Latest / Love Matters With Leeza Mangaldas / Choosing to be a Childfree Woman in India ft. Amrita Nandy

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Choosing to be a Childfree Woman in India ft. Amrita Nandy · Love Matters With Leeza Mangaldas

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I'm Lisa Mangeldas, and this is Love Matters. Motherhood is presented to women
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as the most important and noble role they can take on. But is it
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really all it's cracked out to be? And what about those who want to
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do it differently or those who want to opt out altogether. That's what we're
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going to be talking about today in conversation with doctor Amrida Nandi, an award
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winning writer, researcher, professor, and the author of a book called Motherhood
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and Choice, Uncommon Mother's Child Free Women, which was the result of her
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doctoral research on the subject that earned her a fellowship at Yale. Amrida,
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I'm a huge fan of your book as a child free woman myself, and
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so I could not be more delighted to have you on the show. Thanks
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so much for joining us. I'd like to start by asking a little bit
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about your own personal ideological journey. You came to this research asking this question
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of yourself, do I or do I not wish to be a mother?
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Right? Could you take us a little bit through that process of self reflection?
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Thank you so much, Lisa, such a pleasure and honor to be
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here to be talking to you. So Lisa. As a child, my
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view on motherhood was quite starry eyed. I was really moonstruck. I loved
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playing with babies and I still do tremendously. And I remember roleplay games with
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my little girlfriends, play acting as the mother to the neighbor's baby, to
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plastic dolls. And since all the adults around had their own children, I
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grew up presuming that motherhood was inevitable, it was desirable, it was aspirational.
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My interest in researching motherhood has another personal beginning. I agree up watching
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my mother, my homemaker mother. She was constantly in character, as I
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say in the book, sometimes even in her other roles. You know she
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would eat last. She still does. She still waits for me at the
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meal table. So one comes across many such mothers. I'm sure you have
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to that they're all the same flavor, as it were, right, flavored
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by what I call me to normativity. We can get to the term a
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little later, or they're playing the script that's offered by society, this whole
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mammalian body mind which is wired to protect the child. And I observed as
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a young girl, I observed how how women's lives, especially of mother's was
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really monopolized by different forms of care, not just mothering as a form of
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UH. And I noticed how much women juggle, how much they struggle with
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paid employment with care work at home, dividing up their awakening hours in two
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or three shifts of daily labor. They're exhausted in this sort of relentless caregiving.
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And regardless of whether women are full time homemakers or part time workers in
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paid employment, most of them, most of us, are expected to regard
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care giving to the family as as primary duty, and they downplay, or
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we downplay, are other aspirations, are other capabilities or responsibilities, and some
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regret having to abandon certain aspects of their pre motherhood life, such as careers,
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friendships, or sometimes even just leisure and rest. So this is what
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this is what I was. I was watching through the years as I was
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growing up, and all of this then came up to me when when I
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was married and I had this, I had to face this question. And
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I mean you mentioned it already. I definitely want you to explain to people
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who haven't yet read your book what meta normativity is. I think it does
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factor into all aspirations, even for us who choose to reject the role of
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motherhood. It's hard to escape that conditioning. Absolutely, you said it.
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The term meta normativity, it's I cooked it up, and it's not a
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very pretty word, but I think it does its job, which is to
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communicate this paradigm, the dominant paradigm that identifies women as potential mothers, all
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women as potential mothers, symbolic mothers, or as maternals. So meter normativity
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is really two conjoined words. Meter, which stands for mother, and normativity
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is the state of being normative or of the norm It's the assumption that all
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those born females are and must be naturally maternal, and thereby motherho and mothering
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and all the forms of caregiving come naturally to them and therefore should be their
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main pursuits in life. And this hype around met normativity or the maternalization of
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female identity is very disempowering. It's disempowering not just for women, but also
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for girls and mothers. I start I start with girls first, because from
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a young age, I think we're socialized, we're groomed for marriage and motherhood,
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and if we're lucky, for education and career. So most girls and
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women can never even come to think of motherhood as choice. It's this strong
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cultural muscle that's flexed in our faces, in the faces of girls, so
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they see little else and this it robs little girls of their ability growing up
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to fully imagine and live out their authentic true selves. And what can be
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worse than stubbing someone's imagination as their or crippling their agency, because even questioning
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motherhood is like is like sacrilege for mothers. I think a metanormative culture,
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which is what which is what our culture is, which is what most cultures
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across countries, and is that it controls our motivations, our actions, even
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our attitudes towards sat paid employment. We know that mothering is often it's just
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euphemism for single handed care m right where are the men in the day to
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day care of children in childcare? Yet mothers lived with what is often called
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maternal guilt. It's that ceaseless feeling of never doing enough or the best for
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one's child. And you've see blogs there are heartbreaking accounts of how mothers are
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judged or judged themselves, policed and police themselves by their own partners, school
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teachers, and so this is this is really the metanormative, and for those
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who are unable to have children, meter normativity can often lead to great personal
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trauma, social difficulties, a sense of failure, emptiness, shame, stigma.
