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, where I shared reflections on my historical research and engaged in dialogue with researchers and activists from various fields. The event also hosted the program Gestations: Bodies, Technologies, Ecologies, Justice, which explored the complexities of gestation and its political implications—far beyond its biological dimensions.

As a historian of reproduction—and having written my dissertation on the history of medically induced abortion to save women’s lives—I left the event with a deepened awareness of how little we still discuss miscarriage. Within feminist circles, there is a palpable tension around acknowledging the grief of pregnancy loss, for fear that this might inadvertently affirm the “life” of the embryo or fetus and, by extension, support movements that restrict reproductive autonomy. This week, I was directly confronted by that tension and found myself reckoning with my own limitations.

I heard the 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 known not to survive after birth. Her book, The Song of the Whole Wide World: On Grief, Motherhood and Poetry , gathers her poems and reflections on carrying this expectation of both life and death. Gabriel’s lungs never developed; the only way he could breathe was through his mother’s body.

Her poem made me cry. She wrote of her longing to throw herself into the ocean and live there with her son—where, perhaps, he could transform into a small fish and finally breathe. Even if it cost her life, it would be, in her words, a small price. What she most wanted was to find a way—any way—for him to keep breathing.

In my own work, I’ve often avoided writing words like “mother,” “baby,” “son,” or even “woman”—partly to avoid imposing fixed identities, and partly to align with a feminist agenda that resists essentialism. But this week I’ve been reminded of the layered, often painful complexities of reproduction, life, death, and the ethics of care. If we are to imagine a world that truly loves women, it must include both the defense of reproductive choice and the recognition of the grief of those who mourn children they longed to meet.

There is so much to sit with, and so much more to say.