Gestation - Critical Reflections on Feminist Research

I had the pleasure of being invited to an immersion at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Loughborough University to share reflections on my historical research and dialogue with researchers and activists from other areas that, among many activities, also hosted the event Gestations: Bodies, Technologies, Ecologies, Justice . The meeting discussed the complexities of understanding gestation and the political implications that go far beyond this bodily process.

As a historian of reproduction-related topics — and having written my dissertation on the history of medically induced abortion to save women’s lives — something I learned at this event is how much we still need to discuss miscarriage. There is a real fear within the feminist movement of acknowledging the grief of people who lose a pregnancy, for fear that this implies recognizing a certain “life” of the embryo or fetus — and, ultimately, end up supporting movements that constrain individual reproductive decisions. I was very, very confronted with this during this week, and I was able to recognize my own limitations.

Today, I saw poet and academic Tamarin Norwood read a poem she wrote for her son, Gabriel — a baby who, from the fifth month of pregnancy, was already fated not to survive after birth. She published the work The Song of the Whole Wide World: On Grief, Motherhood and Poetry with different poems and her accounts of living with this expectation of life and death. His lungs did not develop, and the only way for him to breathe was through his mother’s body.

The poem made me cry. The mother wrote about her fantasy of throwing herself into the sea and living with her son in the ocean, where he could perhaps transform into a little fish and then breathe — even at the cost of her own death, which to her would be just a detail. She wanted to be able to ensure that he continued breathing, in the only way possible, in any way.

In my work, I’ve always tried to avoid writing “mother,” “son,” “baby,” and even “woman,” both to not impose myself, and to suggest a feminist agenda to which I affiliate. But now I have been confronted with the complexity of reproduction, life, death — and commitments to a philogynous practice. If it is necessary to create a world that loves women, it is also essential to defend the right to choose and the right to mourn for those desired children who could not come to be born.

There’s so much to think about…