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Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy, and Birth by Anne Finger

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A lovely memoir of Finger's pregnancy interspersed with recollections of coming into her political identity as a disabled person. How her political activism worked with and against her personal activism of being a disabled woman having a child.

This book was hugely helpful to me in processing things it has nothing to do with. This book was about Finger's planned home birth, and how it went so terrifyingly wrong, and her son's first six months, and the way she had to reconcile her political beliefs with how she viscerally responded to the possibility that her child would be disabled. And I read it, and I thought about the conversation where my sister was talking in a restrained, wistful way about how she still wasn't pregnant, and how even if she could be, there was a pretty big question about whether she could ever safely carry to term. And without thinking even for a second, without stopping at all, I blurted, "I'll carry for you." And I have wondered in some astonishment ever since, through everything (carrying someone else's baby is not as easy as they made it look on Friends, shockingly), why I said it. Not regretting, just -- why? I'm a self-centered career woman with a hugely draining and important job, and I didn't know it back when we first talked, but I was about to go through a couple years of unrelated low-grade personal hell. Dedicating my body and my time and my hopes and my care for months and months to make another person's dream happen is not something I should have volunteered for like that, in that instant of course way. But there it was.

And this book really helped me figure it out. I won't go into the whole damn thing because really, this box is not that big. And also, this book deserves better than my tangent, because it is rich and interesting and very cool in its own right. It's a little sad how much it isn't dated -- there's a weird bit where Finger comments on how new ultrasonography is as a technology, and is it really safe to use on pregnant women? But then nearly every other political moment in the book was painfully real and true. Like when she stood up at an abortion rights meeting and said, "yes, I am with you, I support this cause, but don't you think the way this movement talks about how important it is to abort fetuses with disabilities is really problematic?" And the viciousness and hostility she was met with….yeah. There's nothing dated about that.

Anyway. I highly recommend to many of the mothers of my acquaintance who have thought about their ownership of their bodies in relation to motherhood, or who have considered motherhood to be a political act for whatever reason, or who have looked at their baby and thought, what if you are disabled?

Random pull quotes that helped me in my thinking:

"But I think too that we do our best work politically when we do the work that really tears at us."

"People who aren't disabled never seem less than human to me. But they sometimes seem to be missing a dimension, glib and easy, skimmers over the surface of life, not quite as real."

When I was pregnant I used to get so sick of people saying, "you won't care if it's a boy or a girl, as long as it's healthy." So sick of the assumption that health was all that mattered. But I sometimes used to say, "I don't care if it's healthy or not as long as it's a girl." It's not a joke I would make again.

Health, physical well-being does matter. It's my own internalized oppression that makes me fear having a disabled child, but it's not just that. It's the knowledge that being non-disabled is easier than being disabled. … But to admit that disability and illness are hard doesn't mean that they are wholly negative experiences, meaningless.

I had a child because I wanted something perfect to come out of me. I got just the opposite of what I thought I wanted. I don't believe in God or any version of God, any hand of fate or karma that was out to teach me a lesson. But my child's potential disability did teach me that I don't own my child, he's not an extension of me, not there to reflect me, not there to heal my past.

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