Giving up baby

What is it with this moment that it produces these so-called feminist movies about women giving up babies? First Juno and now Baby Mama, a movie about a woman and the surrogate she hires.

I haven’t seen Baby Mama, so I’ll withhold judgment on the movie itself. But I do think it’s striking that, just as with Juno, this movie is being celebrated for its strong female heroines and feminist sensibility—yet the core of the plot is the use of one woman’s body to produce a baby for another. And it appears that the movie traffics in the same clichés about gender and class as Juno did—rich, uptight, sterile career woman versus uninhibited, low-class, fertile girl/woman. Both movies seem to use a veneer of feminism—and, particularly insidious, of supposed female solidarity—to purvey deeper anti-feminist messages. We are still in the backlash.

The commentary on Baby Mama also recycles the class-blindered idea that we’re in the grip of an obsession with babies. It may be true that for women of a certain age and class—the same chattering class that writes the reviews—becoming a parent is a current challenge and obsession. But that hardly makes it a culture-wide issue.

The subhead for Salon’s review of Baby Mama called it “this spoof of our child-centric culture.” In a similar vein, an article on the recent surge in the U.S. birthrate quoted Nan Marie Astone, associate professor of population, family and reproductive health at Johns Hopkins University. "Americans like children. We are the only people who respond to prosperity by saying, 'Let's have another kid,'" she told the AP.

Where was I when the notion that America is child-loving and child-focused culture became conventional wisdom? Where did anyone get this idea? An American child is 79 times more likely to be a victim of abuse than a Swedish child and two to three times more likely to live in poverty than a child in other industrialized nation, We offer no national paid family leave, have no nationally supported system of early childhood education, require employers to give no sick leave or vacation, and have no rules requiring equity in rates of pay for part-time work. How exactly are we child-loving?