The Pregnancy Childbearing Project 1786602938, 9781786602930

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The Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project

The Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project A Phenomenology of Miscarriage Jennifer Scuro

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Scuro All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-292-3 PB 978-1-78660-293-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available ISBN 9781786602923 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 9781786602930 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 9781786602947 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction to the Project ix Part I Miscarriage or Abortion? (Or, #shoutingmyabortion in a Graphic Novel)

1

Part II An Interlude on Philosophical Allegory

177

Part III A Phenomenological Reading of Miscarriage

189

Part IV Griefwork: How Do You Get Over What You Cannot Get Over?

223

Works Cited

245

Index 253 About the Author

259

v

Acknowledgments

Bianca Jeannot and Amanda Hernandez were still undergraduates at the College of New Rochelle when they were completing their graphic novel One of Us (2016). I was so inspired by their work and the process by which they collaborated on constructing a textual and visual narrative that only about six months later I “unloaded” all the flash-card memories of my pregnancies into a sketchbook. I am so grateful to both of them for sharing their work with me and, like my colleagues, immensely proud of their accomplishments. I wrote the original thesis of part III of this book, “A Phenomenological Reading of Miscarriage,” quite soon after my third pregnancy, and it is the starting point chronologically for this project. I thank Eva Kittay, Caroline Lundquist, and Sarah LaChance Adams for supporting this part of the project and for their kind words regarding it. When publishers of the anthology Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering cut my contribution before going to press, I put my project away as rejected. I tried a couple of years later to condense and clarify some of my thesis for journal publication, but without success; though I had taken my personal experience out of the project, these academic rejections of the work were just too emotional. I have to thank my husband, Stephen, for all that we have shared and for his consistent love and acceptance, especially as I recalled these difficult experiences and narrated them—often quite graphically. When I drafted the graphic novel narrative in late 2015 and early 2016, even though it was very different from the philosophical work, I vii

viii

Acknowledgments

couldn’t help but imagine that it should not be free standing from it. I was fantasizing about these efforts being published in a shared volume because there was a mirror effect between this newly unarchived personal narrative and the philosophical analysis already shelved. Because these two genres have distinct audiences, I was doing either something original or something too strange for publication. And so I thank Martina O’Sullivan, formerly at Rowman & Littlefield International, for enthusiastically supporting my “strange” vision and also thank the anonymous US and UK reviewers who did not see strangeness but novelty and necessity in this project. This reception was one of the only ways I could have reclaimed the project from the rejection pile and prepared it for a diversified audience. I thank Mike Watson, Katie Lane, Jon Rosenberg, Chris Jahns, Patricia Stevenson, and Charlotte Wyatt for their assistance as I developed this project for publication. My late colleague Elisabeth Brinkmann, a theologian in health-care ethics, was one of the first to read my phenomenological analysis. The support and rigorous feedback she gave me remain close to my heart. To those in my College of New Rochelle community who had encouraged me to pursue the project—particularly Ruth Zealand, Elizabeth Spadaccini, Erica Olson-Bang, Anne McKernan, Dennis Ryan, Marga Taylor, and Michelle Jammes—many, many thanks. To the students, colleagues, friends, and extended family with whom I’ve discussed this project to varying degrees over the years and who have provided me with invaluable support, I thank you so much and hope you find your influence in these pages. My philosophy family keeps me alive. Those who know how I’ve struggled with this material personally and professionally also have been my lifeline. Maeve O’Donovan, Devonya Havis, Lauren Guilmette, and Joel Michael Reynolds, thank you for reminding me to keep investing back in this work (and especially Joel for describing this project as “bad ass”). Tina, Revekka, and Vanessa, your enthusiasm for this project gave me hope that my work might influence future feminist thinking. Finally, deep gratitude for my sisters—both literal and metaphorical—in blood and in spirit: Richele, Alisa, Lauren, Bernie, Kate, Yvonne, Julie, Monica and Sonja, Mary, Gabrielle (and Annette), Nancy, Adria, Maria, Joan, Clare, Anne, and Ciara, and, especially, my mom and her sisters, Marian and Donna, who always treated me like a sister. There are so many others I cannot name but to whom I am deeply indebted for comforting words and conversations, whether brief and timely or still ongoing and for the long term.

Introduction to the Project

≠ [DOES-NOT-EQUAL] This project is about disentanglement. It is a theoretical hypothesis disentangling the phenomenon of pregnancy from the phenomenon of childbearing, supported by a narrative of personal experience as best as I could recall it. When you have been raised and groomed to believe that pregnancy is equivalent to—if not also inherently entailing—the phenomena of labor, childbirth, and motherhood wrapped up in a mythos of unconditional love and desire, anything short of these expectations of equivalence becomes a site of harm and humiliation. This project is also intended to be an outright condemnation of our shame and blame culture, especially when it is a gendered phenomenon—an unnecessary bearing-down on women and girls for no other reason than their anatomical differences from men. I would like to identify this project as a feminist phenomenological project—at least in method—yet, ultimately, it is experimental as to what this project might yield. Philosophical analysis is not usually traditional fare for feminism and feminist critique; few philosophers deal in—much less construct narrative in—the form of the graphic novel.1 That said, much good, feminist work has already been done through the medium of the graphic novel with which I will not be able to compete but, hopefully, only complement. To this point, I place this work among other feminist theorists and philosophers breaking the boundaries down regarding “what counts” for the work of philosophy. ix

x

Introduction

When I became aware of the #shoutyourabortion Twitter hashtag, I was hit by a wave of conflicting feelings as latent memories resurfaced, and yet this provocation also came with a kind of clarity.2 Up to that point I had an uncritical but functional distinction embedded in my recall of events: although I had experienced a spontaneous miscarriage in my first pregnancy, I had also classified in my mind my third pregnancy as a miscarriage when in fact I had undergone an abortive procedure in what could be considered an abortion clinic. I had—and my family had as well—classified it in this way because this had been a wanted pregnancy and I had it aborted in order to—by all accounts— save my life. What came clearly into view with the #shoutyourabortion thread was that this experience of pregnancy counted as an abortion. The public knowledge or “shouting” of this would mean that I could not hide behind the safety of the “less shameful” reasons for having an abortion. Just because I did not seek it out and had expected my “baby” did not mean that I could maintain distinctions I had comfortably kept any longer. Intellectually—and, to a degree, emotionally—there had been no demand that I grapple with the ambiguity of my situation. As Simone de Beauvoir states it in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947, part II, §5, ¶10), when an “individual lives in a situation of falsehood, the falsehood is violence, tyranny: shall I tell the truth in order to free the victim? It would first be necessary to create a situation of such a kind that the truth might be bearable and that, though losing his [or her] illusions, the deluded individual might again find about him [or her] reasons for hoping.” This project is a hopeful one in its negative assessment of pregnancy and in the disentanglement of pregnancy from the bearing of children; it is motivated by a coming-to-terms with falsehoods and illusions that most pregnant women have come to bear. In this project, in grappling with the truth of what had been “my situation,” I hope to provide what has been up to now an underdeveloped point of solidarity among women: that, once pregnant, there is a phenomenon of undergoing that is temporal and substantial and of which we will all find ourselves postpartum. Most important to this point of possible solidarity, this is an undergoing given to all pregnancy whether or not a child is born. As Sandra Bartky (1990, 97) puts it, “Moral psychology has told us a story, but not the whole story,” which prompts me toward the necessary unpacking of the conditions of shame and guilt that come with the per-



Introduction xi

ceived failure(s) of a “pregnancy that does not lead to the bearing of a child” set in this project and in cooperation with her phenomenology of oppression; for this project, shame and guilt are not “moral emotions.” With a project like this, I am imagining how the conditions might be set such that “the truth might be bearable” and I may reevaluate the oppressive and victimizing demands of a misogynist society, starting with my own illusions. This project is an attempt to deinternalize the shame and grief of a compartmentalized and suppressed memory. This is the significance of part I’s title, “Miscarriage or Abortion?” as my way of #shoutingmyabortion, as well as the significance of the title of part IV, “Griefwork,” as I found myself needing to ask the question: How do you get over what you cannot get over? HAVING (AND NOT HAVING) “A BABY” My story—the content of the graphic novel—is thick with cisgendered white privilege, especially as it begins with my introduction into pregnant naïveté. In 2006, I was young, married, and employed, and therefore it came time in the script to “start a family.” Instead, I was initiated into a quiet community of women who knew how naive and privileged—and damning—that assumption can be. I ran up against a razor’s edge where I had assumed there would be nothing but a cushion of joy and accomplishment. This is what I had described to myself as “a privilege that is not a privilege”: it is a privilege to embody the political, gender, and social norms of being pregnant. I know there are many women for whom getting pregnant would be a privilege, and one they have been denied. Yet pregnancy without its childbearing function, as with “pregnancy loss,”3 was a complex of deprivileging and alienation from privilege. Still, there was more to be had in this privilege that is not a privilege: I found many other women who knew this contradiction in its painful intimacy4—to have been pregnant without the production of a child—such that this, too, became its own, new form of epistemic privilege. In “Being Torn: Toward a Phenomenology of Unwanted Pregnancy,” Caroline Lundquist (2008, 136) calls for a more inclusive phenomenology of pregnancy that “gives voice to the multitudes of women who have not chosen their pregnancies,” and this project follows that call.

xii

Introduction

At the same time, while deviating from Lundquist’s project, I will bracket desire and choice regarding pregnancy in my phenomenological approach. Lundquist accounted for phenomena attached to the rejected and denied pregnancy; I suspend that phenomenon to get at the quality of expellation5 given to all pregnancy. That my project is negative toward pregnancy can still be appropriately contextualized in her call for an inclusive phenomenology, as I will argue it, especially as I outline what I call a death-within-the-self—the phenomenal expulsion of expectation—as an existential given to all pregnancy. Lundquist specifically states that “until women have the vocabulary with which to express ambivalent and even negative feelings regarding pregnancies . . . they will continue to suffer in silence. By offering a more inclusive account of pregnancy, feminist phenomenology has the potential to produce such a vocabulary. The lived experience of pregnancy is so radically diverse, and so heavily conditioned, that it behooves feminist philosophers to continue to explore it” (152). What this project opens up to examination is the ontological fact that all pregnancies are open to miscarriage, so I also ask: Can’t there be grief in birth? Doesn’t all postpartum experience share in the experience of miscarriage in a deep and fundamental way? Added to this project, with this expellation, at least ontologically, grief is on the scene. I will argue this grief as phenomenologically on the scene as a necessary labor that cannot be glossed over and gotten over—calling this necessary labor a griefwork that needs to be done and ought not be done by women alone. Although I experience grief alone in that it alienates me from others, it is not mine and this grief ought not leave me to myself. The idea of griefwork outlined here is not captured in the private, personal exercise of grieving, because the more I allow my grief and “do it,” the more, in my alienation, I am isolated by it. It has become the case that “the foetus is integral to their [and her] procreative aims. It is valuable to them because having a child is an important desire of theirs” (Porter 2015, 66). This ontic assumption of childbearing is another kind of alienation from meaningful possibilities, because all meaning of pregnant embodiment rests on the production of a child. Here is where I find the disconnect (the razor’s edge) embedded in the promotion of the “successful pregnancy,” such that even reproduction as a production renders the force of her need to be a productive (read: valuable) member of society. Yet when pregnancy



Introduction xiii

leads to normative outcomes of childbearing, at the same time, any alternative to this expectation of outcome is rendered unthinkable and becomes read as a most undesirable situation, fundamentally “unspoken.” Analogous to the alienation found in wage work, the productive pregnancy can alienate me from my individual power for collective action—finding myself as a woman among women in having been pregnant—now isolated each from the other. Similarly, in the way that one might think having a job gives one status and protects social standing, it is an artificially induced and manufactured division from those unemployed (yet the harder I work, the more I might desire the alienation than the overcoming of it; I believe myself to have found myself in the productivity). Hilde Lindemann (2015, 80) acknowledges this as a kind of “plot” and states that “master narratives . . . serve as hermeneutical resources” and the bearing of the child becomes integral to the story: “The baby is wanted.” She notes how “many aspects [of her pregnancy] are [now] purposeful,” by “calling the fetus into personhood” (82–83). Iris Marion Young (2005) writes that one of the most important instruments to the advancement of the entanglement—the “plot”—of childbearing with pregnancy is the ultrasound image.6 It is often the catalyst for the wanted pregnancy, a sign of the fetus, but also part of the setup in which women can fail and in which women may come to grieve. This is why I cannot attend to grief psychologically because I provide no therapeutic relief in this project: I only describe what labor and work must now be required, what leads to its onset and its sustenance. I will defend the idea that grief must be grappled with, as labor-intensive, or else it further entangles us in the plot of pregnant productivity. I will add to this reading an active critique of the idea that the bearing of children is an “accomplishment” because it is attached to the master narrative of neoliberal ideology. Pregnancy, whichever way it goes, when in the function of a misogynist and neoliberal culture, with its corresponding mechanisms and affectations, is a trap, a setup. The failed or unwanted pregnancy becomes a “woman problem,” or, worse, “her fault.” So here I plan to shut that idea down. Maybe the outcome of this, as it is an experimental project, will be that we do not continue to be divided by paternal and neoliberal interests to play our part in the master narrative of productive pregnancy; perhaps instead solidarity will be found with the woman who has miscarried, as she might recog-

xiv

Introduction

nize herself in the woman who has aborted her pregnancy, and again each with the woman who has “successfully” given birth. NOTES 1.  It is fairly recently that the first academic dissertation was delivered as a graphic novel. See Sousanis 2015. 2.  Hardy and Kukla (2015, 109) describe this connection better than I do: “The Internet provides an unprecedented and dizzying source of communities united by common experiences, as well as equally unprecedented tools for creating new communities. Women are using these new resources to find ways of getting uptake for and giving shape to narratives that were previously resistant to articulation.” 3.  I note this in quotes because pregnancy loss is code for miscarriage and stillbirth, but in this project I will argue that all pregnancies lead to a kind of loss—an emptying out of the situation. 4. To this point, Lindemann (2015, 89) states that sometimes we must “leave unspoken the stories that are too painful for her to tell. Some sorrows go too deep for words, and others are too fragmentary or chaotic or fleeting to be captured by words.” 5.  I call it expellation because of the additional quality to pregnancy superseding the physiological “expulsion” given to all pregnancy and how medicine might define the phenomena of pregnancy and “postpartum.” Expellation here includes the phenomenological content of possibility and expectation that comes along with the event of pregnancy termination and independent of fetal status. 6.  In her 2003 postscript to “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation” discussed in part III (and published in Young 2005).

Part I

Miscarriage or Abortion? (Or, #shoutingmyabortion in a Graphic Novel)

This story begins as a cis-white-het dream . . .

My story is a common one but not often told. I waited until I was married, with a Ph.D., in a tenuretrack job. We even bought a white house (but no picket fence) of our very own. 1|

1



Part I

When I got pregnant, we were happy but naive.

I was also in the best shape of my life.

I felt good. 2|



Miscarriage or Abortion?

When we went in for our six week visit and during the ultrasound, the doctor gave me a look. I’m sorry, but . . .

. . . it’s a blighted ovum. He said that if I don’t spontaneously miscarry we would need to remove it. 3|

Part I



We headed home dazed and confused. Also, we were very, very sad.

(I wondered if I could get pregnant again.)

We stopped for lots of comfort food.

We had to go home. 4|

Sitting on the back bumper in the parking lot . . . The

began.

Miscarriage or Abortion?



I spent lots of time in bed or bleeding into the toilet. 5|

Part I



I was on my own. [My husband had to go back to work.]

It’s not like somebody died or anything . . .

Still lots of pain & blood. I was told it might even feel like labor, including going through some post-partum symptoms.

6|

Miscarriage or Abortion?



We went to the E.R. (because there was so much blood) … This should not hurt.

As I bled, with the wand, the doctor saw no evidence of my pregnancy.

So, I went home. 7|

Part I



And I went back to work (I was only a few weeks on the job).

I cut off all of my hair to donate it to Locks of Love. I looked almost like a different person with short hair. 8|

Miscarriage or Abortion?



A privilege that is not a privilege. When I told my closest friends, I discovered how many also had miscarriages.

Even family, though we had not really talked about it before.

Even if it was a long time ago, they were still were sad. 9|

Part I



The olidays were a bit tough.

I wasn’t sure if I could have children.

I found out at one party that our close friend was pregnant with her first girl. I was

so happy for her.

She had been through so much.

But sobbed uncontrollably in the car on the way home. 10 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



What I did not know is that I was already pregnant.

G was a beautiful baby girl.

11 |

Part I



My pregnancy was successful.’

I bled a lot for the first three months. I gained lots of weight. I was terrified but the baby was okay.

12 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



We did Lamaze.

It was a natural [read: VAGINAL]

birth. I even breastfed.

And a few months later . . . 13 |

Part I



My blighted ovum’ was not meant to be.

14 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



My daughter was only a few months old when, at my sister’s house, enjoying the first grandbaby,’

I did not feel good and went to the bathroom. 15 |

Part I



There was a lot of blood and large black clots (so much so)

I almost passed out. 16 |



Miscarriage or Abortion?

I was pregnant again!

17 |

Part I



The calendar became important.

Counting back weeks . . .

Q: How far along are you?

Q: When was your last period?

Q: How many pregnancies have you had?

I don’t remember. 18 |

I just had a baby!

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Still bleeding. . . Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 During the night I was waking up to blood-soaked bedsheets.

There were clots . . .

I started sleeping on chux. 19 |

Part I



You will need to be on bedrest. You will need to take it easy. We will have to wait & see. This happens to many women. 20 |

Lots of writing on the chart.

6+ wks. . .

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Regular Doctor Visits: Appointment Card

July 12 2016 am 1:00 pm Appointment July Card 12 2016 am 2016 11:30 pm July 12

Taking regular pregnancy tests to reassure myself . . .

Appointment Card

1:00

am

And then the ultrasound.

pm

My doctor had moved offices and took on a partner. The partner did the ultrasounds. At 8 wks., just as the bleeding started to wane. . . 21 |

Part I



My OB’s partner pushed down on my belly so hard that I winced. I cried out: I’ve been bleeding a lot. Please don’t push so hard.

22 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Please get dressed and we can talk in my office.

He ripped off a printout from the machine. He handed me an image of a baby.

Thanks,” I said. 23 |

Part I



I tried to

They can

hand him

all look alike,

back the image.

right?

No, that is yours.

This is someone else’s ultrasound. I don’t think this is mine.

Sorry. [In hindsight: why the FUCK was I apologizing?] 24 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



25 |

Part I



Reception

As soon as I left the exam room, and stepped into the office waiting room, I felt a rush of blood coming down my legs.

26 |

Examination

Restroom

Miscarriage or Abortion?



[He saw the look on my face when I came out of the doctor’s office.] 27 |

My husband kept knocking on the bathroom door.

People in the waiting room could hear us.

Are you okay? No. No. I don’t think I’m okay.

Part I



28 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Ultrasounds do not cause bleeding, miss. If you still have an issue tomorrow, call the office. Go home and rest. 29 |

Part I



So, we did.

It did not go well. 30 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



12

By 7:30am, the next morning, it was clear that I was bleeding too much.

6

I also started passing clots

again. Okay . . .

We called the OB’s service. They said to meet her at the office at 9am. 31 |

Part I



Examination

Reception

We were there exactly 9am.

And we waited . . .

32 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



(...) and waited. I knew I was bleeding badly. I’m sorry miss, but you will have to sit down and wait for the doctor. She has other patients this morning and will see you when she can. You need to calm down and be patient.

But I think I have been patient. I’m really bleeding now. I think I am miscarrying. My wife is not feeling good and needs a doctor now, please. 33 |

Part I



Finally, the doctor emerged.

Meet me at the hospital. 34 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



At least now I’m in the hospital.

35 |

Part I



A midwife came to help out. The baby is still there.

I’ll call your doctor for permission.

Yes.”

Sure.”

Whatever you say.”

36 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Perhaps there was a lot going on . . .

I knew to look away when getting a needle.

The nurse could not get in the vein. Had another nurse try again. She dropped the mechanism for the needle on the floor, and made a sound like ughooh.” Then I heard liquid hitting the floor.

37 |

Part I



Look away . . .

Look away.

38 |



Miscarriage or Abortion?

Don’t look right now. We are cleaning you up.

Like a series of unfortunate events ...

The nurse(s) had accidentally missed my vein and I was bleeding on the floor.

But it was OKAY. They had put the fetal monitor on so that I heard a heartbeat.

39 |

Part I



The midwife returned with results that indicated there were gene mutations (or bleeding dispositions) saying something about clotting factors (?).

Two Issues: 1. Prothrombin gene mutation The second most common cause of thrombophilia in the United States.”

2. MTHFR gene mutation (we dubbed it the Mother Fucker Gene): associated with elevated homocysteine levels.”

40 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



So, the midwife called my doctor to let her know that she was going to show me how to inject heparin.*

*Hmmm . . . If heparin is a blood thinner, and I’ve been bleeding for a few weeks now, is this a good idea? … But I also don’t want to have a stroke or thrombosis.

41 |

Part I



So they showed me how:

I am really bad at this.

42 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Here’s the thing about timelines:

I think I went home after the heparin lesson. And if I did, I can’t remember exactly what came after . . .

There was construction going on in the house. My daughter was just learning to walk. I have memories of injecting heparin in our dining room that was converted into a kitchen.

Oh yeah, and they told me I could no longer breastfeed. 43 |

Baby gates everywhere.

Lots of microwaved food.

Part I



And I kept bleeding.

44 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



I was admitted into the hospital.

I miss you, my little girl.

I was there for about 10 days. I spent most of it on my own since my family was taking care of my daughter and my husband could not take off from work. 45 |

Part I



I remember throwing up a lot because it was difficult to digest food while lying down. Hospital Food (and I was semivegetarian too.) 46 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Many nights on my own.

I do remember celebrating that my husband’s cousin got to carry the Irish flag in the Olympics. Seeing her made me so proud.

I got to watch on the television of my hospital room for only $5 per day. 47 |

Part I



I had been in for so long that my hospital roommate

Leg Compression machine

and I wept openly because she too had been on bed rest for quite a long time. I don’t remember if I saw her face. 48 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



There came a point where I had smelled so bad from all the shit & blood that the nurses offered me a sponge bath.

I’m sure they meant well. Just pretend you’re at the salon.” 49 |

Part I



Trying to make small talk, one of the nurses admitted that she was a student visiting. When she asked me about myself, I revealed that I was a teacher. At the local college …

I stared at the wall.

Really? Where?

Oh wow! I start there in the fall!

I wept as they washed me. 50 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



At one point, the hematologist came to tell me:

Enough with the heparin.

At another point, my OB admitted:

We can do little for you. Either he will stay or he will go. That was in response to my question:

Is my baby okay? 51 |

I just don’t know.

Part I



DESPAIR comes easy in a hospital room. Well, good morning to you!

I’m sorry,

what?

Why would you come into my room loudly stating good morning’ to me like that? I’ve been bleeding for months and might lose my baby!

52 |

Oh, my. I’m so sorry. I’m just a student nurse in to check your vitals. I didn’t realize . . .

Miscarriage or Abortion?



The head nurse came in to apologize.

I’m so sorry about that. We are a teaching hospital, so our students are still learning how to handle patients. I hope you understand. Now I’m a monster. A smelly, disgusting incubator of a monster.

53 |

Of course.

