“Care will be feminist or it will not be” was one of the most applauded slogans during the 4th national gathering, “The Future of Care in Mexico,” held in late August in the city of Guadalajara. The organizing consortium was led by UN Women, UNICEF, and international organizations, notably OXFAM and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Institute. Also noteworthy was a blunt statement made by one of the speakers: “The care agenda is our Trojan horse to deconstruct the family.”
While it is true that caregiving is a fundamental issue for sustaining life, and it is essential that it takes center stage in the public agenda so that public policies are implemented to support and strengthen it; the purely feminist approach—which seeks to remove caregiving from the family and private sphere due to the “unjust and oppressive organization” that this perspective claims is imposed on women—proposes impoverished solutions due to its biased vision, yielding uncertain results in terms of social evolution.
Caregiving, like any human issue, needs to be approached from a systemic vision that considers all angles and actors involved. For this reason, the following reflections are offered to the reader.
Where does the need for care come from? If we delve into it, we reach the conclusion that care is a human response to the call of vulnerability, dating back to when man left his primitive brain behind to become a human creature. In this sense, anthropologists declare that a femur healed after a fracture is the irrefutable proof that the species ceased to be a simple hominid to make the evolutionary leap to becoming a human person, as it was capable of caring for the vulnerable and not leaving them behind, as happens in the animal kingdom.
Hence, the heart of care is not in the caregiver, who only responds to a call, but in the vulnerability of the one who, due to their circumstances, needs care to survive: a child, a sick person, an elderly person, or a person with a disability. Therefore, the quality of care is a function of the dependent person’s need; that is, care is a personal relationship initiated by vulnerability.
Given the above, one could say that care cannot be an oppressive imposition, but rather a vocation—a moral response to the vulnerability that claims it. The caregiver, acting freely, responds to that call, moved by the love implicit in the personal relationship with the one whose vulnerability moves the heart to the point of prioritizing their need over one’s own. Recognizing this is crucial for properly appreciating the value of care.
We should analyze a paradigmatic case: a baby. A newborn is so vulnerable that without care, it dies. This vulnerability moves those around it, especially its parents, who pour themselves into its care and protection, without this being a detriment to their person. On the contrary, they are capable of developing capacities and virtues hitherto unknown for the good of their child; that is, it makes them grow, makes them better people. This dynamic repeats itself time and again in the face of disability, illness, or the deterioration of an older adult.
We are in a position to reach a primary conclusion: care is a radically family matter. Besides being the natural place for it, the family is the only institution capable of sustaining it humanely over time. For example, a person with a severe disability may need 60 years or more of care.
While it is true that care relationships must be a matter of public concern so that they can be sustained in a modern society—one that has developed abuses by almost always overloading women with this work without support or recognition—it would be a mistake to “defamilialize” care by advocating solely for the demands of female caregivers.
Being a personal relationship born from the moral response to vulnerability, care is an issue that must be treated from a family perspective. First, it must consider the needs of the one in a state of dependency. Second, it must sustain the conditions so that whoever assumes the caregiving role (naturally, mothers) receives recognition, support, respite spaces, and other requirements that dignify their labor. And third—a point almost always forgotten—it must ensure that the person providing the material resources necessary for the sustenance of the dependent and their caregiver is also not subjected to conditions of exploitation and abuse. Such exploitation eventually leads to the same behaviors toward the caregiver, which in turn leads to violence toward the vulnerable person.
Therefore, the construction of an adequate care system implies placing the person experiencing vulnerability and their family at the center, providing them with a support network to sustain them, economic conditions to strengthen them, and services to help them assume care in a dignified manner.
In this way, care, far from being an imposition, becomes a vocation—a calling from which all of us have benefited, and a relationship of human growth characterized by tenderness, gratitude, generosity, and other virtues that make man grow in humanity.
Thus, it suffices to say that the care agenda is a family agenda, as the family is entrusted with personally caring for human life at every stage of existence—the reason why mankind has survived and developed for thousands of years throughout history.