Life & Mortality Quote by Andrea Dworkin

Dworkin’s line is designed to feel like an accusation because it is one: not of motherhood itself, but of a culture that needs danger to mint meaning. By yoking “glorified” to “women die,” she collapses the sentimental register around childbirth into something closer to sacrifice. The point isn’t shock for its own sake; it’s to force the reader to notice how reverence can operate as anesthesia. If death is part of the bargain, praise becomes a way to keep the bargain from being renegotiated.

The intent is clinical and confrontational. “In part” matters: she’s not reducing childbirth to mortality, she’s isolating one mechanism that props up the myth. When a society routinely fails to protect women in pregnancy and labor, it can manage the discomfort in two directions: improve conditions, or romanticize the risk. Glorification makes the hazard sound chosen, even holy. It turns preventable suffering into proof of devotion, and it converts systemic negligence into a personal virtue story.

The subtext is about power and consent. If women are expected to accept bodily peril as a rite of passage, then refusal looks not merely like a personal choice but like moral betrayal. That pressure doesn’t require explicit coercion; it lives in language, in the halo around “motherhood,” in narratives that reward endurance and shame complaint.

Contextually, Dworkin is writing from radical feminism’s refusal to let “natural” stand in for “just.” Her provocation sits amid long histories of maternal mortality, medical paternalism, and pronatalist politics. The line works because it weaponizes a taboo truth: celebration can be a cover story for indifference.