What does it mean to contemplate 'motherhood' in a world that values some bodies – and some decisions – over others? Behavioural scientist Pragya Agarwal tells Alice Bloch about her experiences as a woman of South Asian heritage – from abortion, to pregnancy, to surrogacy – and the social, historical and scientific factors that shape how we talk about motherhood. How have women been controlled and contained through history? And how does that continue, worldwide, today?
A candid conversation about maternity and reproductive justice, asking what motherhood means in a world of inequality, prejudice and control.
Hosts: Alice Bloch and Samira Shackle
Exec Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Danosongs
Image artwork: Ed Dingli
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Transcript:
Alice Bloch:
Hi and welcome to With Reason with me Alice Bloch.
Samira Shackle:
And me Samira Shackle.
Alice Bloch:
This podcast comes to you from New Humanist magazine and the Rationalist Association. It's the place where we talk to people in fields like philosophy, science and culture. People who use bright thinking to challenge dogma and lazy ideas. It's a space as usual to think about reason and unreason, belief and disbelief, debate and crucially criticism. In the past couple of series, we've talked to people like the AI expert Kate Devlin, about sex tech and feminism, and to the writer Katherine Angel on the subject of consent and real life desire. But today we're looking at motherhood and choice with Pragya Agarwal. Alice, this one's yours. So I'll sit back and let you introduce Pragya and I'll be back to chat with you about my take a bit later.
AB:
Pragya Agarwal is the behavioural and data scientist who you might well know already from her best-selling book, Sway: Unravelling unconscious bias. That book unpacks the way in which our implicit biases affect how we communicate, how we make decisions, and offers a kind of toolkit for addressing them.
Now though, Pragya is turned to motherhood in a book by that same name, with the “M” brackets, so kind of motherhood, “otherhood”, I guess. She describes that book as sitting between a memoir and a scientific and historical disquisition of women's reproductive choices, and infertility. It’s pretty frank, it's moving at times. And it tells the story of Pragya’s roller coaster journey through fertility and infertility. So she's experienced pregnancy, abortion, IVF, and surrogacy across two continents. And along the way she considers the choices available to women and the compromised context in which they're made.
I should say, I think “choice” really is a word that we should keep in kind of quotation marks for the remainder of today's discussion. And now Motherhood does feel like really different territory from that covered in Sway. And so I asked Pragya, did she see any kind of thread linking the two? You know, is it perhaps the concept of choice that links these two books?
Pragya Agarwal:
Yes, absolutely, it’s the notion of choice. But also the thread that I feel runs through my work is about how we behave and why we behave the way we do. But also what impact does it have on society? What impacts our positions in society, the systemic and structural hierarchies that have been created in society? What impact does it have on different people according to their place in these hierarchies? And I think reflecting on that is like a common thread to Sway and Wish We Knew What To Say. And then Motherhood is about these inequities that exist in society. Why is it that some people have more choice, ome people don't have choice? Some people are more marginalised, ome people are at the bottom of the hierarchy? And what dynamic does it create? How does it affect the society? And how does it affect individuals?
AB:
I mean, motherhood is really a saturated general market, I guess, in publishing, there was a lot written about it. But one thing that your book in particular stresses is an intersectional approach to the study of pregnancy and birth, you know, so one that takes account of differences re, you know, race, class, and gender and so on, that really remains lacking. I wonder, you know, as a data scientist, what are the existing data gaps, re pregnancy and motherhood for women of colour? You know, maybe was there something you went looking for in your research, heading off to the British Library, or whatever. And we're really shocked to actually find the answer just didn't exist because no one's bothered to ask the question.
PA:
I'm actually pleased that you thought that this is how it stood apart because when I started writing it before the pandemic, I didn't really think that there were that many books about motherhood from even a mothering perspective. And I think it's that notion, of how mothers or women are carrying much your mental and emotional load, has become so heightened during the pandemic and lockdown. So it was interesting to see how suddenly this discourse has become so mainstream. But still, that means that discourse is very much focused on one kind of person, one kind of mother, and one kind of family I think. And we still fall back on those norms.
AB:
When you say one kind, do you mean white middle class?