Part I



Release Kd;j uhg sib rhbnsp bfb subfjnb sngj gsgyn jnh s Kd;j uhg sib rhbnsp bfb subfjnb Kd;j uhgsngj gsgyn sib rhbnsp jnh s bfb subfjnb sngj gsgyn jnh s

Signature

Date

Around this time, my doctor thought it best that I go home for bed rest. I had been stable enough, even though I was still bleeding -- but it was better to be in bed at home. 54 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Bedrest: This meant in bed on the upper floor. Close to a toilet.*

*See Gilbert & Gubar’s The

Madwoman in the Attic (Yale UP, 2000).

55 |

Part I



56 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



wild

She was a little girl! Sometimes she was too active,

57 |



Part I

What we did not know at the time (but now do know) is that my daughter was on the autism spectrum. Not quite able to express herself, she would scream and cry without her routine.

58 |

So I would sit on the stairs to check on her.

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Please go back upstairs. I’ve got this.

Please?

It is incredibly difficult to watch someone else take care of your child.

59 |



Part I

Somewhere in this story (before bedrest? after bedrest?) . . .

I got to walk to the store with my daughter and sang Old MacDonald. She made all the animal sounds. 60 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



The bleeding had slowed and it came time for a visit to the specialist to see how the pregnancy was going . . . how the baby was doing.

*

Would I be going back to work? *the halfway mark! 61 |

Part I



Oooh, fancy . . .

Television monitors on the wall to project ultrasound images.

Mom came with me. 62 |



Miscarriage or Abortion?

There he was. Mom & I marveled at the sight of him. The tech was very quiet. 63 |

Part I



64 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



I’ve seen that look once before and I would see it once again after = the look’ a doctor gives you when they are worried. 65 |



Part I

Unfortunately, your situation is very serious because you have been bleeding for so long, the condition of your pregnancy is very quickly deteriorating.

You are probably going into D.I.C. 66 |

Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Here, you need to speak to her.

I’m so sorry but you must terminate this pregnancy immediately. I will have a special surgeon call you tonight to make an arrangement. 67 |

I cannot do this procedure myself because it is too complicated. You will need to go to his clinic. Be prepared for tomorrow, because you need surgery right away.

Part I



You know you need to call him right away. I know, ma. I can’t think just yet. I saw him move. Maybe I could wait.

Let me just get outside. 68 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



It was bright & sunny outside. Cars were parked neatly in the lot. I fumbled for my phone to call my husband.

69 |

Part I



70 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



The doctor said I have to terminate right away. He said the baby is being crushed by a big clot and that I have bled for too long . . .

. . . and that I have to terminate or else I could die.

71 |

Just come home.

Part I



I was told to call the specialist right away. ________ I couldn’t. I didn’t.

72 |



Miscarriage or Abortion?

He called me instead.

You must do this right away. You might not last the night. 73 |



Part I

You will go to the hospital for prep. From there, I will drive you to my clinic myself – it is not far – and we will go in through the back entrance.

Why can’t I just go to the hospital?

Yes, well, I have all of the equipment I need – I can explain more tomorrow morning – and your doctor cannot do an operation like this. Please trust that I know what I’m doing but that I won’t have my team and all of my equipment at the hospital.

Okay. See you tomorrow. 74 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Lots of quiet prep that night. Watching my daughter,

enjoying her.

75 |

Part I



Early in the morning, we went to the hospital. Mom had my daughter for the day and maybe our life would no longer be on hold. Knowing was a bit easier than waiting & guessing.

76 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



And I was trying to save my life.

77 |

Part I



He was known as a boy wonder’ – only because he looked so young. He sat on the windowsill and laid out my options ...

( ) He drank Red Bull®

After we arrived at the hospital, it was decided that I would stay the night to observe me, then I would go to the clinic in the morning.

I think they wanted to make sure I was ready. 78 |

Or, there was a debate with the doctors about my case.

I will never know.

Miscarriage or Abortion?



So you know, anyone looking at this ultrasound would know that this is not a viable situation. You can see it here and here.

(But I could not see what he could see.)

Option A:

We are going to do a D&E’ --

a dilation and evacuation. You are 19 weeks, so it could be a bit delicate in your case. Quick recovery.

Option B:

One complication may be that your

uterus does not contract after the procedure and then we will need to provide additional medication and observation. You won’t necessarily need a hysterectomy.

Option C:

You uterus may be

damaged either

from this pregnancy or become so from the procedure; in this situation, we will perform a hysterectomy. 79 |



Part I

I was not offered* an opportunity to hold’ him afterward . . . At this point, I was about 19 weeks, 5 days.

So, that may have not been a bad thing.

*at 20 weeks this would have been considered a prohibitive procedure.’

But I started to experience chest pains.

We asked for an E.K.G. (just in case). 80 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



After the E.K.G., the nurses reassured me that there was nothing wrong with my heart. They asked the doctor to prescribe Ambien® so I could sleep.

81 |



Part I

As the sun set, my family waited with me in a private room.

82 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



My OB came by to check on me.

How is she doing? Can I buy you dinner?

I’m right here.

He really is a very good surgeon. She is in good hands.” 83 |

Part I



Maybe you should take that Ambien® now.

What made it harder was that I could still feel him move – but only a few times. I had to say goodbye. 84 |



Miscarriage or Abortion?

My family reported to me later that I called the nurses complaining that I was very cold and needed more blankets.

I have no memory of this. I was blacked out on Ambien®.

85 |

Part I



The next morning the boy wonder was there to personally drive me to the clinic.

My husband could meet me in the afternoon. 86 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Are you comfortable? We are just down the road.

It was strange to have my doctor – not my husband – driving me.

87 |

Part I



I felt well enough to walk into the clinic with the doctor (through the parking garage).

I undressed and got into a medical gown.

The nurse did a final ultrasound but I did not look at the monitor. 88 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Hi. I’m the anesthesiologist.

You should feel the needle, then you should count from ninety backwards.

Okay?

89 |

Part I



As I woke, I was walked to recovery.

They put me in the recovery chairs. I was twilighting. 90 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



As I recovered in a recliner,

91 |

Part I



Are you okay? I think I am. I really needed to be here. I was almost 7 weeks. I cannot have a baby.

I just can’t.

She paused. I don’t want to be with this guy and I just joined the police academy and my parents are so proud of me now that I can take care of myself. I mean, what else could I do? I couldn’t have a child now.! I’m just glad I could do this.

I couldn’t stay pregnant anymore. 92 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Q: Didn’t I just survive’ my pregnancy? But she needed to survive as well.

And I felt an amazing solidarity with this young woman next to me. And I thought: Her situation is not different than mine.

How is the fact that I wanted my baby and she did not make us

different?

I did not think her situation different because I needed to be here too. 93 |

Part I



As the doctor discharged me, he said:

So you know, he had already died before we started the procedure.

The umbilical cord had prolapsed.

94 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



My husband was waiting for me. He did not look okay.

Wait here. I have to get the car across the street.

No, it’s okay. I can wait for you outside. I don’t think I quite understood where I was. 95 |

Part I



While he ran across to get the car ...

I decided to go outside to wait.

96 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



As I leaned on this wall, an older woman came up and began to address me.

You know,

God wants you to save your baby.

I hope you made the right choice today. That baby’s life does not deserve to be destroyed. WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

GET AWAY FROM ME. I HAD NO CHOICE! GET AWAY FROM ME. 97 |

Part I



Please get away from me. I don’t need your help.

Get the FUCK away from her.

You know what you did hurts all of us.

98 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



I felt horrified by the way the woman thought that she could say to me what she did and yet knew nothing about my situation. Then I thought of the woman next to me in recovery and found an even deeper connection to her -- even yet,

defensive of her. My husband kept calling the older woman a fucking cunt.’ I didn’t mind and I didn’t correct him. 99 |

Part I



My mom and sisters were waiting for me.

Hi. How do you feel?

Are you hungry? Can I make you something to eat?

I’m alright. I need to go lay down. I would like a peanut butter & jelly sandwich, actually. 100 |



Miscarriage or Abortion?

I think I am bleeding again.

I felt like I had failed. 101 |



Part I

My sister went over the discharge sheet with me.

I had started bleeding quite a bit. 102 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



My mom brought me a peanut butter & jelly sandwich.

It was SO good. I remember eating it in slow motion. You okay? I really don’t like how you look. Are you bleeding a lot? Are you sure you’re okay? [The sandwich came with questions.] 103 |

Part I



Why are you sitting at the end of my bed? [My sister]

I don’t know. I just wanted to watch you. Tell me about your sandwich. 104 |

Mmmm.

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Can you open your eyes and tell me how you are feeling?

Um, weird . . . I’m fine. Glad I ate. Why? Do I sound weird?

[And they said to return immediately.]

This saved my life. 105 |

Part I



So my husband took me back to the clinic.

Please take it easy. It is okay.

On the way back, I kept questioning whether or not it was necessary. I wasn’t in pain. My feeling was that maybe nothing was wrong.

The looks on my family’s faces said otherwise. 106 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



The woman in reception took one look at me. She called the nurses and doctors to

come get me STAT.’ But I remember the faces of the other women in the clinic looking at me -- including what looked like a mom with her teenage daughter.

107 |

Part I



108 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Sir, please wait in the waiting room.

Miss, in the wheelchair, please.

Please get her on the monitor. I need to see what is going on. Can you keep your eyes open for me? 109 |

Part I



There was boy wonder. I thought to myself:

I’m fucked. 110 |

Once he got to look inside, he turned and gave me the look.’



Miscarriage or Abortion?

It seems that your uterus did not contract and is filling with blood.

Yes, well, B,’ but

So that is Option B,’ right? Please B? Not C’, right?

it seems that you are also going into

D.I.C.’*

We will need to contract your uterus, stop the bleeding, and you will need to go to the hospital for a transfusion. We might save your uterus.

What I did see: pink water’* on the floor as I was bleeding openly now. *As in: Her blood looks like water.’ See Willing and Unable (L. Freedman, Vanderbilt UP, 2010, pp. 166-67, nt. 6). 111 |

Part I



I’m the anesthesiologist. Did you eat anything? I can’t Oh, no. put you As I recovered in Really? under.a recliner, You can aspirate peanut butter. If you had had anything but peanut butter . . . 112 |

Yes, a PB & J sandwich.

Why?

Fucking peanut butter!



Miscarriage or Abortion?

I was awake for the procedure.

113 |

. . . did I realize it was me.

Part I



I asked the nurse to apply pressure between my eyes. It was very comforting and she was quite obliging.

114 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



I always imagined the packing as swirls of gauze . . .

But it felt like a giant pillow shoved into my private parts (in a good way?). It was the first time in almost five months that I was not 115 |

bleeding . . .

Part I



Meanwhile,

My husband was in the waiting room when the ambulance showed up. He knew it was for me but did not know why. He later said that he thought I was dying.

116 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



When I got to the hospital E.R., the pressure from my bladder was incredible so they gave me a catheter. At one point, a nurse snarked: Well, you’re a very stable emergency’ patient. 117 |

Part I



There seemed to be a lot of hallway discussion of my case.

Not quite audible, but I was happy that I did not need a hysterectomy and that I was alive. 118 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Everyone came and met me at the hospital, even my dad.

I think he was trying to be lighthearted, but a storm was brewing. 119 |

Part I



I needed four pints of blood. 120 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



I spent the night in the hospital. 121 |

I also got to take home a prescription of Valium (aka, Diazepam tablets).



Part I

When I got home my family was there -now also my sister-in-law, who came to help.

There was enough food for a party or a wake. My dad had bought out As my husband says: my dad broke the supermarket. out the Italian.’ 122 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Everything was as if through a tunnel.

Lots of family. Some wanting to talk about it. Or not wanting to talk about it. 123 |

COSTCO.

I debated whether or not to take the Valium.

COSTCO.



Part I

Things started to sink in.

Grief started to overwhelm me.

I was not able to sleep. I was having vivid nightmares. 124 |



Miscarriage or Abortion?

(feeling)

I was again condemned to my room. I could hear everyone downstairs. My husband and father went out back and drank wine. 125 |



Part I

As it got late, my mom and sisters left, my sister-in-law had the spare bed and my dad had too much to drink.

In the backyard, my husband was buffering me from

what my father could not reconcile. Why did she go there? Why wasn’t she in the hospital? They could have killed her.

She should not have gone there.

126 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



I had never tried Valium before.

(actually, nothing stronger than Aleve®) but I decided that I needed to sleep and not to dream.*

I took one pill. *Although, there have been studies that question the use of sedatives and sleep aids after traumatic experiences and that, instead, it becomes a way for negative memories to consolidate’ themselves, leaving one at greater risk for PTSD . . . 127 |



Part I

I laid in bed staring at the ceiling light as it got weird looking.

I could hear my dad watching television downstairs. 128 |



Miscarriage or Abortion?

He insisted on watching the Republican convention live.

A Culture of Life.’’ [I only knew that McCain had taken on Palin as an antiabortion conservative. I

was frightened by what I might hear.] 129 |



Part I

Can’t I ask him not to watch this?

Of course you can! After what you went through? But my dad was also distraught. He often expressed his feelings through anger and defensiveness.

I knew if I asked him to change it, it would not go well. 130 |



Miscarriage or Abortion?

Dad, could you please not watch this? Anything but this?

I can’t listen to politics right now.

Are you telling me I can’t watch this? I just want to see this and you can’t understand that? I want to watch that stupid woman Palin –- that’s all. Why do you have to listen? Go back upstairs then

if you don’t want to hear this.

131 |

Part I



FINE. Then I’ll just leave.

It’s FiNE. You don’t want me here. I’ll go.

No, I didn’t say that! No, please, dad.

My husband added:

Don’t go. You’ve had too much to drink.

Stop. Are you okay? The more I pleaded with him, the angrier (guiltier?) he got. I started to get dizzy and hyperventilate. 132 |



Miscarriage or Abortion?

My dad and husband argued in the driveway that night. They cursed at each other but my husband convinced him to stay. 133 |



Part I

I went back to bed after my sister-in-law (who was horrified by all of this) got me to calm down. I talked to my mother on the phone (still high on Valium) until about 2 a.m.

My dad left first thing in the morning.

134 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



My nightmares included a reoccurring dream of my daughter running into the street

and getting crushed by a car. A couple of times I woke to my own screaming. 135 |

Part I



G’s first birthday was less than two weeks away.

We also discovered that she was getting sound sensitive. She would go

completely non-verbal and get distressed anytime anyone sang Old MacDonald.

[She still won’t discuss it to this day.] 136 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Days passed . . .

Medical bills started to arrive. I asked someone else to teach my classes until I decided to return.

I wasn’t sick but I wasn’t well. 137 |



Part I

my father.

138 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



I tried to enjoy my daughter but every day was a weight on top of me. 139 |

Part I



Just no pictures. I have to just make it to the party.

I could fit none of my clothes except the maternity ones. I still looked pregnant so I did not leave the house.

I conceded to having my dad come to the party. This made it more stressful. [I had planned to go to work after the party, even though I could barely function.] 140 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



My little

sister

told me about grief baking,’ and how she made cookies, cakes, pies, and breads when her cat died.

She said it helped . . . the part [except where she ran out of flour].

141 |



Part I

So, I had committed myself to baking and then carving a giant birthdaycake version of my daughter’s favorite television show character.

My grief cake.’ 142 |



Miscarriage or Abortion?

I actually do not remember much. I was numb and avoiding feeling anything. 143 |

Part I



R

Depression After Miscarriage Can Linger March 3, 2011 -- Feelings of depression and anxiety following a miscarriage may last for almost three years after [and even with] the [subsequent] birth of a healthy baby . . .

Health providers and women themselves think that once they have a healthy baby after a loss, all will be fine and that any anxiety, fears, or depression would go away, but that is simply not the case.’ Among the women who had one previous miscarriage or stillbirth, 13% were still experiencing symptoms of depression almost three years later, and about 19% of women who had two previous pregnancy losses were still depressed after 33 months, the study showed. 144 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Sorry to hear about what happened.

When I went back to work, it was awkward and business as usual. I had daily panic attacks.

Thanks 145 |

.

Part I



I had begun to experience insomnia from the nightmares. One night, I found myself down the road in my pajamas longing for a car to run me over.

I realized I needed help. 146 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



And with my first period, a strange tissue’ appeared:

WTF?

147 |

Part I



I brought it to my OB and asked her to test it.* She did not seemed pleased and reluctantly agreed. *It was deciduous’ tissue . . .

She also gave me a prescription for a low-dose anti-depressant.

148 |



Miscarriage or Abortion?

I was actually against medicating myself. I had already felt like a failure, because I was associating the meds with a kind of defeat.’

149 |



Part I

I went to a therapist specializing in grief and depression from pregnancy loss. Along with encouraging me to try the medication, she suggested a local support group. 150 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



You continue to theorize [read: overthink] your experience and I’m not really sure that it is helping your progress.

But I am trying to process all of this and also trying to

function ... Well, then, I would recommend you take the medication prescribed. You know it is working when it does not feel like it is working.* 151 |

*To be fair, I had heard this from a few other people too.



Part I

My husband and I attended bi-weekly meetings of a pregnancy loss support group (for couples). 152 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



There were positives from going to this group:

1. My husband and I got to talk about what happened and spend some time together because otherwise we hadn’t (and really needed to). He would open up in group even though whenever we were going he would swear: I’m not saying anything tonight.’

2.

153 |

Hearing other stories helped me confront this (mistaken and haunting) feeling of failure. Although the feeling was real, it was reasonable and common among the women (and, surprisingly, their partners as well).

Part I



3.

Every story was different and seemed important:

In one case:

Another case:

Comparatively:

She had so many miscarriages and no children. She would ask us: Am I a mother?’ She would light candles daily for each of her losses.

One family had a photo album of their still-born infant dressed as if just sleeping. They brought it in for us to see. One woman came to group but her partner often could not. I was grateful for the support I had, but really recognized the deep loneliness that comes with experience.

Her courage kept her returning (read: surviving). 154 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



But there were negatives too:

1.

We all came together out of grief -- sometimes not gelling’ and bonding, but advising, dismissing and (nearly) insulting each other. The tension was quite

draining.

2.

It did not necessarily feel like progress’ to go to these meetings.

My husband and I would get coffee or pizza afterwards just to recoup’ from the horrors heard that session. In an attempt to bond outside of the group, 3.I started email correspondence with one woman. When I told her about my [real] ideas about loss, she stopped speaking to me. It might have also been because I was one of the people that already had a child. 155 |

Part I



Could I do a phenomenology of miscarriage? Uh, I can’t really talk about it like this . . . I’ve got to go.

Most of the questions I raised:

Q: What is the role of the medical doctors and professionals in medical care?

Q: Shouldn’t pregnancy be more meaningful than just having a baby’?

Q: Shouldn’t we defend pregnant women everywhere -- no matter what their choices –- from the judgments* of others? * especially condemnations, microaggressions, paternalism, etc. 156 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Around this time, the meds were starting to work. Everything I experienced felt like I was watching it through a windshield. 157 |

Part I



I spent Thanksgiving with my friend instead of family (& my father).

158 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



But I also did not realize or pay attention to her (and my husband’s/daughter’s/mother’s/students’/colleagues’) issues.*

The loss and the recovery of my self became the center of my concerns. My husband and I decided to go to Ireland for the New Year. (Emotionally, I skipped Christmas altogether.) * I found out four months later that in that same Thanksgiving visit, my friend found herself in the depths of an abusive relationship. I had no idea. 159 |

Part I



We would be in Dublin at the same time as my original due date. I didn’t realize it until we were already there. 160 |



Miscarriage or Abortion?

Also at the time of the original due date, I broke out in a strange rash.

It’s Lichen Planus. You do not have Hepatitis C,* and there is no other known cause. It may be autoimmune. Are you under stress?’ * Associated as one of the causes for which I had been tested. Related to my transfusions? 161 |

Part I



Yes, yes, baby girl.

What now?

What do you want now?

Taking care of G was tough.

She was mostly non-verbal often screaming when she needed something. She didn’t say mommy yet. 162 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



At the same time, I kept fighting for my self

. . . psychologically, personally, professionally. . .

I gave a talk on miscarriage at a conference on pregnancy and childbearing. During the Q&A:

Sorry [not sorry], but what does miscarriage have to do with philosophy? 163 |

Part I



One of my fellow panelists discussed making pregnancy losses visible through tattooing.

The other panelist had done a long-term study with families after pregnancy loss. Part of her presentation included a drawing by a boy who would say that his baby brother was an angel.’ His name was Connor –- the name we had originally chosen for our baby.

Two amazing points from the latter presentation that stayed with me.

A: That the fathers grieved differently, taking much longer (up to 10 years) to confront the loss. B: That children born after pregnancy loss often went into care-taker professions and were generally intuitively caring people. 164 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



It was the first and only time I had wept openly at an academic conference

and I was on the panel.

My fellow panelists and some audience members wept too.

The experience was empowering yet humbling. 165 |

Part I



There were other moments when I began to feel like I could redeem myself. I found out about what happened to you

and I’ve had pregnancy losses as well. I ‘m so sorry for how I treated you.

Thank you. 166 |

The receptionist who left me waiting in the OB office called to apologize.

Miscarriage or Abortion?



Around the same time, I found out that my OB had moved back to her old office.

I wondered if it was related. 167 |



Part I

When we finally made the time for each other, I discovered that my husband had been emotionally shut down –as if I had actually died.

But I’m still here. 168 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



We had to start over.

We had a daughter to raise.

We had to decide whether we were going to try again.

169 |

Part I



And we tried again. I came to terms with the idea that my husband

might have to raise our daughter alone. 170 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



I went to one of the best prenatal specialists in the city.

The doctor recommended genetic counseling.’ The counselor’ recommended an amniocentesis. The statistics for genetic anomalies made refusing difficult and the pregnancy scarier. But we refused. 171 |



Part I

When I got to the halfway point (at least one week past my other pregnancy), the specialist transferred me to a local OB stating that I was a low risk (no longer a high risk) pregnancy.

I had gotten so heavy that the weight of the pregnancy laid on my diaphragm. I had to sleep sitting up on the couch. In the week before my second daughter was born, I went to the hospital for breathing problems. 172 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



The new OB shamed me often about what I ate and how much I weighed.

173 |

Part I



One of the most liberating moments of this pregnancy was knowing that this was my last one. Consent for Sterilization

I signed the form to permit sterilization after my C-section operation. 174 |

Miscarriage or Abortion?



