Performative Charity

Why donating to Planned Parenthood as a female-centric business isn’t a flex

The other night as I drove the weary hour-long drive home after having worked a 13 hour shift at my women’s health job, I was listening to a women-hosted podcast that started out the show by mentioning a very large donation they had made to The Center for Reproductive Rights, a “women’s health” organization. There was banter about the significance of the work done at such organizations and how these rights are now jeopardized. The usual.

I was reminded that the generic slogan of “Support reproductive rights” doesn’t actually mean the holistic picture of what the reproductive spectrum encompasses as a whole, it means support of acts which aid in the management and manipulation of the implications of a womanhood enmeshed in carnality for various (often understandable, to be fair) reasons. “Support women rights” doesn’t always mean support female needs. It often means support male desires, support economic growth, and support the continued dilution of feminine power.

Charity by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

In this same vein, “support women” is now just code for just “support abortion” and I find it irritating that so many women are either just not picking up on this or simply have no qualms with it. This follows how “women’s rights” is simply code for “the right to not reproduce”. There is a deep and vast void of true support for what “women’s rights” actually encompasses, the support that would include mothering and all of the other aspects of reproductive health that play into the process of being a mother. That support should also include babies and children, as they are extensions of the women who birth them during their childhoods. Forget true sex-based rights for women, we seem to only want the one right that enables us to distance ourselves from our sex.

“Support women” is the familiar phrase we hear served up to us by our fellow women, friends, family, and also even in advertising via companies we buy goods from. Enter Doen. On Giving Tuesday of this year, they posted the following post on Instagram, stating that they had proudly donated $15,000.00 to Planned Parenthood L.A., their “longtime partner”. The reaction was mixed.

shopdoen

A post shared by @shopdoen

Doen makes very expensive, very beautiful clothing. Their garments are worn by many celebrities and are beloved among the women who can afford them (and some who can’t). Their brand is the center of a thriving buy-sell-trade market, with many Facebook groups, Instagram reselling accounts and sales on Poshmark supporting this market. They basically have a cult following made up of trad-wife adjacent, cottage-core-ish, vintage-repo-loving women, many of them mothers. They even make matching dresses for little girls sometimes, clearly on the premise that a large part of their demographic is comprised of mothers. Below is a good representation of what their customers thought about their choice of charity:

It is curious that female-centric companies such as Doen choose to very consciously and strategically focus their charitable efforts on organizations that make manipulation of female reproductive existence their primary goal (to be fair, the above mentioned Center for Reproductive Rights does list maternal health as one of their causes, but this is right alongside abortion and assisted reproductive technology—and the majority of their website focuses on abortion).

Many women see these acts of charity as a strong sign of allegiance with women and our desire for freedom and choice. I see them as performative charity which does not recognize the full spectrum of choice. There is no consideration of the choice to mother. There is no consideration of the choices women should be entitled to make in the process of becoming mothers such as what kind of care they can receive and where they receive it during pregnancy, birth and postpartum. There is no thought for the multiple choices women have to make as we raise our children.

The origins of the word charity are as follows:

“from Latin caritatem (nominative caritas) ‘costliness; esteem, affection,’ from carus ‘dear, valued’ (from PIE *karo-, from root *ka- ‘to like, desire’.)”

When we are engaging in charity, we are extending ourselves in a costly way to what we find most dear to our hearts. What then, does it communicate to us when female leaders in businesses that profit widely off of women and mothers of children hold most dear the ability for women to choose to not mother, the ability to avoid children?

I’m sure they would pivot back to the freedom and choice angle if posed this question. There are flaws in those arguments though, flaws which are undeniable if any one person considers them honestly and critically. “Freedom to choose” isn’t simple, but the rhetoric surrounding it like “my body my choice” is simplistic.

I’m not a black-and-white adherent to any one political stance on reproductive politics. I don’t believe I have a fully formed opinion on abortion as a topic of debate and I’m okay with that, it is a very complicated topic. What I do know about abortion is as follows:

•I regret the abortions I allowed myself to be coerced into.

