1. Introduction: phenomenology of unchosen pregnancy
Unchosen pregnancy affects millions of women and other peopleFootnote 1 worldwide annually (Houle Reference Houle, Mary, Sabrina and Khader2011, 160; Dreweke Reference Dreweke2016). While ethical discussions about abortion and unchosen pregnancies are extensive, phenomenological investigations into the experience of pregnancy have largely overlooked this significant aspect. In recent years, there has been a growing phenomenological interest in unbirthed pregnancies that end in miscarriage or stillbirth; however, phenomenological studies of unchosen pregnancies and the experiences of women seeking to abort their pregnancy are still scarce.
One of the few substantive works to posit a phenomenology of unchosen pregnancy as its main subject is Carolyn Lundquist’s pioneering work “Being torn: Toward a phenomenology of unwanted pregnancy” (Lundquist Reference Lundquist2008). Lundquist emphasizes the need for a broader and more inclusive phenomenology of pregnancy to complement and problematize existing phenomenological accounts of pregnancy, particularly Iris Young’s seminal essay on pregnant embodiment (Young Reference Young2005). To do so, Lundquist approaches unchosen pregnancy by discussing two marginalized and relatively rare types of unchosen pregnancy experiences, both of which result in full-term pregnancies and births rather than abortion. Therefore, Lundquist’s research, while groundbreaking, offers limited insight into a common experience of an unchosen pregnancy: an unplanned but noncoerced,Footnote 2 unchosen pregnancy that does not reach birth.
In this essay, we claim that the predominant notion of pregnancy as merely a teleological process progressing toward birth hinders the understanding of unchosen pregnancies ending in abortion. If the birth horizon serves as pregnancy’s only measure and structuring principle, thus valuing pregnancy only by its “product,” then pregnancy is only the past of this upcoming future horizon, a time of not-yet. Under this reasoning, “unbirthed” pregnancies are left with no meaning or value, other than as a failure, a “miss” in carrying out the pregnancy (Scuro Reference Scuro2017, 196). Thus, the shadow birth casts on the phenomenon of pregnancy prevents pregnancy, especially the phenomenon of an unchosen pregnancy that ends in abortion, from ever appearing as meaningful on its own.
We use the term “unchosen pregnancy” (rather than unwanted), first to indicate we are referring to those pregnancies that are not included in Young’s definition of a chosen pregnancy, to which she limits her account of pregnancy: a pregnancy “chosen by the woman, either as an explicit decision to become pregnant or at least as choosing to be identified with and positively accepting of it” (Reference Young2005, 47). Second, we use this term to avoid overdetermining any assumption concerning the will and wishes of pregnant women, following Lundquist’s and Bergum’s warnings about the complexity of assigning free will to decisions concerning pregnancy (Lundquist Reference Lundquist2008, 137, 140; Bergum Reference Bergum1997, 48). As pregnancy can also, for many reasons, shift from being chosen to being unchosen, and vice versa, we restrict the meaning of this term in this essay to a pregnancy that is unchosen from the start. Our discussion is thus restricted to the experience of an unplanned pregnancy that the woman carrying it has not accepted, and either has already chosen to terminate by abortion, or is debating this decision, and has, to some extent, the option to do so. In other words, we are referring to pregnancies in which abortion is one of the prominent future horizons. Indeed, different social and cultural contexts and locations generate different sets of possibilities, and thus shape different experiences. Like Young and others, this study focuses primarily on the experience of pregnant women in Western societies, where culturally, medically, and legally, there is, to varying degrees, access to abortion. Within these societies, of course, there exists a wide range of cultures, identities, and life circumstances that give rise to significantly diverse experiences. Our aim is not to portray a single, unified narrative, but rather to identify shared temporal features of experience as shaped by social structures, working toward a phenomenology of pregnant embodiment.
This study uses critical phenomenology, a multidisciplinary method that combines classical phenomenology with critical theory by making critical applications of phenomenological concepts (Sealey Reference Sealey, Weiss, Murphy and Salamon2020, 36). Unlike classical phenomenology, critical phenomenology includes a normative dimension. Following Guenther’s definition of this method, this study is a thought moved by a concrete problem and oriented toward its clarification but also toward its reparation (Guenther Reference Guenther2021, 9). As pregnancy is a deeply value-laden phenomenon (Browne Reference Browne, Giorgio, Jeremiah, Lee Six and Rye2018, 41), and unchosen pregnancy is widely considered first and foremost an ethical problem, even before it is an experience (Houle Reference Houle2013, 14), we find this exploration especially fitting for it.
Temporal manipulations, particularly the “collapsed future” (Sofia Reference Sofia1984, 59) of fetal personhood, play a central role in the increasing criminalization of pregnant bodies (Gentile Reference Gentile2023c; Paltrow Reference Paltrow2013). This trend places all pregnant people at risk, but especially BIPOC and economically marginalized women (Gentile Reference Gentile2023b, 49). By focusing our inquiry on the temporality of unchosen pregnancy, we aim not only to better understand this experience but also to resist such criminalization by exposing and destabilizing the temporal logics that sustain it.
