Motherhood as life sentence?
This article first appeared in the Minden Times on September 21, 2022.
My third grandchild was born not breathing but with heart beating. In the endless minutes of frantic medical activity that took place before they rushed her off to the NICU, we knew her brain – her body was perfect – was grievously injured. We sat, each alone, pondering the future. I hoped the badly damaged baby would die before she swallowed whole my daughter’s life, a life on the cusp of realizing its full potential. She did die. My daughter had to decide when to pull the plug of the machine that made her seem alive. I wonder if the loss would have been easier had nature had its way at birth.
Dawn Davies, in Mothers of Sparta, a memoir in pieces, in the final chapter that gives the book its title, exposes the tragedy that hitherto lurked beneath the surface. It is that her son, whose life at birth was saved by the miracle of modern medicine, has grown into an aggressive, sadistic, pedophilic sociopath. His behaviour cannot be managed by any programs or institutions, so he has been returned to his mother for safekeeping. She ponders that had he been born in ancient Sparta, he would have been assessed at birth whether he warranted the social investment that would turn him into a stalwart defender of the state. The assessors would likely have found him lacking, wrested him from her arms and tossed him on the dung heap. She wonders whether that might not have been a better outcome for all concerned.
I was raised on a farm, and I remember my father explaining to me, an outraged child, why it was necessary to dispatch soon after birth runt piglets and a portion of each batch of barn kittens. The general wellbeing of the farm could not be sacrificed to the need of the individual, he said; each unit in the system must pull its weight. He was not wrong.
Ah, but in the larger society, where to draw the line? Who gets to decide? To whom and how are the deciders accountable? These are the questions of our time. Of all time. But perhaps more difficult now when we as a rich and learned society can do almost anything, and must therefore struggle mightily with what we should do. Used to be we said life and death were in God’s hands: increasingly they are in our hands.
The most in-our-face problem is with the elderly, who are long outliving their ability to contribute to the economy (although perhaps they could continue to contribute to society, should we choose to value elder wisdom). They may indeed be absorbing human and financial resources that the young require in order to optimize their contribution to society and the economy. We kinda turned a blind eye when seniors died in droves in under-resourced facilities during Covid; post-pandemic, we seem to be investing even more in the system that delivered that outcome. We pour funding into bricks and mortar (aka ‘beds’) but continue to tolerate that the work that is expected to turn that straw into gold is poorly paid and supported. That says we’ve decided that elders are expendable.
Next in line may be the disabled. Brazilian mothers whose children were infected in utero with the mosquito-born Zika virus in 2015-16 wear t-shirts that say, in Portuguese, Fight Like A Mother. Because that’s all their children have. The Zita virus didn’t rock the globe like Covid, it never made it to the First World, it never became a scientific priority, it remains an unexplored mystery. Who are the First World equivalents to the forgotten Zita mothers and children? That is an unarticulated mystery.
Since we have supplanted God as the purveyor of justice in matters of life and death, we must expose and explore and articulate the mystery of how we make these decisions. We must talk about death as an inherent component of life. As relates to the individual. As relates to the broader society. If it were easy, we’d already have done it. But time – mine, yours, ours – may be running short. We need to get down to it.
