Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a "Good" Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence by Sarah LaChance Adams (review)
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When a mother deliberately harms her child, it is tempting to assume that she must be either insane (a "mad mother") or lacking the "natural" love of a mother for her children (a "bad mother"). We want to believe that such mothers have almost nothing in common with "good" mothers. Drawing extensively on empirical research, Sarah LaChance Adams' Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What A "Good" Mother Would Do shows that maternal ambivalence, simultaneous desires to nurture and violently reject one's children, is both common and reasonable, the result of genuine conflicts between mothers' interests and those of their children. Both appropriate support and deliberative agency are necessary to avoid maternal ambivalence finding its expression in filicide. As LaChance Adams shows, it is because of not in spite of these tensions that motherhood is an instructive case for ethics. When we appropriately reflect the lived experience of mothers, rather than relying on long standing stereotypes, we find a new paradigm for ethical relationships. This new paradigm reveals that we require an ethical theory that recognises human needs to care for, to be cared for, and to maintain independence.
The book begins with a notorious example of purposeful filicide: LaShanda Armstrong, who deliberately drove her minivan into the Hudson river with her four children inside. Armstrong and all but one of her children died. LaChance Adams argues that dismissing such cases of purposeful filicide as simply the actions of "mad mothers" or "bad mothers" oversimplifies both these tragedies and the character of maternal love in general. Most maternal filicides do not meet the legal requirements of insanity, but nor can they be simply categorised as bad mothers. Indeed, in many cases, mothers who kill their children see doing so as, in the circumstances, being a good mother (Meyer and Oberman 2001 89; LaChance Adams 2–4). In the first chapter of the book, LaChance Adams connects our inadequate understanding of maternal filicide to a widespread idealisation of the mother's relationship to her child, which [End Page E-1] takes a loving willingness to self-sacrifice as a given. She outlines the major flaws in philosophical treatment of motherhood and shows how her more nuanced account will build upon and improve the philosophies of care ethics, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir.
Chapter Two explores the mother as ethical exemplar as portrayed in care ethics. Care ethics challenges individualistic ways of understanding ethics, which start from a conception of human beings as autonomous, independent beings whose main duty to others is non-interference. As LaChance Adams notes, simply thinking about human reproduction undermines the individualistic picture: "We do not pop out of the ground like mushrooms, as Thomas Hobbes would have us imagine, but out of the womb of a woman. Without a mother, or someone acting as a mother, no human infant would survive for a day." (18). Unsurprisingly, therefore the mother-child relationship is repeatedly used in care ethics as an ethical exemplar. However, LaChance Adams argues that care ethics focuses too much on the interdependence between mother and child and does not pay enough attention to ways in which the needs of mother and child might conflict. It ignores the mother's need for individual flourishing. LaChance Adams argues that motherhood is most useful as an ethical exemplar when we recognise both the interdependence of mother and child and the ways in which their needs can conflict.
LaChance Adams argues that maternal experience reveals deep internal conflicts that are relevant to all human beings: "we have simultaneous needs to nurture, to be nurtured, and to maintain independence." We are pulled between two selves: the self as independent and the self as "entangled in indissoluble bonds with others" (LaChance Adams 24). Traditional rights-based ethics and care ethics each recognise one, but only one, aspect of the human condition. To bring the two together, LaChance Adams argues, we need a...