And little Chi was born. She was healthy but I took a very long time to recover. The doctors were sure to joke as they did my tubal ligation: You want me to do just the one ovary, right?’ I didn’t get that it was a joke until they laughed with each other while I was still open on the operating table. 175 |

Part II

An Interlude on Philosophical Allegory

WHAT “COUNTS” AS PHILOSOPHY? As I lay on the operating table, immediately following my C-section, having just kissed my newborn daughter (but unable to touch her) as she was whisked off to be monitored and measured, the doctors standing over my open abdomen paused before they began the tubal ligation that I had—due to a difficult history with pregnancy—voluntarily requested. Through the surgical mask, my obstetrician asked, “You want me to do just the one ovary, right?” In my haze, I panicked. The idea of chancing pregnancy after making it to this delivery, at that moment, had me beside myself. Before I could respond, he and his partner began to laugh. It was just a joke. Since, I have found any attempt at contextualizing this “joke” difficult. So, too, the question I had been asked at a conference on pregnancy: “What does miscarriage have to do with philosophy?” Confronted by this question, without hesitating, I responded that philosophy had everything to do with what is left unsaid and the not-quite-spoken-for reality of things, and the work requires that we are willing to dangerously confront what is not given to the usual assumptions and everyday ideas. As Maxine Greene argues in “What Counts as Philosophy of Education?” (1995, 7), “to create ‘what counts,’ educational philosophers have to discover their own intertextuality, extend their minds towards the horizons, shape and reshape their traditions. In the shaping, in the interpretation, in the reflection, the questions will multiply. Posing questions, loving the 177

178

Part II

questions, philosophers may open whatever doors there are.” Ever since, I have continued to ask myself “whether miscarriage counts,” such that, were I asked again, I might make a case for miscarriage as philosophically significant. At the conference that day, the presentations given on the panel on miscarriage were all about making the invisible visible1 and about sustaining and substantiating personal narratives about loss, which is why I was astonished that he—whoever he was in the audience who asked this question—didn’t “hear” (should I say “hearken to”?) what seemed to me to be obviously at stake. We were venturing on slippery terrain, unusual at an academic conference, no doubt,2 but I had assumed that “doors were being opened” and the preconceptions about pregnancy challenged, but not without great difficulty. Bringing to bear a truth about the reality of miscarriage was not in question, because it was and has remained for the most part unaddressed and unacknowledged. But, in hindsight, perhaps he did us all a favor by asking the question that comes out of the privilege of ignorance. The favor was simply that the case still might need to be made as to how miscarriage counts as a philosophically important matter. Few philosophers in their work directly deal with critically thinking about, grappling with, and shifting perspective on the meaning of the “failed pregnancy,” even if they may have dealt with and experienced it personally. To begin new conversations about pregnant embodiment that are also transformative (a literacy in phenomena that is not par for the course) and, more important, that are framed in a way so as to think the unthinkable while remaining free of the ideologies and indoctrinations about motherhood, femininity, and the politics of pro-life—all of this was no easy endeavor. What might make this particular project more philosophically significant is that my personal narrative might function as allegorical instruction. Following Greene (1995, 17), whatever counts for philosophy must be for the sake of formulating “queer questions” that take “into account a variety of narratives and entangled language games.” That the function of women has predominantly been considered a reproductive one has done women no favors, and often women find themselves placing (or feel that they need to place) their value in the work of producing children. I would hope to liberate women from some of this compulsory childbearing as well as give hearing to women’s voices that have been silenced by pregnant experiences that did not equal or exemplify the expectations of “making babies.”



An Interlude on Philosophical Allegory 179

This interlude is meant to function as a conceptual glue—bonding the narrative with the interpretive theory that follows. This does not mean that the project at hand will cohere; this overall work is suggestive in the accidental and intentional juxtapositions, which can themselves be provocations to questioning and thinking through the reality in relation to possibility. I was attracted to what could be described as Walter Benjamin’s favor of allegory over symbol (Hansen 2004, 669), in that allegory could be an effective tool to “refashion important dominant narratives” as it “blasts open the commodity form” (Joseph 2012, 70, 81). In this case, pregnancy symbolizes only what the neoliberal project has designed for it, such that women are set up; a neoliberal society validates only results. If one cannot meet the desired outcomes and expectations in a way that resonates as normal and natural, the response is fundamentally ableist. The entrenchment of ableism3 surrounding pregnant embodiment is further complicated by the sexist, racist, homophobic, and misogynistic connotations that accompany it. This, I figured, was the context for the doctors’ joke, laying it in the lap of an unquestioned neoliberal cultural and social economy. Neoliberalism is at the heart of all demands to “get over it” (whatever “it” may be) and “move on.” Neoliberalism weaves itself into the perception of failure in my pregnancies and frames me for having survived my pregnancies, part and parcel of the ultimate failure in expectation for pregnant embodiment, conditioned by our shame and blame culture. Neoliberalism makes their joke so very funny in the hypothetical tyingoff one ovary and “saving the other,” and, although the stuff of disempowerment for me, it is an affirmation of their authority as clinicians— so, hardy-har-har, the joke is on me and on top of me. To the joke—to make sense of the joke that could not be funny to me even though it was directed at me—I offer Simon Springer’s “Fuck Neoliberalism” (2016, 285–86): “Why should we be more worried about using profanity than we are about the actual vile discourse of neoliberalism itself? I decided that I wanted to transgress, to upset, and to offend, precisely because we ought to be offended by neoliberalism, it is entirely upsetting, and therefore we should ultimately be seeking to transgress it. Wouldn’t softening the title be making yet another concession to the power of neoliberalism? . . . Fuck that.” In this project about how pregnancy does not really equate to childbearing, with the narrative as allegory, I hope to provide some power

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to raise questions and start a larger dialectical engagement about the condition of pregnancy free from childbearing ideologies. Naturalness and normality is assumed and constructs expectation, signaled by pregnancy, such that a baby will be born and she-who-is-pregnant has established her maternal bond. Those who have journeyed off the beaten path—who have had pregnancies that did not lead to a child— also know of a reality for which there is little translation or recognition. What was true to my experience is that I could not, through denial and compartmentalization, unknow the complexity of the situation I found myself in, this so-called trap. There was so little language and meaning for the “naturalness” and “normality” of having miscarried despite its being a fairly common phenomenon experienced by women. Even trying to “move on” (as many people who loved me wanted me to do) and having my children was not enough to genuinely speak to what had come to pass. The graphic novel is only a sketch in that way—if only a token of epistemic reparation for what I had undergone and for what almost completely undid me.4 So the project at hand is an attempt to complement the academic work that has become available since the panel, including the most recent work, particularly the special spring 2015 issue of the Journal of Social Philosophy, “Miscarriage, Reproductive Loss, and Fetal Death,” edited by Ann J. Cahill, Kathryn J. Norlock, and Byron J. Stoyles. My project is only part of what they too had concluded in the introduction to their compilation on the matter: “We suggest that the riskiness in theorizing about miscarriage, and its implications for applied philosophical arguments with respect to abortion, seem to us compelling reasons . . . [for] a shift [in] this conversation.” “Miscarriage,” they add, “is liminal” (1–2). PHILOSOPHICAL ALLEGORY Plato (1935, 514a–520c), midway through his building of the ideal city in the Republic, has Socrates infamously offer an allegory “about education” with men in a cave, manipulated by shadows on a wall, ignorant to the outside “real” world.5 Most primers in Western philosophy include this Allegory of the Cave, and, for general philosophical pedagogy, it has become standard reading. That does not mean that the



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context or the applications of this allegory are a given; even with close, exegetical reading, this allegory’s content and the ethical and epistemological implications are not readily available. These dialogues are inherently open to question, to multiple and competing interpretations, all of which can also leave it open to easy misinterpretation. With this allegory, Plato intends to describe the work of a philosophical, dialectical education as an incorporeal, metaphysical transformation. It is referred to as a kind of “turning of the soul,” more academically (and more appropriately for my project) as metanoia6: the “true analogy for this indwelling power in the soul and the instrument whereby each of us apprehends is that of an eye could not be converted to the light from the darkness except by turning the whole body. . . . Of this very thing . . . there might be an art, an art of the speediest and most effective shifting or conversion of the soul, not an art of producing vision in it, but on the assumption that it possesses vision but does not rightly direct it and does not look where it should, an art of bringing this about” (Plato 1935, 518c–d). This “art” gains more meaning when connected to the passages in the Republic that come before the allegory, usually described as the Divided Line, in which Socrates accounts for a “division in respect of reality and truth or the opposite expressed by the proportion” (510a). What is important to this old, ancient (“useless”7) formulation is that the allegory can be transformative in how it can better connect truth to reality free of indoctrination. Although allegory could be used as a promotion of ideology—and, as, I would argue, is usually the case in a neoliberal society—in my context and in the work of this project it is intended to be metanoic. I want to suggest that whatever might be found to be instructive in this narrative as an allegory can lay bare real and transformative insights, ones to which only those few privileged (without privilege) have been directed. This project is in step with the attempt to “break the catastrophic spell of neoliberalism” (Joseph 2012, 90) as it magnifies the unqualified assumption that being “pregnant” equals “having a baby.” The phenomenological account of miscarriage to follow is a mirror theory of the allegorical events narrated in my graphic novel. I can give at least three examples: 1.  Because of experiences like a confrontation with a pro-life protestor after my D&E (dilation and evacuation), I dedicated a section of this

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work to opposing the rhetoric that has women arguing with other women and misrepresenting other women through pro-life discourse, which prevents any possible future solidarity among women. 2.  During an ultrasound that had triggered another bleeding event, I had been callously given another woman’s ultrasound image and was dismissively told by the doctor, “No, it’s yours” and “They all look the same, right?” as narrated in part I. I go on in part III of the theoretical work to challenge the use of the ultrasound image as one of the ways women have been coerced into valuing childbearing over pregnancy as a form of “success.” This ultrasound—which may or may not be mine—is the image of the cover of this book. 3.  The delay of my husband’s grief, specifically in how he mourned my death despite the fact that I had survived my pregnancy, leads me in part IV to grapple with grief as its own labor, as it is part of pregnant embodiment but not just the “work of women.” Coercion, solidarity, and labor are all important theoretical concepts for this project of disentanglement as I’ve described it in the introduction. I hope there are more mirrored connections to be found in the reading-through of this narrative-as-allegory that direct both philosophical insight and theoretical critique. I’ve limited my artistic license to the mood and memories recalled; holding onto the strangeness of the details (or lack thereof) has made my experience more survivable as also (only to a limited and most likely flawed degree) translatable. I realized this flawed translatability in the changing look of my own facial features (or in their complete absence) as I drew them from one part of the story to the next, as I externalized the suppressed picture-book memories into sketched images and as the chronological narrative unfolded in front of me.8 In this way, as allegory, the narrative is not “make-believe.” The narrative drawn here is meant to retain the strangeness of the experience, the incredulousness of what had taken place, even within the banal cis-white-het context in which my particular case rests. The naive qualities of pregnant experience and the socialization of the undertaking of the work of “having a family” were complicated by my particular situation in ways that my training could not make much sense of; it was mostly unthinkable. Emotively, I did retain the feeling of a very deep resentment for



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how much I was set up to fail by these experiences, despite my education, despite my privileges, despite having survived and not succumbed to the overwhelmingness of it all.

CRITICAL THEORY AND NEOLIBERALISM Madhava Prasad’s “On the Question of a Theory of (Third World) Literature” (1992, 57) defines the important work of critical theory for cultural studies thus: Critical theory, by opening up a field of inquiry into the production and reproduction of subjectivities, transformed the object of literary/cultural studies. It became possible to think of cultural studies not as a means of selecting and preserving the quintessence of a society’s cultural production . . . but instead as an investigation of the cultural domain for the purpose of making visible the ideological processes by which meaning in culture is naturalized. This work posed a serious challenge to the orthodoxies that reigned in cultural studies, and many ways of escaping the consequences of theoretical knowledge have since been devised.

This defining feature allows for this project to add to the work in the denaturalization of the ideologies of childbearing and its material effects on bodies and their relations. The naturalization of the childbearing pregnancy and as it is held to be also “productive women’s work” pervades many cultures as orthodoxy. Feminized childbearing is and can be validating, despite Shulamith Firestone’s call for a cultural, feminist revolution in The Dialectic of Sex ([1970] 1979): [The] elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction: not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human fertility—the new population biology as well as all the social institutions of childbearing and child-rearing. And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the

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sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.9

While globalization remains an unabated work of producing capital through the exploitation of alienated and marginalized labor, the “social institutions of childbearing and child-rearing” remain classed, raced, sexed, and gendered in ways that render “ideological orthodoxies” invisible and operational. The primary ideological orthodoxy that operates unchallenged in the personal narrative and is not quite challenged in the phenomenological theory to follow is neoliberalism. I am actively acknowledging how neoliberalism is in silent operation in this glue between parts of my project. Like any other binding, and with this particular binder’s properties, this may or may not hold under varied conditions. Why do I bring into the project a critique of neoliberalism here—into an interlude between narrative and analysis? Because this project is personal and phenomenological, neither method of describing what is already a liminal reality could properly call out one of the most consistent factors in the construction of my situation and the situation of many women who are set up to fail; neoliberalism is a system that demands and expects childbearing to be the proper function of women; otherwise, validation and virtue are withheld. George Monbiot (2016) captures the problematic qualities and concealed pervasiveness of neoliberalism, generally speaking: Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007 [and 2008], the offshoring of wealth and power . . . the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has—or had—a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly? Inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like



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Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.10

This is the neoliberalism that haunted me during my D&E, my hemorrhaging, and in postpartum. Neoliberalism had my doctor personally drive me to his abortion clinic. Neoliberalism is at the heart of all demands to “get over it” and “move on.” Neoliberalism framed me in a perceived failure for having survived my pregnancy. Neoliberalism persuaded my father to take interest in the platform of Sarah Palin and John McCain as they supported abortion “only in cases where the health of the mother is at stake.” Neoliberalism finessed pro-life policies that coerce women like me into “unthinkable” situations and will continue to set up women to fail in their need to stay alive and survive their pregnancies as they themselves see fit. Pro-life politics is a cultural phenomenon that emerges out of neoliberalism—an agenda that has nothing to do with me as far as I would concede it, and yet has everything to do with who I am, determining who I ought to be, in part because it allocates value for what are considered “successful” or “failed” pregnancies. Returning to “Fuck Neoliberalism,” Springer (2016, 287) describes what an anti-neoliberal, “prefigurative” move would be: To prefigure is to reject the centrism, hierarchy, and authority that come with representative politics by emphasizing the embodied practice of enacting horizontal relationships and forms of organization that strive to reflect the future society being sought. . . . [T]here has been significant attention to the ways in which neoliberalism is able to capture and appropriate all manner of political discourse and imperatives. . . . In other words, there is a constant and continual vigilance already built into prefigurative politics so that the actual practice of prefiguration cannot be coopted. It is reflexive and attentive but always with a view towards production, invention, and creation as the satisfaction of the desire of community. In this way prefigurative politics are explicitly antineoliberal. They are a seizing of the means as our means, a means without end.11

Neoliberalism has coopted so much of the labor of childbearing for mechanisms that are illusorily democratic and representative only in its paternalism. The introduction of genetic counseling in the context of a neoliberal and ableist system of medicine continues to serve the ends

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of childbearing masking ideological and even eugenic orthodoxy about normalcy and nature. The pressure to do an amniocentesis revealed the paradox of “choice” and “determination,” which included patronizing undertones and veiled threats of anomalies, disabilities, diseases—all projected with equal risk and urgency. The social, political, and moral good of the amniocentesis remained elusive only in that it is a profitgenerating, consumer-oriented decision: in the end, it serves market forces and not women. Even if I had agreed to the amniocentesis, I still had to add the risk of miscarriage to the list of considerations in having the procedure done. For Joseph (2012), allegorical function is about transformation but must be nonromantic: “Allegory is, thus, a form that successfully approximates a totality that cannot yet (or ever) be represented adequately” (86, 83). It can trivialize functional fetishes; it can caricature modes of consumption and commodification; it can “hollow out” the “real or use value with a substituted meaning” with the intention of reorganizing the risks and claims over present and future economies of meaning (88). This project does have a political agenda: that the purposefulness of pregnancy—by disentangling it from the neoliberal teleology of childbearing—be then renegotiated in favor of those in the position of having to do the most labor regarding its necessary work: of ontological demand and existential expellation, of having to bear the burden of perceived failures, the burden of having to avoid blame and shame while trying to survive, and the bearing of grief when it comes “on the scene. It cannot remain that she-who-is-pregnant is already condemned in the world that only recognizes “neoliberal success” (70) so that she is always “damned if she does, and damned if she don’t.” If this is to be a viable project, it must be (and I hope that it is) one that offers real hope without romance, with metanoia and not phantasmagoria,12 with philosophy and not bullshit. NOTES 1.  This is in direct reference to my copanelists’ work on sociological application of Merleau-Ponty and miscarriage and the long-term study of families who survived pregnancy loss and their memories and perceptions about that loss.



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2. Philosophy blog Daily Nous discusses Daniel Dennett’s argument that analytic philosophy has become “self-indulgent.” See Justin W. (2016). 3. In my forthcoming monograph, Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Meditations through Disability Studies, I outline the “scale and scope” of ableism marked by neoliberal values of self-sufficiency, independence, efficiency, and productivity. 4.  Sarah Clark Miller (2015, 150) discusses how “epistemically, a woman may no longer trust her competence as one who knows the status of her pregnancy. Feeling that she cannot count on herself in these ways can ultimately result in a compromise to her moral integrity and can have a cascading effect. . . . Miscarriage . . . can carry with it a strong sense of betrayal.” 5.  To be clear, the “real world” for Plato was the world of ideas independent of the world of experience. I am borrowing the idea of the Platonic allegory rather than furthering a position about the Platonic system of ideas and reality. 6. Plato’s dialogues are multilayered exercises in philosophical thinking: in describing the phenomenon of intellectual insight (the “turning of the soul [psyche]”) through (1) the allegory, Socrates is also (2) in dialogue with Glaucon, who is engaging in dialectic instruction, such that (3) the reader of the dialogue is also in a dialectical relation with philosophical ideas represented by the allegory. 7.  Socrates discusses the supposed uselessness of philosophy to the masses: But the far greatest and chief disparagement of philosophy is brought upon it by the pretenders [Sophists] to that way of life, those whom you had in mind when you affirmed that the accuser of philosophy says that the majority of her followers are rascals and the better sort useless. . . . Have we not, then, explained the cause of the uselessness of the better sort? . . . [The] inevitableness of the degeneracy of the majority . . . philosophy is not to be blamed for this. . . . Will it not be a fair plea in his defense to say that it was the nature of the real lover of knowledge to strive . . . nor would his desire fail [until] he came into touch with the nature of each thing in itself . . . to lay hold on that kind of reality . . . and consorting with reality . . . he would beget intelligence and truth, attain to knowledge and truly live and grow, and so find surcease from his travail of soul, but not before? (Plato 1935, 489d–490c)

Plato follows this discussion in the Republic with the defense of the rarity and the necessity of one who could embody the commitment, the work, and the risk of living a philosophical life. 8.  There are points in the narrative when I admit not knowing where these memories belonged chronologically. I also did not “look up” or try to confirm my recollection short of asking close family how events were arranged in their memory and the degree of correspondence. If there was much conflict, I stuck with the memory I had as best as I had recalled it.

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 9. The first chapter is available online at “Shulamith Firestone (1970): The Dialectic of Sex,” Marxist Internet Archive (website), accessed August 2016, https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/firestone-shulamith/ dialectic-sex.htm. 10.  Monbiot (2016) goes on to add, “Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that ‘the market’ delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.” 11. The prefigurative move is nonteleological in that sense as well— important to the challenge I pose to what I will call the childbearing teleology in part III. 12. Joseph’s term (2012, 88). Her analysis of allegory and neoliberalism uses Aravind Adiga’s novel White Tiger (2008).

Part III

A Phenomenological Reading of Miscarriage

THE “CHILDBEARING TELEOLOGY” Within my larger project of disentanglement, in which pregnancy does not equal childbearing, I name this the childbearing teleology: the scripts and rituals that underwrite sociopolitical, gendered, and embodied expectations about pregnancy while overwriting and erasing the existentialia implied by the pregnant body. This teleology is exercised through a medical and cultural complex of guidance and instruction, asserting itself as what “everyone always” expects when the pregnant body “appears.” There is very little meaning or ritual granted to the experience of miscarriage, except in the negation—as a “failed pregnancy.” When it comes to the phenomenon of pregnancy that does not lead to the “successful” birth of a child, simply stated, “women of all stripes and colors . . . suffer erasure” (Frye 1983, 154). This childbearing teleology imposes and domesticates the possible phenomenal content of pregnant embodiment. Generally stated, after a miscarriage one is simply advised to “try again.” So, as pregnant embodiment is uncritically connected to a childbearing teleology, miscarriage bears little meaning and is read in an everyday sense as a failure, a nonevent. Alison Reiheld calls it out as such in “The Event That Was Nothing” (2015, 11), describing the liminality of miscarriage: “Procreation is not only identity-constituting, but sometimes relationshipconstituting. Pregnancy loss, then, can deal profound damage to both 189

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personal identity and to interpersonal relationships. . . . It is a state of becoming which never becomes.” The value of pregnancy has become solely dependent on its outcomes. The Greek telos can be translated as “end,” “goal,” “good,” or “purpose.” A teleology reads all things as they are related in a hierarchy of goods, from conducive ones to those valued intrinsically. This teleological model is one that is adapted for the logic of the pro-life agenda. For example, one “philosopher,” in describing what he thinks is a “womb teleology,” writes, “This fact of the uterus existing for the unborn child also tells us something about women: they are to be mothers.”1 This seems to be the case when religious and nonreligious defenders of pro-life politics use the teleological model to describe the function of pregnancy: it is an erasure of an already undertheorized phenomenon of the pregnant body, concretizing the entanglement of bodily “productivity” with some sort of natural or moral value.2 This logic, embedded in the Western intellectual tradition, is assumed to be neutral in these “natural” characterizations. I’m thinking here of the analogy of “bearing children” with the “bearing of fruit.” As with Aristotelian teleology, the “good” of the seed is that it becomes a tree and fulfills its “natural purpose.” To some degree, what is added to this entailment is the moral implication that these expectations manifest an intrinsic purposefulness—as in, not only is the “function” of women to bear children, but they also ought to choose to do so. For a contemporary utilitarian, the entanglement of pregnancy and childbearing has moral value, especially if bearing children in the neoliberal economy upholds the GHP and the GDP. Utilitarian ethics (and its greatest-happiness principle), like Aristotelian teleology, organizes the significance of all supposed “natural” phenomena based on its functional consequentiality, translated today in the many practices that support human (but really dominant Western), anthropocentric interests over nature, such that, problematically, too often what is normally expected is also assumed to be the natural outcome. Teresa Brennan (2004) questions the model of Aristotelian teleology as it can make the pregnant body passive in relation to a kind of fetal autonomy. In The Transmission of Affect she describes how Aristotle’s “account of pregnancy . . . gives the maternal body no potential or potency. . . . Here we have the essence of the problem . . . [:] while the mother’s body is assumed to be passive in the event that a pregnancy



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progresses predictably, her influence in shaping embryonic life is acknowledged [only] if something goes wrong” (89). While Brennan wants to provide an activation of the maternal body as it materially and genetically interacts with fetal development, she admits that “the tradition from Aristotle onward is to conceive of this constant [of the maternal environment] negatively, as an absence, rather than a presence” (91). Although this is not integral to the project at hand, I follow Brennan’s insight that “subjectivity and objectivity cannot rest on a distinction between psyche and soma” (93). She also speculatively points to what is now being scientifically discovered in epigenetics: that stress, anxiety, and trauma experienced can be affectively transferred and inherited in the genetic code.3 Yet even a classic existentialist reading of this phenomena will not hold expectations as an easy entailment of goods or goals; rather, possibilities ought not be narrowed to meet expectations but amplified as they might be open and interpretive of possibility. Lisa Guenther (2006, 20) reads through Beauvoir’s challenge to the reproductive determination of women’s bodies. “As Beauvoir describes it,” Guenther writes, “birth can leave a woman exhausted, misshapen, malnourished, emotionally unstable, and possibly even dead. . . . Pregnancy does not always accommodate itself to the women’s own projects; it does not admit a bodily distance between self and other . . . by virtue of which the reproducing woman could rise above her ‘product.’ It would seem that . . . reproduction happens despite the one whom it nevertheless requires.” The signs and signifiers that entangle the “natural” purpose of pregnancy with the goods and the goals all directed for the sake of a child produced instead makes the case, I think, in the wake of miscarriage, for a required disentanglement. The substance of the bracketing in this project comes out of the need to suspend all these teleological assumptions that organize and groom girls and women for how they ought to labor in child production. This phenomenological reading will suspend, or “bracket off”—as a kind of Husserlian epochē—both the everyday sense and the significance of pregnancy from the entailments of childbearing as well as the medicalization of pregnant experience, especially when, by bracketing, we can sufficiently challenge the teleological scripts of health, success, and, most problematically, the value of life.4 The last of these scripts that sabotage “life” in its ontological possibilities, including the ideological

