Pregnant Women May Soon Get Prime Parking

A new bill would allow women experiencing a difficult pregnancy to park anywhere in New York City for free- even No Parking zones. I’m sure this will make some who choose not to bear children suddenly become pregnant… with rage.

Pregnant women would need a doctor’s note stating that they’re experiencing a difficult pregnancy in order to take advantage of the proposed free parking, and the note would grant them a “get out of tickets free” card until 30 days after their due date.

Some people are happy about this; others are not, and without even thinking for very long, I can already formulate a half dozen objections to this law. There will be the “sluts should’ve kept their legs closed!” camp. There will be a group of women who want to know why they can’t have free parking, that they’re already asked to pay for the choices of those who become parents when they pay taxes that fund schools. There will be men who say that since men can’t get pregnant, this is reverse-sexism or bizarro-sexism or some other made up -ism. There will be a group of people who worries that this privilege will be abused by unscrupulous doctors who just right notes willy-nilly for every pregnant woman who asks for a special pass. There will be people donning prosthetic stomachs and pretending to be pregnant, Maggie Lizer style, in an attempt to circumvent the already-insane parking situation in NYC. Others will claim that parking is already complicated enough and that this will be impossible to enforce with any degree of efficiency. Am I at six yet?

While granting pregnant women some form of courtesy while they’re in physical pain seems like a decent thing for human beings to do for one another, offering free parking hardly begins to address the unjust way we treat pregnant women in this country, from workplace discrimination to measly maternity leave to the astronomical cost of childcare. Sonia Ossorio of the National Organization for Women sums it up nicely: “I don’t want to see a short-term privilege like easy parking … create an environment that further stigmatizes pregnancy.”