With that, we aim to enhance understanding of unchosen pregnancy as a lived experience, potentially opening new ethical perspectives, and therefore contribute to what can later be used as infrastructure for new and different ethical discussions on this issue.
2. The time warp of pregnancy: the unique connection between pregnancy, time, and the future
Pregnancy has been viewed as inherently and uniquely connected with the future. To be pregnant is to be the bearer of the future, the upcoming, and beginnings not yet manifested. Feminist phenomenology of pregnancy often described the future as embodied in pregnant women’s flesh: De Beauvoir sees it as a “movement towards the future while being a thickened presence at the same time” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir2010, 663), and Young, following her, describes pregnant existence as entailing a unique temporality that stretches into the future (Reference Young2005, 47), and “imagines women’s bodies as pregnant with the future” (Oliver Reference Oliver2010, 774).
Nevertheless, not all future horizons define pregnancy, but a specific one: the birth of a healthy child. As Victoria Browne puts it, “The time of pregnancy is commonly represented as a quintessentially futural time: a time that derives its meaning and structure solely from the event-horizon of birth and the projected future of the expected child” (Browne Reference Browne2022a, 447). Thus, pregnancy is depicted as a time of being-towards-birth (Browne, Reference Browne2022b, 102).
Jennifer Scuro (Reference Scuro2017) terms this link between pregnancy and the birth-future “the childbearing teleology.” According to this perception, the birth of a healthy child is the only significant future horizon of pregnancy, and the value, sense, and meaning of pregnancy depend solely on this outcome. The childbearing teleology, despite its naturally evident appearance, is a socially constructed perception of pregnancy, which includes, according to Scuro, “the scripts and rituals that underwrite sociopolitical, gendered, and embodied expectations about pregnancy while overwriting and erasing the existentialia implied by the pregnant body.” (Reference Scuro2017, 194). This teleology aligns the time of pregnancy to the fetus’s expected (yet not guaranteed) biological development as a singular trajectory of linear progress (Franklin Reference Franklin, Franklin, Lury and Stacey1991, 197–200), subordinating the present of the pregnancy completely to this single future horizon (Browne Reference Browne2022b, 6).
In the radical version of this teleological perception, which Browne names “the proleptic version” (Reference Browne2022a, 447), the present of the pregnancy is not just secondary to the future but completely succumbs to it and is canceled by it. In this version, the predetermined future of the birth is collapsed in on the present. The fetus is thought of as already a child and the pregnant woman is already a mother (Browne Reference Browne2022a, 447). This version is widely used in pro-life propaganda and discourse (Edelman Reference Edelman2004, 14; Cooper Reference Cooper2006), but is not limited to it. Feminist philosophers, too, sometimes treat “the pregnant body” and “the maternal body” as interchangeable (Browne Reference Browne2022b, 14). As Lauren Berlant writes, “the narrative that so often and so powerfully governs the ways women who reproduce are thought about, a narrative in which the pregnant woman is cast in advance as already a mother embarked on a life trajectory of mothering” (Reference Berlant1994, 148).
This perception of pregnancy, both weak and strong, is problematic in many ways. First, and what has brought most writers to this issue to date, it does not account for the many pregnancy experiences that do not end with childbirth: those that end in miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion. If the birth horizon serves as the pregnancy’s only measure and structuring principle, unbirthed pregnancies are left with no meaning or value. However, unbirthed pregnancy experiences are not the only pregnancy experience affected by these perceptions of pregnancy. If the meaning and value of pregnancy are deduced from its projected future outcome, then pregnancy in and of itself is left an empty phenomenon with no value or content of its own.
According to Gentile, when the future runs over the present, there is no space to reflect and generate meaning (Reference Gentile2015, 34). This subjective space is needed to hold the tension between the past, present, and future. Without it, she claims that our capacity to “use” time and space for reflection is constrained (Gentile Reference Gentile2015, 38). Hence, as the fetus is given existence in the present, the pregnant woman loses hers: she becomes “a nonperson who is not now” (Dinshaw Reference Dinshaw2015, 42). Consequently, the future-oriented concept of pregnancy costs pregnant women’s temporality; it denies them of the present and their ability to use time to make sense of their lives. They are left out of time.
Dinshaw calls this displacement in time “asynchronous living” (Reference Dinshaw2015, 40). But this asynchrony is not the nonlinear asynchrony of the Bergsonian durée (Al-Saji Reference Al-Saji, Weiss, Murphy and Salamon2020, 101). In contrast, this asynchrony reduces the polytemporal experience of pregnancy (Browne Reference Browne2022b, 12) into isolated linearity, which in turn reduces the female body to a compliant, docile vessel, defined solely by its capacity to reproduce to produce the future (Gentile Reference Gentile2015, 38). Zoe Sofia claims that this compliance is the goal of all the discourses of “future collapse”: to use the alleged inevitability of the future to paralyze people into inaction (Sofia Reference Sofia1984, 57).
The collapsed future of fetal personhood—the framing of fetuses and embryos as already-children—is a central mechanism in the criminalization of pregnant women. When the future baby is treated as a preexisting fact, any action that deviates from this imagined future, whether skipping prenatal vitamins or seeking an abortion, becomes a violation against both the future child and the very idea of the future.