•Abortion is a choice that carries spiritual consequences, no matter how justified it may seem/be.

•Abortion is something women have always engaged in, and will always engage in, no matter what societal, social, familial, relational, and religious scaffolding may be in place. I want these women to be safe and healthy regardless of their choices. I don’t think Planned Parenthood is where they should turn for that safety.

•Abortion is often a choice made not just by the woman it is performed on and this makes the idea of “choice” actually very messy.

•The abortion industry and their politics and business practices are objectively problematic. The other services offered like gender transition and assisted reproductive technology at such places are equally ethically problematic. Thus, when giving money to such organizations, that money is going to a multitude of potentially harmful efforts.

•Life is life, period. Using tricky semantics like “clump of cells” to avoid this fact is manipulative and dishonest and frankly, stupid.

•If motherhood in general wasn’t depicted as a dull, gross, social life-ending, financially draining life suck (and similarly, if childbirth wasn’t depicted as horrifying and disgusting above all other things), abortion would be less appealing.

•Prevention is the absolute MOST important thing in the realm of reproductive rights. Girls need to know how to cycle track. Girls need to know when they are ovulating. Boys need general knowledge on this as well.

•Women need to have self discipline in their fertile period if they truly do not want a baby, and men need to respect this. This doesn’t mean abstain when you are feeling most interested in sex, it means taking careful and intelligent steps to eliminate the possibility of impregnation in those few days a month.

•In cases where implantation is possible, women need to know what natural options they have to prevent it, making abortion a choice they never feel forced to make. There are herbal preparations and things like menstrual extraction that are very hidden within our culture, but which can facilitate a next step in prevention and a lack of need for abortive efforts. This is bound to be controversial but women deserve this knowledge and this knowledge has the potential to take back the power of places like Planned Parenthood.

So why aren’t these big companies or smaller businesses or even individual women prioritizing things like teaching young girls cycle tracking when it comes to directing their charitable efforts? Why don’t they throw money at teen moms or moms in recovery housing pursuing sobriety in early motherhood? In that case, their money would go to both bettering the lives of women and the lives of their babies.

Why don’t they send money to fund research on the conditions that impact our maternal mortality rate like preeclampsia? Why don’t they send money to direct entry midwifery training programs to help train up more midwives so that there are less “maternity care deserts”? Perhaps they could support an organization like Human Milk for Human Babies that helps babies get breast milk within their communities if their mothers are having issues with supply or are not able to nurse due to medical conditions?

They could provide menstrual products for homeless women. They could give to fundraising campaigns for women whose babies are in the NICU so they don’t have to go back to work before their baby even comes home. They could pay for childbirth classes or doula care for first time mothers who are economically unable to afford those things. They could donate to diaper banks.

These suggestions are just the ones that encompass the reproductive realm. Their money could also go towards something like protecting sex based rights via organizations like the Women’s Liberation Front (WOLF). It could go activities for girls that promote community and well being like Girls on the Run. They could donate to organizations that help women heal after they have been trafficked or after they decide to leave the prostitution industry.

They very much could extend the gracious hand of charity to women and girls in absolutely countless ways that do not involve handing money over to an organization whose main driving force is abortion. Why, then, is abortion the trendy charity recipient of choice?

Why does it seem to be fashionable to focus charitable output towards endeavors which place more importance on female independence at all costs than anything else? It seems that independence is the highest ideal to aspire to for young women and these companies know this. The issue is that no one making these decisions is asking why this is. Why do female-centered companies choose to signal that they are “with women” by aligning themselves financially with a company that profits off of women who have been trafficked, who have been coerced, who may regret their decisions, who have no support?

Louis Adolphe Salmon after Andrea del Sarto, Charity

Yes, in sending money to places like Planned Parenthood, these companies are supporting choice. But what choice for women is the most significant? To mother or not to mother? Who is to say? And why is it not equally as trendy to support the other version of “reproductive choice”, the choice to give birth and become a mother?

