Rough Draft – Pregnancy
Unwanted pregnancy is a serious problem amongst women today. There are so many situations in which a woman gets pregnant without ever having wanted a child. There are so many unsafe places where helpless women get raped and have a child as a result. What woman would want that baby? The problem is, that unwanted child has to live in a difficult situation. There is either no father, a negligent mother, or both, and that child has to live with that as well.
In society today, women have options to handle an unwanted pregnancy. There is adoption, in which you give your child to a family that might not be able to have a child of their own. Another option is abortion, where you terminate your pregnancy altogether. In A Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, there is a good example of what could happen in the future. In the story, society has changed dramatically. Men are the rulers and women are meant to simply stand off to the side, raise babies, or serve the men. The futuristic novel is told from the point of view of Offred, a woman taken away from her family and friends all because she is capable of having children, unlike the Wives. This story represents what may happen in a few hundred years. We could never predict for sure, but what if forced pregnancy becomes the main focus in the future? In A Handmaid’s Tale, having a baby raises your status. Because of a lot of the Wives have lost their ability, the handmaids, such as Offred, are used only for their fertility. If they are unable to reproduce, they are sent away and a new woman is brought in. This book is a very feminist one, because it portrays the man as the enemy and women as the victims. In a way, that is generally the same as it is today. If a man gets a woman pregnant, how easily could he abandon her? The woman has to live with that pregnancy, she can never just run away.
In Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, pregnancy is a huge issue, but in a different way than you would expect. The people in this novel have no care for individuality or having an identity, therefore they create babies in test tubes, and make them all so similar that they don’t need names. They train humans for one job only, not giving them the option of doing what they want to do, and punish them at a very young age not to like flowers or music or anything that could encourage their individuality.