In the US, the criminalization of pregnancy disproportionately affects BIPOC women. African American pregnant women, for example, are significantly more likely than white women to be arrested, reported by hospital staff, and subjected to felony charges (Paltrow Reference Paltrow2013, 3; Paltrow and Flavin Reference Paltrow and Flavin2013, 333). This, too, can be understood as a consequence of temporal manipulation: the collapse of the future depends on erasing the multiplicity of human experience and foreclosing the possibility of diverse, open futures. It enforces a single, predetermined, hegemonic future structured through heteropatriarchal whiteness (Gentile Reference Gentile2023b, 44). Thus, to be a nonwhite pregnant woman is, in itself, a divergence from that hegemonic vision—a near-criminal deviation.
As Christina Sharpe asserts, Black women “birth blackness” (Sharpe Reference Sharpe2016, 57), and are therefore caught in an impossible bind: the collapsed future renders them the bearers of both innocent babies and already-criminalized Black adults. As such, they are criminalized in advance—as criminals bearing criminals (Sharpe Reference Sharpe2016, 65).
The future does not hold the same promise for everyone. As Saidiya Hartman writes, “For the enslaved, reproduction does not ensure any future other than that of dispossession nor guarantee anything other than the replication of racialized and disposable persons or ‘human increase’ (expanded property-holdings) for the master. The future of the enslaved was a form of speculative value for slaveholders” (Hartman Reference Hartman2016, 168). As queer and anti-Black theorists have shown, the future of promise is extended only to a privileged few (Al-Saji Reference Al-Saji2013, 7), revealing that temporality itself both shapes and is shaped by oppression and privilege (Gentile Reference Gentile2023b, 49).
The future itself is constrained and reduced by this temporal perception. Instead of a multitude of optional, surprising, and new futures, there is only one inevitable future horizon. As the future collapses into the present, not only is the present in its fullness lost but also the futureness of the future and its capacity to bring something unexpected. Thus, pregnancy is thought to have a powerful and bizarre effect over time; it can warp time, make the fetus “a fascinating temporal traveler” (Gentile Reference Gentile2023a, 1), by bringing the future into the present, and compromise both the presentness of the present and the futureness of the future.
3. Suspending the birth future horizon
The challenges inherent in perceiving pregnancy through teleological and proleptic lenses are common to all pregnancies and are not exclusive to those that do not result in birth. In recent years, the phenomenological critique of this perception, done primarily by Victoria Browne (Reference Browne2022b, Reference Browne2022a) and Jennifer Scuro (Reference Scuro2017), focused on the experience of an unbirthed pregnancy due to miscarriage and other involuntary pregnancy loss. In the following pages, we consider the effect of this temporality on a different yet related pregnancy experience, that of unchosen pregnancy.Footnote 3
If pregnancy is understood as gaining all its sense, meaning, and value from its birth future, then an unchosen pregnancy that radically undermines this future cannot be thought of as a pregnancy experience. Thus, unlike other unbirthed pregnancy experiences, unchosen pregnancy cannot be fully considered within the birth-oriented teleological perception of pregnancy. If it is a phenomenon that draws all its meaning from a future that will not happen and was never going to happen, it is left meaningless, void, and paradoxical; it cannot appear as a pregnancy. Therefore, to write a phenomenological account of an unchosen pregnancy and make any sense of it as a lived pregnancy experience, one must first find a way to think about pregnancy disconnected from the birth future horizon, to find meaning in the phenomenon of pregnancy in and of itself, in its present.
To examine unchosen pregnancy, we draw on Scuro and Browne and suspend the birth future horizon of pregnancy. Critical suspension of hegemonic norms is the main method of critical phenomenology (Guenther Reference Guenther2021, 6): the phenomenological suspension not of an ontological structure but a social one. While Husserl’s epoché brackets off the question of the ontological existence of the phenomena to be able to examine them as such (Husserl Reference Husserl1982, 58–59), this suspension brackets the birth future horizon to let unchosen pregnancy appear as a phenomenon.
Using Sara Heinämaa’s metaphor of weight instead of length for thinking of time (Heinämaa Reference Heinämaa and Stoller2014, 181), this suspension can be thought of as lifting the heavy weight of the future off the pregnancy’s present to allow the present to expand and be revealed. This metaphor also resonates with postcolonial conceptions of temporality, which shed light on the “painful sense of time” women may experience under the burden of a birth-oriented future. As Édouard Glissant writes of life “under the weight of colonial duration,” this too is a temporality shaped by domination and constraint (quoted in Laferté-Coutu Reference Laferté-Coutu2021, 101).
By suspending the birth-oriented future, we do not intend to negate or dispute its significance in shaping pregnancy experiences. Instead, our aim is to challenge and complicate this dominant perspective, allowing for a wider and more multifaceted understanding of the underlying phenomenon beneath it.