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implications of pro-life politics and moralistic attitudes about how “life” begins at conception, are to be intentionally undermined by this suspension. This intentional undermining emerges from the knowledge that all pregnancies are survived or they are not, and, therefore, with every pregnancy there becomes a selective flight from the realities of death “always possible and on the scene.” I add to this the possibility that with miscarriage or stillbirth there is still a worthy life to be lived despite what she may have undergone. The “natural” and “normal” expectations of pregnancy-as-childbearing draw from teleological but effectively dehumanizing scripts that dangerously implicate women in both the successes and the failures of these labors. Pregnancy continues in an everyday way in an unabated and intimate relation to the marked expectations of childbearing. In the baby showers, the birth announcements, the naming ceremonies, the existential tax on women (that includes the emotional, psychological, and even economic burdens of childbearing expectations) is unspoken and unwritten. That a pregnancy may fail, that one may not find purpose in the bearing of children, all that she might undergo in the burden of the labors of pregnancy, are pregnant phenomena that become erased in romanticized notions of the childbearing teleology that only validates the productive womanhood, naturalized ideas of maternity, and functional femininity. The pressure to contain the meaning of pregnancy within the context of childbearing combined with the ways in which “success” still dominates the narrative of pregnancy has, in effect, silenced the phenomenal content of miscarriage. Here I am following Iris Marion Young’s lead from “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation” in On Female Body Experience (2005, 54), in which she writes that “the image of uneventful waiting associated with pregnancy reveals clearly how much the discourse of pregnancy leaves out the subjectivity of the woman. From the point of view of others pregnancy is primarily a time of waiting and watching, when nothing happens.” The silence that transfers into the everyday interpretation of miscarriage adds another dimension of oppression and labor to the work of pregnant embodiment in how it “leaves out the subjectivity” of women. The socialization and domestication of the pregnant body reinstates the teleology of expectation toward the event of childbirth in ways that also mask the initial subjection of pregnancy. With the “success model” of pregnancy as a guide, meeting these expectations resonates as an illusory set of



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“accomplishments.” Here I am thinking of how pregnancy is broken down into trimesters in accordance with fetal development, coupled with scripts of appropriate (read: normalizing and domesticating) expectations and anxieties—of which only she must bear. In this way, in suspension through the epochē, I treat each trimester as an arbitrary “container” of expectation and as codification of the entanglement of pregnancy with childbearing expectations. If she can meet these expectations, she is provided a kind of ontic5 relief. Yet if miscarriage is a failure of expectation, “an essential disappointment” without product, then without accomplishment no relief is offered or found. A sign of the domestication of the pregnant body is the silent response to miscarriage: No one knows what to say. The “unsuccessful” pregnancy has little legacy and demonstrates how women have been, proximally and for the most part, left out of the constitution of meaning for pregnant embodiment. As Guenther (2006, 44) puts it, “this critique . . . demands a different account of reproduction . . . a renewed significance of the past and the future—for the women whose labor, work, and action have gone largely unnoticed for too many generations.”6 As it is, miscarriage is at the margins of recognition, invisible to the sociopolitical discourse about pregnancy, rendering all pregnancy loss patently unintelligible by either an everyday or even a scientific (read: medical) interpretation of the “problem.” Often women who experience pregnancy loss are given a series of statistics and probabilities in relation to the loss (what caused it, whether it can and if it might happen again) in a way that mixes the crisis with what is for now, unfortunately, the only way to make sense of pregnancy loss: as it is related to having another child, “trying again,” future fertility, etc. Making suspicious and subverting these markers of pregnant expectation is purposeful here because it is in an effort to speak for what has remained unspoken in the brute force of pregnancy loss. The silence that surrounds and evades the depth of pregnancy loss is inherently sexist. Women suffer this kind of loss in a way that can never be expected and, to this extent, are compelled to move on, functioning and serving a male-biased society, such that, instead of pregnancy loss being a crisis and an exception in every case, the miscarriage at six weeks is assumed to be “not as bad” as the miscarriage at thirty weeks. Yet, with childbearing, my child is also their child; in miscarriage, my loss

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is my own. The privation of pregnancy loss has been a site exploited, rendered negligible and meaningless, because, I would argue, there is no translation for the fact that, despite all the labor and subjection, there is no child. The situation of pregnancy, its subjection and significance, as well as the possibility of miscarriage that follows all pregnancy, belongs to women in an exceptional way. There is an open-ended and paradoxical quality of pregnancy such that one is no longer merely oneself. The irreversibility of the phenomenal situation, the depth of affection and implication, at least as I am reading it here, could also be reread as a privileged condition of existential risk and possibility, regardless of one’s particular motives and intentions. Here I am thinking not of the psychic implications but of the phenomenological and hermeneutic ones. In miscarriage one is brutally confronted with the existentiality of a paradox despite all expectations. In Young’s (2005, 46) account of pregnant embodiment, the awareness of my body in pregnancy, in the way that pregnancy “fractures,” can also add a “substantiality” or “weight” to my place; it is a “unique temporality of process and growth.” In pregnant embodiment, her subjectivity is “decentered, split or doubled. . . . She experiences her body as herself and not herself.” She quotes Julia Kristeva in “Women’s Time” (1981, 31): “Pregnancy seems to be experienced as the radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject: redoubling of the body, separation and coexistence of the self and another, of nature and consciousness, of physiology and speech” (appearing in Young 2005, 49). Here, with my attempt to read pregnant embodiment with the suspension of childbearing and its expectancies, I am reading pregnancy for its loss, and so this loss cannot add “weight and substance.” The depth of affection that arises from the fracturing of pregnant embodiment does not come from the process of growth but from the loss and the irreducible paradoxicality of the existential situation. This is where the project is most challenging: my reading for miscarriage generates a thoroughly negative reading of pregnancy. Yet the strange situatedness of pregnancy has been a source of oppression and silence rather than an opportunity to generate new meaning and worlded significance for life as well as for the idea—the threat—of death. Once the everydayness of pregnancy and its correlative expectations have been bracketed, I will be reading only for what



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remains in the wake of miscarriage. The initial subjection of pregnancy I will treat here as an ontological event—not merely experiential, yet not left to be defined by medical science by default: that we who can become pregnant—in the sheer possibility of the event that can be neither reversed nor repeated in its idiomatic quality—could deal directly, truthfully, and with accountability about how pregnancy works without childbearing, could open up a new kind of solidarity among women and girls not yet constructed. APPROACHING MISCARRIAGE PHENOMENOLOGICALLY As I read miscarriage, I will characterize pregnancy as an inherently negative and a negating subjection for “she who is now pregnant.” As this phenomenon may be understood independently of its products, it can also be hermeneutically free from its positivistic, objectifying, and teleological interpretations. This nonteleological approach comes from what I take to be the intent of Levinasian tracework, as described by David Michael Levin (1998, 346–47). In the “later phenomenology” of Emmanuel Levinas, Levin writes, “the unrepresentable trace, namely, of an unrepresentable alterity . . . [becomes] a ‘tracework’: an approach to the unapproachable, which withdraws itself from every approach . . . an attempt to describe the inevitability of a failure in the very ‘logic’ of the attempt.” He later continues, “Levinasian phenomenology must become a tracework . . . Although the search for the trace . . . is hopeless, . . . the search is nonetheless not futile . . . the attempt itself carries enormous moral merit” (349, emphasis added). This tracework will bear a meaning for pregnancy that is almost unrecognizable in its ordinary and medical contexts. I am not treating pregnancy itself as it can be empowering and uplifting. In the wake of miscarriage, the veil of an innocent and emotively naive idea of pregnant embodiment has been lifted and will not be redrawn. I’ve chosen this approach of tracework in order to critique the social and cultural constraints of expectation and desire (such that a child is the expected outcome and the implicit goal of every pregnancy), especially insofar as these expectations and desires domesticate meaning while silencing the possible intelligibility of this gender-specific situation. By

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suspending the everyday sense of pregnancy as an event of expecting, I do not want to necessarily introduce something nonsensical to pregnancy either; rather, I want to uncover a closed off, more complex meaning to these phenomena as such. Now, as a phenomenological tracework, a key outcome of this reading becomes available: all pregnancies carry the possibility of miscarriage. A pregnant body cannot escape, evade, reduce, or be relieved of this ontological fact. So this account treats pregnant embodiment for its first ontological fact: it is an inescapable event in which the self is to be “emptied out” in its situation and its expectation, materially and phenomenologically. It is this aspect of pregnancy that has had no name. As miscarriage becomes approachable phenomenologically, I have named this emptyingout given to all pregnant bodies as a death-within-the-self. With this concept I purposefully will blur the (false but often employed) distinctions between the wanted and unwanted pregnancy, the life of the child and the life of the mother, the healthy pregnancy and pregnancy loss. Levinas’s ethical theory suspends the intentional self, and this approach allows me to describe the phenomena of self and other, death and meaning, without having to directly attend to the intentional life of the person—or, in this case, the experiential components of pregnancy. Fundamentally I am reading miscarriage as an utmost possibility given to every pregnant body in a way that rivets7 yet privileges this body to a particular phenomenal, “exceptional” situation independent of experience as well as individual, social, or political desires. THE “DEATH-WITHIN-THE-SELF” AS AN INTELLIGIBLE SITUATION In Being and Time, Heidegger (1962) expresses a real intolerance for the everyday interpretation of phenomena. Das Man, translated as the “they,” is the mode of being in the world that is “average” and “ordinary,” especially in the everyday way we might “talk through” and chatter about nothing as if it were something and something as if it were nothing. Idle talk is a “gossiping and passing the word along. . . . Things are so because one says so. Idle talk is constituted by just such gossiping and passing the word along—a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand on . . . becomes aggravated to complete groundless-



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ness” (212). This everyday attitude, instructed by das Man, levels off the brute particularity of one’s own death as it decomposes into the idle talk about the death of another. Despite the fact that the existential origin of this everyday, idle talk originates with Dasein’s8 concern and care (Sorge) for (its own) being, it instead sabotages and submerges the possible ontological interpretation of death. Then, in the proximal relation to another who dies, everyday Dasein clings to the ontic, everyday interpretations of death because death is about somebody else, anybody else, not about me, not mine, and, therefore, death is inauthentically interpreted as being about nobody. For Heidegger, an interpretation of death becomes authentic when it is ontologically interpreted as the utmost (existential, not teleological) end of Dasein. The ontological end is an interpretation of death that belongs to Dasein in the nothingness of its being and is not intrinsically purposeful, just mere existential fact. Authentically interpreted, death can only be owned in reticence and silence; authentically understood, it is importantly “in each case mine” (Heidegger 1962, 318). The problem with ontic solicitude in the idle talk of das Man and the source of Heidegger’s intolerance toward the everyday chattering about death is that one escapes from engaging and owning the existential significance of the nothingness that already always accompanies its being. Nonbeing belongs to us—and of which there is no evasion—and, as Heidegger often adds, is a possibility that, no matter how we might talk around it, is utmost and not to be outstripped. So, although I will be using a Levinasian phenomenology to further an approach to miscarriage, I think there are two important components to be taken from Heidegger’s ontology. First, an ontic/ordinary, everyday interpretation of death obscures the existential significance of death. Once this ontic content is bracketed, the existential significance for death contains a rich potency of meaning. Free from the usual way we might talk about death, the ontological possibilities for what fuels the anxious groundlessness of idle talk becomes open to new disclosures. As Heidegger interprets this ontological concern as it is from a “being-toward-death,” it becomes most useful to the project at hand in that, at the same time, it brackets all the chatter in the paternalistic, pedestrian demands about the moral meaning of life. This ontology does not find the meaning of life in the promotion of an evasion from death.

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This means that even the biological attributes given to the meaning of life are suspended but open to unique meaning; at the same time, this openness to meaning must suspend the more “epistemologically satisfying,” bioanalytic approaches to death. Heidegger’s phenomenological approach suspends many of the questions of a scientific attitude adapted by medical authority, including questions about where life ends and where life begins; as Heidegger (1962, 292) puts it, “Methodologically, the existential analysis is superordinate to the questions of biology, psychology, theodicy, or theology of death.” These have been questions that obscure the condition of pregnancy, silencing the subjectivity of women. While bioanalytic approaches seem to make unambiguous the biological fact of death, phenomenologically speaking, there is nothing but ambiguities when it comes to those intellectual and moral commitments that assume a life/death binary. Heidegger’s ontological interpretation opens up the root cause of all worlded content in the singular subjectivity of the existing individual in its tentative, temporal fragility and for which no worlded objects or futural project can guarantee its sustainment. The ontological reading of the meaning of death is a good template for my experimental approach to a phenomenon that is located in between the binary of life and death in a fundamentally exceptional way because miscarried pregnancies do not yield a birth and, taken as ontological fact given to any and all pregnant bodies, cannot promulgate “pro-life” chatter and idle talk. The second important component to be taken from Heidegger’s ontology is that Heidegger uses the mood of anxiety (Angst) as a way to authentically access the ontological meaning of death. As described in Being and Time (1962, 227), the “phenomenon of anxiety will be made basic for our analysis. In working out this basic state-of-mind and characterizing ontologically what is disclosed in it as such, we shall take the phenomenon . . . as our point of departure, and distinguish anxiety from the kindred phenomenon of fear. . . . As one of Dasein’s possibilities of Being, anxiety . . . provides the phenomenal basis for explicitly grasping Dasein’s primordial totality of Being.” Heidegger describes anxiety as a “revelatory” mood so that, even though psychologically we read anxiety as negative, ontologically it is necessary to the existential interpretation of being in the world. Anxiety is subjective without object and an indication of the urgency and inescapability of death as always, already “utmost possibility, not to be outstripped.”



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Deviating from the Heideggerian ontology, I would like to offer a different kind of revelatory mood, one analogous to this ontological anxiety about death: guiltedness. This guiltedness, as I employ it here, is not necessarily a psychological or experiential idea of feeling guilty or having shame.9 It is in the exposure to alterity that “engenders me as a responsible self” (Guenther 2006, 71). With the initial subjection of pregnancy, the body in its being is already condemned to a deathwithin-the-self; the pregnant body renders the self no longer the same, because every pregnancy will come to be emptied out. In this existential possibility is the paradox and exception of pregnant embodiment; this is the mood that reveals the existential fact that now—as pregnant—you are no longer your own. I mean this guiltedness in a wholly nontheological sense; this is the “guilt” that accompanies the initial subjection of pregnancy, in the implication that one must expect the bearing of a child by all normal and natural accounts while at the same time a situation exists in which the pregnant body cannot escape, even though desire for this kind of escape is existential. For clarification, I borrow from Levinas (2003, 64): “If shame is present, it means that we cannot hide what we should like to hide. The necessity of fleeting, in order to hide oneself . . . in shame is thus precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself. . . . Nakedness is shameful when it is sheer visibility [patience] of our being, of its ultimate intimacy.” She, as pregnant, will be stripped of the intimacy of her own body, and if she begins to show her pregnancy, neoliberal sociality lays claim to her in the interrogations and the demand to satisfy a need to touch her belly. Estelle Erasmus (2015) writes, “After struggling with infertility for several years, I was ecstatic to be expecting. Being radiant with child, however, came with unexpected side effects: I was made fair game for inappropriate comments, unwanted advice and marauding palms.” Guiltedness might also function as a kind of revelatory mood that accompanies the inescapable subjection of pregnancy, manifests as a manifold of conflicted desires and denials in the everyday experiences and interpretations of pregnancy as expectation. To be clear, I want to affiliate this existential guiltedness as a phenomenal accompaniment to being pregnant, indicating a correlating “possibility not to be outstripped.”10 That is to say, in pregnancy there is a kind of existential thrownness toward the always possible and utmost

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threat of loss in that the paradoxicality of the subjective, exceptional, existential situation. By allowing the analogy between the mood of guilt for this project with Heidegger’s mood of anxiety as it is in his ontological project, it is worth distinguishing the by-products of these analogous “moods.” Dasein in anxiety reveals the ownness of its own being; yet, for she who is pregnant, guiltedness is a disownment, the undergoing of a kind of bodily dispossession. If we take the significance that Levinas (2000, 176–77) attributes to the ethical content of subjection, what he describes as the “passivity of the bearing,” there is “at the bottom of me, a preoriginary vulnerability or being-seized [susception], a passivity prior to all receptivity”; then the miscarriage becomes the sign of the impossible situational position of pregnant embodiment. In this fundamental breaking from the self-same, in which I have already, paradoxically, been subjected and not quite myself, not quite another, I am up against death in a way that is not quite about my death and not quite about another’s death. Guiltedness is a revelatory mood that can lay bare the possibility of expellation given to all pregnancy and, therefore, is indicative of a situation both diachronous (as Levinas might say, “out of season”)11 and undesirable. With this account of thrownness, in a kind of ontologically binding susception, I am intentionally challenging the assumed difference between the wanted or unwanted pregnancy, as not in itself a paradoxical situation but an ontically constructed problem imposed by the childbearing teleology, falsely dichotomizing women in the guilt of “not being able or not wanting to bear children,” a dichotomization that only a shame and blame culture could manifest. The guilt of not being able to bear children is the implicit ableism given to the neoliberal project of entanglement, while the not wanting is a condemnation made easy to attach to women out of permissible misogyny and misogynoir,12 such that, as a dominant cultural trope, women and girls are set up in the way validity and identity get tangled up with their reproductive functionality.13 But it is at this point in the project that I more fully abandon Heidegger for Levinas. In God, Death, and Time, Levinas (2000) offers a phenomenological account of death, giving it both an ethical and an existential importance. “Each death is a scandal,” writes Levinas, “a first death. . . . The problem of death is incomprehensible when it concerns man [sic] not as a being subject to annihilation but as the very compre-



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hension of being. This end finds no model in intelligibility” (90–91). As Levinas describes it, death is always a scandal, and the death of a proximal other—particularly the death of a neighbor—cannot be reduced or dismissed in an everyday sense; the other’s death calls me by name and finds me responsible for that other who can no longer respond to me in their otherness. Levinas finds alterity in the meaning of death that signifies an extraordinary burden on me and my sense of self; yet I cannot simply read this significance of my neighbor’s death in terms of my own (possible, hypothetical) death. The demand of alterity is inescapable: death, even though it is not mine, undoes me, interrogates me, and puts “me” in question. What I think is most striking about Levinas’s account of death of a proximal other is the surprising depth of affection one can have in the wake of another’s passing. This affectivity can wholly disrupt one’s sense of self, and yet it is not merely a signal to the nothingness of being: “being affected [l’affection] by death,” writes Levinas, “is affectivity, passivity, a being affected by the beyond-measure [la dé-mesure], an affection of the present by the nonpresent, more intimate than any intimacy, to the point of fission, . . . an immemorial diachrony that one cannot bring back to experience” (2000, 15). By finding alterity at the center of the significance of death, Levinas’s reading opens up a hermeneutics of death to a depth of affectivity in which the self—in spite of itself—is undone. The culpability of the survivor in relation to the passing of the proximal other, the bearing in which the self is subjected, reveals what is not available in the everyday interpretation. Yet there is an open-endedness to the Levinasian interpretation of death that we can translate in a way that does not have to be merely about a neighbor’s passing. That the death of a proximal other can be interpreted beyond a psychological (or, as it will be argued, even ontological) significance is important to the project at hand. Miscarriage is neither strictly about my death nor, strictly speaking, about another’s death, but rather a relation to death that still most profoundly and proximally affects me and implicates me. In miscarriage there is a phenomenally significant rupture14; as much as I survive, I cannot go back to being “myself.” Levinas describes the position of survivor as a position of vigilance and suffering. Insofar as I am riveted to survival and subjection by pregnancy, I am already nonindifferent. For Levinas, nonindifference

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is the deeply affective and existential reception to alterity (otherness), contrary to all the ways in which ontological moods of Heidegger’s Dasein are not receptive to alterity. To this, Levinas says (1994, 99), “note must be taken of this antihumanist or nonhumanist tendency to link the human to an ontology of anonymous being. It is a tendency characterizing an entire era that, while reflecting upon anthropology, is suspicious of the human.” Judith Butler (2004, 148) adapts the Levinasian demand of nonindifference when she argues that “the derealization of loss—the insensitivity to human suffering and death—becomes the mechanism through which dehumanization is accomplished.” The mood that I have designated for pregnancy is an adaptation of this phenomenologically significant, guilted culpability of ethicoexistential nonindifference. The guilted subjection is riveted to the particular burdening of this body as pregnant and is not just about anybody; it is also a subjection without abstraction. The inescapable loss accompanying all pregnant embodiment can be read, if we follow this phenomenological account, as an exception to selfhood in the ordinary sense, a kind of “phenomenal emptying out.” Levinas explicitly and implicitly critiques Heidegger on his interpretation of death, especially as Dasein encounters the death of another. With Levinas’s critique of Heidegger, I can argue that the initial subjection of pregnancy, an existentially significant position in which there is also a depth of affectivity, can disappear irreparably in the everyday interpretation of and scientific attitudes toward pregnancy. If the subjection of pregnancy is a position in which she cannot escape, then social and cultural narratives for pregnancy have been organized such that the paradox is classified and contained in a series of scripted expectations, developmental goals, and milestones. In other words, the depth and existential significance for what I will describe as a possibility for loss that accompanies every pregnancy is usually glossed over, “taken care of,” and “handled.” Levinas explicitly critiques Heidegger because, in the passages on the death of another, Heidegger dismisses the existential value of that other’s death, no matter the proximity of the other who passes. Heidegger limits the meaning of death to the status of threat: the other’s death indicates a “silent threat to the being of Dasein.” In this way, Levinas adds (2000, 37), “we have to bear this question, which asks whether it is through its own nothingness that this end marks our time



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and whether anxiety is the true emotion of death.” Heidegger describes the ontological obscurity (the “covering over”) of death when ordinary Dasein, in its “everydayness,” assumes that because someone they know has died, they can “know” death. To quote Heidegger (1962, 297) on this point at length, In Dasein’s public way of interpreting, it is said that “one dies” because everyone else and oneself can talk himself into saying that “in no case is it I myself,” for this “one” is the “nobody.” “Dying” is levelled off to an occurrence [that] reaches Dasein, to be sure, but belongs to nobody in particular. . . . Death passed off as always something “actual”; its character as a possibility gets concealed, and so are the other two items that belong to it—the fact that it is non-relational and that it is not to be outstripped. . . . This evasive concealment in the face of death dominates everydayness so stubbornly that, in Being with one another, the “neighbors” often still keep talking about the “dying person” into the belief that he will escape death . . . [such] “solicitude” is meant to “console” him.15

Levinas reads beyond Heidegger’s concern about this interpretation of the other’s death in the “evasive concealment” of “idle talk” for an existential significance that includes the depth of affection we might have for the proximal other. This depth of affectivity is in relation to the irrevocable departure of the other in death: “Death is a departure: it is a decease [décès] . . . [a] departure toward the unknown, a departure without return . . . it is emotion par excellence, affection or being affected par excellence” (Levinas 2000, 11–12). In order to reclaim the phenomenal content of this paradoxical and exceptional situation in an unimperialistic way, the event of miscarriage needs privileging in order to command—if also to reclaim—intelligibility.16 This is in fact Levinas’s approach and his more implicit critique of Heidegger. Heidegger makes the death of proximal other unintelligible ontologically and dismisses the ethicoexistential content given to this relation. Levinas, in response, seeks to add intelligibility to that death (as a scandal in being, as an affection par excellence, as an interruption and election of me by the other who will not return) rather than treat the other’s death as a sign of the nothingness of one’s own being. For Levinas, with every death there is a surprise in being—an interruption in the ordinary, everyday course of events. In death, the other becomes a face that no longer expresses otherness, a death mask; the

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other no longer speaks otherwise. The position of alterity recedes in death, leaving the self to itself, and, in turn, commands an extraordinary responsibility in the form of a “para-doxical question.” It is with the proximal death of the neighbor that I am implicated as a survivor. And, instead of facing the phenomena of death with silence and reticence, as Heidegger suggests, Levinas insists that the drama of death not become spectacle17 while recognizing how the other’s death incurs significant disquiet and discomforts in selfhood and its ordinary expectations. This death, even in its closest proximity, “resists all appearing, all phenomenal aspects, as though emotion passed by way of the question . . . [and] the question went beyond appearing forms, beyond being” (Levinas 2000, 17–18). So, if we read miscarriage as a death that is both a kind of death (in a phenomenal sense) and yet not a death (in an everyday sense), then there is a possibility only given to the pregnant body that remains somewhere in between and, at least as possibility, that is also a possibility given to every pregnant body. Calling miscarriage a possibility that is proper to all pregnant embodiment is also to properly free pregnancy of its assumed and expected possibilities of child production. If the phenomenon of pregnant embodiment is already bound to the possibility of miscarriage, then we can begin to more thoroughly disentangle pregnancy from a childbearing teleology. Thinking of all pregnancy as a condition of subjection, an openness to loss independent of the childbearing teleology is the subject of my tracework. In this way, from the postpartum experience of a healthy childbirth to the abortion of an unwanted pregnancy (read: best-case/ worst-case scenarios of pregnancy as viewed through the teleological lens of successful childbearing), the emptying out of the paradoxicalexistential situation is already a given. This “given” is what I shall call here the death-within-the-self: as you are and as you have been subjected, with this emptying out of the paradox, you will and can no longer remain “at home” with yourself. The paradox, in both its fracture and its fullness, will come to an end not as a relief from the paradox but as an irrevocable alteration by what has been undergone. This death-withinthe-self is a concept that mimics Heidegger’s being-toward-death18; yet it can be understood neither through the analogy of the threat of the possibility of “my own death” nor through the analogy of the death of another, as in Levinas’s sense of a “neighbor who will not return.”