PA:
White middle class straight women, and a lot of memoirs were still being published from them. A lot of work that was being done, was still focused on them. And I started looking at the data and infertility and when I first started looking at it, the data wasn't even desegregated or collected from black and brown women and I couldn't find how many women were undergoing infertility treatment and what were the ages and even if there was data desegregation according to the BMA category, which is such a universal broad category. So I really struggled to find data on it.
And then again, if we start looking at the different people who are on the margins, fringes – transgender or non binary people – there's hardly any data. So as I say, in the book, I talked to many people, I talked to many trans men and women and non-binary and their experiences of healthcare and their experiences and motherhood. But in the end, I couldn't find a lot of scientific data because they're being ignored in the studies, not that they don't exist. But there hasn't been any dedicated research studies on that. And also, I didn't want these 20 experiences that I had to be this kind of tokenistic voice. And it was not my story to tell.
I had to write from a cisgender perspective. And that is why I think it was really important for me to make that lens clear as well. And this is my perspective. And so the terminology I use, the data I fall back on, is because it exists, and the other doesn't exist, I have to talk about it from this perspective. I cannot be the voice of a community that I do not belong to. But it is a shame that this data still doesn't exist, that we are still not disaggregating the data to understand how different people who are not at the top of these hierarchies are affected by this.
AB:
Your own perspective is a really, really fascinating one because you're a really successful academic and consultant over here in the UK and have been for a couple of decades, I think now, but you also you grew up in India, and that's where you had your first child and your daughter who (correct me if I'm wrong), she lived with your mother in India while you completed your PhD here in the UK.
And I don't want to make assumptions, I guess about motherhood in saying this. But you know, that sounds like an incredibly difficult thing to have gone through. I imagine. Tell me what were the conventions around motherhood when you were growing up.
PA:
So I grew up in the north of India, which is more patriarchal, I think, than the South. I think there are some matriarchal societies and communities in the south of India where, for instance, the women, the daughters take their mother's names and things like that. But in the north, it's very, it was a very patriarchal society that I grew up in, in the sense that the moment a girl is born, there's always a sense of kind of commiseration with the parents because it wasn't a son or a male to take over. My parents had three daughters. And I remember how everybody would look at us with pity that we didn't have a brother to look after us or our parents. I think that made me quite angry, as I was growing up. But also I determined to break those norms and stereotypes that were imposed on me. If somebody said, this is good for girls, or girls are supposed to do that, I would rebel against it.
So there was a sense that a girl or a woman's destiny is to be a good wife, a good mother, it's all about what can you do to be an ideal wife so that you get married into a good family. And then your destiny is obviously to be a good mother. And the role models that I saw were about mothers who were self-sacrificing, your identity doesn't matter anymore, or your aspirations or ambitions, because the success of your husband or your children is what is most important. And that's what women do. Yes, and, and women are good at it, women are good at hiding their pain. And women are good at hiding their expectations. And women are good at staying calm, and keeping everybody calm. And these are all the things you see in films, and these are the things you see around you, as well.
But as I write in Motherhood, there were other roles, models of motherhood, I saw as well – in the sense of women who had to leave the children behind in villages, because they had to go and look after other people's children as well. So there was this huge socio-economic disparity that exists in India as well. And where you belong in this hierarchy determines your place and your notion of motherhood as well. So I saw that, yes, and I gave birth to my first daughter there. And it was a very difficult pregnancy, and difficult childbirth, but that also what everything that I saw around me, I think kind of woke me up in a way to this awareness that I had to create a different life.
AB:
It is really clear that this background, this experience, gave you a really strong understanding of how our so-called choices and decisions really, you know – whether and how to become a mother, you know, our very sense of kind of what the horizons of what's possible – are just so strongly shaped by cultural context. And you do talk about this in the context of abortion, which is something that you personally chose when you became pregnant later again, now here in the UK in the early stages of a relationship, and writing in a very candidly and very movingly about abortion.
And you list some really shocking examples of how women's choices can be constrained so I think the most standout one for me was from Paraguay, where, in 2015, Amnesty reported that a 10-year-old girl who was pregnant after being raped was denied access to a safe abortion due to strict abortion laws there. But I guess whilst examples like that are shocking it's also important to note that it's not just the law that limits women's access to abortion. It’s that, you know, there are way more kind of insidious subtle things at work that prevent a woman having control over her own reproductive health, including here in the UK, I guess. And I wonder what examples you have of that from your research – either kind of discursive ones that just kind of subtly nudge, or actually mechanisms that get in the way of people making free choices.