Browne and Scuro approach this bracketing of the birth future in two different ways: Browne suspends the normative future of birth to examine the present of the pregnancy for itself. She then offers a complex polytemporal understanding of pregnant lived time as “multilayered, multirhythmic, and multidirectional” (Reference Browne2022a, 457) and finds meaning in the experience of pregnancy in and of itself as a potential site of growth and expansion (Reference Browne2022b, 114; Reference Browne2022a, 456). Scuro, on the other hand, still thinks of pregnancy mainly through its future: She suspends one future horizon—that of childbirth—to let the other silenced future horizons appear, specifically that of miscarriages. Such reading of pregnancy, she claims, frees it hermeneutically from positive, objectifying, and teleological interpretations, ultimately resulting in a radically negative reading of the pregnancy experience in its present (Reference Scuro2017, 197).
4. The time of early pregnancy
When pregnancy is flattened and reduced by its future, the experiences of all stages of pregnancy are colored by those of its late stages, where the birth future is most present. Consequently, the first weeks of pregnancy are hardly ever mentioned, let alone well considered. Suspending the birth future allows the pregnancy experience to expand from the dense and flattened mode and unfold as an experience with temporal length, in which various segments have distinct basic characteristics and are experienced differently.
Understanding the unique aspects of early pregnancy is crucial for understanding the experience of unchosen pregnancy. As nearly all abortions are performed during the first trimester of pregnancy,Footnote 4 the experience of most pregnancies that end in abortion is limited to early pregnancy. Hence, an unchosen pregnancy is not just a specific pregnancy experience, but, for the most part, a specific early pregnancy experience.Footnote 5 Recognizing early pregnancy as a phenomenon demanding a separate phenomenological description and theorization is, thus, a necessary step toward doing the same for unchosen pregnancy.Footnote 6 The following subsections discuss the phenomenology and temporality of early pregnancy.
In doing so, we do not wish to participate in the carving of “procreative time up into increasingly fragmented units, which are imbued with the potential for danger” (Simonds Reference Simonds2002, 560), constantly done by the rigid time standards of the medical discourse of pregnancy. This fracturing of pregnancy time leaves every fragment as more of the same, a “reified time slice,” which is meaningful only as a measure of the progress of the pregnancy (Simonds Reference Simonds2002, 560). Instead, we wish to focus not on the medical or objective demarcation of the temporal boundaries of the first trimester, but on the lived experience of the first weeks of pregnancy and allow it to appear with its uniqueness, distinctive features, and fuzzy boundaries.
4.1 Early pregnancy as a phenomenon concealed by the birth future
Early pregnancy is a private and invisible phenomenon that rarely appears in the public sphere in real time. It is invisible because there are usually no observable physical changes by which to notice early-weeks pregnant women and unspoken of, as many pregnant women refrain from sharing news of their pregnancy in the first weeks due to the dominance of the miscarriage future horizon (Carin et al. Reference Carin, Lundgren and Bergbom2011, 3, 9).
Even the phenomenology of pregnancy does not discuss its early weeks. Young, for example, in her only reference to the beginning of pregnancy, says: “As my pregnancy begins, … My nipples become reddened and tender; my belly swells into a pear. I feel this elastic around my waist, itching, this round, hard middle replacing the doughy belly with which I still identify.” (Reference Young2005, 49). However, pregnant bellies do not start to swell or harden as pregnancy begins. In the first weeks and even months of most pregnancies, bellies are still doughy, and almost none of these sensations appear. Directly next to Young’s description is her feeling of fetal movement, usually first felt at approximately 16–22 weeks of pregnancy. Similarly, Adrienne Rich writes, “In early pregnancy, the stirring of the fetus felt like ghostly tremors of my own body” (Rich Reference Rich1976, 47). Thus, both “founding mothers” of writing about the pregnancy experience, write of “early pregnancy” referring to the second trimester, and not to the first weeks of pregnancy.Footnote 7
4.2 Early pregnancy’s ambiguity
We argue that the experience of the very first weeks of pregnancy is, first and foremost, an experience of ambiguity. The ambivalence of pregnancy is a common aspect discussed in phenomenological works (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir2010; Young Reference Young2005; Kristeva Reference Kristeva and Roudiez1980, Reference Kristeva1985): The ambivalence between the pregnant woman and the fetus, or her ambivalent feelings toward the pregnancy, is well described and theorized. But the ontologicalFootnote 8 ambiguity as to whether there is a fetus and a pregnancy at all, that preexists this ambivalence (Houle Reference Houle, Mary, Sabrina and Khader2011, 165), is a less addressed aspect of pregnancy.Footnote 9
The ambiguity of this experience is ontological, as the existence of pregnancy in these weeks is in question. It might not exist at all, and be no more than a suspicion, a wishful thought, or a “false alarm”; it could have started and ended without the woman ever knowing, leaving no trace; and even if reliable, objective tests prove it to exist, it may stop, or has already stopped, at any moment, without necessarily any noticeable signs. The experience of pregnancy does not have a clear beginning. Since pregnancy can only be detected about two weeks after conception, the first days of pregnancy, when pregnancy is a bodily phenomenon that cannot be medically detected and usually has no symptoms, are always an ambiguous time of a “maybe-pregnancy.” Thus, pregnancy can be seen as an extremely ambiguous phenomenon that gradually becomes less ambiguous as pregnancy advances. This understanding of the phenomenon of pregnancy is quite the opposite of the way childbearing teleology paints it: it is not a phenomenon with a clear, predetermined endpoint fully present from its very beginning, but a phenomenon defined by the subsiding ambiguity of both its present status and future horizon.
