Baby, baby, please let me hold him

24 11 2013

This makes no damned sense.

No, I’m not talking about ACA/Obamacare criticism—there are legitimate political questions about the size and role of government in the provision of the general welfare—but the notion that maternity care only benefits fertile women:

A “single male, age 32, does not need maternity coverage,” [Representative Renee] Ellmers said. […]

[…] Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, a former Mitt Romney adviser, asserted: “Having children is more a choice than a random act of nature. People who drive a new Porsche pay more for car insurance than those who drive an old Chevy …. Why isn’t having children viewed in the same way?”

[…] “My [Nicole Hopkins, writing in the Wall Street Journal] asked ‘Do I need maternity care at 52?'”

No, men don’t get pregnant, yes, having children is a choice, and no, most 52-year-old women do not need maternity care.

That is all irrelevant, however.

Garance Franke-Ruta concentrates on the empirical realities facing mothers in the US in her analysis of the anti-maternity care argument, but even that analysis is beside the point.

What is the point? Every single goddamned person who is and was ever on the planet was born to a woman, and was cared for by someone else—almost always the woman who gave birth. It is a basic condition of our existence.

There is no human life, no society, no politics, no world, without children being born and raised.

We do not exist without care.

Which is precisely fucking why maternity care affects us all, and ought to matter to us all.  Goddammit all.

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3 responses

25 11 2013
dmfant

25 11 2013
27 11 2013
dmfant

Would it be so wrong
to suggest that he move
next door? I don’t want him
gone altogether, neither can I stand
him underfoot. It might be ideal
to holler over the fence,
invite him to dinner.
We’d sit together on the patio, eat
asparagus from his garden,
grilled shrimp under the setting sun,
then kiss the grease from our lips,
maybe more. After,
he’d go home
and watch basketball at full volume,
while I soak in the tub listening to Coltrane.
Then, wearing pajamas, hair uncombed,
I’d curl up in my own living
room with Robert Frost or People
and the cat, the quiet,
the light of a single lamp.

by Krista Lukas
happy turkey-day!

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