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In urban families with women professionals, the pressure to be your mother may
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have lessened somewhat, but this does not represent the larger social attitude towards towards
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motherhoods. So it's not just prevalent in India. I think it's among those
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very rare, nearly universal concepts. I'd love for you to expand on that
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a bit more, because I think we don't sufficiently sufficiently question the romanticization of
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the mother, right. We talked about how it feels almost sacrilegious to question
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it. Even women themselves police such thoughts, police each other's thoughts. If
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you are a bad mother, if you ever admit to feeling ambivalence, let
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alone disinterest or regret around having had children, or just the idea of having
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children. And so I think that for most women, and you talk about
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this in the book as well, is it even a choice? Right if
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it's presented to you in the way that it is, Are you even making
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a choice even when you think you're making a choice. I think that's such
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an interesting question, in one that we're not encouraged to ask at all.
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And I also wonder whether you'd like to expound on the fact that this romanticization
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of motherhood isn't as sort of harmless and innocuous and lovely as it seems,
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because there are authors of capitalism and religion and patriarchy that by design seek to
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control women's choices, right, and this is very much a part of that
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nexus. But by guising it in this sort of like you know, haloed,
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beatific vision of motherhood kind of makes what's quite sinister much more palatable to
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most of us. Absolutely, you've said it's so beautifully Lisa. But before
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answering your question of the romanticization of motherhood, let's speak of the what I
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think it's useful to to know just what kind of motherhood gets romanticized and why.
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Motherhood in a heterosexual setting where a man and women get married, especially
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within a socially approved cast, class, religious setting, that is seen as
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the ideal setting that deserves romanticization. So non marital motherhood or you know,
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motherhood that's out of wedlook, for example, that's the term, the use
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is not romanticized, and single adoptive mothers are not held as high in esteem
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as married women who gave birth and also in a majority in culture, which
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is what India's turned out to be. Unfortunately, minority motherhood is meaned even
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though within the minority subculture motherhood could be romanticized. So there is this hierarchy
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of sorts unacknowledged, not fully unspoken, i'd say, but it looks in
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discourse, it looks and united use. It's also fascinating to pay attention to
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the contexts of motherhood. The romance around motherhood actually begins with the institutional marriage,
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which itself is a substantiechnom. We're all expected to marry, especially women,
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so that us, our body is, our sexuality can be policed.
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Marriage is seen as an ideal setting for the expression of our love of romance,
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sexuality, and family making. And here too the norm is the marriage
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in motherhood take place within, like you said, a patriarchy's setting, where
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the woman marries into the husband's family, takes on his name uh, and
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then and then the children then belong to that patrilineal line, and so on
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and so forth. So it is in such contexts. It is these certain
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forms of motherhood that that are romanticized. Now, now about the romanticization piece,
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it's also a mother's labor at childbirth. I think it begins there and
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then the subsequent decades of caregiving labor that are romanticized as her sacrifice, even
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though there's very little talk of what all this this role can jeopardize, such
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as the other pursuits that she may have put aside. And like I said
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earlier, maternal guilt is also in a sense a manifestation of the romanticization of
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the role, whereby you feel you can never do enough for the child.
