UPDATED Reminder about comments policy:
This comment thread is open to feminists and those who are feminist-friendly only. Thread-derailing to advance an anti-feminist agenda has no place here. I’ve been remiss in enforcing this recently, but am going to be better about it out now.
On the Fourth of July, KJ Lopez at the National Review Online offered up what she calls “A Good Girl Role Model”. (One assumes, after reading the piece and being familiar with K-Lo’s work, that the adjective “good” modifies “girl” rather than “role model”. Lopez is from that school of social conservatives who wish fervently that there were more “good girls” — in the classic sense — running around. Or, better yet in the right-wing world, not running around.)
Lopez tells us the story of Agata Mroz, a former Polish volleyball star who died of leukemia shortly after giving birth.
When Agata was 17, she was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a collection of disorders that prevent the bone marrow from producing sufficient blood cells. Some forms of MDS progress to leukemia, and Agata’s did. In the prime of her sports career, Agata needed to take a sabbatical in 2007 to fight the disease. The first part of her treatment involved many blood transfusions. When her fans discovered that she needed blood, they formed a queue to be donors, giving 3,170 pints.
Her condition worsened as she was preparing to marry Jacek Olszewski on June 9, 2007, leaving her too ill to go on a honeymoon. Because of her illness, doctors cautioned her against getting pregnant, but she tried anyway. She was realistic about her slim prospects to beat the disease and, if she were going to die, she at least hoped to be able to give life.
She became pregnant soon after marrying. “The news about the child made me feel lucky again,†she said in a February news interview. “I felt happy that I would know what it is to be a mother and that I would give my husband something good of myself.â€
A few weeks later, doctors discovered her cancer had progressed. They told her that she urgently needed a bone marrow transplant, but she opted to wait until after delivery to receive the transplant lest she imperil her child’s life. She clearly knew the risk she was taking, but considered the reward worth the danger, putting her child’s life above her own. She gave premature birth to a daughter, Lilliana, on April 4.
Agata died on June 4.
It’s a bittersweet story. Who among us would question Agata’s decision? She did what she wanted to do, making a conscious choice to get pregnant despite the huge risk and to forego lifesaving treatment in order to ensure her daughter’s well-being. I honor that choice as a good and valid one. I was moved reading the account Lopez shares.
But what is so infuriating is the clear sense that Agata’s decision wasn’t a choice, but a spiritual requirement for any woman who might find herself in a similar tragic predicament. For Lopez — and indeed, for many Catholics, a woman is required to put the life of her unborn child ahead of her own. It isn’t so much a “choice” as a divine mandate. Lopez’s piece concludes:
In his homily, the celebrant of the Mass, Bishop Marian Florczyk, said that Agata’s life is a witness of “love of life, motherhood, the desire to give life and the heroic love of an unborn child.”
It is all that. I’m not raining on Agata’s parade, of course. But Lopez doesn’t entitle her piece “A Mother’s Choice”. She calls it “A Good Girl Role Model”, driving home the point that young women ought to aspire to be as radically selfless as Agata to the point of de-valuing their own lives.
Agata Mroz learned the lessons of sports and applied them in life. Accustomed to giving all she had on the court, Agata indeed gave the best of herself to her husband and every last ounce of herself to her daughter. She learned that there were things more important than herself, and she valued Lilliana’s life more than her own — even before she was conceived.
Oy. (Hey, by the way, if sports teaches such good lessons to women, why are all the right-wingers trying to undo Title IX?)
The call to such extreme sacrifice traditionally falls harder on women than on men (recall the high rates of death in childbirth for mothers in the pre-industrial world). Rhapsodizing about the Blessed Agata (I won’t be surprised if canonization proceedings start following the predictable reports of miracles) as a role model gives young women the stern impression that their bodies were made for the purpose of their husbands’ delight and their children’s nurturing — not for their own pleasure or joy.
It’s hard not to read this piece as a none-too-subtle dig at those who might be queasy about abortion rights, but still support the right to terminate a pregnancy in cases of threats to a mother’s life. Lopez’s Independence Day message is that “good girls” don’t terminate pregnancies even when choosing not to do so is essentially a death sentence for themselves. A good mother dies for her child, folks: no exemptions ought to be permitted for something as ultimately insubstantial as the life of she who carries a child. In K-Lo’s world, the life to come is always more important than the life that is, particularly when the life that is is designed by the creator for one purpose: reproduction. That’s a perverse reading of God’s plan for our lives and for our bodies, but it is one that is, alas, resurgent in traditionalist Catholic doctrine.