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If we take pregnancy to signal more thoroughly the exceptional and gendered phenomenon of fracturing and splitting, then we ought to begin to retranslate the sociopolitical work that domesticates this subjection. With this comes the urgency of the project at hand: if miscarriage is to find a place of meaning, then this interpretation must be freed from the kinds of demands and anxieties that may stem from the more positive expectations of pregnant experience. Young’s reading of pregnant embodiment does not read directly for the possibility of meaning in the fractured atemporality of miscarriage. For Young (2005, 53–54), “the pregnant subject straddles the spheres of language and instinct. In this splitting of the subject, the pregnant woman recollects a primordial sexual continuity with the maternal body. . . . [The innocent narcissism is in that] like a child [I] take pleasure in discovering new things in my body. . . . Perhaps the dominant culture’s desexualization of the pregnant body helps make possible such self-love when it happens.” The kind of discovery of this newly emerging pregnant body, as Young describes it here, still contains the possibility of ownness and not subjection—and, in this way, is a much different reading of the fractured situation of pregnancy I describe. The innocent narcissism of pregnant embodiment—what I reference in my own experience as the consolation of pregnant naïveté—relative to this phenomenological tracework, must remain bracketed. The somewhat arbitrary analogy of pregnancy as sickness—as if a dis-ease—is not without phenomenal content, although not a justified analogy. As Young (2005, 57) states it, the “tendency of medical conceptualization to treat pregnancy as disease can produce alienation for the pregnant woman.” I would think, in this way, as soon as there is pregnancy, one first loses their place; only perhaps later, through everyday expectation, one then might find an escape from the subjection, enjoying more of the substantiality that Young implies comes with pregnant embodiment. Yet when pregnancy is read as a hosting of life, even if the fetus is read as a parasite, the crisis of miscarriage is obscured further by missing the true irony and edge of the paradox and miscarriage is still not intelligible as undergoing, a “real” death. If the fetus is understood as parasite, then miscarriage is uncritically read as a relief and unburdening as if of a sickness or dis-ease. As Levinas (2000, 185) states it, there is a radical, existential quality in that which “comes to pass whereby the spontaneity of the subject

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finds itself broken.” By suspending the interests and institutions that speak to pregnancy as equal to childbearing—interests and institutions that in many ways contain a sexist teleology—pregnant embodiment read through the phenomenon of miscarriage speaks to the outstanding loss that occurs no matter the pregnancy outcome. I also want to especially avoid all the ways in which phenomenal and gender-specific content of pregnancy collapses into the sociopolitical function of the woman’s body as it carries the expectation of producing a son for the father. BREAKING WITH FECUNDITY At this point, it is worth referencing Luce Irigaray’s challenge to Levinas’s hermeneutic of fecundity. For Levinas in Totality and Infinity (1969, 267), fecundity is “the encounter with the Other as feminine is required in order that the future of the child come to pass from beyond the possible, beyond projects. . . . Both my own and non-mine, a possibility of myself but also a possibility of the other, of the Beloved, my future does not enter into the logical essence of the possible. The relation with such a future . . . we shall call fecundity.” The production of the child, specifically in this relation to the future as it is the production of the son, is a questionable reading of the transubstantiation of the future. As Levinas describes it, “Fecundity engendering fecundity accomplishes goodness: above and beyond the sacrifices that imposes a gift, the gift of the power of giving, the conception of a child” (268–69). Irigaray (1991, 109) pointedly counters this demand of fecundity. “The feminine is apprehended not in relation to itself,” Irigaray writes, “but from the point of view of man, and through a purely erotic strategy.” Levinas misses the sexual difference in the demand and direction of desire as it seeks the other and to what is beyond being. He proscribes the feminine other in her differentiated desire to the production of the son so that 1.  Levinas seems to know “nothing of communion in pleasure” (110– 11) and there is no meaning for ecstasy prior to the child, and 2.  Levinas “substitutes the son for the feminine.” Irigaray protests that “the child should be for himself, not for the parent” (111).



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Irigaray’s attention to the difference in desire (and that she may have a desire prior to [and independent of?] wanting a child), allows me room to offer the suspension of (what I have been calling) the teleology of childbearing. She must, and should be able to, want in a way that he does not want; all erotic desire does not seek this same end, mapped according to his desire—to bear a son. With the question of difference pointing to the gendering of expectation along with the particularity and exceptionality of pregnant embodiment, her desire must be reclaimed from the marginality of his expectations. Irigaray opens up a site of meaningfulness in this sexual difference that permits an “irreducible nonsubstitutability” for the place of her desire (115). I think Irigaray presents a real challenge to Levinas’s “disfigurements brought about by ontotheology” (Irigaray, 114). I suspect that it is this teleology of desire and expectation for the son, as it is unproblematically mixed in with the phenomenon of pregnant embodiment, that can, in effect, create an ontological gap in meaning as well as an emotional setup for the situation of miscarriage. Derrida’s reading of Levinas’s existential ethics as a “hospitality ethics”19 allows me a further reading of pregnant embodiment in order to better develop Irigaray’s challenge to fecundity. Derrida (1999, 56) finds an irreducible paradox in Levinas’s construction of the self/other as ethicoexistential relation20: “[The] host [hôte] is a hostage insofar as he is a subject put into question, obsessed (and thus besieged), persecuted, in the very place where he takes place, where, as emigrant, exile, stranger, a guest [hôte] from the very beginning, he finds himself elected to or taken up by a residence [élu à domicile] before himself electing or taking one up [élire domicile].” Before all intention, the subject is called out by the other, situated between being a host and a hostage. Extending this paradox to the pregnant body, she is first besieged. She, in pregnancy, is both a host and a hostage “from the very beginning.” In order to fully suspend the sociopolitical teleology of the pregnant body as childbearing, I want to develop this alternative reading more fully. If the host can also be hostage, then the paradox, as it is “from the beginning” and not yet domesticated, can generate an opportunity for me to make sense of how the pregnant body may not necessarily be about the birth of a child. Pregnancy phenomenologically understood in this way as a situation in which she is already besieged is not a question of

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wanting or not wanting a child; it is already a condition in which she, as pregnant, is no longer at home with herself. It is important to note that the burden of the pregnant body, without the imposition of a childbearing teleology, is already a state in which the jouissance21 of the self is undone. The paradox of hospitality yields a phenomenological discovery: a hospitality problematic (Derrida 2000, 47), in which, in the hosting of the other, there is the existential risk that one finds oneself in a hostage situation. As much as “I want to be master at home (ipse, potis, potens . . .), to be able to receive whomever I like there . . . [anyone] who encroaches on my ‘at home,’ on my ipseity, on my power of hospitality, on my sovereignty as host, I start to regard as an undesirable foreigner. . . . This other becomes a hostile subject, and I risk becoming their hostage” (53, 55). This is Derrida’s reading of the hospitality problematic: the risk of the encroaching other is that one slips into the situation of becoming a hostage and, therefore, loses their place and no longer is host. In that the subjection of pregnant embodiment has already altered the situated self (jouissance), taken hostage by the existential conditionality of the paradox, there is an excess in pregnancy that cannot be contained but only undergone. Levinas (2000, 175) describes this “undergoing,” or conatus, in the context of ethical substitution. “It is the exceptional uniqueness in the passion of the self,” he writes, “that is this incessant event of subjection to all and that expresses subjectivity. Subjectivity of a being who detaches himself, who empties himself of his being, who turns himself inside out [emphasis added]—who ‘is’ otherwise than being [emphasis original]. Otherwise than being is dis-inter-ested. . . . The responsibility of the hostage should be understood in the strongest sense [emphasis added].” Then, borrowing from Levinas again, if we assume that there is a loss already existentially built into the relation of pregnancy, then we can treat this as an existential exception, oriented toward expellation; it is “a scandal in Being”22 that is noneconomic and without return. In breaking with fecundity, I hope to voice the limits of the feminine eros as Irigaray had defended it; as much as she argued that, prior to pregnancy, she has her own desire (“I want [too] to be master at home”), in pregnancy I can no longer desire to be master in my “at home.” In pregnancy what I desire is already suspended and, with this subjection, the significance of pregnancy here is already indifferent to the wanting



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or not wanting of a child. Then this paradox is covered over with the world-generated, gender-biased imperatives of pregnancy as expectation. Again, her desire has been disregarded; she must become host. Yet these imperatives of worlded expectation compound rather than just cover over the paradoxicality of pregnancy for she who miscarries. Her own desires, already sabotaged and marginalized in pregnant subjection and worlded expectation, then, in miscarriage, become silenced by the furthered exceptionality of the situation; she has nothing “to show for it.” She, in miscarriage, is “privileged” to the hostage state while, in every sense, remaining “at a loss” as host. So, I ask, in miscarriage isn’t one only ever a hostage? As this project entails a negative reading of pregnancy, the exceptionality of the situation must be seen for the phenomenal quality that signals an existential crisis. It is a necessitated labor for she who is now pregnant, and, therefore, recovering the paradox more fully means finding appropriate existential significance for this hostage state. I would like only briefly to address the domestication of this paradox of hospitality insofar as the subjection of pregnant embodiment shifts to and is contented by a renewed object of desire: “to carry a child.”23 In the spirit of what bell hooks calls “the privileged act of naming,”24 this phenomenological reading (even though it is a negative reading of pregnant embodiment) yields an important outcome: it is a reading in which all pregnancy is an expellation, open to loss as an “emptying out.” This loss, the risk and possibility proper to all of pregnant embodiment, is in (1) the literal emptying out of the body in the postpartum state, and also (2) the more phenomenally contented emptying out of the paradoxicality of pregnant embodiment, the host/hostage situation. This latter paradoxicality, given to pregnancy, is one in which she, as pregnant, will already lose. This emptying out has no resemblance to relief and does not “disburden” the situation of pregnant embodiment.25 Insofar as I am first a hostage before I am a host, the paradoxicality of the pregnant body announces the distortion that is assumed by the teleology of childbearing. My negative reading of pregnant embodiment provides a different privilege in that only she can and will know what it is to be first a hostage before she is host; only she risks the loss and subjection that accompanies all pregnant embodiment. As I will argue, there are ways in which this experience gets coerced into a hosting. In this way, Young (2005, 61) describes the privilege of a more positive

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reading of pregnant embodiment: “[She] is a pregnant person; it is she and only she who lives in this growing body and moves within it. She and only she has a privileged relation of feeling with the developing fetus. . . . Others have access to feeling this developing life only by contact with and through her.” The pressure to contain the meaning of pregnancy combined with the ways in which success still dominates the experience of pregnancy, I think, has silenced the phenomenal content of this particular kind of existential crisis. As Young reflects in her 2003 postscript (later published in Young 2005), “Description of the experience of pregnancy in this essay does not take into account the influence of sonogram technology, which arguably has altered the experience of pregnant women and their partners in significant ways. . . . The sonogram projects an image of the developing fetus. . . . This shared and sharable experience of the fetus tends to have more status as ‘reality’ than the feelings only she can report” (61). The seemingly translatable quality of pregnant embodiment through the ultrasound image also silences the intelligibility of miscarriage as paradox and subjection into an everyday interpretation, dispossessing the phenomenon out from underneath (or by making a spectacle of) her; the renewed demand of fecundity adds oppression and labor to the work of pregnant embodiment. If I had not disposed of Levinas sooner in this reading, I might have found myself drawing from the idea of ethical substitution as a way to describe the host state of pregnancy. For Levinas, ethical substitution is an existential situation in which I am for the other; the “one for the other” is a noneconomic relation in which I am my brother’s keeper.26 If we were to read Levinas this way, we may have considered pregnant embodiment as a similar, noneconomic state of hosting the other in a form of ethical substitution. It is Irigaray’s attention to sexual difference that has allowed me to interpret pregnancy other than in its resemblance to the work of ethical substitution. In miscarriage she only knows what it is to be hostage; she is not able to be recognized (by others in the world) or self-reflexively know herself, construct herself, as host. These socially reified expectations allow the fractured self of the paradoxical situation to be replaced in a normative and average way; so she becomes codified and constructed through the technologies and rituals of a childbearing teleology. As host she may start to care about her pregnancy as productive, accept the general worlded meaning and demands of a childbearing teleology, imagine her motherhood. The



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pregnancy-as-expectation, as now the dominant interpretation, selects scripted, particular interpretations of pregnancy for the sake of these normative and normalizing expectations—especially that this body— my body—ought to produce a child. Accompanying these expectations is a manifestation of guiltedness—that she resolve or exclude any interpretation or meaning for the initial subjection of pregnancy-asparadox. These containers of worlded expectation leave little room for ambivalence and for what may be otherwise. Once she wants a child, miscarriage is hauntingly unthinkable.27 Pregnancy here means that this existential and phenomenal risk of encroachment is given to the exceptionality of the situation as it is and as soon as it is. The self that undergoes subjection and fissure by the initiation of the paradox now withdraws from meaning. Marked with this expectation of childbearing and motherhood, although she is already no longer at home with herself, she can only forego the implications of the paradox. In miscarriage, one is brutally confronted with the existentiality of the paradox despite any and all preconceived expectations. The risk of becoming a hostage is not of hypothetical possibility but, existentially speaking, part of the facticity (existential fact) of this exceptional situation. I am treating the radical paradoxicality of pregnant embodiment as a privilege not so much because it is exclusive but rather because it is an exceptional situation. I am neither simply myself nor simply host to a not-yet, soon-to-be other, such that pregnant embodiment requires us to reconsider Derrida’s hospitality problematic. The exceptional situation here reverses the shifting of the paradox in Derrida’s problematic: pregnant subjection means that I am first already a hostage, already besieged. The hostility of the situation is that in pregnant subjection I find myself compelled to the only part of this project that is recognized in a worldly way: I must become host.28 So as I am arguing it, the shaping of the “hostage so that she becomes host” levels off the significance and possibility of two key existential significations of pregnant embodiment: the paradoxicality29 of pregnant embodiment as well as the exceptionality of this situation. In this way many of the containers for pregnancy signify the productivity of the pregnant body in relation to childbearing expectations, adding to the subjection of crisis and expectation. The existentiality of this crisis is in the fact that she is subjected to and will be already given over to pregnancy loss. This paradox of pregnancy—as it is a situation of first

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hostage and then host—will be emptied out, and yet from this situation there is no escape; with or without the birth of a child, of this burden she will not be relieved. Yet miscarriage is a crisis only known to women who already have been subjected to and made vulnerable by the paradoxicality of pregnancy. This project is intended to give language to rather than dismiss the fact that this loss is a suffering and labor that haunts every pregnancy. As the work of childbearing is part of the public domain through medicalization of reproduction, women are more vulnerable to the controls that manage the reproductive potential of the body. Historically miscarriage may not have always been understood as loss; rather, it might have been understood as an escape from death. The miscarriage of a pregnancy might have meant that women were able to survive their pregnancies. As the gender-specific ipseity of the pregnant body became prescribed and marked off by these technological and reproductive controls, the “success model” of pregnancy became the dominating script for meaningful pregnant embodiment. In pregnant embodiment she cannot be understood through ethical substitution—that is, without reintroducing the childbearing teleology. Being pregnant is not the same as taking on the demand to be my brother’s keeper, or even the way Levinas traces out the hostage state.30 We can only take from his description of ethical election the exceptionality of the condition and of the loss, an anarchic interruption in the statehood of self. We also cannot assume here the goodness or inspiration of ethical election as Levinas describes it, or else miscarriage may be accidentally misread as some kind of ethical election or, perhaps, noble sacrifice.31 The pregnant body is an election only as the death-within-the-self is an “utmost possibility not to be outstripped.” Miscarriage as an election—“called out in the very place in which she takes place”—then only seems to privilege her in a fundamentally disruptive way, not only out of place but also, if she fails to come due, out of time and expectation. As every pregnant body carries the possibility of the death-withinthe-self, as I argue it here, it will also definitively be an emptying out of what is other than oneself and bears on an existential fact in that all pregnancy will bear loss. My reading of miscarriage in this way links the healthy, full-term pregnancy with the not-to-be-outstripped possibility of miscarriage, to the extent that, minimally, all pregnancy participates



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in some kind of postpartum experience. As the death-within-the-self can be given to and connect all pregnant embodiment, linking pregnancy in all of its varied intention and expectation, then miscarriage no longer needs to be shadowed by the many ways the world has given meaning to pregnancy as it entails the birth and life of another. Read as first subjection and crisis, all pregnancy is paradoxical; this is the other privilege of pregnant embodiment. As a paradoxical (im)position misunderstood by the model of selfhood and self-knowledge, there is a hermeneutic mistake in speaking of pregnancy as either wanted or unwanted, especially against the utmost possibility of miscarriage. The mistake of the wanted/unwanted dichotomy is the assumption that either possible manifestation of her desire—to want or not want her pregnancy—could satisfy the paradoxicality of pregnant embodiment. Even if a pregnancy is unwanted, even if she feels never more than a hostage and never expects or imagines herself a host, she cannot escape the phenomenon of fracture. In this way as well the termination of pregnancy does not provide some kind of relief from this situated, existential subjection: once pregnant, there is no escaping the paradox and the exception. Her privilege (that is not a privilege) is already crisis, as it is a paradoxical and an exceptional situation. She cannot afford the paradox, to be not at home with herself; rather, she must take the posture of host, recognize and replace herself as a mother to be and expect her child. In the wake of miscarriage, the unspoken-for excess and what may lie beyond the containers—the remainder—amplifies as loss that is both existential and maternal, so that, in finding meaning for this special kind of crisis, this phenomenon of death that is not a death in the ordinary sense of the term, we discover that meaning has been sabotaged and stolen from women by the inflammatory rhetoric surrounding abortion. COMMENT ON PRO-LIFE DISCOURSE Pro-life discourses have placed women in an even more precarious situation than the one I have described in this project. This sabotage comes in the form of what I would call, borrowing from Heidegger, an inauthentic solicitude.32 There is an “evasive concealment”33 in the assumption of “care” implied by pro-life discourse (i.e., “care for the unborn” and

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“concern for life”). For example, Rosalind Pollack Petchesky (1987, 59) contextualizes the film The Silent Scream and how the fetal image functioned in the anti-abortionist campaign: [An] article in the New England Journal of Medicine by a noted bioethicist and a physician [claimed] that early foetal ultrasound tests resulted in “maternal bonding” and possibly “fewer abortions.” . . . According to the authors, both affiliated with the National Institutes of Health, upon viewing an ultrasound image of the foetus “parents [i.e., pregnant women] probably will experience a shock of recognition that the fetus belongs to them” and will more likely resolve “ambivalent” pregnancies “in favor of the fetus.” Such “parental recognition of the fetal form,” they wrote, “is a fundamental element in the later parent-child bond.” Although based on two isolated cases, without controls or scientific experimentation, these assertions stimulated the imagination of Dr. Bernard Nathanson and the National Right-to-Life Committee. The resulting video production was intended to reinforce the visual “bonding” theory at the level of the clinic by bringing the live foetal image into everyone’s [living rooms] (emphasis added).34

She goes on to argue that there is a dialectical tension in the viewing of fetal images: Above all, the meanings of foetal images will differ depending on whether a woman wishes to be pregnant or not. With regard to wanted pregnancies, women with very diverse political values may respond positively to images that present their foetus as if detached, their own body as if absent from the scene. The reasons are a complex weave of socioeconomic position, gender psychology and biology. . . . Moreover—and this fact links them with many women whose abortion politics and [lifestyles] lie at the opposite end of the spectrum—a disproportionate number of them seem to have undergone a history of pregnancy loss or child loss. (73–74)

The “solicitude” suggested by pro-life rhetoric is inauthentic in that the paradoxicality and exceptionality of the situation of pregnancy becomes economic—as the mother will deliver (to society?) a child— assuming that maternal bonding can be effected with the ultrasound image. Amy Mullin (2015, 30–31) also argues that the ultrasound image (and its “increasing sophistication of ultrasound technology”) constructs fetal personhood. The sharing of the ultrasound image also



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entails the person status as morally considerable; Mullin says, “some will construct fetuses as social actors worthy of moral consideration” (but she also adds, “some will not”). It is the placement of these imaging technologies that becomes central to the plot of childbearing, utilized with the effect of coercing out and erasing the paradoxicality of pregnancy as expellation in false solicitude for she who has to bear the phenomenal exception of her situation. Carol A. Stabile (1992, 198) also explores the problem of the fetal image in relation to the erasure of women’s bodies in pregnancy for sociocultural demands of expectancy and delivery. “Put bluntly,” she says, “at this particular historical moment, only ‘women’ can carry out the work that is pregnancy. Furthermore, as long as this specific laborer remains invisible, the discourse of fetal autonomy is going to be difficult to overcome.” This coercive solicitude continues to manifest as the rhetoric seeks out political standing. As recently as 2011, a North Carolina abortion law attempted to require providers to place an ultrasound image next to a patient before her procedure; it was later blocked by a federal judge. As if it were about women’s choices, Barbara Holt, president of an anti-abortion group, in full inauthentic solicitude, made a favorite pro-life rhetorical argument: “We have a right that trumps free speech, and that’s our unalienable right to life” (Reuters 2014). Read through this phenomenological approach, when the fetal image is used as currency to move (what I have called) the hostage state proper to the pregnant body into the expectations and demands of maternal host, this work of securing the parent-child bond during pregnancy not only is an erasure of women in pregnancy but also censures the miscarriage. Pregnancy is translated by this solicitude that sets up the plot of childbearing and thus becomes an exercise that sets us all up for failure. Whether a pregnancy is wanted or unwanted, complete or incomplete, produces a healthy child in the end or not, this consideration of the death-within-the-self can be primarily understood in its existential significance. As the utmost possibility of Dasein, death can authentically inform worlded meaning; applied here, to the extent that this idea of the death-within-the-self may be considered a separable, out-fromthe-everyday phenomenon, worlded meaning can be informed by the exceptional existential possibility as it can only belong to the pregnant body. Without this liberation of the meaning of pregnancy from its

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everyday expectations, miscarriage will remain contentless, seeming to bear insignificance; it will remain a phenomenon of incompleteness and failure that does not register meaning in a worlded sense. The dominance of “life”-oriented interpretations for pregnant embodiment suffocates the possibility of meaning for miscarriage. The silence that surrounds miscarriage is multifold, and it is an active erasure of possible knowing: 1.  There is a lack of scientific study related to the causes and effects of miscarriage. Understood as infertility, persistent pregnancy loss is treated only in the ways that will produce a child. There is also no congruity between our knowledge of the healthy body and its reproductive power. We know the healthy body primarily for its productive powers; this knowledge for the sake of productivity is especially disempowering for women. 2.  There is a lack of ritual for miscarriage. The grieving process (for a death that is not a death) has become so idiomatic and individuating such that there is little public discourse or even feminist thinking available on it. Women who have been experiencing miscarriage have little opportunity to share meaning and make sense of this loss.35 I think there is a real ritualized horror with the fact that, after a miscarriage, as I have already stated, women are often told to try again. 3.  Most important, the sociopolitical discourse on “life” as it belongs to a baby or fetus equal or greater to she-who-is-pregnant is a formulation of value that silences and sabotages women. The focus of the project here has been on the crisis of pregnant embodiment and its existentiality. Insofar as the pregnant body has its own, more existential, teleology (toward the emptying out of the host/hostage situation), the sociopolitical content of the childbearing teleology demands consistent bracketing. Life-oriented discourses on pregnancy assume that, from conception to birth, a productive pregnancy must lead to a fully dematernalized other: “a person is to be born.” In effect, these discourses domesticate and silence the labor and subjection, as well as the possible solidarity, which comes with, as I have argued it here, the death-within-the-self, as an existential possibility that belongs to every pregnancy.