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And this feeling, this knowing feeling, is it resembles regret. It's it's
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this unbridgible gap between the idealized mother and the real mother. The romanticization is
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done through norms, social norms, cultural norms that have been put in place
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to regulate our choices as women and to engineer these these systems to reproduce,
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to reproduce biologically, to reproduce socially human societies. And where do these norms
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live? They live in our everyday conversations with each other. In film Poetray
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Song Mythology blogs and so on. I think our own behaviors reiterate and nourish
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these norms. Let's think of early marriage. Say, early marriage in some
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communities is a norm because those who hold part in that community, say villay
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editors, are worried about the sexuality of young girls. There could be legends
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of it's about laid marriage leading to infertility and childlessness. All there are cuss
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words, you know, words like bane band is a Hindi word for barren
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woman. It's an explititive. So you see how language the medical industry of
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fertility clinics, for example, they lunify human worth over adoption of children for
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the purpose of their own profits. So the discourse of and around motherhood that
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is a source and the site of this romanticization. It suits the market,
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it suits the state. Of course, it suits patriarchal family men if women
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were to keep devoting most to their lives to only your primarily bearing in research
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exactly. And I think that it's so important for us, even if we
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do choose to be mothers, to be informed of and questioning off all of
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this that surrounds the construction of it as an injunction rather than a true choice.
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But I want to also sort of unpack the ideas of child free versus
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child less. Sure, now, that's an important one, and we often
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very loosely use these words interchangeably, and it's important to know the distinction.
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Therefore, so if in popular linguo Lisa, those who are without children are
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referred to as child less, however, some among these so called child less
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could be so intentionally, but the term childless pains over this rather crucial distinction.
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So as a way to mark the intentionally childless as separate, there have
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been other terms in existence terms such as childless by choice or voluntarily child ass
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but I found both of these terms slightly problematic because these expressions use the suffix
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less in child less or child less by choice or voluntarily childless. To me,
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child less implies an incompleteness, a deficit in an individual's life or their
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identity, as if they lack something they ought to have, So I prefer
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to use the term child free. I came across the term in other books
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that I read on the subject, so I adopted this sys term for my
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own use. I like child free because it's affirmative, unlike the negative child
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less, and so to adopt and claim the child free label is to also
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make a political statement, right, it's paradigm mending that statement. It means
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I do not myself and I would not want you to see me as childless,
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and I do not accept the child bearing or rearing is the ultimate purpose
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of my life. And I see many more fulfilling, beautiful, notching roles
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for me, including caregiving for those who they need it. And yet there's
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sort of unique stigmas that attach themselves to both the state of childlessness. When
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you want children but can't have any, you mentioned the word bande as well
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as to those who are child free, because that's the state of being that
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they have chosen, right, And it's funny how sometimes the same sort of
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shame becomes attached to both states for women unfortunately, sphere of judgment and low
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YAKAYENGI. Then there's so much nuance in your book, and I think that
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sometimes a simplistic, you know, pro natalist versus anti natalist sort of discoss
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on social media or something miss is so much of that nuance. And I'd
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love for you to just elaborate a little bit further on this issue of child
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less versus child free because I think you bring out the nuances off and the
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stigma, which in a way it comes to both locuses from major normativity.
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Right, whether you choose not to have children or you cannot have children because
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of an infertility, you're unable to be another and therefore you're not going enough.
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No, that's such a fine question, and I'm so happy put the
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binary out there to speak against pro natalism is not to be an anti natalist.
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One is not saying we all stop having children. All one is saying
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is recognize deeply the pressure, the mandate, the inferative, Where does it
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come from, who does it benefit, and what does it cost women.
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We're saying this so that there's better public infrastructure. We're saying this so that
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women are able to live their lives in as fullsome a manner as as possible.
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That's the intention. The intention really isn't what it's often painted out to
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be. But to answer your question, I begin with myself. I was
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faced with with you know, with the usual milestones of education, career,
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marriage, motherhood, and I found great insights into womanhood at each of these,
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you know, reading literature, for example, reading My Women's Lives,
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gender, career, marriage, each of these offered very eye opening experiences and
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counter narratives to what films or popular discourse had portrayed motherhood as. And so
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I faced some very thoughtful working questions, like why did I want a child?
