Chapter 8: Commentary Beyond Stigma: Critical Approaches to Violations of the Motherhood Narrative

In a woman’s life, pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood can be significant developmental events involving complex personal experiences and consequences. The fact that motherhood is an experience unique to women makes it all the more significant, particularly in patriarchal societies. Motherhood can be at once empowering for women and a dangerous site for social control. The embodied experience of pregnancy can serve as the ultimate expression of a woman’s sexual and gender identity. However, while a woman’s pregnancy may signify the pinnacle achievement of her body, Occidental ideals of feminine beauty stress a body that is slender and restricted in form. In this way, a woman’s bodily transformation throughout pregnancy can also be experienced as a departure from the feminine ideal as a woman’s body begins to accommodate the growing child more than social beauty norms. Further, medical models of pregnancy focus almost exclusively on the child and view the mother’s actions, diet, and lifestyle with critical suspicion. A recent federal lawsuit in the United States is fueled precisely by this model, as a 28-year-old pregnant woman in Wisconsin was arrested and enrolled in a court-ordered 78-day stay at a drug treatment center after disclosing a previous pill addiction to her doctor—an addiction that had ended prior to her pregnancy (Eckholm, 2013). The medicalization of pregnancy and motherhood, and the way this medicalization operates through both medical and legal systems, therefore symbolically works to separate a woman from her child and body, pitting one against the other (e.g., Cahill, 2001).