the male owners and heads of propertied households and women (the child-bearers and unpaid domestic labourers). A central plank of the pro-family ideology is that "good" women, "whole" women, "valuable" women bear and rear their husband's children.
Ever since the invention of private property, many infertile women have been divorced, socially ostracised and condemned to lives of poverty and misery because they could not bear children. This still occurs in some societies.
In advanced capitalist society, the social pressure on women to bear at least one child takes different forms. For instance, it is more socially acceptable for women to bear children outside of marriage, although that acceptance may decline under the onslaught of the conservative "back to the '50s" push accompanying neo-liberalism.
Nevertheless, the pressure is enormous. A quick survey of the content of every major vehicle for capitalist ideology — the media, the church, the education system and the family itself — attests to just how strong is the social imperative on women to bear children.
Women who bear and raise their own children are universally portrayed as fulfilled and happy in a way that women who are unable to have a child, or who choose not to do so, are not. The latter are pitied as incomplete human beings or condemned as selfish women.
The strength of that social pressure is such that most women who are unable to give birth to a child "naturally" feel inadequate, regardless of how unconventional and/or fulfilling are other aspects of their lives. To tell these women to "accept infertility and then look for other options", as Riley does, rather than facilitating their access to adoption or technology which could enable them to bear a child, is to punish the victims.
And what about those women who choose not have children? Does the fact that, in the economically advanced societies, the number of these women is increasing indicate a change in the Western female gene pool, a weakening of the so-called biological imperative to have one's own children?
Of course not. It reflects that, for most of history, bearing children has, for many reasons (social, as well as medical), rarely been a question of choice for women. Given both the medical means and more economic and social freedom to choose, more women will decide not to become biological mothers, or mothers at all.
Until capitalist social relations — which are based on the family unit's economic and psychological enslavement of women — are swept away, women will be impelled to bear children of "their own". And, until then, the basic human and civil right of women to exert as much control as possible over their reproduction must be uncompromisingly defended.