PA:
I think coercion works in many different ways. And we can talk about coercive control. And I know we're having this discourse a lot around “What does coercion really mean?” And I address it in the book about how coercion can work in different ways, about limiting our choices, but also it's thinking about what choices do we really have on offer and the messages that we get from society that if we make this choice, then we are not making the right choice. And that can sway us towards different choices as well, because we get this sense from society and internalise this message, that actually, even though I really want to make this choice, this is not the right choice. And so we are swayed towards that choice.
So there's always this message that's given that if you actually choose to undergo abortion, you will regret it later. And we hear so many more stories of that. But there's also research to show that women who have undergone abortion, who chose to do that, more than 85% of them did not actually regret the choice later on because they were very fully capable of making the choice to choose the kind of life that they wanted, what was right for them in that instance or not. These questions can come from family members, from cultural context, religious reasons as well, about what emotion really means. So not just legally, and about the partner that you're with, about whether you have access to the services or not. Sometimes the kind of access to the services and resources can also limit a woman's choice, which we don't often consider as well.
AB:
And also the access to services if you are to then become a mother, you know, will weigh heavy on your mind. You talk about the socio legal framework, you know, is there state funded childcare available, can women afford to become a mother? And returning to your own story, some years after the abortion that you describe in your book you tried for another baby with the same partner I think, and the struggle to conceive. You turned to IVF and then you looked into surrogacy, which you went ahead with. In the book, you suggest that perhaps women do have some kind of primitive desire that makes them “broody”, to quote, but you also dismiss the idea of the so-called “body clock” as a kind of social and patriarchal construct.
So I just wonder, can you clarify what your perspective actually is here? Because I guess, you know, some people might say, well “body clock” is a really annoying phrase, and I don't want to be pressured about it by adverts on the tube telling me to freeze my eggs or whatever – but, you know, time is real, age is real. It’s pretty much real, isn't it?
PA:
Yeah, time is real, age is real. But this panic that's created around this, this mythical figure of 35 is not real. It's not related to women. 35 and women and this date, and after that they call it “geriatric”, because of this notion that 35 is just too late to have a child. And every woman is not built on a template. So we don't have enough data. Women are not given enough data to actually make up their mind and to know what these data sets even, what the blood tests, are telling us. How do we know whether we can become pregnant later on or not? Yes, women have a limited egg reserve, we do know that. But this is also linked to how women's fertility is big business. And that is why there is this panic around it.
And also the societal expectation that every woman has to become a mother and every woman's role or destiny is to become a mother, which is why we're seeing this panic at the moment in the media around the falling birth rate. And every media publication reporting on that, that the world birth rate is falling. And why is it that women are choosing a career over having children. And so it becomes like this binary choice for women, we have to choose to have children and not prioritise our career because otherwise we are seen as selfish. And I think that panic is not really conducive to making any decision or to having a choice. It's not a choice if you're being pressured into making this choice because of these external messages. And also, my point is that, first of all, women are not built on a template. Secondly, we're not talking enough about men's fertility.
AB:
Yes. I wanted to ask you about this. What does the actual science say about whether the body clock is real in men, too? Because one of the biggest takeaways from your book for me was just the staggering facts about Charlie Chaplin becoming a father in his early 70s, which I had no idea about. But I mean, is that an anomaly? Are you saying actually there is a body clock thing going on for men too? And actually, that's not talked about enough?
PA:
Yeah, that is not it is not talked about enough. It's again linked to this notion that yes, egg freezing is a very lucrative business, it costs 20 times more than sperm freezing, if I recall correctly. And yes, first of all, there has not been enough research in men's fertility, there's not been that much focus on it because of the focus is on women's fertility so much. But the research that we have shows that actually there is a degradation of the sperm, there is degradation of sperm mobility, and other factors that can affect men's fertility as they grow older, after the age of 40.