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We very often fantasize about having children, and I did too, and
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I still love children, but we very rarely subject this desire to thought,
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very rarely do be questioned deeply. And when I when I reflected on the
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meaning and the implications of motherhood, I realized that I did not have any
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substantive reasons except mush and hope that the child will bring meaning, the child
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will bring more love, the child will bring the opposite of loneliness. And
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yet all around me I saw that this expectation from the child bringing full such
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fulfillment, but not really the case. Many children work, or are disinterested
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in or are unable to take care of their parents or whatever reason, or
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the relationships won't turn as imagined or hope I hoped, and so my mother
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would dream had been pricked by by by the reality that I saw around me,
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and I started to think of it as yet another human experience that was
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rather self serving, like all other human projects, and not quite bought through.
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I thought motherhood was a gamble as well, like romance or like marriage.
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And I realized also that raising a child is a very serious ought to
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be, a very serious and demanding responsibility. And if I were to become
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a mother, adoptive or biological, more perhaps perhaps adoptive than biological, I
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too will want to give it my all. But to create a human being,
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and then to give them you're all just to meet some of my own
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emotional needs seems like a very untenable equation, especially when there are other,
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i would say, less demanding means available to address some of my needs.
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And of course those means may not deliver. But what is the guarantee that
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the child will? But if you tell folks that you choose to be with
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our children, they tend to see you as a normal and your decision is
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as going against a so called natural imperative or a natural call. You could
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be questioned and even warned about your wrong decision. People can take it upon
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themselves to cure you of your problem, undo your supposedly wrong choice. I
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recall a child free woman, a rather successful professional, telling me that she's
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had to make extra effort to come across as kind and soft and polite and
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caring because people some people won't see her like that. Another child free woman
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I spoke to shared how a friend also neighbor hid her pregnancy from her from
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the child free woman tit till as long as the tummy didn't become big,
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perhaps because she felt some discomfort or suspicion or had a bad feeling about her
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child freelness. Another child free woman said she was not allowed to hold a
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baby by her mother, who thought ill of her child free status. So,
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and these are all educated, highly educated, these women, I was
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told about a certain subtle, sometimes in your face exclusion from certain social circles.
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To not be invited to a kid's birthday party just because you've openly shared
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that you don't want to be a to be a mother, which is somehow
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always read as you don't like children, which is one of the most strongest
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taboos they could ever be. The fascinating aspect here is the conclusion reached about
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this very conclusion reached about the child freel that they do not like children,
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and disliking children is is just not acceptable and admitting it can make things really
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bad. It's like a taint in one's character places you in the devil's company,
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when surprisingly, the truth could be very very far from assumeing adore children,
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but you may not want to be a parent to a child. The
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two are distinct, very very distinct. And yet I mean it should also
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be okay to be disinterested in children. You know, you don't even have
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to adot children and choose to be child. You can just I don't.
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Really. Children don't do anything for me. I don't think I'm even dogs
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do a lot for me. But I think we need to agreeize that stigma
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and be honest about it, because even women who are not particularly interested in
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children must pretend that they are right. And so I think it's very important
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that we be more open about ambivalents or disinterest. Also, we don't even
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have to adopt children. You know, it's okay, i'm children, but
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I don't absolutely I'm not going to go out of my way to hang out
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with them either, and that's okay. So just putting that out there since
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I can, since I have the privilege to be able to be honest about
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that. But I do want to also unpack some of the double standards and
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hypocrisy around our societal glorification of motherhood and children, which I think you touched
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upon, but I'd love to hop on it because it's so we're so inconsistent.
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Right. You said that we only approve of mothers who have their children
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within an endogamous heterosexual marriage. You know, if you're a single mother having
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a child outside of marriage, if you're a queer mother who wants a child
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without a husband, if you are a you interviewed sex workers who are mothers.
