Some New Thoughts About Mother's Day

I have decided that Mother’s Day, in the States traditionally celebrated on the second Sunday of May, has the potential to make as many women unhappy as it does to make them feel loved and revered. In fact, before the service started in church this last Mother’s Day, I leaned back to a friend in the row behind me and said as much. To my delight, the lead pastor of our church, Jeanne Stephens, created an elegant blessing for the mothers in the congregation, but she was especially careful to also include all those for whom Mother’s Day was a day that caused mourning rather than joy. Good job, Jeanne!

This realization hit me early in my marriage when I was a young mom with four wonderful but often neglectful kids. “The kids haven’t done anything for Mother’s Day!” I would complain to my husband. “You have to coach them,” I would explain. This was invariably answered by the proverbial husbandly defense, “But you’re not my mother!” David never really made the connection to the fact that his offspring recognized him on Father’s Day, because I reminded them Dad’s Day was on the near calendar. (This in spite of the fact that David Mains is not my father.)

Due to this yearly in-house male resistance, I finally figured—Why am I making myself unhappy over this highly over-commercialized day anyway? (The National Retail Federation’s spending survey for Mother’s Day indicated some $23.6 billion was spent in 2017 on United States moms.) Ah-hah!, I thought. Plan a day for yourself. Do something you want to do. Spend a few hours enjoying some activity that brings solace and delight to your own soul. This year, for instance, I’m giving myself the gift of signing up at the local community college for two courses in Advanced Gelli Printmaking: Digital Photo Transfers and Homemade Texture Rolls. Decades ago, I decided I had the power to design my own Mother’s Day trajectory and avoid any of the blues that can bite moms due to offspring neglect.

“Don’t spend any money on me,” I’ve instructed my adult children. A phone call or a card will be enough. Between nine grandchildren and four adult children (and their various spouses), our cumulative offspring’s Mother’s Day batting average is about 50%. Not bad. I am slightly smug that the Mains clan is not contributing to the national GDP due to the over-hyped, over-sentimentalized advertising campaigns of the greeting-card industry, restaurateurs and local florists—at least, they’re not contributing to it on my behalf.

There are also deeper considerations I’ve learned through the years regarding responses to Mother’s Day. While designing a healing liturgy with a team of women who had all experienced childbirth losses, I became aware that Mother’s Day was, for many, a painful event. “I don’t go to church on that Sunday,” several explained. It just hurts to recognize other mothers when you have suffered childbirth losses or have not been able to have children or have never married. It’s not that you’re not happy for all the friends who are being honored. It’s just that the wounds from past pains are still real but often unrecognized by others or just not understood. On every Mother’s Day since creating the gentle healing liturgy, I always hear my friends’ voices, “It’s just too painful.”

Recently, I’ve had some other radical thoughts about Mother’s Day and how it might be used to make a difference for other mothers in the world and in a way that wouldn’t evoke pain for those who suffer silently. Partly this is because I’ve been writing about and consequently researching the dilemma of women worldwide. Partly this is because I served for eight years on the board of directors for a faith-based international health organization that had developed a remarkable training program to train women to train women. Partly this is because for much of my life I worked in women’s ministries and consequently, co-wrote a book titled Child Sexual Abuse: A Hope for Healing.

To begin thinking about my idea for a radical approach to Mother’s Day, let’s begin with what is called the “missing women quandary.”

According to demographers, there are some one hundred million women missing in the world. This phenomenon was first noted by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, in an essay he published in 1990 in The New York Review of Books. Through the following decade he continued to expand his exploration and discoveries that were published in many subsequent academic works. The present estimates of between 90 and 101 million “missing women,” and the various causes for the phenomenon, have been studied and debated and analyzed by demographers and social scientists in the years since Sen’s original announcement, but most agree now to the reality that millions of women worldwide are missing.

This number is determined by what is called the sex ratio—a means of measuring the number of males born in a society against the number of women. Generally, the ratio between male and female births is slightly biased toward the masculine sex. Due to some kind of equilibrium matrix, nature allows for, on average, some 105 male births for every 100 female births.

