Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare: Ethics, Experience, and Reproductive Labor (review)

In Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare: Ethics, Experience, and Reproductive Labor, Amy Mullin argues that pregnancy and child rearing are not only embodied but also active and thoughtful reproductive work. Thus the most distinctive feature of Reconceiving is Mullin's decision to focus on pregnancy and child rearing and to consider birth only briefly, a decision that has three important effects. First, Mullin prioritizes the experiences of the pregnant woman rather than the resulting child. In this way, she highlights the similarity of pregnancy and child rearing as purposive, complex activities serving the complicated and not necessarily consistent interests and needs of a number of persons, not just the mother and child. Second, Mullin illuminates meanings of pregnancy that are usually obscured by understanding pregnancy only in relationship to birth and shows how pregnancy is like other human activities. Third, Mullin's focus on the similarities of pregnancy and child rearing goes a long way toward explaining why an understanding of reproductive work is important for many other questions in ethics and feminist theory.

One of Mullin's goals is to contribute to ongoing feminist work on mothering that resists the ideology of essential motherhood. With respect to this goal, I find most compelling Mullin's demystification of pregnancy as an experience unlike any other and her analysis of several widespread assumptions about child rearing. These assumptions, found even in feminist work on mothering, are that child rearing is typically done by individual mothers of their biological children, that it is done by one woman alone in a private home, and that the children's father supports her and her children. As Mullin shows, these assumptions are core elements of the ideology of essential motherhood and work to preclude reorganizations of pregnancy and child rearing that might benefit mothers, children, other caregivers, families, and society at large.

A strength of Mullin's work is the variety of disciplinary approaches on which she relies; she brings into productive conversation moral and social theory, empirical social science research, cultural studies, economics, and disability studies. Mullin's use of empirical social science research allows her to take seriously women's experiences and accounts of pregnancy and child rearing while ideas from cultural studies enable her to contextualize these experiences and accounts. Mullin properly tempers her concern with validating women's experiences with analysis of the social forces and factors that determine both experience and the accounts we give of our experiences. She uses phenomenological methods to interpret the embodied elements of women's experiences, while using social science research to correct traditional phenomenology's obliviousness to gender. Especially impressive is Mullin's use of insights from disability studies to explicate the difficult issues of dependency, inequality, and paternalism in caregiving.

In her approach, Mullin rejects virtue ethics in favor of an ethic of care. I don't necessarily object to this choice, but I would like to have heard more about the advantages of care ethics compared to virtue ethics in relationship to pregnancy and child rearing. Mullin argues that virtue ethics "tends to focus, though it need not, on the actions of particular persons" and does not allow "questions about how we can have caring institutions and how care can be provided in public contexts" (90). But some versions of virtue ethics, such as Alasdair MacIntyre's (1981, 1984), do consider the proper relationship of practices and the institutions that should enable and sustain them. Including such a version of virtue ethics could enhance Mullin's project. She herself recognizes that "both approaches [care ethics and virtue ethics] could be developed in ways that attend to the public dimensions of responsibility for pregnant women and fetal well-being" (90). Mullin is right that feminist thinkers have more thoroughly analyzed and critiqued care ethics, in comparison to virtue ethics. But work on pregnancy and child rearing would be a good place to engage in feminist analysis and critique of virtue ethics.

The most important result of...