By: David Conde
There was a moment of terror for the family in a Michigan cherry orchard as a tractor was about to hook and lift a stack of boxes to take to the truck for shipment. My 2 year old sister and I had fallen asleep next to the boxes and could not be seen as the tractor hooks were set to go under the crates and into our bodies before someone noticed and sounded the alarm.
I remember my father waking me up and carrying my sister to safety. Mom was in the hospital losing a child. A year later my mother left the tomato fields of Ohio to have another baby. That baby at least got a name, Raul, but was born dead.
A year after that, my mother gave birth to my brother Roy in the comfort of our grandparent’s home in Raymondville, Texas. My father had stayed behind in Ohio to work.
There were other episodes of baby birth and death regarding my mother and the family but that sequence in Michigan and Ohio left a deep imprint on my thoughts of life and the womb. They resurfaced during my graduate research on the cycles of life in Jungian analytical psychology as I was trying to understand the feelings that go with the process of birth and rebirth. I went deeper however, when I realized that it was the period of conception to birth that carried the hazards in my experience.
That period was like a journey from the chaos of the unconscious to the black and white reality of our civiliza- tion. The rules for that journey are beyond the ability of any person or institution to understand and much less control.
There is an Argentine novel where the fictional hero takes the same journey but going back rather than going forward like the normal conception process. As the hero travels back, he realizes how separated he had become from himself by previously living as a flat character on the outside and finds wholeness in a realm without structure that is origins before conception.
Attempts to prescribe rules for the journey from conception to birth are empty gestures as there are elementary principles that exist beyond the control of social contracts and existing societies. The only thing that people and institutions end up doing is to regulate its members concerning the unregulatable.
This kind of indirect regulations and prenatal concerns fall heavily on the liberties of womanhood. Curiously enough, it is also a political process designed to maintain gender-based authority in a world as it is today.
At some point in our history when women felt strong enough, “My body, my choice” became the rallying cry and direct political response to that effort. So the battle that is on about gender has little to do with the sperm, the egg and road to an uncertain future. It is about power of men over women and women over men. It is this struggle driving cultures and its institutions.
One way to gauge the seriousness of the concern for the unborn is the lack of care for a child after it is born. This lack of seriousness reveals that the politics around this issue has little to do with it.
My mother never complained about what happened to her as a migrant and as a woman. Her political involvement after we left farm work included advocacy for the welfare of children everywhere.
That is where the political process should be. It is about children and their journey.
The views expressed by David Conde are not necessarily the views of La Voz Bilingüe. Comments and responses may be directed to News@lavozcolorado.com.