4.3 Early pregnancy’s polytemporality
This intrinsic ambiguity of early pregnancy produces a nonlinear, multilayered, and polyrhythmic temporality, as can be seen in Beynon-Jones’s description of becoming pregnant “as a bodily state that emerges over an extended time period, in relation to multiple, inextricable, socio-material processes with varying temporal rhythms” (Reference Beynon-Jones2017, 9). Building on Browne’s concept of the polytemporality of pregnancy (Browne Reference Browne2022a, Reference Browne2022b), we wish to explore the unique polytemporality of early pregnancy, claiming that, when viewed through the lens of this multifaceted temporality, it is characterized by a complex interplay of overlapping timeframes.
One of the dominant temporalities in this multitemporal experience is biological bodily temporality. In many cases, the first indication of pregnancy is the lack of menstrual bleeding, which breaks the regular circular time of the female reproductive system. This circular temporality of the body supposedly transforms into a linear, forward-moving temporality of pregnancy advancement and fetus development. However, at the beginning of pregnancy, this development is only felt, if at all, through bodily symptoms, such as morning sickness and tiredness. These sensations are nonlinear; they can appear and disappear at random and do not necessarily subside linearly. This discrepancy between the linear and nonlinear advancements reveals that bodily time itself is multiple.
Thus, body time offers multiple demarcations for early pregnancy. A decrease in early pregnancy symptoms is one option, while quickening can also be considered the beginning of a new, perhaps less ambiguous, stage. Body changes also affect social and interpersonal dynamics, as visual changes to the body, no longer allowing pregnancy to be kept private, may mark the end of the early, discreet part of pregnancy.
Body time is not only experienced from within but also measured, defined, and shaped by the medical institution. Medical pregnancy time is divided into discrete fragments set to fixed temporal milestones according to rigid time standards determined by tests and sonograms. This fragmented and heavily controlled time is defined through risk factors and statistics, thus setting the limit of early pregnancy to the end of the first trimester when the risk of miscarriage dramatically reduces.
The legal time of abortion restrictions and work legislation giving different rights or restrictions to pregnant workers add another temporality, especially relevant to unchosen pregnancies. Legal time often runs opposite to the forward-facing linear time of fetal development. It counts time backward toward legal limitations. Such legal limits also mark the demarcation of early pregnancy at different points in every country, according to local laws.
The lack of fixed and clear boundaries for what constitutes early pregnancy does not mean that it cannot be considered distinct from advanced pregnancy. In contrast, its fuzzy boundaries are part of its ambiguity. As a phenomenon so essentially ambiguous, a stark contradiction to the saying “you cannot be half pregnant,” a Schrödinger’s cat rather than an arrow in its flight, the phenomenon of early pregnancy is fundamentally different from that of advanced pregnancy.
4.4 Early pregnancy and the future
Another way of thinking about the temporality of early pregnancy is to consider its unique relationship with the future. In Lundgren and Wahlberg’s empirical phenomenological research about the pregnancy experience (Lundgren and Wahlberg Reference Lundgren and Wahlberg1999), the inevitability of birth, commonly considered central to the pregnancy experience, appears as a theme in the participants’ experience only in the second trimester. In early pregnancy, however, the future horizon of miscarriage takes precedence.
This becomes apparent when considering most willingly pregnant women’s actions, duties, and concerns in this stage of the pregnancy. A pregnant woman in the first trimester is expected to follow a long list of instructions about foods and activities to do or refrain from to avoid miscarriage, while having frequent medical tests and checkups, to check if a miscarriage is likely to occur, if it has already begun without her knowledge, or if abortion might be advisable or necessary for medical reasons. All this is carried out while usually concealing her pregnancy from most people, as it may not last. Thus, her everyday experience is not that of expecting birth, but that of expecting, dreading, or avoiding miscarriage.
Furthermore, one of the prominent themes in the reported experience of the first trimester of pregnancy is that of thinking more about the past than about the future (Lundgren and Wahlberg Reference Lundgren and Wahlberg1999): Women’s thoughts and concerns were directed to their life histories, memories of their childhood, grief for lost parents, and thoughts about previous pregnancies, abortions, and births (Carin et al. Reference Carin, Lundgren and Bergbom2011, 5; Lundgren and Wahlberg Reference Lundgren and Wahlberg1999). Beynon-Jones’s (Reference Beynon-Jones2017) empirical study provides a different aspect of how the present time of early pregnancy is past-oriented. In this study, it is apparent that, in an unplanned pregnancy, much of the woman’s focus in the first weeks of pregnancy is turned to thoughts of the conception of this pregnancy, trying to figure out how and when it happened, and how long she had already been pregnant without her knowledge (Reference Beynon-Jones2017, 9).