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Suddenly, our love for motherhood and children and respect for those roles is
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missing, is conspicuously absent, and we disadvantage people who might want to be
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mothers who don't conform to idea of the normative good mother. Right, So
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where's our meter normativity now? Huh? You know? And I think that
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we're not questioning enough of those very sort of sinister structural biases and who gets
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to who gets to be the good mother? Right? And I think that
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your book is so wonderful and in bringing together those who are child free by
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choice along with those who are non normative mothers, because those are both forms
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of resistance. So I'd love to hear also about the insights from your research
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and conversations with these uncommon mothers because we haven't yet really dived into that that
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no one's is very important that women as mothers from within the motherhood tent as
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it were, are rebelling and have rebelled and are trying to reimagine what motherhood
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as an institution and mothering is a practice should be or ought to be.
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And to offer you an example, I can think of the voluntarily adoptive mother
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or couple and I call them voluntarily adoptive because these are women or couples who
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chose to adopt not because of some biological incapacity, but because they won't to
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adopt. It was a political statement, an emotional an emotional psychosocial decision for
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them to have a child who does not come from their genetic lot. So
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that's that's the that's the politics they wanted to put out there. The love
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and belonging in kinship has nothing to do with genetic ties. So the voluntarily
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adoptive mother or couple has has also been celebrated, celebrated for their altruism,
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which could be a part of the motivation to adopt. However, for those
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who wanted their voluntary adoption to help loosen the hold of the pronateless parader to
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reformulate kinship beyond bodily connection. I think their message can get lost in the
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noise around real proper mother with the single adoptive mother single women adopt children,
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the metaanormat blends. Sadly, it pits them against the again, the the
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ideal of the conjugal procreative family, the merrit family. So they come out
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looking small to some. For the sex worker mother, also, there's both
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internal and external pressures from again the metaanormative discourse. Now, since the sex
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worker and her child do not belong to the conjugal, monogamous pro creative unit
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that's legit as for a patriarchy, they can face lifelong stigma. They're denied
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basic human dignity and rights. Sex workers are assumed to be immoral, incapable
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of care. But I came across fascinating accounts from sex workers trying to bend
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norms and in the process create more more liberating definitions of who is the good
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mother. Yeah. I think that what's so sort of dissonant about some of
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the ideologies around motherhood and who and good motherhood is that there's this sort of
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charmed circle of legitimacy. Right, So if you're single but you're adopting a
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child, then it's it's kind of good optics or like what a what an
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altruistic person? If you're single and you have sex and you have pregnancy and
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you go through with it, but you don't get married or the man abandons
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you or you abandon the man or whatever, that's not so that's not so
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sort of acceptable in the social modes of good motherhood. Right. And then
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on the other hand, you know, the sex worker mother, even if
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she's doing the sex work so that she can support her child, isn't a
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good mother because again, mothers aren't meant to be sexual. But it comes
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to you are never a good mother basically, right, never a good enough
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mother unless you are the property of your male spouse who gets to determine,
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you know, everything about your sort of reproductive choice, as it were.
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Or that's the kind of template unfortunately in twenty twenty three that we're still stuck
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with, and interestingly, the fertility industry and reproductive technology kind of reiterates this
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whole very patriarchal, pernatalist lens in quite a disturbing way. I think again,
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we're not able to be honest about this because we you know, doctors
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are another group of people you cannot criticize in this country, right. We
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do not criticize medicine, We do not criticize motherhood. I think it's really
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worth asking about the ethics of some of this staff. I think pronatalism itself
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is so highly coeresive and at so many levels, individually, collectively, symbolically,
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subtly, conspicuously, and so besides religion and culture, which gave pronatalism,
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it's moral, it's moral currency, it's it's right is high ground.
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There's also, like you said very rightly, the medical industry. Uh,
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interestingly, in India, with the cutting age medical technology and the market they've
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they've sort of milked milked hard this uh, this collective sort of deprivation of
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life without children anart is especially Saragi till at least it was commercially available in
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India. Has a very has had a very pernicious, a very substantive role
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to play in this obsession, in fueling this obsession of ours and so technology
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we can see how how technology can actually denaturalized conception on the ideological level,
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but also it can act scentuate and exaggerate embodied motherhood glorify it. So it's
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explaining both those roles. Gee, I want to say how meta normativity,
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or the maternalization of a female identity actually also harms men. It denies men
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the chance to fully experience the parent child journey, men to get tied to
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toxic gender rules. I mean. A small example is the government of India's
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child care leave. Till some years ago, it could only be availed by
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women with children, not men with children. So if my partner and I
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both work with the state or the central government, only I could take the
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childcare leave. Of course, it finally included the single male parent who has
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say, lost his wife to death or divorce or has a disabled wife.
