From his late-night open
thread:
Well-meaning NJ legislator introduces a bill allowing obviously pregnant women from using handicap parking spots. Inexplicably, the NJ chapter of NOW freaks out.
Absolutely ridiculous. Since when is being pregnant a handicap?
Have any of the women over at NJ NOW ever been pregnant? Because it's not about the label "handicap", it's about allowing women with limited mobility and lots and lots of pains some measure of comfort. Kind of like surrendering a seat in a bus or train to the pregnant lady who walks in.
The arrogance of a man's questioning whether women at NOW have ever been pregnant really astounds me. The odds are more in their favor than his, unless there's something biologically special about kos that I don't know...?
Man, oh man. I haven't been posting diaries or comments lately because I've been too busy working--working, in fact, on teaching critical and creative thinking to undergraduates as well as researching the role of children's literature in the reproduction of mothering ideology from generation to generation. I'm halfway through reading Shulamith Firestone's classic feminist text
The Dialectic of Sex, published in 1970, and still apparently way ahead of its time in positing a radical utopian future in which women get to control our own bodies, to the benefit of all humanity. I'd like to finish reading the book now and weaving her theory into my analysis of
The Giving Tree, but first I have to write the pregnant parking issue out of my system.
If a spokeswoman for a chapter of NOW suggests that there might be a problem with equating being pregnant with having a handicap, shouldn't a progressive thinker, whether male or female, take a moment's pause to follow her question to its roots instead of kicking her in paternalistic reflex?
I have given birth to three children who are now young adults. I was fortunate to be in good shape and not disabled by the lack of mobility, and I would have been embarassed to take a handicap spot just because the gentlemanly state said I could. Of course, the experiences of pregnant women vary widely, and some would benefit from the spot as much as anyone leaning on a walker or carting an oxygen tank. Individual women who are truly "disabled" by pregnancy can and should receive a parking permit through the usual channels. And stores that wish to provide all pregnant women a shorter walk often do provide them with a designated spot--it's good business.
However, the assumption that all "obviously" pregnant women should have access to handicap parking spots (or that others should give up their seats to pregnant women on a bus or train) is part of the same well-meaning paternalism that keeps women from having full control over our reproductive rights and from gaining true equality with men. And to those who believe that women do have true equality, take another look at the Supreme Court of the United States, at the roster of CEOs in the Fortune 500, at the list of U.S. Presidents past and present. Women comprise at least 50% of the population yet have very little representation in the systems of power that dictate the lives of all people. This still, whether we like to face it or not, has an awful lot to do with the fact that we bear 100% of the pregnancies within a patriarchal social structure that defines motherhood as a woman's primary role.
But perhaps kos is right to kick the New Jersey NOW. Perhaps progressives should support the "pregnancy is disability" argument, language already used to obtain paid maternity leave. Perhaps we can turn it to our advantage if we let pregnant women race all the old men with emphysema to the parking spots nearest the doors of all the Walmarts and McDonalds across this great land. And then, after the idea is firmly embedded in the American psyche, we can tell the antiabortionists who condemn those selfish girls who don't want to be handicapped, "But I thought you said pregnancy was just an inconvenience?"