The motherhood myth

Tiny children emaciated from severe malnutrition look piteously into the camera. Outraged, we look around for someone to blame. The compassi...

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Tiny children emaciated from severe malnutrition look piteously into the camera. Outraged, we look around for someone to blame. The compassionate point a finger at poverty. Liberals condemn government policies. Socialists insist on more tax money to provide better welfare for the poor. NGOs bewail the lack of education among women.

Does anyone blame the mother? I submit this heretical, possibly heartless, suggestion rather nervously. Mother, I say, not even mother and father. Because the child is born of the mother. Because the possibility of pregnancy and its consequences always exists more potently for the woman than it does for the man. Because the world has too many single, often depressive, mothers struggling to bring up children with little or no support. Because sacred motherhood is a concept we love to celebrate. And because mothers themselves glorify the umbilical bond and mother’s love.

Perhaps it seems harsh and simplistic to hold a poor illiterate mother accountable for her child’s malnutrition. But bringing a child into the world is a staggering responsibility. If a mother cannot even keep the child from starvation, does she have a right to bring it into this world? Can we say that women existing on the edge of starvation lead such instinctive, miserable, subhuman lives that rational thinking is the last thing they are able to do? How many children of educated, struggling single mothers deserve to grow up emotionally insecure or damaged? And why is it always perfectly acceptable for women — rich, poor, educated, illiterate — to be little better than passive cows and get pregnant?

We glorify the concept of motherhood to an absurd extent. Pigs procreate, but we don’t go into ecstasies about the miracle of the piglet’s birth. Reproduction is biology at work, the difference being that the pig mother has no control over her biology, the human mother does. Yet countless babies are carelessly conceived and born.We feel compassion for orphans. Poor motherless children, we think. When the keepers of these institutions ill treat the children we are indignant, we clamour to have them arrested. Why do we never hold mothers similarly accountable?