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For men whose lives are able bodied and you know, have functional family members,
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it is only they, the wives, who could get to the childreive.
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So that's really the the institutionalization of the metanomative by the state. So
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the metanomative is like a concentric circle, one among the many concentric circles of
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patriarchy. Let's talk about some of the reasons for choosing to be child free.
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Yeah, I think these are to understand the reasons for women's child freenness.
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It may be helpful to know who who these child free women are,
31:37
because they're not your every woman. So from my research, from my small
31:41
research, it seems that the child free women in India comes from a middle
31:49
to upper class melieu, and almost all of them, the ones that I
31:56
met, had the privilege of good education, very often higheration, successful careers,
32:02
and or strong interests with public and socially engaged lives, possibly exposure to
32:10
Western ideas ideologies which means they may not be so traditional minded. And so
32:16
it seems that their widened horizons offered them much else that brought meaning to their
32:24
life, that brought self worth and interest and paths to what one could call
32:31
a higher calling. And motherhood is often placed in that haloed realm of higher
32:39
calling. And it's these other avenues of meaning that seemed to them more or
32:49
as exciting and as fulfilling as motherhood. And so reasons for these women's chealthiness
32:57
lie mostly, I think, in they're having found these enriching avenues to devote
33:01
their lives to, rather than devoting all of one's resources and decades in raising
33:07
a child too. What also struck me about these child free women is that
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they seem acutely aware of how motherhood, specifically in a country such as India,
33:21
plays out. They see it as without any filters of romance, as
33:25
it were. They see it for what it is, rather than for what
33:30
it is glorified to be. They see it as rather demanding, because very
33:36
often looking after children is a woman's job, the male partner's absent from active
33:40
day to day hands on care. If you're lucky to have money, you
33:45
can hire childcare, or if you're lucky to have parents around who can help,
33:51
you can also some pieces of childcare to them at times. But for
33:55
most Indian families, in the absence of states and her public childcare, childcare
34:02
is a daily, very tired and scramble because there's a paid job to do
34:08
that very day for the next five to six days or seven days if you're
34:14
a domestic worker of from the working class. So earning and raising children simultaneously,
34:21
as we know, takes a village and much money. And the child
34:24
free lot knows this too well, and they seem to say no thank you
34:30
to this, to this kind of life. Personally, I think there are
34:32
also deeper philosophical reasons and spiritual benefits to child freeness that I really like to
34:39
talk about. I think we humans live mostly in a state of dissatisfaction,
34:45
despite having made effort and pursued what we think will bring us happiness and peace.
34:52
This is not to say that human life only equals pain. Lives are,
34:54
of course and dispersed with joy, with pleasure, maybe pockets of peace.
35:01
But dissatisfaction emerges with every experience of our lives because nothing stays joyful.
35:08
Impermanence is, as the wise ones say, the most profound truths that we
35:14
forget about or like to forget about, and afraid of this uncertain future,
35:20
anxious about loneliness, disease, old age, we keep clinging to the hope
35:23
that children will offer tender love and the best of care. But look around
35:28
and you'll see that for a number of reasons, this does not happen.
35:31
And we're we're deluded in thinking that a child, or a relationship, or
35:37
a job, or a new house and vocation, other experiences possessions will and
35:44
can take away these You know this, this sort of existential pain that lies
35:51
at the base of every human phenomena. So we do not have to be
35:54
surprised or paint that children are not unloving or unavailable, or we do not
36:00
have or we do not have to paint parenting as a source only love and
36:05
care. So I think it's vice to accept it and then make informed choices,
36:13
especially heavy duty ones such as parent Well, it's emotionally, environmentally a
36:19
very heavy duty one. I couldn't agree more I think. I mean,
36:23
today we're asking why some people choose not to have children. I think most
36:27
people who have children never really ask why they're having children. So I encourage
36:30
anyone who thinks they want to be a parent to think long and hard.