Demographers propose this is because men are at a higher risk of dying for a variety of causes—violence, accidents, injuries, war casualties—and in time, the sex ratio of a given population for any particular age set begins to equalize. However, today, when what should be a normal equalized sex-ratio is measured in many current populations, particularly in developing countries in Asia, as well as in the Middle East and in parts of Africa, results show a divergence from the norm. The current sex-ratio measured against what should be the normal sex-ratio in China, for instance, reveals—not a ratio that is beginning to become even between the sexes—but an expanding men-to-women ratio of 1.06 men per 1 woman, which is far higher than in most countries. Researcher Amartya Sen concludes: “These numbers tell us, quietly, a terrible story of inequality and neglect leading to the excess mortality of women.”

There is now a general consensus as to the reasons why sex ratios are teetering on a wild imbalance in various countries of the world: sex-selective abortions, female infanticide, inadequate healthcare and nutrition for female offspring, lack of pregnancy and childbirth education, and the now booming sex-slave trade industry. Nicholas Kristoff and his wife Sheryl WuDunn report, “In other words, far more women and girls are shipped into brothels each year in the early twenty-first century than African slaves were shipped into slave plantations each year in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.” This horrendous reality is verified by the Foreign Affairs journal, and the above husband-and-wife writing team estimate some 3 million women and girls (very few boys) worldwide are entrapped in the sex slave trade.

The issue of malnourishment also takes a generational toll. When children are malnourished, and historically girls are malnourished, they give birth to underweight babies, whose bodies are then more susceptible to disease. Malnourished girls become malnourished women, prone to childbirth losses—miscarriages, stillbirths, infant deaths—and multiple pregnancy complications resulting in mortality. In India, for instance, demographers find that by and large, the main cause for female deaths is cardiovascular disease, diseases of the heart and blood vessels that can lead to heart attacks or strokes. Medical researchers have discovered a close relationship between low birth weight and eventual cardiovascular diseases at a later age.

Maternal mortality refers to the percentage of women who die in childbirth. Some 99% of women in the world who die giving birth are from poor countries. This is determined by another ratio—the MMR, or the maternity mortality ratio—the number of maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births.

The MMR measures the potential of death per pregnancy. Another ratio measures death probability over a lifetime of multiple pregnancies. The lifetime risk of dying in childbirth is 1000 times higher in a poor country. Kristoff and WuDunn, in their comprehensive book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, write, “This should be an international scandal.” Kristoff/WuDunn quote some alarming statistics:

• The highest maternal mortality risk in the world is the African country of Niger. Here the lifetime risk of dying in childbirth is 1-7;
• In sub-Saharan Africa, the lifetime risk of death is 1 in 22;
• India is 1 in 70;
• The U.S. is 1 in 4,800, which is actually a high ratio for a developed and wealthy country;
• In Italy, the lifetime risk is 1 in 26,000;
• In Ireland, the chance of dying in childbirth is 1 in 46,000.

Morbidity is different than mortality. Maternal morbidity deals with injuries in childbirth, which occur even more frequently than maternal mortality. The book Half the Sky, a report on the worldwide status of women written by two Pulitzer Prize winners, concentrates pages on the occurrence of morbidity, particularly fistulas; in this case rectovaginal fistulas, which are often the result of trauma in childbirth. Here a tear between the vagina and rectum (also caused by rape) is left untreated where there is inadequate healthcare. These women, many now mothers, having successfully delivered an infant, become outcasts in their villages since they cannot control urine or feces flow.

“For every woman who dies in childbirth, at least ten suffer significant injuries such as fistulas or serious tearing. Unsafe abortions cause the deaths of seventy thousand women annually and cause serious injuries to another 5 million. The economic cost of caring for those 5 million women is estimated to be $750 million annually. And there is evidence that when a woman dies in childbirth, her surviving children are much more likely to die young as well, because they will have no mother caring for them.” — Kristoff/WuDunn

All these factors are symptoms of one major toxic cause: female discrimination—women in a cross section of wide-ranging cultures are not valued. In fact, they are actively abused, neglected and abandoned through countless engrained cultural practices that deem women as inferior to men and ensure they stay in subsistence-like conditions.

