They're certainly not held up as eeevil, unnatural witches, as seems to be the most extreme criticism aimed at Dr Rashbrook. Is this because womens' fertility (and, by extension, women's bodies) is circumscribed, or because fathers are considered expendable?
I suspect, as with many cultural phenomena, that it's impossible to nail down a single cause. Women's bodies/fertility have a kind of public visibility and symbolism that men's bodies don't. The policing of women's bodies/fertility has historically been critical in establishing/idenitifying oneself with public norms of "morality" for political purposes. (Hence, in part, the prominence of the abortion debate today.)
Additionally, upon giving birth, women are still seen as the vital "nurturers" of children for a variety of reasons (cf. if you can manage it, the old Fathers 4 Justice thread in Switchboard--I give a history of this on page 5 or 6 I think), whereas fathers really are only required to pay for the kids. Thus, a wealthy old guy can "fulfill" his paternal function simply by leaving a healthy estate to his progeny. He's under no tacit or legal obligation to physically nurture the child, or even be present in its life, and--pace Fathers 4 Justice--may also not even be seen as particularly capable of nurturing. The law may be technically gender neutral, but as the F4J thread reveals, in practice it is not. This creates a whole series of faultlines as women's greater "right" to custody in practice also reifies essentialist ideas about what's "natural" for women and men. And, thus, wealthy men are not "irresponsible" for having babies later in life, in particular.
Poor men (in the US anyway) do carry the stigma of poverty, of course, but I'd argue that they are not "marked" by their fertility most of the time in the way that poor women are consistently so marked in public discourse; their potential fatherhood is less visible than a poor woman's potential motherhood. (E.g., a "welfare queen" is a single mother virtually by definition--often one who is perceived as having more children in order to keep her AFDC [now TANF] payments. For a variety of reasons, there is no precise male equivalent. There are "bums" and "deadbeat dads" but "bum" is not fertility dependent, and "deadbeat dads" are not necessarily poor. And, although this is probably more impressionistic on my part, I would argue that the term does not make them a kind of vampire--or succubus?--on the body politic, in the way "welfare queen" implies. A "deadweight," really.)
Women are obliged to nurture others, and so are open to deep critique on these grounds in ways that men simply are not. So that the wealthy woman's equivalent to being the welfare queen is this image of an older woman having or adopting a kind of "vanity baby." Thus her "nurturing" of the babe is transformed into "selfishness." She's perceived as not being "self-sacrificing" by having this baby, but doing it for her own "ego" needs.
Again, I hasten to say that class analysis should not at this point drop away--because there is a market for babies that has arisen for complicated reasons, and poor, young women are arguably exploited for this purpose by wealthy, usually Western, usually "white" families--e.g., as egg donors or birthmothers, most directly, but also simply by having their medical needs ignored as I mentioned above. But it's often tempting even for leftists to simply turn the women involved into scapegoats for the entire system, and thereby leave the larger, deeply entrenched social engine--shaped by the enduring legacy of patriarchal power and privilege (one of which is the privilege of remaining invisible)--unexamined. |