Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Mothering

Foreword

xi Foreword E V A K I T T A Y What a joy to see a collection such as this. In it, Sarah LaChance Adams and Caroline Lundquist realize one of the hopes of the earlier generation of feminist philosophers of which I am a part: that philosophy takes seriously the experience and lives of women. Every woman, whether she has embarked on the path of motherhood and whether she has gotten there via pregnancy and childbirth, is faced with the default social expectation that maternity is her destiny and her principle source of accomplishment and joy. A concomitant ideology, found not only in Western society but also more globally, is that not only the social but even the ontological status of woman is tied to her capacity to bear children, give birth to them, and rear them. Therefore, every woman is touched by the topics covered here, whether they are part of her actual experience or the imaginary through which women’s subjectivity is constructed. Hence, these concerns are central to any philosophical project that takes the lives of women seriously. The essays here place the nurturance, physicality, and situatedness of mothering in dialogue with the abstraction and putative universality of philosophy’s canonical works. They explore the profound shaping of a woman’s identity and subjectivity through the process of pregnancy, childbirth , and mothering both when there is and when—through miscarriage, abortion, or adoption—there is no child to nurture and raise. The essays are explored through the works of traditional male philosophers such a Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida, as well as the groundbreaking works of feminist philosophers such as Sara Ruddick, Iris xii ■ Foreword Young, Virginia Held, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray, among many others. In some chapters, we are invited to see features of the pregnant and maternal body through the lens of contemporary culture. In many, the philosophy proceeds by means of the writers’ experiences. The personal voice in the essays is not incidental to the philosophical project. It reveals vividly how the disembodied impersonal voice of philosophy is, as a matter of fact, already deeply gendered, reflecting the perspective of a dominant voice that has the luxury and privilege of taking itself as definitive of human experience. If men got pregnant, and were expected to get pregnant, bear children, and feed them from their own bodies, would a philosophical discourse created by men fail to feature the generative capacity of their bodies? Would they blithely ignore the doubling of bodies in pregnancy, the indeterminacy of the pregnant person as one or two? Would they so easily relegate the body functions by which humans reproduce to our animal and abjected nature—regarding them to be of little importance to the distinctiveness of humans? Today we have women engaging in philosophy—and doing so as women, that is, as people who come equipped to the task with the distinctive capacities of the female body, the socially constructed subjectivity of a gendered self, and a set of life experiences that vie with those pictures of the human that our male philosophers have handed us. For these women philosophers, the sense of wonder does not stop at the doorstep the sexually differentiated body. At that threshold a new wonder takes hold. While the labor of mothering has received a good airing by both proponents and critics of an “ethic of care,” many aspects of mothering beg for a continued exploration. In this collection a number of different aspects of mothering come into focus. When a birth mother who chooses (if that is an appropriate term given the social stigma that can attach to pregnancy of an unwed woman) to give up her child for adoption, how is she to understand her motherhood, and does she take up a maternal identity? When a mother adopts a child whose history of sexual abuse skews the sexual desire of the abused child, how does one take up the project of mothering? The essays that address these questions show us a side of motherhood that has not yet found its way into ethical discussions of care and mothering. They also make us see that the specificity and complexity of maternal identity is far greater than what we have thus far attempted to comprehend. Most of the essays, however, are phenomenological and ethical investigations of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering. The visceral, bodily aspects of maternity are at play. This is what makes this...