LAW, POPULAR CULTURE, AND PREGNANCY IN AMERICA

IN 1991, Vanity Fair magazine broke ground by placing an image of a nude and pregnant Demi Moore on its cover. The resulting media firestorm was intense, and the controversy helped the cover become iconic. The magazine broke records, selling more than one million copies (in contrast to a regular distribution at the time of around 800,000) and receiving voluminous correspondence, both in support of and angry about the cover.

The Vanity Fair cover and the attention given it helped to change how pregnancy was seen and represented in the contemporary press. In the last twenty-five years, in large part because of celebrity openness about their pregnant physiques in the wake of the Demi Moore cover, the pregnant body has mostly lost its reputation as repulsive and embarrassing. Now, pregnant women are encouraged to enjoy the physicality of their pregnancy — in fact, to embrace the beauty of pregnancy by dressing (and undressing) to show off "the bump."

This is a sea change.

Histories of mothering situated in the Western world highlight the strange mix of horror, fascination, and reverence with which pregnancy has long been treated in the popular culture of each period. Such histories also almost uniformly stress that, at least for white and middle- to upper-middle-class women, motherhood was constructed as part of the realm of the domestic, the private. If they were to be seen out in public, pregnant women were expected to be "demure and modest." Francus notes that in British fiction of the eighteenth century, women who were not able to be appropriately domestic and maternal were vilified and suspect. Popular literature from the period abounds with tales of infanticide, evil stepmothers, and self-centered women — clearly the antitheses of mothers who met the norms of domestic and modest, nurturing and self-abdicating. Such women were idealized, and domesticity and motherhood were seen as the pinnacle of a white woman's potential development. These women were also relegated to the private realm — the home — outside of the gaze of the public sphere. In some regards, their proper domesticity and maternity depended upon women's invisibility.

These attitudes travelled easily to the United States and very much informed the sociocultural politics surrounding motherhood in the colonial period and well beyond. While women of color and lower-class white women were indeed in the labor force, white women of the mercantile class in the United States were relegated to private life. These mothering women were expected to manage the private sphere and remain outside of the public one; their pregnancies were self-managed and self-regulated, with the help of other women in secret. Pregnancy, an indicator that sex has taken place, was simply considered too risqué for polite company. Contemporary media coverage of female celebrities who highlight their pregnancy in form-fitting dresses on the red carpet at awards shows could not have been imagined a century ago, when "a concern with physical appearance during pregnancy [was seen as] incongruent with the image of the ideal mother figure."

Nor could contemporary representations of celebrity pregnancy have been imagined even as recently as 1950, when Lucille Ball was the first woman to be acknowledged to "be expecting" on television, though the Federal Communications Commission considered the word "pregnant" lewd enough to censor. And they could not have been imagined even in 1970, when Cleveland junior high school teacher Jo Carol LaFleur was placed on mandatory leave in her second trimester, because school administrators worried that her pregnant body would alternately disgust, concern, fascinate, and embarrass her students.

Yet now, twenty-five years after the Demi Moore cover, more than a hundred years of cultural norms seem to have shifted. Some women's pregnant bodies can be seen as acceptable, even desirable. In the years from 1970 to 2000, popular culture became more open to performances of pregnancy; once kept secret and articulated as private, pregnancy became "public." At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court reached decisions that had the potential to give women a greater measure of control over their reproductive capacity, both while pregnant and while seeking to avoid pregnancy, by articulating a tenuous right to privacy. This is an interesting juxtaposition: women have sought and gained rights to privacy in reproduction, just as they have also sought and received the freedom to be public with their pregnancies.

Popular culture and jurisprudence have facilitated steps toward equality and freedom for women, to be sure. However, the relationship between popular culture and jurisprudence in the period is an interesting and complex one; it is a history of openings and closings, steps forward and back. While part of the story is progressive, a second narrative emerges; it is a neoliberal story in which popular culture and jurisprudence work together to make women more responsible for their pregnancies and the general public more invested in these performances of pregnancy.

The contemporary history of reproductive rights in the United States, from both feminist and legal standpoints and especially as it covers the formative years leading up to and after Roe v. Wade, is well told and well known. Much of that history has focused on the momentous Supreme Court decisions and cultural shifts permitting women access to contraception and abortion — the growing right, in other words, to be private in one's decision making surrounding reproduction and to make choices to avoid and terminate pregnancy. There is also a well-established body of scholarship illuminating the legal holdings, regulatory practices, and forms of cultural production that enabled women to be public with reproductive decision making and to make choices in support of their pregnancies: to retain employment, access benefits, and claim public space, even while sporting a "bump." This chapter draws on these sources to identify key moments between 1970 and 2000 — it brings us right up to the era of the baby bump's media dominance — and provides analytical snapshots of the jurisprudence and popular culture of women's reproductive lives in the United States, to help us understand and contextualize the contemporary mania for the baby bump as a sociolegal moment.

The existing scholarship on state control of women's reproductive capacity illustrates that governance serves multiple purposes in the politics of state formation. Rhetorics surrounding motherhood and policies attempting to control women's reproduction served the purposes of nation building in colonialism, into industrialization, and through the contemporary period. In all of its manifestations, those who governed women and their behavior agreed that one of femininity's main functions was to produce...