So it's not just a woman, but also the male fertility that comes into question as well. In the US, we hear stories of men becoming fathers at an older age, but compare that to women who are stigmatised for having children at an older age. Like we saw recently with Naomi Campbell. Men are kind of like put on a pedestal. They can do anything. And then you can become a father at the age of 70.
So there is a huge paradox in how fertility is talked about in terms of women and women's fertility, it is so inherently linked to the stereotypes that are ingrained in our society. So yes, women don't have the similar pressures, but there is still a link between age and men's fertility. And we saw this recently with the WHO messaging around drinking and, and women's fertility, how the focus was merely on women's fertility about how women between 18 and 50, “of childbearing age”, they were called, should not drink or should be prevented from drinking, because it affects the fertility. But as I pointed out, there is research to show, actually, from a number of case studies, that men's fertility is also impacted heavily by drinking. There was no mention of that.
AB:
So crucially, as you say, I mean, infertility is often pinned on the woman in a heterosexual couple as her problem, her kind of burden to carry, something to feel guilty about. It's kind of assumed, if a couple can't conceive that, you know, okay, it's probably the woman. I was really fascinated by this concept of psychogenic infertility from the 1940s that you mentioned. So it's this idea to quote you, that women who were educated, unconsciously hijacked their own fertility I guess kind of you know, if the cleverer you are, the greater risk there is that you might not be able to conceive something like that. Tell me about that. And its resonance today because I mean, for me that that sort of speaks to the trope of the uptight career woman, something like that.
PA:
Absolutely. There's, again, this notion that women, by choosing careers, are actually hijacking or affecting their fertility by not having children. So there's this fear, this panic, that is created around it, that if all women started to just focus on their careers, what will happen to our world? But it's also linked to how women's pain is dismissed and ignored. And women's illnesses are dismissed and ignored in the medical and healthcare domain as well and we’ve seen numerous examples of that through history. But even now, we've had lots of discussions about it. And because it often is considered that these physical manifestations are either imaginary, or they're just linked to emotional distress or emotional kind of anxieties. And that a lot of chronic pain or invisible disabilities, these invisible illnesses, take a long time to get diagnosed, because it is assumed that it's linked to emotional anxiety and that actually women are imagining it.
AB:
On that question of pain, I've also become aware of research that talks about how there can be a perception that women of colour, it's horrific, are supposedly better able to bear pain than white women in childbirth. I wonder if that's research that you've come across, you know, on that prejudice, on that bias? And what on earth that is about and what we can even do about it?
PA:
Yes, I talked about it in Sway actually, in my earlier book: about how these prejudices are formed, and how they're rooted in eugenics, these notions, false scientific myths, that black people, for instance, had thicker skin so that they had more ability to bear pain. And obviously when the gender and race intersect some of these biases are heightened, we know that is the effect of intersectionality. So obviously, women are prejudiced [against] and when you're a black woman that prejudice still carries, and there is recent research to show that actually, a lot of these carry forward in some of the medical and scientific textbooks.
I was recently writing an article about it about how these prejudices and misconceptions have been carried forward and healthcare professionals still believe that black women are more likely, black and brown women are more able, to bear pain because their skin is thicker. Yhere are cultural issues as well sometimes, because when women know that they are undergoing stereotypes, and they have these cultural pressures to appear stronger, they don't have the luxury, they sometimes don't vocalise or articulate their pain as much as others would do. So I know from research that black and brown women sometimes don't talk about their pain in the same way or don't show their pain in the same way.
AB:
The idea of actually being able to articulate your pain freely is actually a privilege that we don't think about. Absolutely.
You're listening to With Reason. I'm Alice Bloch, and I'm talking to Pragya Agarwal about her memoir and academic treatise on motherhood and reproductive choice. If you want to hear more about the importance of taking an intersectional look at real lives, so that's looking at things like racism and gender and class and how they shape a person's lived everyday experience, head to our archive to hear Jason Arday talking about Cool Britannia and its blind spots, or you could head back to Series Two, to catch the sociologist Luke de Noronha talk about his book Deporting Black Britons.
