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The Phenomenology of Gravidity
Reframing Pregnancy and the Maternal through Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Derrida
By Jane Lymer Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Jane Lymer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-689-2
CHAPTER 1
Representing Gravidity
In this first chapter, I want to begin to think through what is at stake in the evocation of metaphors and the imaginary of maternity – phenomenologically, epistemologically, ethically and politically. In particular, I aim to understand gravidity as a relationship between the matter that pregnant women are, and the imaginings and metaphors of maternity that construct how a gestational woman might understand herself, and how others understand her, particularly in the early stages of gravidity. As I shall show, the phenomenological interplay is complex – complicated even further by how women's experiences of gravidity have been opportunistically employed metaphorically in ways that either dismiss the lived experiences of actual women or reduce their experience to metaphysical concepts that purport to speak for her. As Sarah LaChance Adams (2014, 92) argues, 'When philosophers make metaphors about pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering, divorced from any serious dialogue with those who have lived through it, they don't come to understand women's bodily experience, they appropriate it, and often very poorly.'
That the imaginary moulds and sculpts how we think about ourselves and how others perceive us is undeniable. As Michèle Le Doeuff (2003, xvi) identifies, 'There is no intellectual activity that is not grounded in an imaginary,' and to attempt to pass off the use of metaphors and tropes of gestation as an aspect of the maternal, as merely 'illustrative', is to deny their place and their force in the political order. Yet because the imaginary is so intertwined with social perceptions, one cannot simply deconstruct, remove the metaphorical veneer to reveal the 'truth', the ontology or the essential nature of gestation, but rather one must convincingly replace one imaginary with another. This is the overarching aim of this book – to create a convincing imaginary of gravidity that can be understood as a state that differs from maternity. I begin this chapter with a discussion of the various philosophical approaches to maternal imagery, highlighting how these debates are structured through particular allegories of gravidity. In particular, I challenge the conception of the woman; foetal relation as one of hospitality and, in doing so, begin to lay the ground for the argument that imagining gestation as a relationship between a woman who houses and nurtures a foetus as something other than herself cannot be phenomenologically or empirically supported, yet medical and legal institutions ethically rely on the trope of hospitality. I will argue that the condition of gravidity, the state of a woman as having conceived, prior to the quickening – the time when a women might begin to physically interact with her foetus – is an imaginary relationship; a world created through a phenomenological engagement with cultural narratives, epistemologically supported by visual technologies, and narrated through medico-legal discourses which focus predominantly on foetal outcomes.
I argue that a maternal emancipation requires us to keep in mind that a woman in the state of gravidity is not yet a mother, and may never embark upon the project of motherhood. In later chapters, I will show how motherhood requires a phenomenological identification that some women will be most enthusiastic to adopt, while others cannot. Providing a hiatus between gravidity and maternity gives women permission to choose to be maternal, a phenomenology, I argue, that needs to be reflected back to women through cultural imagery that supports her decision to become a mother, or not, in whatever form that may take. Contemporary representations which draw upon the woman; foetal relation as one of hospitality assume a woman in the state of gravidity as already a mother, a position which naturalises maternity and codes abortion as an opting out, rather than thinking of gravidity as a state which opens the opportunity for a woman to opt in, to take up a maternal identity, a way of thinking about maternity that acknowledges the ethical weight of opting in.
For a woman who wishes to give birth and become a mother, maternal metaphors are immensely appealing – particularly in the way they can bring to life experiences and excite expectations through the creation of an enveloping subculture. The maternal imaginary acts as a platform for inclusion, provocatively offering comfort and a sense of normality for women who feel launched into the unknown or a sudden experience of approval where previously there had been objectification and herein lies an appeal that is integral to its manipulative power. For the newly gestational woman who often feels unchanged, unable to yet experience her 'condition', maternal imagery guides her self-knowledge. Narratives of what it is like to be pregnant direct and scaffold her interpretation of herself, moulding an exciting imaginary relationship within an imaginary future and an imaginary baby – a world constructed through and by a cultural mythology and ideology that ties gravidity to maternity so tightly that we find it hard to imagine ourselves otherwise.
THE MATERNAL IMAGINARY
In The Analytic Imaginary, Marguerite La Caze (2002, 45) discerns how images and analogies used to guide philosophical arguments 'provide a framework within which the debate is constructed', a framework that works 'forcefully on the level of persuasion'. To exemplify, La Caze (2002, 45) selects the topic of abortion and Judith Jarvis Thomson's analogy of the 'famous violinist', describing how that particular analogy – to which I will turn shortly – has structured what is and isn't talked about in the ongoing debate about the nature of the relationship a woman has with her foetus while simultaneously 'obscur[ing] a number of tensions'. La Caze's analyses of the woman; foetal relationship in Thompson's argument I take as a good starting point to examine current philosophical engagement with metaphors that posit the woman; foetal relation as one of hospitality. In the next chapter, I will apply this analysis to feminist work that employs host imagery to understand the ethical nature of the woman; foetal relation but for now, my aim is to expand on La Caze's already insightful analysis in order to show what is foreclosed, what is silenced and what is excluded in the use of this imaginary.
