Pregnancy and me [possibly] being a bad feminist

So I'm not a huge fan of my older sister's in-laws and their extended family. Let's just put that out there. And recently my sister's sister-in-law, Ashley*, dramatically announced that after one year of trying to get preggers, she and her hubby finally succeeded. I wasn't there for the nauseating announcement, but reportedly the family cried. THEY CRIED. Because she was their little baby girl and she was finally having her dreams fulfilled as an unemployed wife and soon-to-be-mother. To be frank, this woman isn't exceptional, she's actually rather ordinary with a sketchy sense of personal responsibility (no time to get into that right now). She's not curing cancer or becoming the first female president of the U.S. She's merely doing what women have done, and been expected to do, since forever: get married, birth babies. I know that my contempt for her is tied up in the fact that I feel forced to compete with her for my sister's and nieces' attention, and that I have absolutely zero respect for her as a person, but all of a sudden I had the ammunition I needed to TRULY hate her. She was a breeder! Not only did she not have a college degree or a career, she was resigning herself to motherhood in her early 20s. She was giving up.

Except, I have to begrudgingly give her props: she is one of the very few people I know who deliberately got pregnant because she (and her husband) wanted a child. They weren't trying to save a failing marriage, they weren't letting God/nature/fate take the wheel, they weren't fucking irresponsibly. They were expressly trying to get pregnant in order to become parents. So for that, for being deliberate and knowing that they wanted to have unprotected sex to create a child, I have to respect them.

Did you know that 49% of U.S. pregnancies are unplanned? This number astounds me. Meaning that somehow, along the way, LOTS of women just aren't getting what they need to be able to prevent unplanned pregnancy. I know that this is related to a lot of factors (inadequate sex ed, availability and access to contraceptives, like-minded sexual partners, sexual assault, etc), but I also know from experience that society discourages women from taking an active role in preventing unwanted pregnancy and planning desired pregnancy. Sure, women are expected to bear the burden for preventing pregnancy, we're also expected to be the "gatekeepers" of sex and only allow access to the "right" guy at the "right" time (after marriage, of course), so isn't it kind of contradictory to say that society also expects women to avoid planned pregnancy altogether? True! But thanks to sexism, the miracle of contradictory societal expectations for women abound.

One incredibly obvious reason I can think of for why women are expected to avoid actively planning pregnancy is that OMG women aren't supposed to be initiating sex in the first place!! THOSE SLUTS! Women are supposed to be desirable but chaste, with no sexual desires of their own, so when a lady tells her guy that she'd like to get it on for the sake of procreation... well that's just unladylike. Slut-shaming is an effective way to keep women from being able to discuss sex and reproduction openly and honestly with their partners, support networks, and physicians. If you can't bring up the topic of pregnancy without being/expecting to be shamed for being sexual, that's a very real obstacle to taking an active role in planning your pregnancy.

Another barrier preventing women from planning pregnancy is the notion that God/Fate/Nature will take its course and that "if it's supposed to happen, it will happen." The miracle of life cannot be controlled by mere mortals! How dare we lowly women try to intervene for the sake of our own selfish desires to avoid and/or ensure pregnancy! I see this all the time with married couples who want kids someday but aren't quite ready for them now; this usually involves half-assed attempts at preventing pregnancy that result in an oops! pregnancy. But they're married, so no one really cares that this couple was essentially having irresponsible sex, letting chance make the decision. (Sorry, but irresponsible sex is irresponsible sex, marriage or no marriage.) The idea that some external, omniscient force is in control of whether or not women get pregnant is perpetuated by all kinds of well-meaning people and institutions, but it is harmful. It further distances women from having agency in their own pregnancies.**

Obviously not all unwanted pregnancies result in babies; a good portion of these pregnancies are aborted. But for those that are carried to term, what is the impact on the children born from these unions? Is it fair to have to be your parents' "accident"? How many of these babies are resented? Given up for adoption? Abused? How does these couples fair after giving birth to an unplanned baby? What are the true repercussions of women not being allowed to actively plan/prevent pregnancy? I don't have the answers to these questions, but I sure wish somebody would get on that already.

Sexism regularly prevents women from taking an active role in planning their own pregnancies, and unfortunately that is not going away any time soon. But I'd like to reiterate the idea that trusting women to do what's best for them, to make the hard decisions despite overwhelming social pressure, is one solution. I don't know if it's feasible to expect that 49% statistic to shrink, to expect that every pregnancy be a desired pregnancy. That's the ideal, but in the meantime trusting women, providing access to contraception and abortion, being supportive and validating their decisions to keep or terminate an unwanted pregnancy, is crucial. I have to commend Ashley for giving the finger to society and purposely getting pregnant because she wanted to; it's an all too rare occurrence.

*Obviously, this is not her real name, suckers.
**This is not a criticism of women who are infertile and therefore cannot have "agency" over their own pregnancies. In fact, I think that women who seek treatment for fertility fall squarely into the taking-matters-into-their-own-hands-and-telling-society-to-shove-it camp.

A little about me...

So I think that a little background on who I am is in order. First of all, to clear up any potential confusion, I'm a white cisgendered heterosexual woman. I'm in my mid-20s, I'm originally from northern California (or "norcal" as we affectionately call it), and I'm currently residing in Santa Barbara. I have a bachelor's degree in sociology, and I have two jobs: during the week I'm a cataloging assistant at a local library, and I'm a rape crisis counselor on the weekends. I'm a feminist and a recovering evangelical Christian. I have a big family that is an endless source of stress, entertainment and love to me (I'm sure I'll write more about them later!). I grew up in a rural area, in a very small town that generally doesn't show up on most maps; as a result I'm used to driving inordinately long distances just to do normal things like go to Target or see a movie or go bowling. I didn't start to connect everyday injustices to systems of oppression until my second year of college, and it would take another couple years before I began to get into social justice work and (gasp!) even become a little political. What can I say, I was a late bloomer.

Right now, I think I'm still struggling to find my footing in the social justice world. I feel like there is so much more I need to learn about and experience and understand before I could really accomplish anything. Also, I'm very very aware of my privileged identities, how they make navigating the world so much easier for me but also make landing a job doing social justice work quite difficult. However, I do understand the tendency for allies of marginalized communities to take over movements and play savior, or for movements to exclude communities or those with identities that just don't seem to fit. I get all that, and I understand why a social justice agency would hire a bilingual woman of color for a position instead of me. Not only do her personal life experiences give her such a better understanding of oppression, but she would be able to connect with targeted communities much better than I ever could. Not to mention that women of color still earn much less than even white women do here in the U.S.; I think that one of the ways social justice movements combat economic inequality is to provide jobs with benefits to women of color. It's a win-win. My ego, however, still gets butthurt over it.