“If I Can’t Have It, No One Can!”
Womb Envy and Its Role in Reproductive Legislation Creation
This photo, tweeted out by VP Mike Pence, shows the meeting room where GOP Representatives essentially made being a cis-gendered woman, a pre-existing condition (and this is without touching the stripping of trans-gender healthcare that was also done). You will notice that, although women make up half the population and would be directly affected by the decisions being made, this picture of the meeting does not picture a single one. Unfortunately, this photo is not unique. There are countless just like it throughout history of male-bodied persons dictating the reproductive rights of female-bodied people. This has led to some rather absurd decisions including the removal of pregnancy and newborn care from the list of mandatory healthcare coverage items to the 7 states where there are no laws protecting sexual assault victims from fighting their attackers for custody of children conceived during the attack to oppositions to the long and tiring fight for the right to choose an abortion dating back past the landmark Roe v. Wade case. This leaves one wondering, where exactly do these wealthy, cis-gendered white males get the audacity to make decisions for female-bodied persons everywhere?
Potentially, a more subtle part of this entitlement lies in the phenomenon known as Womb Envy, which Gayatri Spivak delves into in Feminism and Critical Theory. Essentially, this explains the idea that those who cannot carry children experience a disadvantaged due to this incapability, which causes a disjoint between those with wombs and those without. Those with wombs maintain the power of reproduction as their bodies exist as the literal labor sight of human creation. Due to gender roles, assigned women are also often expected to stay home and raise these children, giving them the social role of socialization, allowing them to influence the next generations ideology. This Womb Envy then is the jealousy stemming from the lack of this socio-economic power that exists for those who do carry reproductive abilities. This leaves thee wealthy white cis-men to attempt to control the productive power of the womb through restrictive reproductive legislation.
There are countless ways in which this womb envy is exhibited in restrictions, rules, and even common practices or wording surrounding reproduction. For instance, viewing children as legal property of those who create it and including men in this definition (as described by Gayatri Spivak), disregarding the fact that the entire labor or creation is done by the female after fertilization and somehow putting both parents on equal footing in terms of custody rights is indicative of male-bodied persons writing themselves a larger role in the narrative or reproductive labor. The cultural distaste for female-bodied persons who choose to act as surrogates or to sell their eggs reflects the social reflex we have to describe reproductive labor as “an act of love” rather than the labor it is. This is because acknowledging it as labor of value when done for those outside of the family unit could lead to a cultural shift in the expectations of female-bodied persons within the family unit and the views of reproductive labor. Down to the positions and decisions made during birth are generally made for the ease of the doctors and not the mothers because the doctor is seen as doing the labor as opposed to the mother who is seen as doing her womanly duty.
All of these decisions are made by men without wombs in order to gain some kind of control over the womb as a site of production and this is even more prominent in the current administration, as evidenced by their reduction of women’s health care, goals to de-fund affordable women’s health care such as Planned Parenthood, and even their personal misogynistic beliefs about women. Keeping women in a disempowered position and maintaining male input and control over reproductive rights is one of the most powerful ways that male-bodied persons in power can cope with their Womb Envy. From social measures such as the perversion and over-sexualization and thus censorship of breasts, which have the sole purpose of sustaining newborn children as part of the body’s labor of production, to more direct methods such as restricting access to healthcare and rights to choose when to have children, the GOP and many other groups attempt to disempower women and maintain their power over the labor of reproduction that occurs in the female body, trying to cope with their massive case of Womb Envy.
