Apparently I missed this Washington Post article from a week or two ago, probably due to the vast array of generally appalling items in the news.

Titled “Forever Pregnant,” it describes new guidelines issues by the normally reliable Centers for Disease Control instructing women to avoid risky behaviors even if they have no intention of becoming pregnant:

Among other things, this means all women between first menstrual period and menopause should take folic acid supplements, refrain from smoking, maintain a healthy weight and keep chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes under control.

On the surface, such suggestions sound reasonable, but why stop there? If we are going to consider all women, regardless of their intentions or wishes, as potential baby-carriers, does it really make sense to have them in high-risk situations such as jobs and driving cars? I mean, my god—someone please think of the (potential) children.

I really hope that the people behind these recommendations had good intentions, but the assumptions at work here are fairly disturbing. First, there is the assumption that women cannot be trusted to manage their reproductive systems, the same sort of we-know-what’s-best-for-you mentality that seeks to insert federal and state law into peoples’ bedrooms and private lives. Second, and significantly more disturbing, is the underlying assumption that a woman’s role as the potential carrier of a child regardless of her intentions is more important than her ability to decide how she ought to live her life.

That these guidelines were created with an eye toward curbing the US’s abnormally high (as compared to other first-world nations) infant mortality rate is even more galling. According to the article,

The U.S. infant mortality rate is higher than those of most other industrialized nations — it’s three times that of Japan and 2.5 times those of Norway, Finland and Iceland, according to a report released last week by Save the Children, an advocacy group.

Of course, the fact that all of the countries mentioned have well-funded, highly available public healthcare systems, while the US has a privatized system that leaves minorities and poor with no healthcare coverage at all couldn’t have anything to do with those statistics. No, clearly the answer is for the state to tell women what to do with their bodies.