Thus, early pregnancy has a distinct temporality that does not concur with the concept of pregnancy as a birth-oriented experience, nor with the more general concept of pregnancy as a future-oriented experience.
4.5 Early pregnancy as a temporal vertigo
The temporal orientation directed to the past of the newly discovered pregnancy, described by Beynon-Jones, echoes Browne’s definition of pregnant time as “a lived time oriented as much around what is already happening as it is toward the to-come” (Reference Browne2022a, 455). This definition, viewing pregnancy as a time of “catching up to what is already happening” (Berlant Reference Berlant2011, 54), is true according to Browne to all pregnancies, but especially to unplanned ones (Reference Browne2022a, 455). We argue that it is strongest in the first weeks of an unplanned pregnancy: those weeks of first realizing one is pregnant, of finding out that something with possible grand implications on her life has been happening in her body without her knowledge. She now needs to catch up with what is already happening, to re-sync herself into the new “gestational time” (Beynon-Jones Reference Beynon-Jones2017, 11) she finds herself in. The temporal experience of pregnancy, and especially of early unplanned pregnancy, is thus, as described by Beynon-Jones, “an experience of shocking, traumatic, temporal dislocation” (Reference Beynon-Jones2017, 12).
The medical institution enhances this type of temporal dislocation. Simonds showed that the very way medical discourse counts and calculates the gestational age is counterintuitive and disorienting. Since the “starting date” of pregnancy for medical time measurement is the first date of a woman’s last menstrual period, Simonds reminds us that “Indeed, medically, pregnancy begins before pregnancy begins” (Reference Simonds2002, 562).
Pregnancy thus not only brings the future to the present, but also changes the past; when one receives a positive answer on her pregnancy test, she not only finds out that she has been pregnant without knowing at least two weeks already, but also that the time when she got her last menstrual bleeding, and was thus decisively not pregnant, has suddenly changed into being the first week of her pregnancy. This throwing back and forth in time makes the first days after discovering one is pregnant an experience of temporal vertigo.
5. The time of unchosen pregnancy
Thus, early pregnancy is a phenomenon with unique ontology and temporality. Its ontology is that of an extreme ambiguity that gradually subsides, and its temporality is characterized by disorientation in time and dislocation in the present, a polytemporal experience facing many possible future horizons. We can now return to an unchosen pregnancy and see what can be learned about it as a specific kind of early pregnancy experience, and what needs to be added to the account of early pregnancy experience to account for an unchosen one.
5.1 Too many “times”: unchosen pregnancy as an experience of extreme temporal dislocation and enhanced polytemporality
If an early pregnancy is an experience of temporal dislocation, then an unplanned, unchosen pregnancy is an experience of extreme temporal dislocation. Unlike a planned pregnancy, in which time usually unfolds according to the woman’s plans and desires, making the fantasy of the birth teleology seem convincing enough to soothe the temporal vertigo of early pregnancy, in an unplanned pregnancy, the surprise of finding out you are not where you thought you are in time, puts one in a mode of “catching up”—as Browne says, more so than in a planned pregnancy.
In a planned pregnancy, the lack of menstrual bleeding at its due time is a break in the regular cyclic time of the woman’s body, but a waited for and expected break. In an unplanned pregnancy, this sudden halt in the cycle throws the woman off. As the cycle breaks, the woman realizes “she is late”—her menstrual bleeding is late, out of schedule. As this delay is revealed to be due to pregnancy, the woman now finds not only her period but truly herself to be late, out of time, catching up, and extremely disoriented.
In addition to being an experience of enhanced temporal disorientation, an unchosen pregnancy is also an experience of enhanced polytemporality, constituted by a multitude of rhythms, temporalities, and future horizons. The enhanced polytemporal nature of unchosen pregnancy is partly due to the multitude of future horizons and possibilities that open up with the discovery of an unchosen pregnancy. As Karen Houle details, early unchosen pregnancy is a site of “infinite multiplication of possibility, suspension, indeterminacy,” where “multiple becomings are gathered” (Reference Houle, Mary, Sabrina and Khader2011, 171). The power of the abortion horizon to conditionalize, and thus weaken the dominance of the birth horizon, opens the sky of unchosen pregnancy to many possible futures, making it an experience of a multitude of future horizons, threatening and promising, possible and slipping away, all at once.
Another aspect of the enhanced polytemporality of an unchosen pregnancy is that it combines a multitude of different temporalities that are not only multiple, but also multidirectional and multirhythmic, unstable, and uneven in duration and direction.
As ultrasound measurements of gestation are treated as authoritative accounts of gestational time (Beynon-Jones Reference Beynon-Jones2017, 10), the control of this crucial aspect of pregnancy time is out of the woman’s knowledge and control, making pregnancy time shrink and expand by foreign intervention: A recently discovered pregnancy can suddenly be revealed as almost too far along to be aborted, shrinking the time left for decision and action, or, on the contrary, not far along enough to be detected by ultrasound, stretching the time of waiting and enduring until an abortion can be provided.
