Jessica Clements & Kari Nixon:
No coffee. No seafood. No bicycles. No deli meat. No alcohol. Almost as soon as she sees the telling double lines, the pregnant woman in modern America is bombarded with new regulations for her body. The dynamic, ever-changing nature of pregnancy seems to induce a state of risk aversion that demonstrates a key argument of our book “Optimal Motherhood and Other Lies Facebook Told Us” quite well: In spaces where scientific evidence is incomplete or unclear, the default is to subject women to more — not fewer — restrictions.
This dynamic is the result of a complex braid of U.S. risk aversion, the legacy of the Victorian Cult of True Womanhood (more on that in a bit), and a neoliberal culture that reveres a reductive version of science that does not make room for complex, nuanced answers. Like the Cult of True Womanhood and its new transfiguration, what we call Optimal Motherhood, these restrictions have a history.
Beginning with the development of germ theory and bacteriology in the 1880s, Western society increasingly believed that if risks could be identified, they could by definition be avoided. The formula was deceptively simple for a society still rocked by post-Darwinian secularism and on the lookout for new modes of understanding and thriving in an often chaotic world. Although the Victorians of the 1880s did not yet have antibiotics or other effective cures for infectious disease, product advertisements in periodicals, often promoting a variety of antiseptic panaceas, spoke to the instantaneous development of a fantasy of a risk-free life. This fantasy (for it remains and will always be a fantasy) was only emboldened by ever-evolving Western medicine, which, as the century rolled over, began to develop cures only imagined in the 1880s.