36:35
It also strikes me as peculiar that when you want to adopt a child,
36:38
there's so much due diligence done, but when you just want to have a
36:42
child, I mean, everyone can just have a child. I think there
36:45
would be far fewer problems in the world if we were if people were better
36:52
parents. But anyway, I do think that as we wrap, it would
36:55
be wonderful to convey a sense to those who may not have had the chance
37:00
to really think about alternative models of meaning and kinship and belonging to some extent,
37:08
Having a child seems like the answer to like, why are we here?
37:10
What is my purpose on earth? How can I have a meaningful life?
37:15
And surely there are also many other wonderful answers to those questions, and
37:20
I think you have a lot of very illuminating insights on that sense of meaning
37:27
beyond just motherhood. Love to wrap with those. To that, I'd say,
37:31
Lisa, that it's important for us to first be able to break away,
37:37
break free from this absolutely imperative that all women must become mothers. That
37:45
we must acknowledge that there is choice, that motherhood is really choice. It's
37:51
not mandate or imperative, although it certainly feels like that. And how do
37:57
we break free from this absolute imperative. I think we can do that by
38:01
by talking more authentically about motherhood as an institution and mothering as an experience.
38:08
But this can happen only if we allow women, especially mothers, the agency
38:14
to say it as it is, if we stop judging them, if we
38:17
stop mocking and shaming them, if they were to speak of, say,
38:22
regretting motherhood or regretting some pieces of being a mother. But it's clearly,
38:29
very nearly impossible to do that. So the scultural mandate to become a mother
38:35
can suppress or does suppress. It suppresses women's individuality. It suppresses agency or
38:42
decision making, decision making that's based on your own particular, unique life,
38:49
your context, your personals and social context. It shuts you towards the many
38:54
other sources or sites of nourishment and fulfillment. We need to counter to subvert
39:01
this pressure, this this air that we live and breathe, and crack this
39:06
imaginary and we can break free. I think from this, from this mirage,
39:12
perhaps by reading women's accounts, by reading literature, demystifying the whole romance
39:23
around the blood tie, by not seeing blood ties as beyond conflict, as
39:30
beyond critique all things sugar and honey, by knowing that motherhood is deeply overrated,
39:37
by accepting the love and care need to be nurtured, can be nurtured
39:43
across relationships, across species, regardless of whether that heart beats with my blood
39:52
or yours. So it's really undoing our own obsession with biological ties, which
39:58
can help like the other avenues of care, of companionship, nurturing. But
40:06
lastly, I think we must also simultaneously develop women's autonomy, their agency,
40:14
so that they can envision for themselves these alternatives that are as emotionally appealing fulfilling
40:22
as as motherhood and arguably more socially oriented, and so that then and if
40:30
motherhood is still what they want, it is truly a choice, absolutely and
40:35
a beautiful one. One must say that motherhood and parenthood and parenting is a
40:42
meaningful sight his and and care because care is such a precious and scarce commodity.
40:50
It's it's, it's it's a good choice as long as women having been
40:55
coerced, as long as women know what they are getting into, as long
41:00
as our social, political, cultural context provide the kind of support that women
41:07
and children need for responsible citizens in the country. Thanks so much for joining
41:12
us, Amrita. It's been such a pleasure talking to you and to anyone
41:15
tuning in. I highly recommend reading Amrita's book. It is just so rich
41:20
and full of incredible insights around motherhood and choice. I hope that you enjoyed
41:24
this episode of Love Matters, produced by The Indian Express and d W Germany's
41:30
international broadcaster. We would love it if you rated and reviewed our podcast wherever
41:34
you're listening to it. We'd also love it if you shared it with your
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friends. And if you do have an insight you'd like to share, you
41:39
can reach out to us on Lovematters at DW dot com. And before I
41:44
go, I'd also like to share another podcast recommendation. It's called Don't Drink
41:49
the Milk and it's also produced by DW. And if you're someone who enjoys
41:52
history with a big doors, a pop culture and controversy, you're going to
41:57
want to check this out. Just look for Don't Drink the Milk where wherever
42:00
you get your podcasts. Till next time, I'm Lizamangolas and I believe love Matters