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This domestication of pregnant embodiment is a concern that Young already speaks to in her 2003 postscript to “Pregnant Embodiment” (2005, 61): Control over the pregnant body is effected through the regulating power of medical-technical observation so that, especially with the routine use of sonogram in obstetrics, “these objectified observables come to be defined as the authoritative knowledge of the process of gestation and the state of the fetus and thereby the pregnant woman’s privileged insider knowledge comes to be devalued.” This alienates women from the possibility of authoring meaning and this domestication is complicated by the paternalistic authoritarianism of doctor-patient relations (59). In miscarriage I can no longer identify myself as pregnant, I cannot identify myself as mother, I cannot identify my grief as it relates to death in an ordinary sense, and I can no longer have any expectation. Phenomenologically I hope to have spoken to these facets of this situation as one that is in between and, unfortunately, nowhere. As long as the meaning of pregnant embodiment is easily conjoined with having a baby, it erases the place of this loss—and not that it is a loss to be contained; rather, my hope is that this loss may be better recognized as a nonrelational, noneconomic, yet intelligible phenomenon. Here, if it is permitted, I also hope to have opened the possibility that in pregnant subjection, women can find one another without further marginalizing the significance of miscarriage as well as offer a (feminist and phenomenological) resistance to all the ways in which miscarriage has only come to mean a failure of childbirth. NOTES 1.  From Clinton Wilcox’s (2014) blog, Pro-Life Philosophy, bizarrely arguing for “teleology of the womb.” 2.  It is worth noting Victoria Brown’s work, “Aristotelian Teleology and the Philosophy of Pregnancy Loss” (2015). 3.  There should be concern over how epigenetics will lead to a distortive mother blaming and has been described by Richardson et al. (2014). As it regards the work of the International Society for Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD), they write, “we urge scientists, educators and reporters to anticipate how DOHaD work is likely to be interpreted in popular discussions.” They continue,

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Although no one denies that healthy behaviour is important during pregnancy, all those involved should be at pains to explain that findings are too preliminary to provide recommendations for daily living. Caveats span four areas. First, avoid extrapolating from animal studies to humans without qualification. The short lifespans and large litter sizes favoured for lab studies often make animal models poor proxies for human reproduction. Second, emphasize the role of both paternal and maternal effects. This can counterbalance the tendency to pin poor outcomes on maternal behaviour. Third, convey complexity. Intrauterine exposures can raise or lower disease risk, but so too can a plethora of other intertwined genetic, lifestyle, socio-economic and environmental factors that are poorly understood. Fourth, recognize the role of society. Many of the intrauterine stressors that DOHaD identifies as having adverse intergenerational effects correlate with social gradients of class, race and gender. This points to the need for societal changes rather than individual solutions.

  4.  I do this, in part, to respond to Reiheld’s (2015, 19) concern about how “the liminality of miscarriage makes it all too easy . . . to unreflectively enroll it in debates over abortion in ways [that] negatively impact the women who miscarry, and their families.”  5. The ontic in a phenomenological account is anything that is understood in an “everyday” way. This everyday understanding includes the medicalized discourse as it furnishes cultural ideas about pregnancy. The interpretive work at stake here is the ontological account that seeks to evaluate the existential phenomenal quality of pregnant embodiment.   6.  While my project is a disentanglement, Guenther (2006, 55) describes the “Other-in-the-same” of pregnancy.   7.  I am thinking here of Susan Bordo’s (1997, 231) use of the concept— “the body is experienced as alien, as the not-self, the not-me. It is ‘fastened and glued’ to me, ‘nailed’ and ‘riveted’ to me, as Plato describes it in the Phaedo”—but more phenomenologically than platonically.   8.  Dasein is, in Heidegger’s ontology, the only being that “is an issue for itself.” It is the “being there” of the human being, stripped of its natural and philosophical attributes (Heidegger 1962, 32–35).   9.  That said, Heidegger (1962, 331) employs an existential notion of guilt within his original project, but guilt takes a different character altogether in my project: “Care itself, in its very essence, is permeated with nullity through and through. . . . This means that Dasein is as such guilty, if our formally existential definition of ‘guilt’ as ‘Being-the-basis of a nullity’ is indeed correct” (emphasis original). 10. Guenther (2006, 111) notes Levinas’s warning about interpreting the existential demand of “one-for-the-other” of ethical substitution as if attached to intentionality; ethical substitution is “neither a guilt complex nor a natural benevolence.”



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11.  From Levinas (1981, 164–65): “[More] ancient than the time of remembering, a diachrony without memory and thus out of season . . . is the diachrony of what shows itself to be the ambiguity of subjectivity, the enigma of sense and being.” 12.  Misogynoir is an important critical concept attributed to Moya Bailey. Interviewed in Solis (2016), Bailey says, “I think we have to refine language in a lot of different ways so we can actually come up with solutions that help the communities we want to address. . . . [When] you use language that’s generic or unspecific you can get at some of the problem, but not all of it.” 13.  This includes the sexualization of young girls and the pervasive demand for sexiness in our culture today. One example of resistance to this facet of misogyny and misogynoir is found in Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s public art project, Stop Telling Women to Smile, found at http://stoptellingwomentosmile.com. 14.  Sarah Hardy and Rebecca Kukla (2015, 107) call this a “narrative rupture.” 15.  Also see passages where Heidegger (1962, 238, 281–85) elaborates on care and on the “dying of others.” 16.  Reiheld (2015, 16) argues that that liminality of miscarriage leads to a paradox, not quite what I argue here. I want to argue that the paradox of the pregnancy body makes it an exceptional body and that that should be a form of (at least epistemic) privilege. 17.  Levinas (2000, 25) also references Heidegger’s version of death as an “affair” of being. Here I borrow the problem of spectacle instead because it semantically engages the invisibility of the phenomena of the pregnant body. On the point of the woman’s body made spectacle for the sake of phallogocentric desire, see also Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman (1985). 18.  Following Heidegger (1962, 279), this existential connotation of death exceeds expectation. “Even when one is without Illusions and is ‘ready for anything,’” Heidegger writes, “here too the ‘ahead-of-itself’ lies hidden. . . . In Dasein there is always something still outstanding.” He argues that “death signifies a peculiar possibility-of-Being in which the very Being of one’s own Dasein is an issue. In dying, it is shown that mineness and existence are ontologically constitutive for death. Dying is not an event; it is a phenomenon to be understood existentially” (284). 19.  Derrida (1999, 110) describes this reflexivity in Levinas’s ethical substitution. “The most general possibility of substitution,” he writes, “a simultaneous condition, a paradoxical reciprocity (the condition of irreciprocity) of the unique and its replacement, a place that is at once untenable and assigned . . . the irrecusable place of the neighbor . . . is not all this the first affection of the subject in its ipseity? Thus understood, substitution announces the destiny of subjectivity, the subjection of the subject, as host or hostage: ‘The subject is a host’ [Levinas 1969]; ‘the subject is hostage’ [Levinas 1981].”

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20.  Lisa Guenther (2006, 68) does a reading of these same passages of Derrida on the host/hostage situation. 21.  When I use the word jouissance here, I think of the way in which the self is contented and at home with itself. Levinas uses this idea in Totality and Infinity (1969, 129), in which jouissance, or enjoyment, is the satisfaction of one’s own intentional life: this “relationship differs fundamentally from the inspiration [génialité] of representation. . . . Here the relation is reversed, as the constitutive thought were stimulated by its own game, by its free play, as though freedom as a present absolute commencement found its condition in its own product, as though this product did not receive its meaning from a consciousness that ascribes meaning to being.” This characterization of jouissance resembles Heidegger’s Dasein as it moves toward being as ready-to-hand. From Levinas (1969, 133), “Enjoyment—an ultimate relation with the substantial plentitude of being, with its materiality—embraces all relations with things. . . . Tools themselves . . . become objects of enjoyment.” 22.  Here by scandal I include not only the meaning that Levinas implies by the death of another but also his other use of the word in relation to the extensive state of indifference to others by a preoccupation with one’s own death and, consequently, survival. For Levinas (1998, 192), care for one’s own mortality overwrites the noneconomic responsibility toward the other. This “scandal of indifference” in Western thought, without vocation, unable to attend or decelerate useless suffering in the world comes from a “fear of each for himself, in his own mortality,” and this fear “does not succeed in absorbing this scandal.” 23.  Here I come to want the pregnancy as I realize it as a growth, as a baby, as it will make me a mother, and so forth. To the degree that the hostage does not become properly domesticated by this childbearing teleology, she remains a hostage—subjected to an unwanted pregnancy. This is discussed further in the previous section, “Breaking with Fecundity.” 24.  More than just describing this, hooks (1994, 61) speaks to the way that “theory could be a healing place” and, “as intervention, as a way to challenge the status quo” (60). She testifies to the spirit of the project I am attempting to reproduce here: “I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me” (59). This is an important injunction that I have discussed elsewhere; see Scuro 2014. 25.  Although the body may be “relieved” of its pregnant state (as if it could ever “snap back”), we could perhaps also imagine the “relief” of menstruation as the emptying out of the uterus. Relief from this burden assumes that I can return to myself or still remain myself and at home with myself. Yet pregnant embodiment is an irrecusable burden. There is an exceptionality to pregnant embodiment from which I can never return: this emptying out, unlike men-



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struation, is not an existential loss or a crisis in the sense that I am naming it and, in this way, does not need a recovery or tracework. 26.  Levinas (1981, 77) describes the one for the other as that “which signifies in giving, when giving offers not the superfluxion of the superfluous, but the bread taken from one’s own mouth. Signification signifies, consequently, in nourishing, clothing, lodging, in maternal relations, in which matter shows itself for the first time in its materiality.” And when he argues the idea of ethical substitution he also asks, “Am I not my brother’s keeper?” (1998, 110). 27.  For example, in “Breaking through the Shame and Silence” (2015, 289) Rachel Silverman describes how women were left to grieve on their own. After her mother’s pregnancy loss, “my mother began to realize that she had lost not just her son, but also the community of women with whom she was bringing up my sister and me. For these women, my mother had become their worst nightmare and no one wanted to be near her. While many sent letters and food, few came over to our house . . . she describes her experience as feeling like she had something the other women feared ‘catching’; no one wanted to get too close to her for fear they too might lose their babies.” 28.  If anywhere, here is the site of reproductive choice, to which I actively defend out of the negative reading of privilege of pregnancy: that her desire for herself be reclaimed (not restored) ought only be her choice and never coerced. To reject or forfeit a pregnancy in order to be free of the coercions of having to become a host is part of the ipseity of her situation, not open to any external command—that is, of which no divine or human law can interfere. 29. This is the parallel to the paradoxicality of maternity; see LaChance Adams 2014. What I have found is that the mythos of motherhood and the expectations of natural maternity (parallel to the questionable expectations of a natural femininity) have created a further grief in the wake and complicating the loss of a wanted pregnancy. Here I am thinking of the struggles proper to the problems of infertility as well and the ways in which pregnant embodiment cannot at the same time entail identity in motherhood and the assumptions of maternality. 30. Levinas (2000, 180–81) writes that “hostage means substitution. But substitution does not come to pass . . . such that I sympathize with him; substitution signifies a suffering for another in the form of expiation, which alone can permit any compassion.” He goes on to add that “the subject . . . is unseated by the other. . . . The position of the subject is already his deposition. . . . For it is only then that we witness [assistons] a dereification of the subjection, and the desubstantialization of the condition, or uncondition, which qualifies the subjection of the subject.” 31. Levinas’s (1981, 138) definition of ethical substitution as “one-for-theother” cannot be applied here without distorting the paradoxicality of pregnancy.

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Levinas has it so that there is a “plot of goodness” in this reading of ethical substitution as taking on the responsibility of being my brother’s keeper. 32.  From Heidegger (1962, 158–59), “solicitude has two extreme possibilities”: Inauthentic solicitude “can, as it were, take away ‘care’ from the Other and put itself in his position in concern: it can leap in for him. This kind of solicitude takes over for the Other that with which his is to concern himself. The Other is thus thrown out of his own position. . . . In such solicitude the Other can become one who is dominated and dependent, even if this domination is a tacit one and remains hidden from him.” This possibility is contrasted with what Heidegger describes as the solicitude in which one leaps ahead of the Other, “not in order to take away his ‘care’ but rather to give it back to him authentically as such for the first time.” 33.  Referenced earlier in Heidegger 1962, 297. 34.  Petchesky is citing Fletcher and Evans 1983. She also states that “when young women seeking abortions are coerced or manipulated into seeing pictures of foetuses, their own or others, it is the ‘public foetus’ as moral abstraction that they are being made to view” (1987, 73). 35.  Yet as Hardy and Kukla (2015, 109) argue it, “the Internet provides an unprecedented and dizzying source of communities united by common experiences, as well as equally unprecedented tools for creating new communities. Women are using these new resources to find ways of getting uptake for and giving shape to narratives that were previously resistant to articulation.”

Part IV

Griefwork: How Do You Get Over What You Cannot Get Over?

“GET OVER IT” AND “MOVE ON”: (LIFE) WRITING THE MISCARRIAGE If it is the case, as Sandra Bartky (1990, 113) has argued it in her feminist phenomenological analysis of oppression, that “men get the benefits; women run the risks” and that, in the context of a sexist, misogynist, homophobic, and ableist society, women tend to the wounds and egos of men while denying our wounds and negating our own egos and desires, then we must ask about the problem of narrative deficit in the wake of miscarriage, in the phenomenon of expellation, and even in the disentanglement of pregnancy with childbearing made available by the project at hand. As Bartky argues it, “We know from a variety of sources that women in our society lack epistemic authority. . . . What is absent from this picture is women’s own active role in the assimilation of men’s ideas, our empathetic, imaginative, and affective interiorization of a masculine perspective” (112). In this context, I ask: What is the quality of epistemic injustice with having to grieve within a social and cultural context that also requires us to “get over it” and “move on”? In the wake of miscarriage, this is the impossibility of a situation for those of us who know deep and affective loss of all preconceived and normative expectations. The postpartum body is only intelligible as it functions in service to a child; expectancy includes the physicality of yielding the body to new practices and postures: breastfeeding, as a source of warmth and 223

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comfort, as well as the gentle leanings and semi-awake states of watching a newborn through the night. The postpartum body ends up gross1 and unthinkable without those corresponding labors of childbearing in tow: in the neoliberal frame, it signals only the body as empty, bloated, active only in its leakage and expulsion. As many feminist theorists before me, I read this gross body as not grotesque; it is a phenomenal body as well. Narrating this bodily phenomenon in all of its positive and negative qualities also means abandoning the familiarity of expectancy. Although we expected our body (A) to be supplemented, such that A = Ac and that, as a pregnant body, I will be an expanded body now with child, instead, although we expected A = Ac, pregnancy loss yields a null set, a deficit (if in fact there were active expectations), in the now A = ̴A. Without the labors of pregnancy leading to childbearing, the postpartum body, as it is gross, becomes invisible, if not also disposable. One might survive the pregnancy—the phenomenon of expellation—while, at the same time, not quite getting over it. Yet those bodies uninterrupted and that produce for the sake of capital dictate normative cultural body aesthetics: how bodies may look, feel, as well as how a body ought to look and feel. Most generally, these dominant, market-oriented economic relations dictate that the body is mere carcass2 without its service in productive (including reproductive) labor. As Grace Kyungwon Hong (2015, 17) writes, “Neoliberalism is a structure of disavowal, an epistemological framing,” and “respectability, increasingly defined by attainment of monogamous couplehood, normative reproductivity, and consumerist subjectivity, has become indispensable for determining those who are protected and those who are precarious” (22–23). After a miscarriage, the body still seems pregnant—may still look pregnant— and the yet the question is still asked: Where’s the baby? For my project, most of the literature regarding miscarriage—particularly in relation to the grief—keeps me limited to the narrative testimony available; yet when it makes sense of loss, philosophy has not said enough. According to Lori Gruen (2014, 61, 62), As much attention has been given to the philosophy of death, there is a paucity of reflection on grief and mourning in the philosophical literature. Part of this exclusion may be due to the fact that grief has tended to be thought of as a “negative” emotion, rather than an occasion for reflection and repair.

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. . . [And] one of the purposes [of a mourning ritual] is to generate support and solidarity among members of the group that experienced the harm . . . this process is a moral obligation—to not mourn the dead is the sign of deep moral failing. The obligation is to the community with whom you share the grief, not to the being who has died. It is a way of honoring the relationships and a process whereby new relationships can develop and existing relationships can be transformed (emphasis added).

But this is the privatizing condition of grief, in its terribleness. By opening up to possibilities that an existential-emotional labor could condition, specifically, one might survive rather than succumb to the mechanisms of grief. In this I want to account for the missing solidarity among women having been pregnant—having been undone by the undergoing—regardless of their having been “successful” and having had a baby. That in the wake of significant loss—a death that is not quite a death and that one can speak after undergoing the unspeakable—seems to me a more powerful and authoritative work (ergon) than what psychology or eschatology has been able to describe. This kind of testimony—to testify to the unspeakable and to approximate the unthinkable and without the distance of abstract speculation but instead a deeply entrenched site of absence (“the black hole” of grief?)—is the griefwork I want to defend here. It is the reversal of the internal turn of grief—that internal turn that is like a screwing into the self and away from the world, a tightening withdrawal into the self that can appear like a disconnect from the world, a reversal of the turn that cannot be otherwise relieved or disburdened. Griefwork arrests the screwing in of the self in grief and begins the labor of turning out from under grief and as a labor, cannot be staged and does not progress in stages in any determinate way. Testimony, the gesture that bears the marks (and markers) of having survived an undergoing, often brings the paradoxical condition of denial, such that, if I am to survive, as grief-stricken as I may be, I must deny that I cannot move on and may never move on. Griefwork is invisible care labor. The survivor who speaks engages in a unique and noble labor in that, especially after an event in which “either I die or a work takes place.” Hélène Cixous (with Calle-Gruber 1997, 16) describes where I think there can be affection for a kind of critical-testimonial life writing: Here is the end of language; it is a word that does not fit what I feel. Because in breaking I sense: irreparable. But there is wounding. The

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wound is what I sense. The wound is a strange thing: either I die, or a kind of work takes place, mysterious, that will reassemble the edges of the wound. A marvellous thing also: that will nonetheless leave a trace, even if it hurts us. It is here that I sense things taking place. The wound is also an alteration. . . . And there is no scar. . . . I like the scar, the story.

