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Filial Responsibilities of Dependent Children
- Amy Mullin
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The existing literature on filial morality has an important gap. It explores responsibilities adult children have toward their elderly parents, and ignores questions about responsibilities of dependent children. Filling this gap involves specifying what competent and morally decent social parents can legitimately expect from children. I argue that it is appropriate to expect and encourage young dependent children to demonstrate cooperation, mutuality, and trust, along with gratitude and reciprocity of value.
Contributors
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- By Rose Teteki Abbey, K. C. Abraham, David Tuesday Adamo, LeRoy H. Aden, Efrain Agosto, Victor Aguilan, Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Charanjit Kaur AjitSingh, Dorothy B E A Akoto, Giuseppe Alberigo, Daniel E. Albrecht, Ruth Albrecht, Daniel O. Aleshire, Urs Altermatt, Anand Amaladass, Michael Amaladoss, James N. Amanze, Lesley G. Anderson, Thomas C. Anderson, Victor Anderson, Hope S. Antone, María Pilar Aquino, Paula Arai, Victorio Araya Guillén, S. Wesley Ariarajah, Ellen T. Armour, Brett Gregory Armstrong, Atsuhiro Asano, Naim Stifan Ateek, Mahmoud Ayoub, John Alembillah Azumah, Mercedes L. García Bachmann, Irena Backus, J. Wayne Baker, Mieke Bal, Lewis V. Baldwin, William Barbieri, António Barbosa da Silva, David Basinger, Bolaji Olukemi Bateye, Oswald Bayer, Daniel H. Bays, Rosalie Beck, Nancy Elizabeth Bedford, Guy-Thomas Bedouelle, Chorbishop Seely Beggiani, Wolfgang Behringer, Christopher M. Bellitto, Byard Bennett, Harold V. Bennett, Teresa Berger, Miguel A. Bernad, Henley Bernard, Alan E. Bernstein, Jon L. Berquist, Johannes Beutler, Ana María Bidegain, Matthew P. Binkewicz, Jennifer Bird, Joseph Blenkinsopp, Dmytro Bondarenko, Paulo Bonfatti, Riet en Pim Bons-Storm, Jessica A. Boon, Marcus J. Borg, Mark Bosco, Peter C. Bouteneff, François Bovon, William D. Bowman, Paul S. Boyer, David Brakke, Richard E. Brantley, Marcus Braybrooke, Ian Breward, Ênio José da Costa Brito, Jewel Spears Brooker, Johannes Brosseder, Nicholas Canfield Read Brown, Robert F. Brown, Pamela K. Brubaker, Walter Brueggemann, Bishop Colin O. Buchanan, Stanley M. Burgess, Amy Nelson Burnett, J. Patout Burns, David B. Burrell, David Buttrick, James P. Byrd, Lavinia Byrne, Gerado Caetano, Marcos Caldas, Alkiviadis Calivas, William J. Callahan, Salvatore Calomino, Euan K. Cameron, William S. Campbell, Marcelo Ayres Camurça, Daniel F. Caner, Paul E. Capetz, Carlos F. Cardoza-Orlandi, Patrick W. Carey, Barbara Carvill, Hal Cauthron, Subhadra Mitra Channa, Mark D. Chapman, James H. Charlesworth, Kenneth R. Chase, Chen Zemin, Luciano Chianeque, Philip Chia Phin Yin, Francisca H. Chimhanda, Daniel Chiquete, John T. Chirban, Soobin Choi, Robert Choquette, Mita Choudhury, Gerald Christianson, John Chryssavgis, Sejong Chun, Esther Chung-Kim, Charles M. A. Clark, Elizabeth A. Clark, Sathianathan Clarke, Fred Cloud, John B. Cobb, W. Owen Cole, John A Coleman, John J. Collins, Sylvia Collins-Mayo, Paul K. Conkin, Beth A. Conklin, Sean Connolly, Demetrios J. Constantelos, Michael A. Conway, Paula M. Cooey, Austin Cooper, Michael L. Cooper-White, Pamela Cooper-White, L. William Countryman, Sérgio Coutinho, Pamela Couture, Shannon Craigo-Snell, James L. Crenshaw, David Crowner, Humberto Horacio Cucchetti, Lawrence