The different temporalities of unchosen pregnancy are often not just multiple in their types but also in their directionalities (Browne Reference Browne2022b, 116), primarily because the forward-moving biological time of fetal development is moving against the running-out of time of legal and medical limitations on abortion. Thus, gestational time in an unchosen pregnancy is revealed as an “embodied resource,” as Beynon-Jones describes it, and its accumulation as a threat to pregnant women’s agency and bodily autonomy (Reference Beynon-Jones2017, 12). This threat is due both to emotional and relational temporality, as the women fear the development of increasingly significant bodily relationships with their fetus, and to medical and legal time running out, positioning them as “a gestational emergency” (Reference Beynon-Jones2017, 12).
The polytemporality of unchosen pregnancy is enhanced, because it displays more conflicting temporalities than a chosen pregnancy. We also claim that it is polytemporal in a more inherent way, since unchosen pregnancy is, in essence, a break in the concept of the singular temporality of pregnancy.
The phenomenology of miscarriage depicts it as an “event” in the Badiouan sense (Badiou Reference Badiou2005, Reference Badiou1999): “breaking with linear teleology” (Al-Saji Reference Al-Saji, Weiss, Murphy and Salamon2020, 102), “a drama that shocks being into radically open situations” (Berlant Reference Berlant2011, 5). Thus, it suddenly exposes the nonlinear and polytemporal nature of pregnancy time. As Oele puts it, it “can bring us to experience time not as seamless or unidirectional, but as interrupted” (Oele Reference Oele, Boublil and Ferrarello2023, 106). A miscarriage, which is unplanned, unwanted, and out of the pregnant woman’s control, is a powerful event. It brings the so-far-thought-of-as-inevitable birth future to a sudden halt, thus breaking the illusion of its inevitability and status as pregnancy’s sole future horizon.
This break allows or even forces the present of pregnancy and other future horizons to appear through the cracks. Ann Cahill demonstrates this powerful ability of the event of miscarriage in her description of how, in the wake of her miscarriage: “The future that had been so intimately involved in making sense of the present blinks, or fades, or painfully erodes out of existence, leaving the present unmoored” (Cahill Reference Cahill2015, 54).
However, in these descriptions, pregnancy is a situation (Browne Reference Browne2022a, 458) and miscarriage is the event that interrupts it; an unchosen pregnancy is itself the event, rupturing the pregnant woman’s life. A woman contemplating terminating an unchosen pregnancy, even before deciding to do so, is resisting and negating the axiom that childbirth is the only future horizon of the pregnancy. In Sofia’s terms, she is part of the “struggle to pry open the futureless spaces of futurism and open up the pluripotent space of the future conditional” (Reference Sofia1984, 59). Unlike a miscarriage, an unchosen pregnancy is not an unfortunate hitch in otherwise functioning teleology. By definition, it is an experience of a conditional future; therefore, it deconstructs pregnancy from its roots as a birth-oriented experience. Unplanned, unchosen pregnancy is thus a priori polytemporal from its very start.
This a priori polytemporality emphasizes the shocking, earth-shattering, life-changing aspects of going through such experience, for better and for worse, since, as Baraitser explains, “The event compels us to move from ordinary multiple-being to a new way of being, and on the way to enter into the composing of a subject” (Baraitser Reference Baraitser2017, 11).
5.2 Out of time: unchosen pregnancy as an experience of temporality loss
The experience of an unchosen pregnancy thus radically affects the foundation of one’s temporal subjectivity. The temporal experience of running out of time is not just the experience of an emergency, having to hurry and run against the clock. It is a much deeper experience of losing what Lisa Guenther terms “the capacity to do time—to exist as a temporal subject rather than an object persisting through time” (Guenther Reference Guenther2013, 196).
As mentioned earlier, the common concept of pregnancy depicts it as an entirely future-oriented experience. However, for women seeking abortion, determined to terminate their pregnancy, this future is paradoxical: it is simultaneously both inevitable and unacceptable, and nearly impossible. If pregnancy is all future and an unchosen pregnancy’s future is paradoxical, then the experience of an unchosen pregnancy is paradoxical. In other words, seeking to terminate an unchosen pregnancy is living with the paradox of being in a state fully defined by the future of birth while not having such a future. Hence, the present of an unchosen pregnancy is not only overshadowed by the future, as in all pregnancies; it is also a present subdued by a non-future. As a result, pregnant women seeking abortion are at risk of being dispossessed in both the future and present. If so, their sense of temporal dislocation is not only that of being displaced in time, but potentially that of being displaced from time.
The capacity of women carrying an unchosen pregnancy to exist as temporal subjects is further jeopardized by the control institutions have over pregnancy time. Guenther, in her critical phenomenology of solitary confinement, describes how this capacity is undermined by a structure in which prison authorities have not only power, but also power over time (Reference Guenther2013, 196). Notwithstanding, the structure shown above, in which medical knowledge and institutions have control over defining and determining pregnant temporality (Simonds Reference Simonds2002, 560, 562), deprives pregnant women of power over their time. This is true and problematic for all pregnant women, but for women wishing to terminate an unchosen pregnancy, for whom gestational time is a scarce and crucial resource (Beynon-Jones Reference Beynon-Jones2017, 12), this loss of control over time is a real threat to their temporal subjectivity.
