Equality is one of the most important principles of modern democracies, but does it mean pretending that men and women are identical just when biology reminds us that they are not? For nine months, the woman's body bears the entire weight of the pregnancy.: deals with physical transformations, childbirth, recovery, and, in most cases, even breastfeeding, with consequences that can last a lifetime.
This doesn't mean denying the importance of the father figure—a good father can be indispensable to a child's growth—but recognizing the role of both parents shouldn't erase the fact that one of the two created that life by bearing almost all of its biological, psychological, professional, and economic costs.
Let's look at some data. According to the WHO (2023), the most common consequences of childbirth include pain during sexual intercourse (35%), low back pain (32%), anal incontinence (19%), urinary incontinence (8-31%), anxiety (9-24%), depression (11-17%), perineal pain (11%), and secondary infertility (11%). Many of these conditions can affect women throughout their lives. The economic cost of motherhood also remains high: In Italy, one in five women leaves work after giving birth. and 72.81 TP3T of voluntary resignations by new parents concern mothers (Save the Children). According to the Birth Rate Dossier 2026: Willing or Can, 49% of women fear repercussions on their career in case of maternity, against 24% of men; a well-founded fear, if we consider that over three million women are inactive for family reasons, compared to just 151,000 men. And when they try to re-enter the labor market, only 6.61% of them succeed (Plus Report 2022, INAPP).
For centuries, children have been primarily a women's problem: if a man abandoned a pregnant partner, it was she who bore the dishonor and financial burden. Today the context is the opposite: the low birth rate is an emergency and every child represents a demographic and economic resource. When the child was a cost, it was primarily the mother's; when he became an asset, he suddenly became both theirs.
Pregnancy, however, remains the woman's sole responsibility. Her body, her risks, her scars, her consequences on her health, her job, and her pension. For society, the cost remains private, the value becomes public. From the birth of the child, in fact, what the woman's body has done seems to become a detail without legal relevance.
Even the law on shared custody (law no. 54 of 2006), born with the declared aim of protecting the right of the minor to maintain a meaningful relationship with both parents, has often been criticised for its practical application, which tends to privilege a basically equal division of time even when the previous care burden was highly unbalanced or in the presence of violence, control or serious conflict.
If a society considers men and women perfectly equal, even when one party has made a biological investment that the other can never sustain, are we really talking about equality? Or are we redefining as neutral what, once again, was built on women's bodies?
Perhaps the most extreme point of arrival of this transformation is the gestation for othersIn a society marked by declining birth rates, children are increasingly becoming a precious commodity, while pregnancy risks being reduced to a mere performance. The focus of the debate is the child, not the process that makes it possible. And who makes that body available? In the vast majority of cases, these are women living in conditions of severe economic inequality, for whom their bodies can become the only monetizable resource. This is why many feminists are speaking out. of a new form of reproductive exploitation: not because every single woman is necessarily coerced, but because consent expressed in conditions of profound economic vulnerability cannot be considered entirely free.
The paradox is evident: for centuries pregnancy has been devalued because it is considered a natural destiny for women; today it risks being so because it is considered a service. The language changes, not the result: the female body continues to be the instrument through which others pursue their interests.
Maybe that's also why the crackdown on abortion in many countries and gestation for others, although they appear to be opposite phenomena, seem to share the same logic: At the centre is not women's freedom, but the value attributed to their reproductive capacity.
When pregnancy becomes a collective concern, the female body ceases to belong exclusively to women: the state, the market, and the law end up claiming a role in their choices. It is strange that, in the era we define as the era of maximum female emancipation, reproductive capacity continues to be the aspect of women's bodies that society deems most legitimate to intervene upon.
Surrogacy, restrictions on abortion and a certain interpretation of shared custody seem very distant issues, yet they share a common trait: motherhood tends to lose relevance. In the first case, pregnancy becomes a performance; in the second, the woman's body is subordinated to a perceived superior interest; in the third, nine months of gestation, childbirth, breastfeeding, and often years of care are treated as a past without consequences, almost as if the right could restart from the day of birth.
For this reason, equality should not become the obligation to pretend that everything has been the same from the beginning. If a newborn is still breastfed, or if the mother is his main reference figure because she was, up until that moment, the person who had taken care of him in the main way, Ignoring this reality in the name of an abstract symmetry means sacrificing the concrete experience of the child and the mother to the need to demonstrate that the two adults are perfectly equivalent.
The law seems to remember motherhood only when it has to ask something of the woman: to carry a pregnancy to term, to protect the fetus, to bring a child into the world. When, however, it is a question of recognizing the value of what that pregnancy has entailed, motherhood suddenly becomes invisible. Perhaps the paradox lies here: we've learned to say that children are a precious gift, but we continue to treat pregnancy as a mere detail. If the child becomes "everyone's," while the pregnancy remains only one's, the risk is that the value of the woman who gave birth to it will end up belonging less and less to her, because A society that stops recognizing the value of women's bodies inevitably ends up recognizing less value in women themselves..
Magdalene Comotto
This article is produced through voluntary work.
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