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What Was I Saying About Lost Identity Again?
In light of the last "Nobody's Business" rant, I suppose I should say that clearly the administration under which we live in the United States doesn't agree with me.
I'm hardly breaking this story, which has been reported extensively in the Washington Post, among other places. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a set of guidelines for women of childbearing age that they should always be prepared to get knocked up, even if they have not a thought in their minds about having children.
Women should not smoke (because it's bad for the unconceived- in every sense- baby), they should take extra folic acid (to prevent neural tube defects), they should maintain a healthy weight (again, better for this kid), have preconception exams to prepare for the baby who is as far from a twinkle as it is possible to be, and get all possible chronic conditions under control. Hey, you can't be too careful, you could get pregnant at any moment. And wouldn't you feel guilty if you didn't have a handle on all of this?
I could comment about how the infant mortality rate in the United States is so high because of the lack of adequate health care for the underprivileged and that there are dozens of other issues raised in this unhelpful set of guidelines.
But I can't shake the sense that is set of recommendations is saying that women are really meant to carry children. That their primary responsibility is to take care of the vessel that will eventually get pregnant. Forget about individual will and perspective, every precaution must be taken to protect the prospective baby.
So these are just little guidelines published by the government. They don't seem wildly draconian at first glance, but I find them frightening. I don't want these recommendations to turn into something more sinister like laws and I'm just as happy if the government doesn't try to crawl further up my skirt.
But I suppose this makes some kind of awful sense. Kids are being taught abstinence instead of birth control, and with reproductive freedoms so incredibly threatened, there has to be some sort of nod to women's health. It's just much too bad that all of this reveals how little interest the government has in real, live, not just potential, women.
posted by Elise at 9:59 AM
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It also seems in keeping with our weirdly detached, medicalized view of pregnancy as some sort of illness and the forgetting that we are, after all, animals, that women all over the world carry babies to term, and most of the babies are healthy. Regardless of the folic acid, the sushi, the exercise, the whatever. Many many pregnancies are unplanned, and of those, the vast majority of the babies are born healthy, as they have been for thousands upon thousands of years. What is more disturbing is the underlying, silent message that if you do/follow all of the guidelines, somehow you are guaranteed a healthy child. But it often doesn't work that way. No one likes to feel helpless, and we shoudl stay healthy, but beyond that, there are no guarantees or promises.
5/25/2006 6:52 AM
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