The combination of damage to these two temporal aspects, temporal location and temporal capacity, leaves pregnant women who wish to terminate an unchosen pregnancy with extremely precarious temporality. They not only have no time to waste or no control over their time, they are also at risk of being left out of time and meaningful temporality.Footnote 10 An analysis of the temporality of an unchosen pregnancy reveals the complexity of this experience and its potential to undermine and compromise the subjectivity of women experiencing it.
6. Conclusion: a different horizon
This essay offers an account of the temporality of unchosen pregnancy by suspending the birth future horizon of pregnancy. Our study led to the conclusion that to provide a phenomenological account of the experience of an unchosen pregnancy, it is first necessary to provide such an account of the phenomenon of early pregnancy. The non-exhaustive account of early pregnancy depicts it as an essentially ambiguous phenomenon in which temporality is mostly shaped not by the future horizon of birth but by that of miscarriage or abortion, and is characterized by a disorientating and dislocating polytemporality. After this description of early pregnancy, an unchosen pregnancy is thought of not as the negation of the chosen pregnancy but as a variation of early pregnancy and is thus revealed as an experience of extreme temporal disorientation, enhanced polytemporality, and a potential loss of temporal location and capacity. The examination of the temporal aspects of early pregnancy, shaped by the dominance of the birth future, demonstrates their contribution to undermining the subjectivity of women carrying an unchosen pregnancy.
While our engagement with feminist and phenomenological approaches offers tools for articulating temporal dislocation in unchosen pregnancy, we acknowledge that these tools are rooted in white, Western traditions that may not fully capture the lived realities shaped by different histories, racializations, or epistemologies. Although we have aimed to include references to voices and experiences of women of color, we recognize that this essay does not sufficiently account for alternative epistemologies or modes of embodiment. Furthermore, the analysis assumes, often implicitly, a heteronormative framework, particularly in its focus on pregnancies resulting from heterosexual encounters, which does not capture the full diversity of reproductive experiences across different sexualities and gender identities.
Critical phenomenology is concerned not only with describing a phenomenon but also with transforming the unjust structures that shape the experience and constrict the possibilities of the subject living through it (Guenther Reference Guenther2021, 7). Therefore, the description and analysis offered in this essay also have a normative aim: to alleviate, to some extent, the experience of unchosen pregnancy.
This essay does not aim to provide normative recommendations in the traditional sense of policy or reform. Rather, its contribution is primarily conceptual and diagnostic: by naming and analyzing the temporal structure of unchosen pregnancy, we seek to make the experience more thinkable and more speakable. In doing so, we offer a vocabulary that challenges dominant cultural and biomedical framings which often render such experiences invisible, pathological, or politically illegible.
Following Gentile’s insight that the tethering of pregnancy to the future of birth plays a central role in the criminalization of pregnant women, and specifically BIPOC women (Gentile Reference Gentile2023b), we suggest that releasing pregnancy from this teleological framing is, in itself, a form of moral and political resistance. By articulating pregnancy as a temporality in its own right—rather than merely a means to an end—we aim to contribute to feminist efforts that resist the disciplinary logics imposed on gestating bodies and open space for alternative modes of embodiment,
Freeing the present of pregnancy from the crushing future of birth can give unchosen pregnancy the potential to be, as Karen Houle describes it, an experience of radical openness to a multitude of new future horizons and radical listening to the other (Houle Reference Houle, Mary, Sabrina and Khader2011, 169), and thus “an ethical moment” (Reference Houle, Mary, Sabrina and Khader2011, 170) rather than an ethical problem. This can allow it to turn from an experience of great trouble, to “a site of self-transformation, infinite multiplication of possibility, suspension, indeterminacy” (Houle Reference Houle, Mary, Sabrina and Khader2011, 171). Weakening the seemingly unbreakable connection between pregnancy and birth is thus the first step towards opening new ways of living through the experience of an unchosen pregnancy and new ways of defining the ethical discussion around terminating such pregnancies. This shift in perspective offers new possibilities for navigating the complexities of this experience and reimagining the ethical discourse surrounding reproductive choice.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their generous and constructive comments and suggestions, and to the editors of Hypatia for her thoughtful guidance throughout the process. Special thanks are extended to Tal Menahem and Yaara Rosolio Bankhalter, whose intellectual insight and solidarity sustained this work along the way.
Anat Shalem is a PhD candidate in the Gender Studies Program at Bar-Ilan University. Her research develops a critical phenomenology of pregnancy, with a particular focus on unchosen pregnancy. She is interested in the interrelations between temporality, reproduction, embodiment, and subjectivity, and in the contribution of critical phenomenology to ethical inquiry.
Miri Rozmarin is an Associate Professor in the Gender Studies Program at Bar-Ilan University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Her research interests include political subjectivity, vulnerability theory, and maternal subjectivity. She has published two books and numerous articles in leading journals. Her current work develops vulnerability theory as an analytical framework for qualitative research.
Open access