The compensation for denying that I cannot get over it may also give me some measure of access to the world in its normalcy—the banal operations and constructions of the everyday. Yet, as Arendt has already argued, that banality has its own oppressive, vicious quality of dehumanization. In the banality of neoliberalism, to get over what one cannot “get over” is pure performance—the masquerade—of having “moved on.” Griefwork has mistakenly become women’s work. The binding motion of grief and the internalization of the wound begins a reversal in the attempts to return, recollect, and reworld oneself through the griefwork.3 There is an ethically significant accountability and responsibility in griefwork such that the alternative in succumbing to grief is its own dehumanization, a suffering without necessity. As grief regarding miscarriage provokes a “disenfranchised grief,”4 and because the “exclusion of women from the conceptual community simultaneously excludes women from the moral community” (Frye 1983, 51), this labor has been mistakenly associated with the work of women, but a specific kind of conceptual and moral labor has also been depreciated and devalued despite how necessary it has been for our social and psychological survival. IN DEFENSE OF GRIEFWORK Griefwork is the movement that counters the momentum and the pathos of grief. It is the one who speaks despite the helplessness and the oppressive wrenching of loss and emotion. “The new normal” is always a product of griefwork, a fabrication5 to validate and resuscitate selfhood to a worldedness. The disconnectedness of grief is an inhumanity; griefwork is a reclaiming of and desire for humanity despite the inhumanity of the initial trauma. To connect back to the work—as the labor of griefwork—there is no imperative, no obligation, and yet one, through this kind of labor, “puts back the pieces.” The survivor is a product of

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griefwork; the articulation of the event—in its damage, inhumanity, as a wounding and loss—is invaluable labor. When rape victims speak out, they perform an essential labor that reclaims the humanity of the passive body out from the ways in which the passivity of the body—as inflicted and open to suffering—is always already subject to malevolence and indifference as well as left open and subject to oppression and war. In 1999 at the New School, I attended Derrida’s seminar on forgiveness. In a small room of maybe twenty, he mused with us on the impossibility of forgiveness. He described how, at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the wake of Apartheid,6 a rape survivor testified that she could not forgive and so would not forgive; she exemplified the paradox of the unforgivable—the impossibility of forgiveness—in which one must forgive and yet cannot forgive. Derrida would later describe this paradox in his work On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001, 32–33), and, in the context of this project, I would like to parallel it with the kind of grief that emerges in the wake of the unexpected and unthinkable, especially in how these kinds of paradoxes function outside of the “juridco-political.” Derrida states, “Whether she says ‘I forgive’ or ‘I do not forgive,’ in either case I am not sure of understanding. I am even sure of not understanding, and in any case I have nothing to say. This zone of experience remains inaccessible, and I must respect its secret” (55). He adds, “In any case, I would not reduce the terrible question of the word forgiveness to these ‘processes’ . . . as complex and inevitable as they may be” (57). If we could extend the paradox into this terrain of the problem of grief—in which one cannot get over what one must get over—we discover an insight: there is an aporetic privacy in the undergoing that, for Derrida, is recognized as irreducible and inaccessible from intelligibility and speculation. That in “respecting its secret” and having “nothing to say,” Derrida locates the impossibility of a paradox—in how he describes she who must forgive but cannot forgive—parallel to the question that I now have raised. In fact, the question shows itself all the more unanswerable: so, really, how do you get over what you cannot get over? In defense of griefwork, within the confines of this labor-intensive burden of carrying an internal absence, the walls you scale but do not quite succumb to, there is a kind of creative power at work in that it conditions a regenerative possibility, if only just as a possibility and not quite as probable. One could begin to account for the unaccountable;

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one might give the first word (or gesture) needed to speak for what cannot be spoken for and has been kept “in secret.” In calling this work a griefwork, Ann Hood’s (2008) narrative in her memoir Comfort kept coming to mind. She hints at how griefwork can manifest possibility of survival, even after the sudden death of her young daughter, recognizing that “Grief is not linear” (52): Before [she] died, I could not imagine my life without writing . . . [so] I wondered how I made it this long without words. Then I realized. Knitting saved my life. If ever a life needed saving after loss, it was mine. ... Slowly, words began to return to me . . . [but] every day I picked up my knitting needles. I cast on, counting my stitches. Then I swam . . . to swim on the other side of grief. (42, 51)

There is a poiesis—such that “out of nothing comes something”—in griefwork as I intend it here. Griefwork, if it is to be defended, must be understood to contain its own authorship and authority. There is an important validity to the work of reversing the emotionality and directionality of grief so that what has been deworlded is returned back to the world—even if in a deformed or damaged way—because it is ultimately a form of resistance to our ontological precariousness.7 An affection for the scar (as Cixous had described it) transforms the psychological affect of grief as not just negative, as no longer wholly negating. That said, griefwork alone is not a restoration of the world; rather, griefwork restores a connection of self back to the world in a way that compensates for the violence of traumatic loss and victimization.8 In this narrative of pregnancy, miscarriage, and abortion, I have displayed a deep wound of grief9—definitive, yet underarticulated and one that I’m not quite over. I had to confront it as much as I could in order to survive, albeit incomplete and in caricature. In this, my question—How do you get over what you cannot get over?—I have already dialectically positioned myself out from myself. Although it is an ultimate question without an answer on the horizon, and although I cannot ever quite get over it, despite the psychologization of this grief as mine, in the end I am precariously left to myself if I cannot move on. It is only by asking the question that I have begun to survive myself in order to escape the

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deep narcissism of grief; I testify to what has come to pass first and foremost by just having asked the impossible question. I align this with Hong’s (2015, 16) interrogation into the “impossible politics” of life and death in that it “validates” some lives while it “legislates deaths.” She asks, “what kinds of social (non)existence does ‘death’ describe? . . . [What] kinds of knowledges, modes of being, affects, temporalities, embodiments . . . lives . . . that inhabit what Zygmant Bauman calls ‘death in life’ produce? . . . Do they register on us not as presence, but as absence, or what Avery Gordon calls ‘ghosts’?”10 Griefwork, as I defend it here, is the exorcism of these ghosts; within tracework, it is like the impossibility of forgiveness; it is what has not been and will never be “gotten over” and from which one can move on. It is that I have carried a death-within-the-self—a death that is not a death—in a way that haunts me, moves me, negates me, and leaves me nowhere even when I am still here.11 As Rachel Silverman (2015, 293) argues, we “must read texts in ways that allow us to acknowledge the pain of pregnancy loss without fear of losing our reproductive rights.” This project is a life-writing project (and not just a memoir)12 in that it is an account of how one might come undone by positivistic appropriations of pregnancy in the wake of “failure.” My story is only a small part of the project: to disentangle the phenomenon of pregnancy from the expectations of childbearing is where griefwork has been made to be my work—personally, politically, and professionally. The personal quality of my share of this burden and the partiality of my particular situation, although quite limited, may provide a springboard to better-contextualized provocations and to larger, more comprehensive questions. THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL IS PHILOSOPHICAL What is it to politicize grief? Not so much the emotional experience of grief but the phenomenality of it? The move here is an important one: the gesture from the personal to the political to the philosophical is first rooted in Carol Hanisch’s declaration in 1969 that the personal is political.13 Eva Kittay (2009) expands on this work in “The Personal Is Philosophical Is Political: A Philosopher and Mother of a Cognitively

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Disabled Daughter Sends Notes from the Battlefield,” by describing and defending the “invisible care labor” not acknowledged by traditional philosophers within the framework of abstract utilitarian moral theory. In Kittay’s account, she strategically defends invisible care labor (of which I subsume this idea of griefwork), as it is personal now made political. She also defends this care labor against the ignorance and hubris of naive privilege, a position that is seemingly acceptable even among popular and widely respected philosophers.14 It is the erasure of invisible care labor that also devalues her in her grief. This work of tracing the depth of loss that is shared by all pregnant embodiment gives an existential, exceptional meaning for death, this death-within-the-self, as it is primarily experienced in miscarriage. The personal experience of pregnancy is politicized in ways in which she cannot participate. Yet might it be this difficult “third move” of philosophical analysis in which we might recognize the way that, even with the joy of healthy childbirth, there is still a subjection to pregnant embodiment that remains on its own? The trauma of this subjection, out of my negative reading of pregnancy, might allow us to no longer find satisfaction in all the ways in which women, especially those deeply affected in postpartum, are dismissed as merely hormonal.15 If we carry one of Iris Marion Young’s (2005) concerns further—that medical technologies can dismiss and alienate women from their own bodily knowledge16—do we find another kind of dismissal of women of their postpartum experience? Here, rather than be suspicious of postpartum phenomena, I ask an important question: Can’t there be grief even with birth?17 To entangle pregnancy with childbearing is to assume that once she is pregnant she has chosen her path and, in so doing, buyer, beware: You ought to be satisfied with the outcome or else be held solely responsible for all adverse effects. You ought to have no place for grief. Testifying to grief makes us even more questionable, no longer perceived as reliable or valid to do the work of mothering, further invalidating the having-gone-through it. The reductive quality of postpartum experience that rests heavily on the childbearing does not and will not free us of the complexity of the pregnant situation in its undergoing. In one case, Jill Dabrowski (2016) volunteers herself as aggrieved: There were prior decades of burying pain and trying to ignore all of the demons who haunted my sleep. But now here I was, surrounded by love

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in its purest and most reverent form—two babies and a joyful, compassionate six-year-old. I thought my unending despondency was proof I did not deserve my children. I tried desperately to hold it together. To wish away the feelings of failure and emptiness and despair. I stared at the twins and breathed in their sweet sleepy skin and wished I could stop feeling so horribly sad in the midst of my little miracles. Not even my closest friends knew. I smiled and carefully maintained a façade of stability as best I could until I was alone and able to collapse into myself. Acknowledging the hopelessness and melancholy that formed an edge around my every waking hour. My constant companions were irritability, anxiety, an unending feeling of being overwhelmed, and sadness. Pure, shoulder-sobbing sadness. I cried a lot. Sometimes for hours on end—seemingly without reason. [And] I had struggled for almost four years to get pregnant (emphasis original).

This testimony points to such an important point to my project’s larger goal: solidarity among all of us who have been pregnant as we come to know grief, independent of the childbearing. She who knows grief even with healthy childbirth is not alone and has much more in common with she who knows grief without having borne children. This means, in the context of the work at hand, that it should not be seen as objectionable that a woman who has a child—a “successful” pregnancy with “healthy” children—knows what it is to be disconnected and depressed, unfulfilled, if not also grief stricken, postpartum. A postpartum state will be given to all pregnancies as it is, and yet we tend to make clinical and medicalize what could still be treated phenomenologically. Pregnancy in its passing, temporal quality has still to be recognized as valid and separable phenomenon; instead, if contentment and satisfaction are not the outward and obvious outcomes of pregnancy as childbearing, the cultural signals start to manifest an ableist and misogynist “plot” of “care,” with due (false) urgency to “save the baby” and “fix the mother.” This urgency is lessened when the lives of women are sociopoliticially less grievable.18 In a neoliberal context, there is a withholding of the grievability of some women’s lives while privileging other women’s lives as less disposable and additionally more grievable for reasons of class, race, and national status—a divide compounded by the increasing marginalization of liminal identities and queer bodies.19 To be clear, this

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intersection constructs the disposability of lives in the way it exposes precariousness unevenly; it continues to render women invisible and their lives more precarious but does so effectively. By this I mean that grievable lives are the more valuable ones by way of what values society grants as privilege. It is the mythology of neoliberal identity that favors the survival of those who willingly get pregnant to have children and who are willing to take sole responsibility for their health and welfare regardless of any other contributions or resources required for these conditions to even be possible.20 Postpartum can make the lives of women of color even more precarious and—when it comes to the general care and concern for their lives—less urgent.21 To be clear, the intersection of ableism, racism, and misogynoir renders women’s lives invisible more effectively. A’Driane Nieves (2015) describes postpartum care for women of color: “We are woefully underserved by mental health professionals and social services that reside in our communities—for a variety of reasons. Many of the women I spoke to were dismissed, rebuffed, or had their mental health concerns during pregnancy and the postpartum period downplayed by their doctor, pediatrician, pastor, and/or social worker.” Testifying to postpartum experience especially as it conflicts with the entanglement of pregnancy and childbearing is more often not possible in shame-and-blame culture. Conflicted emotional and psychological states and situations invalidate her in postpartum because—as previously argued—pregnant subjection means that she is no longer herself. Women are again set up as they are in miscarriage because a neoliberal society only validates results, and if it is not the desired outcome, it emphasizes and reinforces a curative model of care.22 If, as I have emphasized it here, all pregnancy is first a subjection and not desire, then the wanting/not wanting dichotomy (to be pregnant, to have a baby) makes no sense. The in-betweenness of pregnancy traced as an existential situation makes the status of an expellation that is like a death, that is not “really” a death, as a death-within-the-self, genuinely precarious. The pregnant body in its susception (from conception) is already a state of existential risk and loss, an exceptional loss that cannot be contained, whether or not the phenomenon is fully contained in her intentional life and in her narrated desires. As the paradox of pregnant expectation and embodiment is emptied out, and as the pregnancy ends in whatever way it does, the guiltedness (as discussed in part III) gives way to grief. The hostage state of pregnancy, as an exception that will

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be emptied out, is in relation to existential possibility and may not be necessarily experiential. One may take on all the worlded expectations of childbearing, the role of host as it includes the complexities of desires and regulation; only it does not factically reduce the ontological script that all pregnancy leads to expellation but merely covers over this existential possibility. In the wake of the death-within-the-self, as the noneconomic, nonteleological end of the pregnant situation, grief sticks to the body in the loss and survivability of what has come to pass. A technological society can contain, dilute, fabricate, and manage the hostage state of pregnancy so that it becomes less the crisis state of a besieged body and can concretize the interpretation of pregnancy as exclusively a host state: as the markers and images of expectant motherhood domesticate desire toward maternity and childbearing expectations. The demands of becoming and embodying this position of mother/host—as I imagine myself as mother, as it may be a social and culturally recognized and validating position—is assisted by the reproductive technologies that are designed in the interest of the child not yet born. Again, the sabotage is in the equation: the work of pregnancy equates to maternal labor; all this is “for the sake of” a baby. This quick and easy translation dispossesses the phenomenal content of subjection as well as the “mineness” of pregnancy. Once pregnant, the guiltedness comes on the scene such that I cannot escape this situation, intrinsic to the bearing (down) of a paradoxical situation; yet, either way, as I have already argued, in the end, in this situation, I already lose. This is why I find that the fetal image is a way that there is an acceleration in force and significance for one to believe in pregnancy as it has come to symbolize natural expectation. We are given sonogram images of the fetus to feed and share imagination and desire; with these now-shared expectations (“We are expecting”), through the public transcription and currency of these expectations, there is the permission for further escape23 from the paradox, and the posture of subjection and seizure as it is only given to the pregnant body loses place in the world of affairs. Young (2005, 61) supports my argument on this point: “It is no accident, it seems to me, that this authoritative reality comes to those who witness it by way of vision . . . [In] the context of a modern epistemological system that has always given priority to the visual over the tactile or even the oral.” As we now must share expectation while shouldering the risk and burden of the paradox, Lindsey Porter (2015,

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70) confirms that, in “one study of men’s responses to miscarriage, the authors found that men who had seen a sonogram image of the foetus scored higher on measure of grief in the aftermath of the miscarriage.”24 As the fetal image begins to resemble an other, especially when the fetus seems to have a “face,”25 the technological apparatus shifts the condition of subjection toward the familiar markers, maps, and pictures of a motherhood to be, erasing the ipseity of the crisis and the unheimlichkeit of the hostage state. In this way, as we domesticate pregnant embodiment so that it is contained in expectation and maternality, we also sabotage the openness of meaning and imagination and whatever pregnancy might mean independent of what our expectations and imagination make of it, including miscarriage, which, framed by this domesticated desire for childbearing, becomes impossible to conceive. The “guilting” of she who is now pregnant emerges socially with the political and philosophical assumptions about the “end” of pregnancy now conflated—a realization of the entanglements of pregnancy with a childbearing agenda attached. This childbearing agenda organizes pregnant embodiment into the three trimesters, the images that accompany the growth and development of the fetus, the “countdown” to thirty-nine weeks (or “when the baby can breathe on its own”). As a teleology previously described (part III), she is (and now “we” are) provided with the strange significances (perhaps now read as impositions?) of markers and milestones in service to fetal development so that the subjection of pregnant embodiment is marked by a mission to “have a baby”: an effective consolidation of narrative. The irony is that, the further along in the pregnancy, and the closer one is to having a baby, the more devastating the bearing of the loss (not only am I “emptied out” of the host/hostage situation, written here as a loss, but I also lose a child-not-fetus). The guilting is inscribed by these markers of fetal development as narrated by a medicalized pregnant body; yet, read phenomenologically, these have no greater import than how her body might be theologically defined. More important, none of these impositional significances of the supposed “development” or “progress” of her pregnant state should remain apolitical. I reject this here; the guilt constructs the magnitude of grief and places an inescapable “work” on her, so that when it all comes to bear—when the pregnancy comes to an end—it becomes compulsory for her to not come undone.

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This guilt includes the residual and obligatory feelings about the moral weight of childbearing; specifically illusory is the inflation of the significance of childbirth as the “real” and only valid function of pregnancy. As the dominant narrative, the pseudoromantic notions of bearing a child physically imply a naturalized, questionable set of moral values. Sarah Blackwood’s (2016, ¶3) counternarrative suggests something more complicated, denaturalizing the romanticism of this idea that, once pregnant, you are “having a baby.” “Childbirth is not empowering. It’s grisly, frightening, and astonishing stuff. Which is not to say that it can never be pleasurable or rapturous, or even mundane. Rather, hoping for something as politically freighted as ‘power’ out of a chaotic biological experience aligns us with a long history of moralizing about birth — a history that has rarely given women the space to honestly encounter what happens to their own bodies. Religious dogma once saw childbirth as punishment, ‘natural’ birth proponents see it as empowering. What’s a person who found birth to be profoundly amoral to do?” In recounting stories of miscarriage and stillbirth, Della Pollock (1999, 6) states what is the ultimate assumption about the body—and about sexed and gendered bodies in particular: “Death,” she writes, “is what medicine overcomes,” and birth stories about “death and deformity” shame these narratives into silence. And what becomes of the reparative work in the hemorrhaged “She but Not Herself”?26 Rahel Jaeggi (2014, 114–17) attempts to redefine what it would mean to grapple with the self-alienations that can emerge in the conflict of desires, exemplified by the “mother who is asked to give up her child.” While Jaeggi interrogates the possibilities that emerge when one can ask, “Does . . . this desire really belong to me?” (117), one cannot simply hang or “fit” these desires together in a coherent self-conception (122–23); instead, she tries to weave them together interpretively (124) as a “free-floating enterprise” (119). “Self-conception,” she says, “has a dual character: it is at once an interpretation and a project—a self-interpretation as well as a projecting of oneself. . . . Neither involves merely an objective inventory of facts” (123). Philosophically, treated phenomenologically, grief implies a materiality—a labor for the specific ways in which she is always already conflicted in desire, paradoxically wanting and wanted, unwanting and unwanted. It is multiplied by the many ways she is “not herself”: in pregnancy, in miscarriage, and even postpartum. And, if it holds that

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there are “patterns of mood or feeling” that “tend to characterize women more than men,” including shame and guilt, and yet if “men and women have the same fundamental emotional capacities,” then how does it come to be that “the shame of embodiment . . . is profoundly disempowering”? Or that “shame . . . as a pervasive affective attunement to the social environment, [for women] . . . is a profound mode of disclosure of both self and situation” (Bartky 1990, 84–84)? The kind of “set up to fail” situation of she who is pregnant, embedded in the context of shame-and-blame neoliberal culture, leads me to believe that grief comes onto the scene as both gendered and oppressive because of the lack of distribution in the existential guiltedness of the situation. As pregnant, without a baby in expectation yet, or, worse, if the childbearing expectations are in question (as in the idea that an abortion “hurts all of us”27), shame “and guilt are alike in that each involves a condemnation of the self by itself for some failure to measure up” (Bartky 1990, 87). Pregnancy is the self guilted out of being (just) herself; the attachment of pregnancy to its childbearing expectations is effected by the unique shaming qualities of our neoliberal society that reads that which does not yield product (or “bear fruit”) that it is also a “waste,” supplemented by the possibility that she may also be judged morally bankrupt. Added to this is the neoliberal system as a fully ableist system, and then all care work—personal and professional—is read as nonproductive—that is, infertile. We actively encourage a denial of this labor every time there is a liminality and ambiguity of situation while, at the same time, it is essential to one’s psychological and economic survival that she also not care, muster an indifference to what has come to pass, and carry on. Grief, not in its everyday sense but as it signals the necessity for griefwork, is not just personal undergoing (if it is not just an overcoming) but also, following Kittay, needs to be a labor that preconditions the invisible care labor in all work of interdependency. Tenderness is only possible after one has grappled with grief. The tendering to the depth of the wound is also griefwork and, as I want to argue it, is ultimately phenomenal and, as such, free from all moralizing demands. That I am permitted to “repeat myself”28 is to more generally permit all of us to dwell on that which has remained unspeakable and free from further subjection to what everyone else assumes I should or should not, ought or ought not, be “doing.” That she does this griefwork I find most morally defensible; I offer no demand that she ought to do it.

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GRIEFWORK IN AN ABLEIST SOCIETY This defense is an investment in the revaluation of care labor (particularly as an important form of self-care) based on a question raised by Judith Butler in Precarious Life (2004, 29–30), which I quote at length: When grieving is something to be feared, our fears can give rise to the impulse to resolve it quickly, to banish it . . . invested with the power to restore the loss or return the world to a former order, or to reinvigorate a fantasy that the world formerly was orderly. Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution for grief through violence? . . . To foreclose that vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human consideration is to eradicate one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way (emphasis added).

Our sensitivity to precariousness, to grieve vulnerability when it is entangled by inequity and injustice, is not weakness. Butler makes it clear that it is this kind of underestimation that mistakes grief as a “privatizing,” apolitical affair; instead, she says, “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something” (22–23). Psychologically, grief is suffering. It has been well described in its stages, but, in that way, grief continues to be attached to a model of success and wholeness.29 More important, I do not want to reduce grief to its ontic content and utilitarian narratives. Less about narrating the experience of grief, I want to narrate how to resist the devaluing of griefwork, in that its devaluation is fundamentally ableist. I want to treat it as an undergoing and not merely an overcoming—as a resource and a reserve of invisible labor. If, as Young (2005, 171) says, “women in a sexist society are physically handicapped” and, “insofar as we learn to live out our existence in accordance with the definition that patriarchal culture assigns to us, we are physically inhibited, confined, positioned, and objectified,” then griefwork, as it has been “women’s work,” can also be disabling in an ableist society (i.e., invalidating the labor of women who are “crippled”30 by their grief). Much work is still needed on interpreting the intersectional and interstitial31 oppressions that operate in the erasure of griefwork.

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Analogous to Sandra Bartky’s (1990) phenomenology of oppression, especially when she reads through the phenomena of women as they may subjectively and objectively find themselves in the work of “tending wounds and feeding egos,” I want to attend to the gendered disparity in that griefwork seems to be “women’s work.” I want to argue that, in fact, griefwork has merely become the labor of women as it serves the patriarchal ends of a neoliberal economy. The gendered division of emotional labor (109) and the grooming of girls and women to unproblematically “find satisfaction in the satisfaction of others, and to place their needs second in the case of conflict,” has shaped our everyday modes of “affection” as “the provision of emotional support” (100, 103) has placed women in a situation of “epistemic risk” (110–11). Regarding this risk that women and girls in particular have come to bear, Bartky includes the following: • The tendency to take on false beliefs, uncritically accepting the “world according to him” (111) and yet not quite trust her own “construction of the world” • To become engrossed in the needs and concerns of the intimate other in which there are “permeable ego boundaries” (110) • An epistemic “lean” toward the objects that are part of a “caretaker’s job,” to which Bartky adds, “comes with the territory” (111) These risks are rarely altered when grief comes on the scene. That all pregnancy leads to an expellation, as I have called it—of expectation, of paradoxical subjection—means that the rupture will ultimately require work, or else she can become undone. For Bartky, women take on “real risks of exploitation in the transactions of heterosexual caregiving” (117); one of those exploitive transactions is more or less energized in the “ordinary micropolitics” (119) of shaming.32 She states, “[Shaming] behavior is typically quite subtle, so much so that those responsible for it are largely unaware of what they are doing. . . . An ambiguous situation, affirming women in some ways and diminishing them in others, holding itself out as fair while oftentimes violating its own standards of fairness, tends to produce in women a confused and divided consciousness . . . [even] in the absence of any actual evidence of failure” (93–94).

