The Peterson case sheds light on a very real problem
A few days ago Oprah did a show on the Peterson case (here and here are a couple relevant snippets). The ostensible purpose of the show was “why did Scott do it?” and the answer, best I can tell, is that “he’s a sociopath.” Glad we could clear that up.
However, the show inadvertently raised a deeper question for me. First, I hadn’t realized that the leading cause of death among pregnant women in the US is murder by their husbands or partners.
Among all murders of women across the country in 2000—the most recent yearly statistics available from the U.S. Department of Justice—more than 33 percent were killed by an intimate partner.
That’s nothing short of horrifying, if you think about it, and it suggests that pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting is currently being attended by some sort of critical social pathology. Further, we’re talking about something that’s an aberration from the normal track of human history. At a basic, elementary level, natural selection would predict that the tendency to murder the woman carrying your child is the sort of trait that would be selected out of the gene pool posthaste, right?
So what’s up? Well, if you read what the shrink in the two links above is saying, the indication is that men are freaking out about the impending shift that fatherhood represents in their lives. Well, okay, but men have been becoming fathers since, I don’t know, the dawn of time? Has murder always been the leading cause of death among pregnant women? I haven’t seen anything pointing to this yet, but maybe that’s the case.
It occurs to me that there’s been a dramatic social shift in recent decades that might be a contributor to this phenomenon. Just theorizing here – treat this as a hypothesis to be examined and not as a statement of fact, please.
We know that gender roles have been evolving steadily since the ’60s. Women have more power and autonomy in relationships, more career opportunities, more political weight, etc. At the same time women have been expanding the scope of their personal and professional possibilities, men have found themselves being asked to assume more in the way of domestic responsibilities (after all, the need for these traditionally female functions didn’t disappear just because Mommy landed a job as CEO, right?)
One of the key areas of expanding male responsibility lies with the domestic side of parenting, and it starts well before the kid is born. Historically the culture and practice surrounding pregnancy was exclusively female, with the archetypal example being childbirth itself. Whether surrounded by the women of the village and attended by a midwife in earlier eras or wheeled off into the birthing room at the local hospital in more recent times, the mother gave birth in the absence of the father. The birthing place was female domain, while the male ritual required the father to keep vigil with other men nearby.
Now, though, men are routinely enlisted in Lamaze classes and are expected to be in the room helping the mother through the ordeal. In cultural terms, I cannot state too strongly how radical a change this represents. We’re talking about roles and rituals that have evolved over thousands of years being turned upside down in the space of a generation, and it is simply ridiculous to think that a society can change so significantly in such a short period of time without massive upheavals.
So, it’s safe to assume that a percentage of men throughout history have been less suited to the demands of fatherhood than others. However, in cultures that provide ample buffers and ritualized support structures, we’d probably expect fewer instances of what we saw in the Peterson case (if we assume that the postmortem on Scott’s motivation is accurate, anyway). Society has provided ways of lessening the shock traditionally, and that ought to provide ill-suited men with a safer, easier way into their new lives as parents.
Contemporary society has, in this view, rapidly stripped away all the safeguards that have evolved over the past 10+ millennia and flung these ill-suited men headlong and unarmed into a situation that is threatening, and for some, perhaps even terrifying.
None of this excuses murdering the mother of your child – duh – but if I’m right, it does mean we need to start looking hard at ways of creating new buffers and support processes for men who are about to become fathers.
lullaby pit 
I’ve seen that stat before (pregnant women killed by husbands/boyfriends), especially when I was fire/police reporter.
A lot of what you said makes sense, but there is another possiblity that has been identified: a “side-effect” of legalized aboration.
Without arguing the rights and wrongs of aboration, what people are finding is those who are killed by their partners have very often been pressured by those same men to abort and have refused. Also, some of those men have refused to see the child as their resposnibility or have tried to maintain control of the women.
I don’t know if this stat has always been the case (paper for a social history major?) but it holds true for women in abusive relationships, too. The abuse either begins or intensifies when she becomes pregnant.
A lot of men are not ready to become fathers. A lot of men are not ready to be parents for other men’s childern (hate that phrase). So we see women abused, murdered and babies beaten and shaken. It’s scary. I think this may have always happened, but was “swept under the rug” in previous generations. Remember, it’s only recent history that women and childern have been seen as other then property.
I have a wonderful dad. I wish everyone had a dad like mine.
Hmmm. Like I say, I don’t know about the longer history here, and for a lot of reasons it might be impossible to know for sure whether what we’re seeing has always been true. But the abortion angle, I don’t know – I mean, wouldn’t this suggest the opposite in terms of the total number? Before you couldn’t have an abortion period, so that should institutionalize the dysfunction, right? Or are you saying that the ATTITUDINAL shift engendered by the legalization has led to a new set of expectations?
Gotta think on this some more.
It seems, also, that “the most important job in the world” is slowly shifting to the least wanted job in the world … or, rather, in the US, anyhow.
Peruse the Childfree message boards. There are some active ones on LJ, for example. A lot of people have very strong feelings about parenting being a choice, not a societal obligation. As a backlash, a lot of people have adamently disagreed, and can’t POSSIBLY IMAGINE why someone would not want to be a parent.
The fact is, there are all too many unwanted children born everyday. The difference is, if the woman doesn’t want the child, she has a number of different recourses to stop a pregnancy – by preventing it altogether through conventional contraception, by the morning after pill when she knows she’s oopsed, and by electing to abort the fetus if those methods fail her.
The man has one option to protect himself: A condom. (and abstinence, of course, but we know this isn’t going to happen, so why even bother noting it?) Not nearly as reliable as all of the methods for women. It is so easy for a woman to “oops” a man, and the law is not on the man’s side regarding this. If he doesn’t want the child, well, tough beans, he’s stuck with it – at the very least, financially. And, on the flipside, if he DOES want the child and she DOESN’T, also tough beans.
Pregnancy has become a hot button issue of late, and women forcing parenthood on men for monatary and/or romantic security reasons is becoming much more prevalent. A woman oopsing a man is nothing new, but fifty, 100 years ago this only meant he had to marry the girl, and in return he’d get a free housekeeper, cook and nanny. If he wanted side action, well, it wasn’t as “reprehensible” as it is considered today. Obviously, the women’s rights movement has completely redefined marriage (and THANK GOD, but that’s another matter).
I, personally, disagree with the child support system as it stands. There should be some way a man can sign off on not being a father, if he so chooses (after all, the woman has this right). Of course, this is a loaded issue and not quite that simple. My mother was a single parent, and even though my father (whom I have never had contact with) offered, my mother refused child support – she said it was her decision to have the child and she knew he didn’t want responsibility, so she absolved him of any.
I think abortion itself, as the last commenter noted, has little to do with it, but more that, while women have a choice on whether or not to become parents, men do not. Is that equal protection under the law? Hardly!