Guest post by AMRITA NANDY

The math of this morality can be puzzling. Why should “sex worker mother” sound like an oxymoron to so many?

It was Mother’s Day recently –  judgment time on who can be a mother, what makes a good mother. Time magazine’s provocative current cover shows a young Los Angeles mother breastfeeding her three year old son (standing on a stool to reach mommy’s breast) as the headline asks “Are you mom enough?” The accompanying article on “attachment parenting”, as put forward by “parenting expert” Bill Sears in his The Baby’s Book, encourages parents to keep their infants in constant bodily contact with the parent by wearing a baby sling, let their children wean themselves from the breast when they are ready and allow “co-sleeping” which aids a child to grow up to be well-adjusted adults.

Attachment parenting has been widely criticized for setting the bar for good parenting impossibly high, especially for parents who have to work full-time, but it is a bar quite easily reached by Radha – she is very “mom enough”.  Amidst the din of the Delhi brothel where she works, she continues to suckle her four year old daughter. But if the judges of “good mothering” were policemen in Satara, Radha would not qualify. For them, a sex worker mother is a “shame”. This is why they dared to kick Anu Mokal, a four-months pregnant sex worker, leading to bleeding and an eventual miscarriage.

Continue reading Good woman=Mother/Bad woman=Sex worker/Sex worker mother =? Amrita Nandy →