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The particular attention given to the existentialia of pregnancy as exercised in this project now might reveal a debinarization in how grief has been a differentiated labor in the way it has been gendered and “carried.” As reported by Sarah Marsh for the Guardian (2016), “the effects of [miscarriage] last longer than you might imagine: a study in 2011 found that the depression and anxiety experienced by many women after a miscarriage can continue for years, even after the birth of a healthy child. Men are also affected, although perhaps differently. One British study of 323 men found that although they displayed less ‘active grief’ than their female partners, they were more vulnerable to feelings of despair and difficulty in coping eight weeks following the loss.” The feminist rereading of pregnancy as a disentanglement with childbearing might imply that griefwork can then be defended in what both women and men undergo in a sexist, neoliberal society. Guenther (2006, 55) quotes Cixous (1975) as saying that “one trend of current feminist thought tends to denounce a trap in maternity that would consist in making the . . . woman . . . the accomplice of reproduction: capitalist, familialist, phallocentrist reproduction. An accusation and a caution that should not be turned into a prohibition, into a new form of repression.” Guenther adds Cixous’s injunction: “Let’s de-mater-paternalize” (55). The intention in my defense of griefwork is also to “de-mater-paternalize” the labors of grief, especially insofar as the feminine is “taken for granted . . . absorbed into the projects of a virile and egoist self” (63). As Roxane Gay puts it in Bad Feminist (2014, 108), when it comes to the “vacuums in which we hold cultural conversations, no matter how good our intentions, no matter how finely crafted our approach, I cannot help but think, This is how we all lose. . . . [But] I do know . . . we need to overcome our deeply entrenched positions and resistance to nuance. We have to be more interested in making things better than just being right, or interesting, or funny.” So a defense of griefwork as I engage it here is neither limited to the experience of grief nor about the status of the fetus (Porter 2015) or (an)other (Guenther 2006) as it has been traditionally connected to the phenomenon of pregnancy. Worden asks (2014, 101), “Is grief work necessary?” He answers his own question, saying, “the answer to this question depends on what you mean by ‘grief work.’” Yet by reading pregnancy as always ending in expellation, I have delineated and

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offered a feminist ethicoexistential defense for griefwork as the necessary labor induced by the way expectation is also always already failed against and in the wake of domesticated desires, especially in that the only validated possibilities one might expect have been predominantly the ones socially and politically entangled with childbearing.33 This working definition of griefwork, I want to suggest, is parallel to the “melancholic aspect” of nonnormative gender identity described by Rachel Dean-Ruzicka (2013, ¶8) as she utilizes Butler’s theory to analyze grief in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. The melancholic aspect that is constitutive of gendered identity for Butler is one that absolutely denies the possibility of non-hetero-normative attachment, which creates a deeply troubled psyche in those who experience homosexual desire. This spills over into how subjects interact as gendered members of society, as well as specifically impacting those with a non-normative sexual identity. . . . Normative gender roles are predicated on abandoned desires that are not grieved, and those ungrieved desires are gradually (and sometimes pathologically) integrated into the subjectivity.

I want to supplement the idea that this labor—the work of shouldering the burden of the break(ing) with normative expectations—is “that which remains ungrieved” until one does “the work of mourning.”34 Again, in this defense of griefwork, there is no moral demand to move on. The lack of accommodation for griefwork pushes the already ambiguous position of women into a state of failure, shame, and irrelevance, an unjustified and unjustifiable liminality. If, as I have argued elsewhere, ableism is exemplified by a “Western somatophobia,”35 then our bodies are set up to fail, as if they remain in need of correction, and any efforts to resist or counter these demands are razed, made liminal, and framed as suspicious and, therefore, engendering grief. It is in the context of this dismemberment, in the liminality and grief of loss—exemplified by pregnancy loss—that I find myself most subject to ableist phobias and affections.36 The project I’ve presented here, I hope, has also demonstrated that, by the suspension—the disentanglement of pregnancy from all childbearing teleology—we can make what has been an exceptional situation survivable, meaningful, and a site of new solidarities. Through narrative and analysis, the gesture is an open one to what, up until now, was

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conceptually and morally rendered as unavailable to women in an exploitive and alienating way. NOTES 1.  What Hong (2015, 69–70) describes as the “existential surplus” constituted by those “non-laboring subjects” considered “superfluous and indispensable” in their difference with the labor that is under productive control “by the market and by speculation.” 2. I am thinking here of the animality that comes with the symbolism of pregnancy in the context of neoliberalism and dismissive naturalization and medicalization of childbirth, specifically in relation to Carol Adams’s (2010, 67, 68, 69) argument regarding how women and animals have overlapped as “absent referents.” She writes, “through the structure of the absent referent, patriarchal values become institutionalized. . . . Through the function of the absent referent, Western culture constantly renders the material reality of violence into controlled and controllable metaphors. . . . [citing Keith Thomas] ‘Once perceived as beasts, people were liable to be treated accordingly . . . [legitimizing] the ill-treatment of those humans who were in a supposedly animal condition.’” 3.  This is somewhat distinct from Freud’s use of the term grief work. According to Worden (2014, 91), “Freud believed that a person’s grief was resolved when decathexis from the lost loved one was complete and the grieving person’s emotional energy could be reinvested in new relationships and activities. Freud termed these mourning activities ‘grief work.’” 4.  As described by my colleague Kenneth Doka (Doka, Jennings, and Corr 2005, 290), “Disenfranchised grief refers to a loss that cannot be openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned, or publically mourned.” He is referencing his work Disenfranchised Grief (Doka 2002). 5.  By this I do not mean the testimony is fabricated; instead, griefwork allows for the fabrication of testimony out from the oppressions of silence and erasure. 6.  See van Zyl 1999 and du Toit 2009. 7.  This is in reference to Butler’s existential description of precariousness, in which we all depend on anonymous others for survival. I discuss this at length in my manuscript Addressing Ableism (Scuro, forthcoming). 8.  I want to distinguish between the victim who is engaged in griefwork by asking about what they cannot get over from the ways in which one might identify politically with their victimization. For more on this, see Stringer 2014. 9.  To be clear, grief is not given to all women after abortion and after miscarriage, nor do I imply with this project that grief (or guilt) should follow.

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My descriptions of guiltedness (part III) and griefwork (this section, part IV) are existential and phenomenological; it is only the solidarity among women that I hope to make accessible in this testimony and defense of griefwork as exorcism. 10.  In this Hong is citing Bauman 2001 and Gordon 2008. 11. The experience of this demonic quality of being haunted by grief is illustrated in the narrative (139) by the weight upon me as I took care of my daughter postpartum from my miscarriage. 12.  Memoirs are personal narratives thematized often for insight intended to uplift the reader; as a life-writing project, the effect of the narrative is less to uplift than it is, through critique and intentional resistance to institutionalized oppressions, a call for solidarity among women, particularly those who know pregnancy. 13.  See the full text of the essay of the same name at Hanisch (1969) 2006. 14.  In her case Kittay challenges Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan, utilitarian moral theorists, in the way they dismiss and dehumanize people like her daughter with cognitive disabilities. Another example of this expanded move of the personal as it is also philosophical and political is the blog What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy?, found online at https://beingawomaninphilosophy .wordpress.com/. 15. Studies that link postpartum depression with hormone levels do not effectively speak to the phenomena. Wisner, Parry, and Piontek (2002, 195) caution that, “although it is tempting to attribute postpartum depression to hormonal decline, several other factors may predispose women to this condition,” yet “to our knowledge, there are no treatment guidelines available that are specific to postpartum depression” (198). Most guidelines that have been constructed to diagnose and treat postpartum states (from baby blues to postpartum psychosis) also uncritically conflate postpartum with birth. Laura Miller (2002) summarizes how postpartum depression may include (but equates risk of postpartum depression with) pregnancy loss. Miller also distinguishes postpartum depression from the PTSD that can sometimes develop after pregnancy loss. 16.  See Young (2005, 61) as already cited in part III (210). 17. In a case vignette from Wisner, Parry, and Piontek (2002, 194), “a woman visits the doctor for her six-week postpartum evaluation. She reports that she cannot sleep even if her baby sleeps. She cries daily and worries constantly. She does not feel hungry and is not eating regularly. Making decisions is overwhelming. She says she is not herself.” 18.  See Butler 2004. 19.  For more on this, see Squier 2004 and Ahmed 2006. As Ahmed puts it, “Compulsory heterosexuality shapes what bodies can do. Bodies take the shape of norms that are repeated over time and with force” (91).

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20.  Taylor 2014 (114) says that “dependency is a reasoning that has been used to justify slavery, patriarchy, colonization, and disability oppression.” The danger of this thinking is that it is not possible to “liberate” these communities from exploitation because they are defined in and by the assumed right to resources and perhaps even moral empathies of independent and ablebodied persons. To this Taylor says that “the ways in which romantic and conservative notions of self-sufficiency, productivity, and independence are entangled in contemporary discussions of animal welfare and sustainability is troubling. . . . The idea that some dependent individuals are less valuable and more justifiably exploitable because they are understood as burdens who offer nothing of value back to their communities . . . has had a long and troubling history for disabled humans as well” (117–18). These notions—selfsufficiency, productivity, and independence, as I argue in Addressing Ableism (Scuro, forthcoming)—are key to neoliberal ideology, which presumes that one “can take care of oneself.” 21.  Lundquist (2008, 140) does well in giving examples of and phenomenologically reading through cases in which women who have “unwilling pregnancies” either reject or deny them. 22.  Baker (2011, 146–50) describes the problem of care versus cure, writing that “an intriguing factor of the relationships between care and care-oriented agendas is the usually strong prevalence of unquestioned assumptions in the surrounding political and public discourse” (164). 23.  See Bartky (1990, 116) on this point: “In the provision of emotional sustenance, then, as in the processes of narcissistic self-intoxication, conventional femininity reveals itself as profoundly seductive . . . indeed difficult to renounce.” Although she applauds the feminist promotion of care ethics, these theorists, “like most conservatives,” may have also “ignored the possibility that women may suffer moral damage in the doing of emotional labor” (118). 24.  She cites Puddifoot and Johnson 1999. 25.  See Mullin (2015) and Porter (2015) on the ways in which the fetus may be granted or denied person status. Levinas rests his ethical metaphysics on the humanization of the face of the other in an ethics of alterity (also described by Derrida as an ethics of hospitality). 26.  This is the title of chapter 7 of Jaeggi 2014. 27.  This is the statement from the woman in the graphic-novel narrative (98) who confronted me outside of the abortion clinic. 28.  This is in reference to how, in my despair, my family thought I sounded like a “broken record.” 29. As guidelines for grief counselors, Worden (2014, 93–94) outlines a set of “tasks” for mourners, reflective of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s well-known stages of grief; Worden states that “the idea of tasks seemed more fluid than

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that of stages.” These tasks, like stages, designed for therapeutic interventions, for those “stuck in their grief,” still carry the connotation that they are to be “accomplished”—albeit in the patient’s/client’s own time and in their own way. Worden goes on to conclude (101) that “we need to establish common agreements in bereavement theory and research. . . . This will increase our knowledge of how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We do not need an orthogonal shift in our paradigm as much as we need to modify what we think we know through better research.” 30.  Although this term is an ableist one, when associated with grief in its clichéd use it is not perceived intersectionally as not only ableist but also misogynist. In a sexist society men and boys are even less permitted and validated when grief is not “overcome.” 31.  Using the term as Falguni A. Sheth (2014) does. 32.  Bartky (1990, 117) describes it the following way: “Women fill men with their energies, thereby strengthening them and depleting ourselves,” and this tends “to keep us in a position of subservience.” 33.  I include the many kinds of grief that come from a loss of reproductive possibilities. For example, as narrated by Ginny Engholm (2014), Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner show in their work on the history of infertility in America, women even mourned their status as infertile, or “barren,” often while experiencing multiple pregnancy losses. The writer and activist Lydia Maria Child, who remained childless throughout her life, wrote a letter to a friend congratulating her on the news of her friend’s pregnancy, but also commented on her own disappointment and grief stemming from her inability to have a child and on the emptiness that she felt as a result: “I never felt so forcibly as within the last year, that to a childless wife, “life is almost untenanted.” The Civil War diarist Mary Chestnut was reportedly “despondent” over her pregnancy losses and inability to bear a living child, and wrote, “God help me, no good have I done—to myself or any one else.”

34.  Specifically, as Derrida (1999, 2) eulogizes Levinas, “to speak straight on, to address oneself directly to the other, and to speak for the other whom one loves and admires, before speaking of him. To say to him adieu.” This is an “uprightness that is stronger than death.” 35.  I argue this in Addressing Ableism (Scuro, forthcoming), utilizing this idea of somatophobia in the way that Kim Q. Hall does (2011). 36.  These ableist phobias and affections are described at length in Addressing Ableism (Scuro, forthcoming).

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Index

Page references for the graphic novel are italicized. #shoutyourabortion, x ableism, 179, 185, 187n3, 200, 223, 231, 232, 236, 237–41, 244n30 abortion/abortive procedure, x, 74, 78–80, 86–99, 185, 204, 214, 215, 222n34, 228, 236 alienation, xi, xii, xiii, 205, 235 allegory, 179–83, 186, 187n5–6 amniocentesis, 171, 186 analogy, 181, 190, 200, 204, 205 anti-abortionist. See pro-life politics/ rhetoric anxiety, 144, 191, 193, 198–99, 200, 203, 205, 231, 239 Aristotle, 190 autism spectrum, 58, 162 baby/“baby” in utero, xi–xiii, 23, 63, 66, 94, 144, 180, 216, 217, 220n23, 225, 233, 234, 236 Bartky, Sandra, x–xi, 223, 236, 238, 243n23, 244n32 Beauvoir, Simone de, x, 191

Bechdel, Alison, 240 Blackwood, Sarah, 235 bleeding/blood, 5–7, 16–17, 19, 21–22, 26–31, 33, 39, 44, 54, 61, 101–2, 105, 120; disorders, 40–42, 66, 111 blighted ovum. See miscarriage bracketing (epochē), xii, 191, 193, 197, 205, 216 Brennan, Teresa, 190–91 Butler, Judith, 202, 237, 240, 241n7 calendar. See pregnancy, calendar care/concern, 45, 59, 162, 164, 197, 200, 210, 213–14, 217, 218n9, 220n22, 222n32, 225, 230, 232, 236, 237, 243n22 childbearing/child-rearing, ix, x, xii–xiii, 13, 163, 175, 179–80, 182, 183–84, 185–86, 189–95, 199, 200, 201, 204, 206, 207, 209, 210–12, 213, 215, 216, 223, 224, 229, 230–31, 232–33, 234–35, 236, 239, 240, 241n2

253

254

Index

childbirth. See childbearing/childrearing; pregnancy children (daughter/son), xii, 10–15, 43, 45, 57–60, 75, 136, 138–43, 154, 155, 162, 164, 175, 177, 178, 180, 184, 206–7, 214, 221n27, 228, 230 choice(s)/choice making, xii, 186, 188n10, 215, 221n28 Cixous, Hélène, 225–26, 228, 239 concern. See care/concern D&E (dilation and evacuation), 79, 86–99 Dabrowski, Jill, 230–31 Dasein, 197, 198, 200, 202, 203, 215, 218nn8–9, 219n18, 220n21 daughter. See children death, 168, 180, 182, 192, 194, 212, 213, 216, 217, 219n18, 220n22, 224, 225, 228, 229, 230, 232, 235 death-within-the-self, xii, 196–206, 212–13, 215, 216, 229, 230, 232, 233 depression, 144, 150–51, 239, 242n15 Derrida, Jacques, 207, 208, 211, 219n19, 227, 243n25, 244n34 desire, ix, xii, xiii, 179, 185, 187, 195, 199, 206–7, 208–9, 213, 223, 226, 232–33, 234, 235, 240 disentanglement, ix, x, 182, 189, 191, 204, 223, 229, 239 embodiment, xi, xii, 178, 179, 182, 185, 187, 189, 192, 193, 194, 195, 199, 200, 202, 204–13, 216–17, 220n25, 221n29, 229–30, 232–33, 234, 236 epigenetics, 191, 217n3 epistemic injustice/reparation, 180, 223, 230, 238

epistemic privilege, xi, 9, 181, 187n4, 209, 212, 213, 221n28 epochē. See bracketing everyday/everydayness. See ontic exceptionality/exceptional situation, 194, 196, 198, 199, 200, 202, 203, 205, 207, 208, 209, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 220n25, 230, 232, 240 existential/existentialist, xii, 186, 189, 191, 192, 194, 197, 198, 199–200, 202, 203, 204, 205–6, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211–13, 215– 16, 218n5, 218nn9–10, 219n18, 225, 230, 232–33, 236, 239, 241n1, 241n7 expellation, xii, xivn5, 186, 200, 208, 209, 215, 223, 224, 232, 233, 238 failure, xi, xiii, 101, 149, 153, 179, 183, 184, 185, 186, 189, 192, 193, 195, 212, 215, 216, 217, 225, 229, 231, 236, 238, 240 father/fatherhood. See men fecundity, 206–13 feminine/feminized, 178, 183, 192, 206, 208, 239, 243n23 feminist methodology/ phenomenology, ix, xii, 183, 216–17, 239–40 fetus/foetus, xii, xiii, 39, 205, 210, 214–15, 216, 217, 222n34, 233, 234, 239 Firestone, Shulamith, 183–84 Frye, Marilyn, 189, 226 Gay, Roxanne, 239 genetic counseling, 171, 185–86 girls. See women grappling with ambiguity/grief, x, xiii, 178, 182, 235, 236 Greene, Maxine, 177–78



Index 255

grief, xii, xiii, 124, 155, 182, 186, 217, 221n29, 241nn3–4, 241n9, 244nn29–30, 244n33; baking, 141–42; griefwork, xii, 223–41, 241n5, 241n8 Gruen, Lori, 224–25 Guenther, Lisa, 191, 193, 199, 218n6, 218n10, 220n20, 239 guilt/guiltedness, xi, 132, 199–200, 202, 211, 218n9, 233, 234–35, 236 Heidegger, Martin, 196–98, 200, 202–3, 204, 213, 218nn8–9, 219nn17–18, 220n21, 222n32 Hong, Grace Kyungwon, 224, 229, 241n1 Hood, Ann, 228 hospitality, 207, 208, 209, 211, 243n25 host/hostage, 205, 207–13, 215, 216, 219n19, 220n23, 221n30, 232–33, 234 infertility/nonproductive fertility, 154, 193, 199, 216, 236, 244n33 Irigaray, Luce, 206–7, 208, 210 Jaeggi, Rahel, 235 jouissance. See self/selfhood Kittay, Eva, 229–30, 236, 242n14 labor, xii, xiii, 182, 184, 185, 186, 191, 192, 194, 209, 210, 212, 215, 216, 224, 225–27, 230, 233, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241n1, 243n23 Levinas, Emmanuel, 195, 196, 199, 200–204, 205–7, 208, 210, 212, 218n10, 219n11, 219n17, 219n19, 220nn21–22, 221n26, 221nn30– 31, 243n25, 244n34

Lindemann, Hilde, xiii, xivn4 love/self-love, ix, 180, 187, 205, 230–31 Lundquist, Caroline, xi–xii, 243n21 Marsh, Sarah, 239 maternity/motherhood, ix, 154, 178, 180, 185, 190, 192, 196, 210–11, 213, 214, 217, 221n29, 230–31, 233, 235, 239. See also women McCain, John, 129, 185 medical care/medicalization, xivn5, xivn7, 20–25, 31–42, 45–54, 61–67, 78–94, 107–21, 148–51, 171, 173–75, 185, 189, 191, 193, 195, 198, 205, 212, 217, 230, 231, 234, 241n2 men, ix, 164, 180, 185, 206, 210, 212, 223, 234, 236, 239, 244n30, 244n32 metanoia, 181, 186 miscarriage, x, xii, xivn3, 3–7, 9, 144, 154, 163, 177, 178, 180, 186, 187n4, 189–217, 218n4, 219n16, 223–26, 228, 230, 232, 234, 239 misogyny/misogynoir, xi, xiii, 179, 200, 219n12, 223, 231, 232, 244n30 Monbiot, George, 184–85, 188n10 Mullin, Amy, 214–15 narcissism, 205, 229, 243n23 neoliberalism, xiii, 179, 181, 183–86, 187n3, 188n10, 190, 200, 224, 226, 231–32, 236, 238, 239 Nieves, A’Driane, 232 normal/natural, 179, 180, 183, 186, 190, 191, 192–93, 199, 211, 224, 226, 233, 235, 240 ontic (everyday/everydayness), xii, 177, 189, 191, 192, 193, 196–97,

256

Index

199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 210, 218n5, 226, 237, 238 ontology/ontological, xii, 186, 191– 92, 195, 196, 197–99, 200, 201–2, 203, 207, 218n8, 228, 233 Palin, Sarah, 129, 131, 185 paternalism/patronization, xiii, 185– 86, 197, 217, 239 personal/personhood, ix–xiii, 8, 86, 163, 178, 184, 190, 196, 203, 210, 214–15, 216, 229–36, 243n25 Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack, 214, 222n34 phenomenology/phenomenological, ix, xi–xii, xivn5, 178, 181, 189– 217, 223, 229–36, 238 philosophy/philosophers, ix, xii, 177–86, 187n2, 187nn6–7, 190, 224, 229–36 Plato, 180–81, 187nn5–7, 218n7 Pollock, Della, 235 Porter, Lindsey, xii, 233–34, 239 postpartum, x, xii, xivn5, 185, 204, 209, 213, 223–24, 230–31, 232, 235, 242n15, 242n17 Prasad, Madhava, 183 precarity/precariousness, 213, 224, 228, 232, 237 pregnancy, ix–xiv, xivn5, 179–80, 186, 187n4, 189–95, 199–200, 202, 204–6, 207–13, 215–17, 218n3, 218n5, 223, 230, 232–33, 234–35, 236, 239–40, 241n2; calendar, 18, 193, 234; loss/ failed, x–xiv, xivn3, 3–7, 144, 178, 179, 185, 189, 192–94, 196, 198, 209, 211–12, 214, 216, 217, 221n27, 224, 229, 240 (see also miscarriage; stillbirth); loss support group, 152–55; privilege of, xi, 211, 213, 217, 219n16,

221n28; as unwanted or wanted, xiii, 92–93, 196, 200, 204, 208–9, 213, 214, 220n23, 230–31, 243n21 pregnant naïveté, xi, 182, 205 privilege, xi, 178, 183, 194, 209–10, 230, 232. See also epistemic privilege; pregnancy, privilege of privilege that is not a privilege. See epistemic privilege productivity/productive, xi, xii–xiii, 183, 185, 190, 191, 192, 204, 206, 210–11, 214, 216, 224, 243n20 pro-life politics/rhetoric, 97–98, 129, 178, 185, 190, 191–92, 198, 213–16, 236 relief (ontic, therapeutic), xiii, 193, 204, 205, 209, 213 reproduction, xii–xiii, 178, 183, 191, 193, 200, 212, 216, 218n3, 224, 229, 233, 239 self/selfhood, 191, 194, 196, 199, 201, 202, 204, 207, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213, 220n21, 225, 226, 228, 235, 236, 239 shame/shamefulness, x–xi, 199, 236, 240; culture, ix, 179, 186, 200, 232 Silverman, Rachel, 221n27, 229 solidarity, x, xiii–xiv, 182, 195, 216, 225, 231, 242n9, 242n12 son. See children sonogram. See ultrasound Stabile, Carol A., 215 sterilization. See tubal ligation stillbirth, xivn3, 144, 192 teleology/telos, 186, 188n11, 189–95, 197, 200, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 216, 217n1, 220n23, 234, 240



trace/tracework, 195–96, 204, 205, 212, 226, 229, 232 trimester. See pregnancy, calendar tubal ligation, 174–75, 177 ultrasound (sonogram), xiii, 3, 7, 21–25, 62–64, 88, 110, 182, 210, 214–15, 217, 233, 234 utility/utilitarianism, 190, 230, 237

Index 257

women, ix, 144, 178–86, 189–95, 198, 200, 210, 212, 213–17, 218n4, 221n27, 222n35, 223, 225, 226, 230–32, 235, 236, 237–39, 240–41, 241n2, 242n15, 243n21, 244nn32–33 Young, Iris Marion, xiii, 192, 194, 205, 209–10, 217, 230, 233, 237

About the Author

Jennifer Scuro has a BFA in painting and sculpture from St. John’s University in New York, an MA in philosophy from Boston College, and a PhD in philosophy from the New School for Social Research. She is associate professor of philosophy and former chair of the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at the College of New Rochelle in New York. She continues to work on her art while teaching undergraduate courses in global and applied ethics, feminist theory, and environmental studies. She wrote the final chapter, “Theory Can Heal,” for the anthology Why Race and Gender Still Matter (2014). Her most recent research is in disability studies, and Lexington Books (a division of Rowman & Littlefield) will publish her forthcoming book, Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Meditations through Disability Studies.

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