March 2, 2010 Special Issue

Baby blues

Pop culture’s unhealthy obsession with motherhood

by R. Brian Hastie

GRAPHIC VIVIEN LEUNG

The fixation on motherhood in pop culture and media is one that is wrought with terrible messages for people who pay attention to weekly trash mags you can find at the supermarket.
Where women once bred for utility and family, some now breed for vanity and TV deals.
Most recently, Nadya “Octomom” Suleman, Kate Gosselin and the Duggar family have become household names for multiplying and marketing what women have been doing since the beginning of time: having babies.

The more the merrier

Suleman is an unemployed single mother who was artificially-inseminated and gave birth to eight children last year. She now has 14 children. Her outlandish behaviour has placed her on magazine covers, celebrity news programs, major network news broadcasts and even landed her a spot on The View in an attempt to parlay her children into book deals and television shows.

The case of Jon and Kate Gosselin—of Jon & Kate Plus 8 fame—was a much blogged about and trash rag-cover affair last year as the couple engaged in a media war of words after deciding to divorce.

Their eight children were used as a point of contention by both parents, with Kate’s ability to raise them as a single mother placed under scrutiny by various media outlets. Judged and criticized, while simultaneously courting the media during her “makeover,” Kate Gosselin and her divorce were captured by an ever-intrusive army of camera-waving lunatics—and TLC—looking to document her family life for major bucks.

Publicly denouncing the use of contraception, the Duggar Family from reality TV show 19 kids and counting stand by the Psalms in believing that “children are a heritage of the Lord.”
From Tontitown, Ark., the Duggars are the kings of super-size families in the states, famous for The Duggar Family Orchestra and their reality show, which will wrap its fourth season on TLC and the Discovery Channel this March. All of their kids have names that start with J.

Baby mama bodies

The fixation on women and fertility doesn’t end the second the children are born, as pressure on famous women to get back to their pre-pregnancy birth body has turned into a veritable cottage industry of diet endorsements, tips, tricks, guilt and shame doled out via the media.
Naturally, in a society where celebrities are held on a pedestal to be dissected and admired, their own health tips on “how I lost the baby weight” are projected onto the average new mother, who may feel an obligation to hit the gym as soon as possible in order to lose the breasts, weight and bellies that are paradoxically celebrated while the woman is pregnant.
Weekly tabloid magazines devote much ink (as well as cover space) to women who can race back down to an acceptable size at break-neck speed and chastise those who cannot.

The image given by celebrities makes it seem as though bearing children has suddenly become a “fashionable” activity that all can partake in—and hopefully get a reality show deal from. Placing famous mothers on a soapbox often undermines the fact that having a child is a lifelong commitment, a huge re-organization of priorities and a lifestyle change.

The discrepancy between a manufactured representation of breeders versus the realities of parenting is harmful to real mothers and motherhood in general, creating unrealistic expectations for women who want to have children the healthy way.