Time now though for a quick word from New Humanist editor Samira Shackle. When we're not making With Reason, we're busy putting together New Humanist, a quarterly journal of ideas, science and culture. If you enjoy this podcast, you'll love the magazine. Recent issues have included an analysis of why conspiracy theories are so popular at this moment, climate change and the politics of health. If you want a 50% discount on a year's subscription, you can head to newhumanists.org.uk/subscribe and enter the offer code WithReason. That means you'll get four beautiful print editions through your door across the air, or for the modest sum of £13.50.
Back now to Pragya Agarwal. So Pragya, we were talking about the idea of the so-called body clock and the pressure to have a child. And it seems a good time to mention a piece from the New Humanist archive which is actually a review that I did back in 2019, of the book called Childless Voices by Lorna Gibb. And that's all about the experiences of childless or child free people worldwide. So it's a global portrait of those without children, whether through circumstance, choice, loss or denial. And Lorna writes about the rituals and the lengths performed by people desperate to have children and how sometimes actually that desperation can be really heavily exploited. You mentioned a couple of times I think how despite being a scientist you know, in the toughest moments when you were struggling with infertility when trying for a second child, you found yourself recalling various Hindu scriptures. Or reading scientific studies, but kind of doing so half-heartedly, or even considering kind of ritual and superstition. Tell me a little bit about that and I guess kind of what it says about human nature.
PA:
Yes, we fall back on rituals, we fall back on some of these things because at that point we are always trying to think of anything that could work. I suppose we want something desperately, we want to just reach that goal and resort to whatever works. But also there is some kind of confirmation bias as well, where we are looking for information that would confirm our existing beliefs.
AB:
Yeah, I mean we will do that when we Google something don't we? We just look and look until we find what we want to hear.
PA:
And a lot of science is like that as well. Sometimes we might think we are being very objective scientifically, but no, we cherry-pick information sometimes. We look for things that confirm our existing beliefs. Because that is less cognitively taxing for our brain. And those times of threat or fear or insecurities, and those kind of desperation or hopelessness, we need to preserve our cognitive resources, we don't have those kinds of mental resources to actually contradict our existing beliefs. And so if we have to take on new information, that doesn't confirm our beliefs, our hope that this is going to work, that will be more cognitively taxing for us.
AB:
what examples do you have from your story of those moments where you did turn to kind of superstitious ideas or rituals, kind of despite your scientific brain?
PA:
I think there was so much of it. There was no scientific basis as to whether I should eat pineapple, or whether I should have acupuncture. There wasn't a lot of information or scientific research to show either way what should work or not.
AB:
During IVF?
PA:
Yes. Or having kale juice or having any of the other supplements that I was taking. There's also not that much scientific research to show whether stress affects our chances of fertility or not as well. But there's always this kind of myth and everybody telling each other, don't get stressed because that can affect your chances of being pregnant. And so I remember really feeling guilty about it, and finding it very difficult because that is a situation when you're being very stressed. And I looked at a lot of research later on about what it says. And actually there wasn't that much valid scientific research to show whether stress affects our chances.
AB:
I guess you gave a scientific explanation earlier of why we might resort to superstition and ritual. But I guess you know, there is this huge risk isn't there, that people's desperation around fertility in particular, can just be so terribly exploited by people offering “solutions”, you know, in quote marks, that just really aren't based in evidence at all. I wonder whether you've come across any examples of research on examples of that, whether from, you know, India or the UK?
PA:
Yes. At that stage, when you're really desperate for things to be successful, when you have this goal, and when you're putting your body through this treatment, you want to look for solutions, anything that could help. I know, in India, there's a huge kind of religious fervour around these things. There are things like gems or stones, there's a huge amount of belief in what we're doing, what kind of gemstone can make things work on which finger. There are lots of solutions that are offered with people who will read horoscopes, about prayers that you can perform, that would put all the planets in the right order for you. And all those things happen quite a lot, not just in the rural parts of India. But also it's really interesting to see very educated, highly educated people in urban parts of India, really believing in a lot of things – planetary alignments affecting our behaviour, and our chances of conceiving or not conceiving, or our prospects in business and success in life, and all those things as well.
AB:
That's fascinating. It's kind of the urban, maybe more educated population as well, it’s not just kind of rural people say, that would be the stereotype.