Thomson's famous violinist is an analogy that Thomson drafted with the intent of shifting the focus of debate around abortion away from arguments for foetal personhood to the importance of maternal bodily integrity and autonomy. In order to make this clear, she begins with the following premise:
I propose, then, that we grant that the foetus is a person from the moment of conception. How does the argument go from here? Something like this, I take it. Every person has a right to life. So the foetus has a right to life. No doubt the mother has a right to decide what shall happen in and to her body; everyone would grant that. But surely a person's right to life is stronger and more stringent than the mother's right to decide what happens in and to her body, and so outweighs it. So the foetus may not be killed; an abortion may not be performed. (Thomson 1971, 47)
Thomson then asks the reader to imagine that you have woken one morning to find that a dying, famous violinist has become parasitic upon you for survival. Should you remove the famous violinist, he will die, but if you don't remove him, you will die within the month. The analogy supports the conclusion that if you do not commit murder by unplugging the violinist, then you also do not commit murder if you abort a foetus, at least in instances where the pregnant woman's life is at risk. In cases where a woman's life is not at stake, Thomson (1971, 73) draws upon the notion of hospitality where the maternal body, as a woman's house, is that woman's property, stressing 'that the mother and the unborn child are not like two tenants in a small house which has, by an unfortunate mistake, been rented to both: the mother owns the house.'
La Caze (2002, 5) describes how the famous violinist has become philosophically famous, sparking an ongoing debate about abortion structured around 'terms of self-defence and killing, individual rights, and overriding principles'. The premise that abortion is a form of killing, for example, restricts the debate to one of degrees: Is this murder (a direct killing as in premeditated murder) or is it self-defence? Taking up this challenge, John Finnis (1973) argues for premeditated murder on the basis that a late-stage abortion cannot be a simple euthanasia (implied in the imagery of being unplugged) but rather one that requires a craniotomy (a grisly process whereby a foetus is crushed and dismembered in order that it be removed piece by piece). Eileen McDonagh (1996, 35), in Breaking the Abortion Deadlock: From Choice to Consent, on the other hand, focuses on self-defence, arguing that 'if a woman has the right to defend herself against a rapist, she also should be able to use deadly force to expel a foetus'. For McDonagh, an unwanted gestation is analogous to a woman being attacked by another human being, only from the inside, and therefore, she has the moral liberty to repel her attacker by killing the intruder.
As La Caze (2002, 52–3) identifies, the image of a woman as owning her body where the foetus resides as guest or parasite, or can be an unwanted intruder, leaves us with a raft of tacit and unexamined assumptions 'a number of worrying consequences from a feminist point of view'. Giving the body the status of property over which one is sovereign, a common liberal argument that La Caze cites as being most often used within analytical philosophy, endorses the view that women are foetal containers. While this imaginary can then support the idea that we be permitted to hire out our bodies as we wish, endorsing contractual agreements involving the body such as surrogacy, this conception also denies any woman; foetal developmental relation beyond that of a clean home and good food. Being seen as a container encourages the view of women as objects, as a resource for foetal growth, and foetal development as something that happens inside, yet separate from, a woman's body.
Although La Caze doesn't explore the history of this imagery, this way of thinking about women as containers has a long history that crosses medico-legal discourses, philosophical texts and folk understandings of the maternal; foetal relation. Irena Aristarkhova (2012, 13) in Hospitality of the Matrix describes how the maternal body has historically and even today been represented as 'a space from which things and beings originate' rather than the 'place' of creation. Philosophically, she traces this imagery back to Plato's Timaeus where he describes the mother thus:
Wherefore, the mother and receptacle of all created and invisible and in any way sensible things, is not to be termed earth, or air, or fire, or water, or any of their compounds, or any of the elements from which these are derived, but is an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligWible, and is most incomprehensible. (quoted in Aristarkhova, 2012, 13)
Walking through the philosophical and medical/legal historical discourse on maternity, Aristarkhova discerns how this conception of the female body has permitted an appropriation of her body as the vessel which houses a foetus created by a 'Father of the World' – Plato's Craftsman, Christianity's God, or for the atheist, biological naturalism. As only space, Aristarkhova argues, woman, all women, become potential incubators for God's (variously imagined) projects, reducing her to the backdrop, the one who provides the resources for that created by Him. Akin to Aristarkhova's research, Karen Newman (1996) unearths images of foetuses sitting inside spatial uteruses as early as the ninth century and medical models and waxworks of eighteenth-century foetuses resembling either miniature adults or infants of 2–3 months of age within container like wombs. Woman as space is carried into contemporary medical thought through anatomical imagery that 'depict much more space in the womb than is actually available', which Aristarkhova (2012, 28) suggests as, 'almost ... anticipating] the foetus before it actually lodges itself in the womb'. Women as having the space for the foetus also informs the idea that one can 'rent a womb', just a womb, a space where commissioning parents might grow their biological child. However, as Aristarkhova identifies (and as shall become clearer as the argument in this book builds), this notion is a rendering, a fantasy, as the womb, even the pregnant womb, never contains empty space, it is not a cavity, nor a receptacle, but rather layers of tissue that are capable of separation that can stretch and alter shape to encase growing matter, be that a foetus or a tumour. The foetus also does not sit inside the womb but rather needs to be deeply imbedded into the woman's tissues for a gravidity to be sustained, a fusion that, as we shall see, does not leave the foetus biologically separate or separable from the woman. In fact, the depth that the human conceptus (a fertilised egg) must attain is an anatomical anomaly shared only with the great apes and a point of medical curiosity (see Burton and Jauniaux 2005).
