Abstract
A healthy baby is the desired outcome of childbirth, but seldom is the agency of the baby given consideration. Seen through the lens of ‘choice,’ the presence of the foetus and baby is something to be managed. Contradicting this are the daily experiences of pregnancy through which the growing child makes their presence felt. This is so from the first weeks during which a mother may suddenly be no longer in control of her body, and nausea, tiredness or hunger signal a giving over of the body to the work of growing a baby. While the legal personhood of the foetus is much debated, even then, its presence in debate is as a human with a will to live. But in the stories women tell, unborn babies also work to make childbirth unfold. From the start through to the moment of birth (and beyond) mothers and caregivers must work with the baby. In this encounter the relationship is not formed around choice but through an embodied learning characterised by negotiation between the thinking self and the unborn other within.
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Luce Irigiray and Julia Kristeva are notable Western philosophers who have given serious consideration to what childbearing and mothering mean for individual agency, subjectivity and the ‘Otherness’ of women in Western thought. Although their contributions are very different, both have opened up debate about what it means to carry a child, as in Kristeva’s discussion of the ways that women are thus given to an inherently ethical experience of establishing relationships an ‘ethic Other’ (Schipper, 2011).
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McKinnon, K. (2020). Negotiating with Babies. In: Birthing Work. Palgrave Pivot, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0010-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0010-7_2
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