Going back to Lorna Gibbs’ book that I mentioned, Childless Voices, it also features interviews with people who've chosen not to have children. So she talks about GINKS (Green Inclinations, No Kids.) And she also talks about a nun who sees herself as a spiritual mother to many. To quote her, this nun, she doesn't see herself as childless. And she says that, actually, to say that a woman is only a mother if she gives physical birth is very limiting of womanhood.
And later, Lorna Gibbs wonders: well, isn't it enough to be a woman? What is it about the role of mother, that means we have to retain it, whatever the difficulties, whatever the form? (That's to quote her). And that part of her book, I think, speaks, at least to me to your own reflections on your experience of contracting surrogates in India, to carry and give birth to, eventually, your twin daughters. That's something that you're very honest about. And you really admit feeling tremendous ambivalence about it, even quite deep into the process. Just tell me a bit about what those feelings were and what you did to mitigate your concerns around surrogacy, which is obviously just such a controversial topic.
PA:
Yes, again, it comes back to the choices that women have and autonomy they have about their bodies, and how we believe that certain women have more rights to their bodies than others, and how we impose our expectations of them in certain parts of the world, and believe that they don't have the autonomy on their bodies.
So I suppose, in the US, surrogacy is highly controversial. I wanted to discuss it in an honest way. Because I think I wanted to write from a perspective of a person who went through it, but also thought about it quite a lot. I didn't want to paint it in a picture of saying, actually, I did it, so it is perfectly okay to do it. I want to look at everything. Because that's how I examine things when I'm working through things. So I looked at a lot of literature about the experiences of surrogates. And I see that a lot of media panic that's created or is around the stories that come out with this, it didn't work, where their rights were, perhaps not respected, and all the legalities and issues around it. And I suppose, once again, we talk about some of these issues without centering the voice of people who really matter and whose stories we're trying to tell. And we see that with other debates and discourses as well. People who are not part of that community, people who have never been through that process, feel that it's right to talk about that process. And I it was the research that centres the voice of the surrogates that was really interesting for me, which is not much again, there's not much of that research.
AB:
That voice is often marginalised.
PA:
Exactly, because it's almost believed that women who have undergone the role of surrogates in India don't have a voice. So in doing that we're actually marginalising them and not giving them the platform or even giving them the option to have autonomy over their body in any way.
AB:
And even if when they did speak, they happen to say, you know, actually, I didn't like this, It's important that they're spoken to and asked for their perspective on their own experience.
PA:
Yeah. I looked at some of the research, this longitudinal study that was done over 10 years. It was really interesting to me to read about that. There's a lot of research done at Cambridge in this area where they've talked about women who have undergone surrogacy, as in the intended parent, but also women who have been surrogates and what their experiences have been at the time, but five years later as well.
I looked at the legalities. I looked at the legal issues. We hired a lawyer to talk through it. We looked at different clinics.
AB:
You translated documents, yes? Which, like you said, doesn't normally happen. Yes. Incredible. You made sure that the documents and the contracts were translated into Hindi So that your surrogate could actually understand what she was signing. I mean, that's phenomenal. But that might not have might not happened in every case.
PA:
Yeah, it might not be happening in every case. But we were really adamant that we wanted to, and we wanted to make sure that we knew how they were selected, how they were chosen for this, how they were looked after, and all those kinds of things. And we met her afterwards. And it was clear that she had been happy about it. But yes, of course, when you read all these news items, when we read such polarised discourse and debates, it's very difficult to make up your mind, it's a very emotional process as well, when you're undergoing something where you feel like you're about to become a mother, but you're not carrying your children. And you feel, I'm so disconnected from this process. I don't know how I should feel or how I'm going to feel because it's all very new. And I really wanted to capture that part as well. I suppose in writing that I was also admitting to parts of myself that I wasn’t really proud of, because I think sometimes we can airbrush those parts of ourselves when we are writing and we say “Actually no, I was perfectly okay or I was really happy” or whatever.
AB:
We can rewrite the story of my own ambivalence to kind of erase that uncertainty that existed at the time. Actually that brings me to ask you the concept of mothering. But before I do that, we should note though, that in 2016, after your girls had been born, India did change its law on surrogacy.
