Every obituary about Gloria Steinem, who died on September 2, has noted two facts. One: Her turn towards feminism at the age of 35 is linked with an abortion she had at 22, the memory of which was sparked at a 1969 “speak-out” where other women shared their own experiences. That day, Steinem wrote, a realisation “clicked” into place: What she had long regarded as something deeply personal was, in fact, political because of the number of women who had also struggled with it. Two: From the age of 10 to 17, Steinem was the primary caregiver of her mother who suffered from addiction and debilitating mental illness.
In the US, reproductive rights, the nucleus around which Steinem’s feminist consciousness was formed, have seen major reversals since 2022 when the US Supreme Court struck down the 1973 ruling Roe v Wade, which had made abortion a constitutional right. Since then, 20 states have either implemented a total ban or imposed severe restrictions on abortions. The troubling way in which the issue is framed — “pro-choice” vs “pro-life” — obscures what it is really about: A decision about motherhood. What Steinem found in that basement meeting in 1969 was permission to accept not wanting to be a mother. To make such a choice possible, to bring motherhood out from under the rubric of destiny and place it in the realm of options, is the feminist endeavour.
Years later, Steinem wrote that her mother, who had been a journalist before getting married, had dreamed of working in New York City. Can Ruth Nuneviller Steinem’s mental breakdown be tied to the thwarting of ambition — of choice? And did it shape her daughter’s own choices? Steinem herself said that while early caregiving responsibility may have influenced her choice, she had also never felt the urge to have children.
So here’s feminist proposition number one: A woman may choose to not become a mother for many reasons, including that she simply doesn’t want to. And feminist proposition number two: Even after she has chosen motherhood, she remains an individual, with agency and her own vulnerabilities. But all too often mothers — expected to absorb everyone else’s needs without generating any of their own — are made to disappear into the ideal that is motherhood. The neglect is global, and structural. All through pregnancy a woman’s body is monitored with great care, while her mind gets almost no attention. According to WHO estimates, one in five women experiences a mental health condition during pregnancy or in the year after birth, which makes it almost as common as gestational diabetes, even as it is screened for far less.
Even where the law prioritises a woman’s mental health over social expectations of motherhood, the story is the same. Take India’s Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, as amended in 2021. It permits termination up to 24 weeks and explicitly counts grave injury to mental health as a ground. Yet, the 2023 case of the woman, already a mother of two, who had to approach the Supreme Court to allow the termination of her pregnancy, showed its limits. The woman was, at the time, being treated for postpartum depression and had not realised she was pregnant until 20 weeks had passed due to lactational amenorrhea. A two-judge bench allowed the procedure saying that continuing the pregnancy could imperil her mental health. Then a doctor on the AIIMS medical board said that the foetus was around 26 weeks and had a strong chance of survival, so was the heartbeat to be stopped first? Within days, the two judges split. The matter went to a three-judge bench led by the Chief Justice, who held that there was no immediate threat to the woman’s life and no foetal abnormality, and that the statutory ceiling had passed. The termination did not happen.
A right that exists in the statute books, only to evaporate under pressure is a right that was never institutionally serious. Mental health may have been written into the MTP Act, but the systems that shape the course of motherhood in India continue to fail women.
It is against this background that the extreme cases are made to do work they cannot do. Consider Lindsay Clancy, an American woman charged with killing her three children, whose defence was postpartum psychosis. Her case has generated more public arguments about maternal mental illness than the everyday struggles of women. But building our understanding of maternal mental illness on such cases only makes the subject seem disconnected from the more common manifestations of this struggle. The solution is not complicated: Perinatal mental health screening as ordinary obstetric care and training health workers at every level to recognise what they are looking at. Finally it calls for treating a woman’s statement about her own mind as evidence to be taken seriously, not dismissed as “mood”.
Take care,
Pooja
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Gloria Steinem at a women's conference held at the LBJ Library in 1975. (Wikimedia Commons) 
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