Issue of the Day

The issue of the day was written by Erin Riley and it resonated with me.

I have been trying to articulate the frustration of gendered expectations in parenthood without touching on what happens before the child is even born.

Thankfully, Erin put together some thoughts that sum up my feelings on the matter:

In the world of debates about caring responsibilities, division of labour and child care subsidies, one part of the work of parenthood is routinely forgotten: pregnancy. While our economic systems are slowly adjusting to the idea of dual-income households with young children, the real challenges of pregnancy are wholeheartedly ignored.

Pregnancy can be a strangely fraught experience. As Marielle Fish eloquently put it recently: "You're never alone, you're annexed. Yet it's a singularly lonely experience. You carry it alone. It's very strange."

You are sharing your body, but that itself is a burden you cannot share with others. Unlike the task of child-rearing, there is no part of pregnancy that you can outsource to a professional (with the exception of commercial surrogacy, which I'll get to).

At its core, pregnancy is bloody hard work. While there is obviously tremendous range in experiences, for many women it is a physical and emotional test. Sleeping, eating, breathing, moving: these most fundamental parts of life become different and often much more difficult during pregnancy.

Add in the pressure of worrying that you are doing the right thing by your child, the limited diet, the weeks on end of nausea and vomiting many women experience and the countless medical appointments, and pregnancy is a consuming time.

In an era of increasing casualisation, this can also have major economic effects. Missed work means a smaller pay check – or none at all – for many casual and contract employees. Even those fortunate enough to have full time work rarely receive extra sick leave or benefits until late in pregnancy.

In fact, taking extended unpaid leave from traditional work in the months prior to giving birth can exclude pregnant people from being eligible for the government's paid parental leave scheme - unless the pregnancy is considered complicated.

If pregnancy precludes some women from participating in the paid workforce, we need to consider the economic effects of pregnancy, and consider that pregnancy itself constitutes work.

But our social model of understanding pregnancy often ignores this. Pregnancy is often portrayed as passive: something happening to a woman rather than something she is doing. Even more, it's work that she is expected to do purely for the joy of producing a child. We treat children as the payoff for the work of pregnancy, despite those children being legally and genetically no less their father's than their mother's.

Children as a reward for pregnancy are simultaneously infinitely worth the work for the majority of parents emotionally, and economically inadequate for the labour of pregnancy.

Our economic system is dependent on a constantly-renewing group of consumers that come with each new generation, yet we expect those who produce the consumers to do it for no economic benefit, and often for significant economic loss. Much like other forms of caring work, the work of pregnancy is undervalued because the economic contribution is not direct and immediate.

On the other hand, this existing model of pregnancy as being intrinsically personally valuable is fundamentally challenged by the rise of commercial surrogacy.

While commercial surrogacy is certainly fraught and requires strong oversight, it provides a means by which women may exchange the work of pregnancy for financial gain. It's no wonder there is such a strong reaction against it: that concept is revolutionary and its flow-on effects could be significant.

The reason women aren't fairly compensated or recognised for the work of pregnancy, much like other caring work, is there is an assumption we will do it for free. Women are expected simply to absorb the vast majority of the physical and economic costs of pregnancy.

Imagine for a moment a world in which women went on a reproductive strike for a year, and refused to be pregnant. The economic loss from that gap in the population would be enormous. Women control the means of reproduction, yet it is a power we have not wielded collectively. Thus, our labour isn't valued by an economy because it expects the work for free, and convinces us this is a totally acceptable state of affairs.

Of course, the idea of a reproduction strike is an impossible proposition, but perhaps it is an illustrative one. Our society and our economy rely on women doing the work of pregnancy. It's well past time we recognised that work, both socially and economically.