Thanks to modern medicine, relatively few women have to make the choice that Agata Mroz did: between her self and her child. She made one possible choice, and it was a fine and good one. It would also have been equally fine and good for her to have made a different choice, perhaps to have avoided pregnancy as an additional health risk. Agata’s life is precious too, you see, and she might well have sacrificed the joy of a child for the sake of longer happiness with her friends, family, and husband. That too, I think, would have been a very fine choice, an equally fine decision.
Our daughters need a variety of role models. One particular kind they need is of women who are capable of loving others while still valuing themselves. They need to know that putting their own lives first, that valuing themselves as much as they value others, is a good and just thing. For those girls who grow up in Christian households, they need to be reminded that all of God’s children are equally precious in His sight: those born with uteruses are not defined by their reproductive capacity, and their chief value to God does not lie in their willingness to give birth (again and again, if possible) regardless of all possible risks. They need to hear that all sorts of girls can be good. They need to hear that their own innate desire for life and for pleasure and for happiness is God-given, and that it is at least possible that the greatest fulfillment comes not merely in begetting new life but in living the one already given to its absolute fullest.
I honor Agata Mroz’s choice. I honor her career and her marriage, and I pray that her daughter grows up happy and free. I pray in particular that her daughter grows up free from guilt, from the sense that she is some way responsible for her mother’s death. And I pray that she values the life for which her mother laid down hers, and that she lives long and happy and free.
There are many ways to be good. Even, it turns out, for women.
And seem my comments policy above: this is for feminist-friendly commenters only.
At the (great) risk of being anti-feminist, I must point out that this is not gender-specific oppression by the patriarchy.
Heroes for boys are frequently the kind who devalue their lives out of concern for others: The 300, Medal of Honor, the firemen and cops on 9-11. The guys who went up the beach at….a hundred bloody places.
And nobody writes articles bemoaning this when it’s boys/men who are expected to Get The Message.
Possibly, it’s because these guys are so useful on their way out that we don’t want to interrupt the supply. Never know when we’ll need another one.
But it is different, richard. We don’t have a draft any more (thanks be to God.) No one is forced to become a firefighter, and we don’t have priests giving homilies about the necessity of each lad fulfilling his God-given destiny by going off to war and dying for his country. We did at one time, it’s true — but no more. We still have this garbage, however, from the likes of K-Lo.
That left a really bad taste in my mouth; I’m not familiar with KJ Lopez at all, but it seems like she twisted for her own purposes an amazingly admirable story about a woman who refused to let anyone tell her no. There are several pro-feminist lessons to take from it, it seems a shame that KJ went with it the way she did. Essentially Agata did what made her happy – something all women need to focus on more often, as you point out, Hugo.
I hate the idea of giving “my all” to other people when it requires giving more to them than I give myself. That might sound selfish, but I think it’s really a backwards notion – if I’m not giving myself everything I need, how in the world could I begin to take care of children and be a good partner to a spouse? It seems that if I short-shift myself, I’m in turn short-shifting them as well.
Richard Aubrey,
One difference might be that while Hugo was focusing on women giving themselves up for unborn children, the heroes you’re talking about are risking their lives for people who are already alive. Does this change anything in your analysis?
Not sure yet what my answer is to your question – Hugo points to the draft being gone as an answer, but women aren’t exactly FORCED to become mothers.
On the other hand, if women stopped having babies, we’d be in deep, deep trouble. So your notion about interrupting the supply doesn’t hold, either.
Actually KJ Lopez didn’t twist anything. The words Hugo quoted were not KJ,s. KJ quoted a sermon by a Catholic Priest, Fr. Roger J. Landry. The only words of KJ are the linking post title “A Good Girl Role Model” which is a reference to a prior day post that asked, in essence – “Who are some good role models for girls today?
I really don’t have a problem with this. I see no reason why praise of one women, for making what a choice that might be seen as evidence that she has the heroic virtue we ask of saints, is interpreted as a puritanical insistence that this is the only model for women. Is any praise of Mother Teresa an insistence that all women sell all they have, move to Calcutta, and spend their lives caring for the poorest of the poor?
B.
Hugo misssed the point. The point is not where heroes come from. The point is that life-offering heroes are held up as examples to boys, the same as the instant case regarding the article about the self-sacrificing mother.