PA:
Yeah, now no foreigners can go and carry out surrogacy in India, nobody who is not of Indian descent. But the main thing for me is that it's a very severely homophobic law as well, even though homosexuality has been legalised in India. Because no same sex couples, even in civil partnership, can carry out surrogacy in that way.
AB:
After talking about surrogacy, you suggest that really we should maybe talk of “mothering” as well as, or maybe even instead of “motherhood” at times. Tell me a little bit about that, what this word “mothering” means to you.
PA:
I was thinking about nature and nurture at that time, as well. Because as I say, I was really during that process feeling so detached from it, because I suppose a lot of the things that you read or hear about or talk about, is about this bodily experience of carrying a child and becoming a mother. And so there's always this notion of becoming a mother. And we read a lot of scientific research about what happens when you become a mother, when you give birth, it is associated with giving birth, and this rush of hormones that creates an instant maternal bond or attachment with your child, because you've also carried them for eight or nine months in your body. And I was looking, reflecting on this experience – very different from my previous experience – of not carrying the children but becoming a mother. And I was thinking about how, actually, instead of that rush of hormones, because I haven't given birth to them, it is kind of a dance between the infant and the mother, about the different ways that we bond and attach together, and this two-way process of forming this attachment in the days, weeks and months to come. So I suppose I was thinking about all those mothers and all those people who become mothers, but have not given birth.
AB:
And finally Pragya, I mean, your book ends on a note of hope on a personal level, you know, with kind of really a strong sense of joy about your family of five, and your daughters. But it also signals a warning too. So you write of a rise in the state control of women's bodies during the pandemic. I wonder what examples you can give us there, what we should be guarding against, what we should be vigilant against.
PA:
Now, as we're seeing around the world, I think bodies are being controlled more and more and some bodies are being marginalised more than others. What it means to be a woman is becoming part of a really polarised discourse and debate around the world. This notion of woman and feminine entity. We're falling back on those tropes, these boxes we try to escape. We get trapped ourselves, again and again, it feels like, because we are adhering to this notion of what a woman means, but we are also seeing the rise of controls on women's reproductive facilities as well. We're seeing abortion rules in the US which are very heavily being state controlled, and the decisions that are made by men for women. We're seeing that in countries like Turkey and we're seeing that in Hungary and Czechoslovakia – how women's reproduction and choices are being curtailed as well.
And so, it is it is quite scary. It is quite threatening how these discourses are becoming so polarised, why women's choices are being curtailed, why again, we are seeing the rise in this discourse around falling birth-rate, and giving women the message that you need to stand up and you need to have children.
AB:
It’s your duty, yeah. Which is always linked with nationalism – often, nativism and nationalism go hand.
PA:
Absolutely. The anti-abortion debate has a lot of racial history, racialized history as well. It's rooted in eugenics. And we are not talking about motherhood so much here, but there is this inherent paradox because the state, even in the UK, is not providing quality free childcare for women. So motherhood, the act of becoming a mother, is revered. But when that happens, women are still facing the motherhood penalty. We just saw the example of Stella Creasy, about the maternity leave [for MPs] in Parliament and how it becomes a bar to women's careers and women's choices later on. So I think we really need to think about what society can do for us.
AB:
Not just what we can do for society. Pragya Agarwal, thank you so much for joining us. That was really fascinating. Thank you.
Parag Agarwal talking about her latest book Motherhood. And with me now is Samira Shackle, editor of New Humanist magazine. Samira, hi, what's your take on what we've heard from Pragya there?
Samira Shackle:
Yeah, what really jumped out at me listening to was all the points at which data is lacking or deficient in some way. It's this kind of idea of missing information, I thought that was a quite consistent thread. And I was actually thinking about that, when you were talking with Pragya about the prevalence of ritual and superstition and old wives tales when it comes to fertility and pregnancy. Now, I sort of wondered to what extent that's a symptom of all these areas where we don't have sufficient data, or to what extent it's maybe just human nature that even if we're generally rational, or prize rational thought processes, that when we're faced with something that's kind of out of our control, and hard to understand in some way, that we do fall back on things, because it makes us feel we're doing something. It gives the illusion of control, perhaps,. I don't know which of those things it is, or perhaps it's a bit of both.