La Caze (2002) identifies how Thomson's famous violinist also assumes gestation to involve two individuals (in this case, adult strangers) who can potentially have interests and desires that conflict. In concert with the womb as property, this imagery sets up, and advocates, the notion that the womb is something which can be discussed in terms of debatable ownership, an argument often framed in terms of competing rights to property: 'Abortion [can thus be conceived] in terms of the woman and foetus as rivals, fighting for their lives' (La Caze 2002, 54). This imaginary allows Thomson to question the idea that foetal rights to life will always and necessarily take precedence over those of the woman. Yet, where the competition is about competing survival, couching the abortion debate in terms of the relative value and degrees of rights over sovereign property reduces the debate 'to fairly simple for and against positions' where one must either be for or against abortion as a specific right rather than examining the notion of choice within individual and particular cases as a relation of dependency and intersubjectivity (La Caze 2002, 54). Should the foetus be an aspect of the woman's body, then it would seem that it is the woman's autonomy that must be respected. However, should the foetus be a separate individual, then under liberal theory, the rights of the foetus to life are going to always trump the rights of a woman to choose whether or not to become a mother after she finds herself in the state of gravidity, a situation that is not logically remedied by Thomson's claim for maternal autonomy, especially when adoption is a viable option.
A woman who finds herself in the state of gravidity after risk-taking intercourse could also, in Thomson's analogy, find herself solely responsible for the life of the foetus because, as La Caze identifies, the analogy only works where the foetus can be thought about as an unexpected intruder into one's home – rather than a jointly owned home. The trope implies a notion of responsibility where 'if a woman engages in sex without contraception, then she must take responsibility for the foetus' (La Caze 2002, 58), a way of thinking that silences debates about male responsibility for gestation and assumes that responsible decision making around abortion is only ever about the needs of the mother, that the lives of both sexual parties and their extended socio-economic networks and medico-legal structures will not play very important roles in the morality of her or their decision making.
Thinking about those extended socio-economic structures surrounding the abortion debate, Lisa Featherstone (2008, 454) argues that understanding the woman; foetal relationship as one involving two persons in a competitive relationship has emerged out of 'social, political and economic discourses stressing the need for population growth' (Featherstone 2008, 454). Focusing in particular on the Australian context, Featherstone outlines how just before the turn of the twentieth century, the birth rate of white Australians fell by over 20 per cent, a decline that was perceived by the Australian government as a crisis in the imperative to maintain a white Australia and the British Empire. Featherstone argues that there is an identifiable link between the regulation and moral condemnation of abortion and anxieties about nationhood and the reproduction of whiteness. For example, she cites the Royal Commission on the Decline of the Birth-rate (1904a; 1904b) in NSW as describing how doctors were becoming increasingly concerned about the popularity of abortion among specifically white women, only in the context of the declining birth rate. For most of the 1800s, it would seem that early medical and self-induced abortions appear to have been performed regularly and were generally considered to be a moral and reasonable response to an unwanted pregnancy, particularly for single women (McLaren 1977, 75). In fact, rather than abortion, the focus of moral condemnation fell on single mothers to the degree that one of the recommendations to emerge from the Royal Commission cited above was to address the public perception of illegitimacy as a way to increase birth rates. As one Sydney surgeon argued, 'An illegitimate is just as good a unit in the community as one who is born in wedlock, and will help pay the National Debt just as well' (quoted in Featherstone 2008, 454). As we shall see in chapter 4, the eventual solution to both problems was to condemn abortion and to force single women to have children that were then placed for adoption, a policy and practice outlined in the 2002 NSW report into forced adoption practices titled Releasing the past: Adoption practices 1950–1998.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Phenomenology of Gravidity by Jane Lymer. Copyright © 2016 Jane Lymer. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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