Unsexing Pregnancy

It began as a horrifying phrase in a Shakespearean tragedy, in Macbeth, if you must. Now it’s the inspiration for a law review article by a pair of law professors who are proposing that women be unsexed. OK, you will note fairly that the authors want to unsex pregnancy, an absurd concept, one that could only have been crafted by law professors.

For the sake of clarity, Shakespeare’s line is cogent and coherent. When a woman prays to the gods to be unsexed we know what that means. It means that she wants to overcome her womanly kindness and empathy. When law professors suggest that pregnancy be unsexed, they are intellectually incoherent and barely intelligible. I hope you are not surprised. 

Would pregnancy be unsexed when men become impregnated? Do we need to transplant uteri in order to allow men to have equal rights to pregnancy? After all, that is what the line suggests, though, I trust that the thought has never crossed the authors’ limited minds. In truth, they really mean that men should shop for baby clothes and cribs and the like. And when said men fall behind at work and cannot afford to let their wives stay home with the children, what happens then? Will women be thrilled to abrogate a sacred responsibility to care for a helpless child in order to sell more widgets and gizmos? Will she respect a husband who cannot provide for the family? No one ever thinks such thoughts... a sad state of affairs.

As for Shakespeare, for your delectation and as a counterweight to the rank stupidity that can only come to us from law professors, here is Lady Macbeth’s line, from Act1; Scene 5:

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe topful
Of direst cruelty!

Evidently, she and her husband are planning to murder a king. To take a life rather than to give life. And she believes that doing so is contrary to her female nature. Hmm. We note also that Lady Macbeth has no children. The topic inspired a literary critic, by name of L. C. Knights to entitle a famous piece of literary criticism, written at a time when literary critics were writing literary criticism: “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” For the record the title is written in pentameter. I thought you would want to know.

By the way, to raise one of my own favorite themes, we might follow the same line of reasoning and ask how many children King Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, had.

Anyway, the law professors are horrified at the fact that women get pregnant and care for children. By their dim lights men should be doing more childcare, thus allowing women to neglect their children, to abandon them to toxic males, and make their way in the business world and on the battlefield. 

That’s the argument emanating from the fever swamps of legal feminism. It demonstrates, yet again, how feminism turned into an infertility cult… one that took pregnancy and childcare as the enemies that were preventing women from find true self-actualized authenticity in the world outside of the home. And it should warn us off allowing the country to be run by lawyers, judges and law professors. 

Christine Emba lays out the argument in the Washington Post:

“Unsexing Pregnancy” is a phrase guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of social conservatives everywhere. Yet — for now, at least — it doesn’t refer to robot wombs, a ban on gender reveal parties or Shulamith Firestone-esque radical feminist propositions. (In the 1970s, the firebrand Redstockings founder advocated eliminating the biological family entirely.)

Rather, it’s the title of a startlingly common-sensical article in the March issue of the Columbia Law Review, one that presents an idea that has yet to get the attention it deserves.

In their article “Unsexing Pregnancy,” George Washington University law professors David Fontana and Naomi Schoenbaum explain the basic reasoning behind sex-equality and equal-protection laws around parenting and care work: When roles and rights are assigned on the basis of sex, they often reinforce the association of men with work and the marketplace and women with the home. These expectations become self-perpetuating, limiting women’s potential at work and men’s roles in the family.

Thus, since the 1970s, the law has endeavored to “unsex” parenting and care work. Recognizing that much of the work of caregiving isn’t in fact biologically or otherwise necessarily the work of only women, the courts have worked to remove sex-based barriers created by legislation and lawmakers and advocates have worked to enact legislation in which sex-based limitations no longer apply.

Only someone who is blinded by ideological zeal could believe that this is “startlingly common sensical.” It is pure stupidity gussied up as serious thinking. 

In the course of human history there is no such thing as a culture that allows men to care for small children. As feminist Nancy Chodorow remarked in her book, The Reproduction of Mothering, “only women mother.” Of course, there is a real basis for this choice. First, the brains of pregnant women rewire themselves to emphasize skills required to care for infants and toddlers. Second, babies and even older children find the most comfort and security in hearing their mothers’ voices. Third, a baby’s cognitive development depends on the number of words he or she hears from said mother in the first years of life.

Only a certifiable imbecile would ignore these facts and revel over the fact that conservative men are going to find the idea to be appalling. Apparently, Emba believes that new mothers will happily abrogate their moral responsibility to care for their children and will happily hand babies off to toxic males.

Besides, do you really think that men quiver in their boots about the chance that they might be competing against women on the football field or on the battle field? 

Can you imagine the culture police pulling up to a new mother’s house and telling her that her husband will henceforth be entrusted to care for her baby? If you want to try it, please do so. But, do not imagine that you are advancing the cause of gender equity. Or that you will walk away in one piece.