AB:
Yeah, I mean, just from personal experience, I would say it's possibly both. I mean, obviously, lack of data, and data gaps that she talks about, especially to do with kind of intersectional inequality is really important and really serious. But just more generally, there, whether you're pregnant or trying to get pregnant, what you choose to do, there's so much information out there, that it's almost overwhelming. And I wonder also, whether maybe people resort to or retreat to ritual and old wives tales and superstition, because they're actually bombarded by information. I know I certainly felt a bit like that. When I had my son recently, and I was overdue. And looking to trigger labour, I pretty much just googled around until I found whatever it was I wanted to hear, even if it was actually on what I secretly probably knew were the most dodgy websites, the weirdest blogs ever, full of typos. And then, you know, I just kind of felt a bit supported in doing the silly things I would do to try and make labour happen. I think to some degree, especially in those kind of examples, you know, maybe it's harmless to just do a little bit extra, you know, the little kind of ritual on top of the science. But where it's obviously not okay, and where it's a massive problem, is where people are being exploited by people who are taking money from people who are in desperate situations, or raising false hopes, you know, whilst extracting money and time and energy from people. That's really not okay to mess with people when they're in such a vulnerable situation and trying to have a child.
I think Pragya’s discussion around body clock was also really interesting for that reason. She talks about how sure, yeah, it's, it's real, but there's a lot of pressure and panic that's kind of socially constructed or amplified really around the idea of the body clock. And that really, that doesn't need to be there. And we can do a lot to make conditions in which women are making choices about pregnancy and fertility much, much better and much, much, much easier for them. She talks in her book for example about egg freezing and how she was on the tube in London seeing these adverts about freezing your eggs now. I think the only adverts I've seen that are remotely comparable are ones targeted at men to be sperm donors. And yet the ones targeted at women are about freezing that their eggs.
SS:
I mean, yeah, the body clock point is so knotty. There, obviously is more of an age-related fertility decline for women than men, or a sharper one anyway, but there's also so much social pressure. And it's overstated. Certainly, the egg freezing point, I think connects back to what you were just saying about marketing services to people. I mean, it's very expensive, very invasive, I think often people don't appreciate how invasive it is. And I was actually, just by coincidence, doing a bit of research about this recently for a piece I'm working on. And a really, really huge proportion of women who freeze their eggs never end up using them. But it's sort of marketed as this tool of empowerment. And actually it's, you know, it's a pretty serious surgical procedure that's pretty unpleasant in many ways. And yeah, and something else that struck me while you were talking to Pragya was this blending that she's done of her own story with academic research. I find that interesting. Obviously you know, having that that sense of narrative can make research much more engaging to read when you're writing for a mass audience. I published a book earlier this year, and I have obviously a completely different subject, a nonfiction book, but I am personally very resistant to writing in that sort of autobiographical mode and really prefer to keep writing as a journalist about other people, rather than myself. But this is obviously such an intensely personal subject.
AB:
Yeah, I think motherhood in particular is a subject I mean, maybe I should say parenthood really is a particular subject that does seem to lend itself to a kind of confessional mode. And it's also really an area that forces people to consider the tension between their beliefs in theory – whether that's, you know, feminism or environmentalism – and their desires in practice, you know, whether that's actually considering contracting a surrogate or having children despite being concerned about the impact on the planet. Praya discussed that tension pretty honestly, re surrogacy, as I say. Also Lucy Jones, the science writer in our episode on nature and mental health, as part of this series, she also has an interesting point to make there that I think is worth listening to.
But yeah, that is all for today and we'll be back next week with more. Remember, you can find reading lists and transcripts for all episodes of With Reason at newhumanist.org.uk. They're ready to share with the student in your life or the resident critic at your kitchen table. You can also find us on Twitter @NewHumanist. With Reason is presented by me, series producer Alice Bloch, with New Humanist editor Samira Shackle. Our sound engineer was Dave Crackles. See you back here soon. Bye.
Reading List:
'(M)otherhood: On the Choices of Being a Woman' (2021) Pragya Agarwal
Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias (2020) Pragya Agarwal
Alice Bloch, Review of 'Childless Voices' by Lorna Gibb (2019) New Humanist Magazine
