She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Failing Moms: Social Condemnation and Criminalization of Mothers, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Failing Moms is both a good example of key themes in the book and too focused on pregnancy examples to get a telling sense of the whole book. The top of page 99 describes a woman who was held at a drug treatment facility for 78 days during her pregnancy despite the fact that she had taken one Vicodin for pain before she realized she was pregnant and had not consumed any drugs afterwards. Even though she had already stopped using drugs, she was held against her will allegedly to protect her fetus. This extended, in-patient mandate resulted in her being laid off and the subsequent loss of her home prior to giving birth. Making a mother-to-be lose her job and home prior to the arrival of her baby is clearly detrimental not just to the woman but to her child. It is important to note that she had no legal representation when she was ordered to drug treatment; only her fetus had a lawyer. This case illustrates that actions taken due to fixating on the fetus’ supposed best interests while ignoring the realities of the gestating person not only lead to violating the latter’s rights, but can easily cause more harm than good for both mother and child.Visit Caitlin Killian's website.
The bottom of page 99 introduces readers to some of the problems around cursory comprehension of the relationship between alcohol use during pregnancy and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). While the typical understanding, encouraged by public health pronouncements, is that any amount of alcohol during pregnancy could be dangerous and that all women are equally at risk, science does not show this. Not only do other variables such as social class, poor nutrition, length of alcoholism, and pattern of drinking, especially binge drinking, likely interact with alcohol to determine outcome, but there is no data to support cautioning women against an occasional drink during pregnancy. Overblown warnings about alcohol consumption during pregnancy intentionally target all women, when concerns actually apply to only a small subset. This, coupled with the fact that women who do suffer from substance abuse problems are too often criminalized rather than aided, and consequences such as women receiving substandard prenatal care and giving birth in prison cells, belie that these approaches are in the interest of anyone’s health.
These examples do typify arguments in the book about mothers being held to extreme, often nonsensical, standards, the social control of women, and how maltreating mothers is rarely in the best interest of their children. However, the book situates mothering historically and culturally to challenge current beliefs about moms and discusses a plethora of other cases beyond substance abuse and pregnancy. In fact, the goal of the book is to highlight unfair treatment of moms across situations and the life cycle to illustrate the pervasiveness of this phenomenon. The double standards begin before a pregnancy is even en-route as women are cautioned about how everything they do affects their reproductive outcomes, but men are not warned about how their age, exposure to toxins, or substance use affects their offspring. Once a parent, women almost never feel they are doing a good enough job at mothering because the expectations are impossibly high. This contributes to mothers exhausting themselves emotionally and physically. If something does go seriously wrong, mothers can face criminal penalties and losing parental rights even if they were not the one to cause the harm. When women lose their children at the hands of social services or go to jail yet men who fail to protect their children in the same ways do not, it becomes clear that this is more about gendered expectations of parents than about safeguarding children.
By targeting vulnerable moms (those who abuse drugs, experience domestic violence, or have been to jail), we ultimately hurt all mothers, even those not suffering from these issues. In making some moms “bad moms,” all mothers face charges (societal or legal) of not doing enough or making a bad choice. While moms of color and poor moms face the most risk, mothers of all socioeconomic levels and races are finding themselves questioned by child services, berated by law enforcement, and charged with crimes they did not even know they had committed. If we actually care about children’s well-being, we need to back mothers, relax our expectations of them, and provide all moms with concrete support in the form of better policies. The book thus proposes solutions for better taking care of mothers and valuing families.
--Marshal Zeringue
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