Commentary: Extending parenting backwards

Jennie Bristow, editor of Abortion Review, explores some of the new limitations placed on women’s autonomy by a culture of ‘intensive parenting’. 

In June 2010, the University of Kent will host a two-day seminar, supported by BPAS, on the theme of ‘pregnancy and pregnancy planning in the new parenting culture’. The seminar takes as its starting point new developments in modern parenting culture, in which themes of ‘intensive parenting’ and ‘responsible parenthood’ have come to shape the direction of social policy. International scholars from a range of disciplines will discuss these themes with an academic, professional and lay audience, focusing on their relationship to women’s autonomy and reproductive decision-making.

Policy over recent decades has become increasingly interested in, and interventionist on, parents’ activities in relation to their children’s health, education and behaviour, situating ‘parenting’ as a key site of political concern. It is not now unusual to see policy measures directed specifically at indicating what foods parents should feed their children, or the extent of their involvement in their child’s homework. While many see such developments as contributing positively to a model of responsible parenthood, by giving parents official advice and support in making the best decisions regarding everyday family life, others have warned that putting parenting practices under the spotlight in this way can have some negative consequences in terms of parental autonomy and confidence in what have historically been considered private matters of child-rearing.

It has also been argued that, in an era marked by an attachment to ‘evidence-based policy’, the evidence base for promoting ‘one method’ of feeding, educating or disciplining children is rather weak; and that children’s health and development is the result of a wider range of factors than can be determined simply by the diet their parents feed them, or the amount of time spent reading to them in the evening.

The University of Kent seminar will draw upon this discussion to examine how the imperatives of this new parenting culture have begun to ‘extend backwards’ into pregnancy and pre-pregnancy, with important consequences for women’s reproductive autonomy. The desire to produce the ‘optimal child’, promoted by policy-makers but increasingly shared by women themselves, has led to an increasingly stark distinction between acceptable and non-acceptable behaviour in pregnant women. Smoking, drinking alcohol, eating certain types of food and taking any kind of medication have become areas of intense concern and anxiety.

The fear is that a pregnant woman might harm her fetus by ingesting the wrong kind of substance, and the conclusion often drawn is that she should therefore err on the side of caution by avoiding any ‘risky’ behaviour during pregnancy, and avoiding becoming pregnant until she has changed her lifestyle in the appropriate ways.

It is known that certain substances and medications can have a negative impact on fetal development, or even cause abnormalities, and it is sensible to take this knowledge into account. Of interest to the conference, however, is the way that even substances or behaviours that have not been proven to cause harm are now tagged as things that the pregnant woman should avoid. One example of this is the 2007 decision, by the Department of Health and the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), to advise pregnant women and those who may be thinking of becoming pregnant to avoid alcohol completely. This new advice was not based on any new evidence about the harm that alcohol might cause the fetus: there is no evidence that moderate drinking during pregnancy has any effect, and as some important American studies have indicated, the evidence that even heavy drinking harms the fetus is far less clear-cut than is generally presumed.

The justification given for bringing in new official advice about abstaining from alcohol during pregnancy was not based on evidence, but on the presumed need for behavioural change. Encouraging women to change their lifestyle habits (in particular, their drinking behaviour) is now accepted as a necessary precondition for responsible motherhood. This is why the advice extends to women who are merely thinking of becoming pregnant: the effect of alcohol upon the fetus cannot be significant here, as there is no fetus; the issue is one of adopting appropriate maternal attitudes and behaviour.

The effect of these developments upon women’s reproductive autonomy is significant. While antenatal care has always exercised a degree of control over women’s behaviour, both the expansion of the maternal behaviours seen as problematic and the extension of these concerns to women before they become pregnant, indicates a tendency towards the increasing regulation of women’s private choices.

Seminar participants will discuss how the phenomenon of ‘extending parenting backwards’ can also impact negatively on women’s reproductive choices regarding contraception and abortion. A woman’s ability to decide, for herself, the circumstances under which she wants to have a child, and to avoid or terminate a pregnancy if those circumstances are not favourable, has been one of the great gains of modern history. But in circumstances where there is a high cultural expectation of the ‘perfect pregnant woman’ as a necessary precondition for creating the optimal child, and where this expectation is often shared by women before they become pregnant, women might find their personal fertility decisions unduly shaped by wider cultural concerns. 

For example, the woman who decides to terminate an unintended pregnancy because she was out drinking with her friends before discovering that she was pregnant, or the woman who worries that her use of hair dye and prescription drugs may have adversely affected the developing fetus, might be seen to be making the responsible choice by having an abortion rather than carrying the pregnancy to term.

However, when the actual scientific evidence about a causal link between the woman’s behaviour and the fetus is weak, and where her choice to terminate the pregnancy has been informed more by anxiety and pressure about the potential negative consequences of her behaviour than by the question of whether or not she wants to have a baby right now, there is a need to address the extent to which the new parenting culture places restrictions on women’s decision-making.

For more details about the seminar, see the Parenting Culture Studies website.

Tickets cost £120 two days / £80 one day (employed); £25 (students and unwaged). Email .