Surfacing (Ashley F.)

“Love without fear, sex without risk, that’s what they wanted to be true; and they almost did it, I thought, they almost pulled it off, but as in magicians’ tricks or burglaries half-success is failure and we’re back to the other things. Love is taking precautions. Did you take any precautions, they say, not before but after. Sex used to smell like rubber gloves and now it does again, no more handy green plastic packages, moon-shaped so that the woman can pretend she’s still natural, cyclical, instead of a chemical slot machine. But soon they’ll have the artificial womb, I wonder how I feel about that. After the first I didn’t ever want to have another child, it was too much to go through for nothing, they shut you into a hospital, they shave the hair off you and tie your hands down and they don’t let you see, they don’t want you to understand, they want you to believe it’s their power, not yours. They stick needles into you so you won’t hear anything, you might as well be a dead pig, your legs are up in a metal frame, they bend over you, technicians, mechanics, students clumsy or snickering practicing on your body, they take the baby out with a fork like a pickle out of a pickle jar. After that they fill your veins up with red plastic, I saw it running down through the tube. I won’t let them do that to me ever again.” (Atwood 79)


This passage really caught my eye because it depicts the topics of love, birth control, and childbirth from a very brutal and emotionless perspective. The unnamed narrator describes the idea of love as taking precautions and being based mostly on sex. She explains how we want to be able to love and have sexual relationships without having to face difficult consequences. Love isn’t viewed as a risk worth taking. The narrator talks about birth control as something that takes away the naturalness of a woman and basically turns them into a machine. It’s almost like they aren’t people anymore, but something that pretends to be. She views childbirth as a very dehumanizing experience as well. I feel like she blames society and technological advances for the fact that she feels like birth control and childbirth are in a sense demeaning to women and horrendous things that women have to deal with. She states how “but soon they’ll have the artificial womb”. It seems as though she’s almost poking fun at the idea of removing all of womanhood’s naturalness yet she’s disgusted at the same time.

It’s very interesting to note that when she describes the process of childbirth she uses the pronoun “you” instead of “I”. It’s like she’s trying to separate herself from the experience and from being connected to another human being by procreation. She portrays childbirth as a very lifeless and meaningless time in a woman’s life in which she experiences excruciating pain for nothing. She looks upon it as a very dehumanizing occurrence during which the woman is treated almost like a dissected subject in a laboratory. There is no depiction of the emotion, and she refers to the baby as “a pickle out of a pickle jar”. It’s a very shocking description of what others express as an emotional time during which an inseparable bond between mother and child is formed and as a beautiful moment when life enters the world. I believe that she tries to distance herself from the wonderful aspects of childbirth because she feels like she was forced to have a child she didn’t want to have with her ex-husband. That experience was extremely awful for her, and I think it greatly negatively impacted her views on giving birth. She felt used and deceived, and so she tries to put that occurrence and the painful memories behind her by cutting herself off from all emotional and motherly ties.


Do you feel like birth control and technological advances have taken away the naturalness of womanhood and childbirth?

Is the idea of love becoming more of a precaution and sexual attachment instead of a risk worth taking and a deep emotional connection with another person?