I have this gnawing intuition that Mother’s Day might be utilized as a day to contribute positively and substantively to the plight of women worldwide. I have some ideas that are stewing in the creative caring part of my soul.

Would love to hear about any of your ideas.

Karen Mains

Article originally published by Gospel for Asia on their Patheos platform.

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Karen Mains

BOOK CORNER

Eunice: The Kennedy Who Changed the World
by Eileen McNamara

Lighting the Fires of Freedom
by Janet Dewart Bell

Karen is on this women’s activist kick and has delighted in reading more in-depth research about the women we know that we really don’t know.
    The first book, just released, is titled Eunice: The Kennedy Who Changed the World and is written by Pulitzer Prize winner Eileen McNamara. It’s easy to think when faced with a new Kennedy tome, Really—another book on some member of this family? How many more can possibly be published?
    The truth, however, is this: We really don’t know Eunice Kennedy Shriver; the sister of John and Robert and Ted Kennedy, we only know about her. Raised in a generation where the women were expected to back the men by a father who was determined one of them would be President, Joe Kennedy Sr. discouraged his daughters’ plans to take courses that would allow them to follow professional careers.
    Some back-cover copy might intrigue a reader’s interest:
    Larry Tye, the best-seling author of Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon, writes, “McNamara gives us what’s been missing in our vision of America’s First Family; a look at the woman who defied Joe Kennedy’s absent expectation for his daughters, an appreciation for how Eunice made the ignored rights of the intellectually disabled into one of the great civil rights causes, and reason to believe the implausible claim that it was Eunice—not her more celebrated brothers Jack Bobby, and Ted—who crafted the Kennedy’s most monumental legacy.”
    John A Farrell, the author of Richard Nixon: The Life, comments, “Spectacular! Who better to write such a terrific biography of Eunice Shriver than Eileen McNamarra who devoted her own Pulitzer Prize-winning career to giving a voice to victims and the disadvantaged. In McNamara’s piercing reporting and lovely prose, the neglected story of the Kennedy brothers’ indomitable sister gets told for the first time.”

In contrast to this one amazing woman is the compilation of interviews conducted by Janet Dewart Bell and recorded in her book Lighting the Fires of Freedom with African-American women, some still alive, who were major players in the civil rights movement. Unsung, many unknown, most unrecognized, and in their own voices, they were nevertheless co-creators of a movement that went far beyond just impacting the black community in the United States.
    The contrast between Eunice Shriver and these other women is stunning, but despite difference in class and advantage and connection, there are also remarkable similarities—one being a determination to make a difference no matter the cost.
    Rashad Robinson, the executive director of Color of Change, writes: “These stories of perseverance, love, loss, inspiration, and strategy add to the songbook of the civil rights era, allowing us to hear and model our newly revived movement for justice on the sharp, passionate, and unforgettable voices of the women whose ideas were so transformative.”
    Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the co-founding editor of Ms. magazine, informs us, “This compelling oral history captures the unique voices of nine intrepid women who, each in her own way, contributed gifts, love, strength, strategy, spirit, and a formidable personal commitment to the struggle for racial rights and dignity. You’ll wish you’d marched side by side with every one of them.”
    An outstanding quote for our days from Diane Nash, one of the voices in this book: “Do not depend on elected officials to make the necessary changes in society. I think if we had waited for elected officials to desegregate the lunch counters and buses and get the right to vote in the South, now fifty years later, I think we’d still be waiting.”
    These two books naturally challenge the reader to question, Have I done enough, despite difficulties, to make a difference in the world?

Buy Eunice: The Kennedy Who Changed the World from Amazon.com

Buy Lighting the Fires of Freedom from Amazon.com