Because these questions exist, this is a false, performative charity. By placing on a pedestal the choice to not mother, these companies are signaling that they aren’t dreadful Conservatives. They are expressing that they too, don’t think women are merely “breeders”. They think women can be anything they want to be, not just moms!

Here’s the thing though-women can be anything, including trafficking victims whose pimps don’t want them to be knocked up lest they lose their money-making value. They can be teenage girls whose abusive boyfriends or toxic mothers are threatening them to get an abortion. They can be middle aged mothers of 5 who think they just cannot afford to feed one more child but desperately want to keep their baby.

What sort of charity do these women demand? Can you even call the financial covering of an abortion for these sorts of women true charity? This is not the help they need, these are the bottom-of-the-barrel crumbs thrown at desperate women in their times of need that we have come to accept as “help”.

There are two sides of the coin of choice. When companies that are functioning well due to the money they make thanks primarily to female interest in their products choose to prioritize companies that similarly profit off of women and their reproductive desperation, not always in the best interest of those women, they are actively choosing to financially bolster acts which very realistically may well harm women. These choices are obviously made in order to be perceived in a certain manner as a company, what could be called the “nice modern woman trifecta”—open-minded, nonjudgmental and kind.

I understand the impulse to be seen as kind and nonjudgemental and open-minded on an individual level. I also understand how important it is to let go of that impulse within a society where to be those things means to ignore basic intuition, pretend things that are very much real are not real, and to let our discernment become dulled.

Women’s intuition is of utmost importance, reality matters more than most things, and our discernment needs to be razor sharp. When this is forgotten on the individual level, it leads to loss of integrity, and this is no different for the more macro level of business. I propose that in order for a women-based business that caters to mothers to stay in integrity, they should at the very least choose to extend some of their charity to the endeavor of the choice to mother, not just the choice not to.

There is a reason why the common artistic allegory for the concept of charity is a mother surrounded by children, typically breastfeeding one of them. The irony of this within this context is potent. In Christian tradition, as many will know, charity is taught as the most important theological virtue, as an expression of neighborly love for others in the image of God’s love for humanity. Motherly love, affection, care and nurturance are the personification of this all encompassing regard for others and the sacrifice that is entailed in that dedication which is the material charity is made from.

“Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.” St. Augustine

Saint Augustine is quoted as saying “charity is no substitute for justice withheld” and I think this is appropriate for the topic at hand. It can feel nice to give money to places like The Center for Reproductive Rights or Planned Parenthood knowing that desperate women in need will be aided with that money. This is an act of skirting the real problems though, as the justice women and babies deserve doesn’t typically lie in destruction. True justice for women of reproductive capacity is reverence for motherhood, respect for babies as full humans, compassion and assistance for women in difficult situations that make mothering feel impossible, true choice and autonomy in pregnancy and birth care, fertility awareness education for girls and women, and education about prevention of implantation in cases where inevitable mistakes are made.

Thomas Stothard, Charity, 1794

Our motherly love as women and women-run businesses must extend to others in the spirit of true charity, not the false, performative version. We cannot nurture what isn’t good, and we should not endeavor to. We should reach our hands out to our fellow women in partnership, in true respect for their capabilities, in honoring of their life-making potentiality.

We should consider directing our charity at efforts which illuminate the basic knowledge women need surrounding that life-making potential, whether it be the choice to mother or the choice to prevent in safe, healthy, self-directed, and intelligent ways. We should consider extending that charity beyond the choice to mother and to the children born as well, to those girls who will become women of reproductive capacity and to those boys which must learn the gravity of and the power held within the female womb.

When the pinnacle of female centered charity is the resourcing of acts which diminish and destroy our most sacred and beautiful imperative as females, the true spirit of charity is lost. It is my prayer for us as women to rediscover the true spirit of charity. May we find it, may we hone it, and may we remember true love for the female body and in so, remember how it is that we may collectively truly flourish in spirit and soul. May we as women become living allegories of charity for one another.