SCHWANGERWERDENKÖNNEN

Man sires the child, woman births it. Only women can become pregnant. Mothers have been pregnant. Paternity can be tested. – If this is what you think, your thinking is wrong, according to political scientist and blogger Antje Schrupp. Being able to become pregnant does not necessarily also beget a desire to have children. Also, pregnancy does not necessarily end with childbirth. Everything is more complex than it was thought to be!

All the more reason to start talking about the topic, because the way we think and talk about pregnancy informs the manner in which we live within a society. It fuels decisions about gender relations, control of one’s own and external bodies, and about our ideas of communal life. It also puts its unsubtle stamp on the current discussion on technology, robotics, and artificial intelligence.

Antje Schrupp sheds light on being able to become pregnant from a political, a legal, and an historical perspective in a lecture with a subsequent talk. Women lived in constant pregnancy in former times, such was their fate. Nowadays, in this country, a woman needs excellent reasons to even consider becoming pregnant. Pregnancy and having children are hindrances to her career and will impede her life. Seen on the scale of an eighty-year life expectancy, women, today, are “barely pregnant”. But what rights and obligations arise if they are anyway? What discrimination follows? Do their wombs belong to them? Questions, carrying a burning currency ,that also affect men, in fact, all human beings.