I suppose the mother thought she had a genuine person going there, passage through the birth canal notwithstanding. If we’re all about choice, she gets to make that decision.
I suppose the mother thought she had a genuine person going there, passage through the birth canal notwithstanding.
Actually, from the narrative, it seems the doctors warned her of the peril, and then she chose to get pregnant regardless of the warning. So while prospective firefighters and soldiers look around at their peers and think, “I’m going to protect them,” the mother in this article decided to place herself in danger before the child was even conceived.
To be fair to you, I don’t necessarily think you’re asking an anti-feminist question, and I do think your question ties in the topic (ie – person placing others’ well-being over his or her own and how that choice is celebrated and encouraged). However, I do think the situations are different, especially because men who choose to not be firefighters or soldiers aren’t villified the way that women who choose to not be moms are.
I imagine if a young boy, after hearing his dad or other adult go on about how noble soldiers are, said, “Er, I think I’d rather be a doctor/architect/writer, I don’t want to risk myself just to help people,” there wouldn’t be too much of an uproar. After making the choice later in life to actually become an architect, people probably aren’t going to ask him, “Why didn’t you join the military/fire department instead?”
Women who choose not to have children, whether because of a known risk to their health or because they just don’t want to give up what’s needed to have kids, definitely don’t get to avoid those questions and uproar.
“Women who choose not to have children, whether because of a known risk to their health or because they just don’t want to give up what’s needed to have kids, definitely don’t get to avoid those questions and uproar.”
B, I think there is too much hyperbole in this, and in the post in general. Yes, of course there is pressure on women to have babies, and there are questions to be answered. No one gets to go through life without pressure and questions. But “uproar”? “villification”? Hardly. Fertility rates are trending downwards, and the age at which woman have their first child is increasing.
Yes, but these trends are lamented by the family values crowd, and, if you read the literature they produce, vigorously opposed. Social conservatives are in a culture war, as they see it, and one battlefront is restoring motherhood (Kinder, Kirche, Kueche) to the center of American women’s concerns.
Hugo.
I’m a social conservative and those three issues leave me…bored.
I suppose one’s virtue is measured by one’s enemies; thus the more the merrier, especially if there’s no danger of actual, real danger.
The reference to Nazis is egregious, although surely satisfying.
Do your research. Richard, the phrase predates the Third Reich.
You’re much, much kinder than I would have been to Lopez here.
Right. Women are supposed to sacrifice their lives to protect their children (but not their husbands or fathers) and their virtue, and that’s it. Men are supposed to sacrifice their lives to save their country, their comrades, their families, their ideals, and strangers in need. It’s not that men aren’t expected to be life-offering heroes, but the narratives are very gendered.
I think the main difference here is choice – that women are expected to happily cede their health and lives to the not-yet-existent, and men are admired for choosing to be selfless.
Sara.
Where do you get the idea that women are expected to happily cede their health and lives to the not-yet-existent?
In the real world, anybody who suggested a woman was deficient because she refused to do as Mroz did would be considered a vile beast.
And the point, I have to continue to drag back to it, is that self-sacrificing heroes are held up to boys/men as exemplars. Women are not alone in this.
The gendered narrative is kind of interesting. Women are, according to this version, expected to sacrifice for kith and kin, men for strangers. Are you really wanting to go there?
But it is different, richard. We don’t have a draft any more (thanks be to God.)
I have my son’s selective service registration in the second drawer down on my right. Think again. He’d have been denied financial aid had he not filled it out.
One difference might be that while Hugo was focusing on women giving themselves up for unborn children, the heroes you’re talking about are risking their lives for people who are already alive. Does this change anything in your analysis?
This woman sacrificed her life for her own flesh and blood; those heroes sacrifice their lives for people who are more often than not total strangers. Change anything in yours?
I’d give my life for my son or daughter (Or possible grandchild – keeping my fingers crossed.) in a heartbeat, without a second thought. I don’t believe any parent – mother, father, left, right – worthy of the title would do differently.
God help their kids if they would.
People, I clearly get that respectful requests for feminist commentary only isn’t getting anywhere. I’m closing comments on this and possibly on future posts. When the majority of my commenters are men who are either hostile to feminism, or at best, highly suspicious thereof, I’m not getting my points across.
I’m debating the wisdom of having comment threads at all, honestly.
Pingback: But dear God what about the menz?? at PunkAssBlog.com