Dear Express Reader

Gloria Steinem died on September 2, at the age of 92, and besides the many encomiums about her work as a feminist activist and organiser as well as criticism of her “White” and “privileged” politics, almost every obituary has noted two facts.

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One: Her explicit turn towards feminism at the age of 35 had a lot to do with the memory of an abortion she had at 22, in London — a memory that was sparked at a 1969 “speak-out” organised by a radical feminist group called Redstockings, where other women shared their own experiences. That day, Steinem later wrote, a realisation “clicked” into place, that what she had long regarded as something deeply personal was, in fact, a political fact simply because of the number of women who had also, in their turn, “personally” struggled with it.

Two: From the age of 10 to 17, Steinem became responsible for tending to her mother, a journalist — rare at that time for a woman — who had to give up her job to raise her family and whose subsequent descent into mental illness and addiction was left almost entirely to a young Gloria to manage.

Hold these two facts together and turn to developments over the recent years that have undone a lot of what feminists achieved in the US, both before and during the “second-wave” feminist movement. Reproductive rights, the nucleus around which Steinem’s own feminist consciousness had formed, have in particular seen a reversal — the most notable example being the US Supreme Court striking down, in 2022, the 1973 ruling Roe v Wade, which had made abortion a constitutional right in the US. In the four years since, 20 states have either implemented a total ban or imposed severe restrictions on the right to abortion. 

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Around the world, the question of reproductive rights, a woman’s right to an abortion, especially, is a deeply polarising one, but the troubling way in which the issue has been framed in the US — “pro-choice” vs “pro-life” — tends to obscure what the decision to use contraception or have an abortion is really about: A decision about motherhood. What Steinem found in that basement meeting in 1969 was permission to accept not wanting to be a mother. To make such a choice possible at all, to bring motherhood out from under the rubric of destiny and place it firmly in the realm of options, is the feminist endeavour.

Years later, Steinem wrote about her mother, who had once dreamed of moving to New York City to pursue a career in journalism. Can Ruth Nuneviller Steinem’s mental breakdown be explicitly tied to the thwarting of ambition — of choice? And did it shape her daughter’s own choices? Steinem was asked about this often and while she refused to make the straightforward connection in either question, she eventually said that while early caretaking responsibility had played a role in her choice, she had simply never felt the urge to have children.

So here is feminist proposition number one: A woman may choose to not become a mother for any number of reasons, including that she simply doesn’t want to. And feminist proposition number two: Even after she has chosen motherhood, she remains an individual, with agency and her own vulnerabilities.

Motherhood has become the ideal into which mothers  — expected to be endlessly loving, competent, resilient and capable of absorbing everyone else’s needs without generating any of their own — are made to disappear. The neglect is structural — and global. All through pregnancy a woman’s body is monitored with great care, while her mind gets almost no attention, neither during, nor after the pregnancy. According to WHO estimates, one in five women experiences a mental health condition during pregnancy or in the year after birth, which makes it almost as common as gestational diabetes, even as it is screened for far less.

Even where the law prioritises a woman’s mental health over social expectations of motherhood, the story is not all that different. Take the case of India’s Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, as amended in 2021, which permits termination up to 24 weeks for several categories of women — it explicitly counts grave injury to mental health as a ground. Yet, the 2023 case of the woman, already a mother of two, who had to approach the Supreme Court to allow the termination of her pregnancy, showed the limits of that law. The woman was, at the time, being treated for postpartum depression and a two-judge bench allowed the procedure, on the grounds that continuing the pregnancy could imperil her mental health. Then a doctor on the AIIMS medical board said that the foetus was around 26 weeks and had a strong chance of survival, so was the heartbeat to be stopped first? 

Within days, the two judges split, and the matter went to a three-judge bench led by the Chief Justice, who held that there was no immediate threat to the woman’s life and no foetal abnormality, and that the statutory ceiling had passed. The termination did not happen.

Two serious claims collided: A woman’s authority over her own body and mind, and the viability of a foetus. Reasonable people land on different conclusions. But a right that exists in the statute books, only to evaporate under pressure is a right that was never institutionally serious. Mental health may have been written into the MTP Act, but the systems of care that shape the usual course of motherhood in this country continue to fail women on that count.

It is against this background that the extreme cases are made to do work they cannot do. Consider the recent case of Lindsay Clancy, an American woman charged with killing her three children, whose defence was severe postpartum psychosis. In a fortnight, the case generated more public arguments about maternal mental illness than the everyday struggles of women.

But building our understanding of maternal mental illness on the rarest-of-rare cases, like Clancy’s, only makes the subject seem disconnected from the more common manifestations of this struggle. The solution is not complicated: Perinatal mental health screening as ordinary obstetric care and training health workers at every level to recognise what they are looking at. Finally it calls for treating a woman’s statement about her own mind as evidence to be taken seriously, rather than being treated as “mood”.

Take care, 

Pooja

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