S. Cunningham, Elizabeth Mason Currier, Emmanuel Cutrone, Mary L. Daniel, David D. Daniels, Robert Darden, Rolf Darge, Isaiah Dau, Jeffry C. Davis, Jane Dawson, Valentin Dedji, John W. de Gruchy, Paul DeHart, Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards, Miguel A. De La Torre, George E. Demacopoulos, Thomas de Mayo, Leah DeVun, Beatriz de Vasconcellos Dias, Dennis C. Dickerson, John M. Dillon, Luis Miguel Donatello, Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev, Susanna Drake, Jonathan A. Draper, N. Dreher Martin, Otto Dreydoppel, Angelyn Dries, A. J. Droge, Francis X. D'Sa, Marilyn Dunn, Nicole Wilkinson Duran, Rifaat Ebied, Mark J. Edwards, William H. Edwards, Leonard H. Ehrlich, Nancy L. Eiesland, Martin Elbel, J. Harold Ellens, Stephen Ellingson, Marvin M. Ellison, Robert Ellsberg, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Eldon Jay Epp, Peter C. Erb, Tassilo Erhardt, Maria Erling, Noel Leo Erskine, Gillian R. Evans, Virginia Fabella, Michael A. Fahey, Edward Farley, Margaret A. Farley, Wendy Farley, Robert Fastiggi, Seena Fazel, Duncan S. Ferguson, Helwar Figueroa, Paul Corby Finney, Kyriaki Karidoyanes FitzGerald, Thomas E. FitzGerald, John R. Fitzmier, Marie Therese Flanagan, Sabina Flanagan, Claude Flipo, Ronald B. Flowers, Carole Fontaine, David Ford, Mary Ford, Stephanie A. Ford, Jim Forest, William Franke, Robert M. Franklin, Ruth Franzén, Edward H. Friedman, Samuel Frouisou, Lorelei F. Fuchs, Jojo M. Fung, Inger Furseth, Richard R. Gaillardetz, Brandon Gallaher, China Galland, Mark Galli, Ismael García, Tharscisse Gatwa, Jean-Marie Gaudeul, Luis María Gavilanes del Castillo, Pavel L. Gavrilyuk, Volney P. Gay, Metropolitan Athanasios Geevargis, Kondothra M. George, Mary Gerhart, Simon Gikandi, Maurice Gilbert, Michael J. Gillgannon, Verónica Giménez Beliveau, Terryl Givens, Beth Glazier-McDonald, Philip Gleason, Menghun Goh, Brian Golding, Bishop Hilario M. Gomez, Michelle A. Gonzalez, Donald K. Gorrell, Roy Gottfried, Tamara Grdzelidze, Joel B. Green, Niels Henrik Gregersen, Cristina Grenholm, Herbert Griffiths, Eric W. Gritsch, Erich S. Gruen, Christoffer H. Grundmann, Paul H. Gundani, Jon P. Gunnemann, Petre Guran, Vidar L. Haanes, Jeremiah M. Hackett, Getatchew Haile, Douglas John Hall, Nicholas Hammond, Daphne Hampson, Jehu J. Hanciles, Barry Hankins, Jennifer Haraguchi, Stanley S. Harakas, Anthony John Harding, Conrad L. Harkins, J. William Harmless, Marjory Harper, Amir Harrak, Joel F. Harrington, Mark W. Harris, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Van A. Harvey, R. Chris Hassel, Jione Havea, Daniel Hawk, Diana L. Hayes, Leslie Hayes, Priscilla Hayner, S. Mark Heim, Simo Heininen, Richard P. Heitzenrater, Eila Helander, David Hempton, Scott H. Hendrix, Jan-Olav Henriksen, Gina Hens-Piazza, Carter Heyward, Nicholas J. Higham, David Hilliard, Norman A. Hjelm, Peter C. Hodgson, Arthur Holder, M. Jan Holton, Dwight N. Hopkins, Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, Po-Ho Huang, James Hudnut-Beumler, Jennifer S. Hughes, Leonard M. Hummel, Mary E. Hunt, Laennec Hurbon, Mark Hutchinson, Susan E. Hylen, Mary Beth Ingham, H. Larry Ingle, Dale T. Irvin, Jon Isaak, Paul John Isaak, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Hans Raun Iversen, Margaret C. Jacob, Arthur James, Maria Jansdotter-Samuelsson, David Jasper, Werner G. Jeanrond, Renée Jeffery, David Lyle Jeffrey, Theodore W. Jennings, David H. Jensen, Robin Margaret Jensen, David Jobling, Dale A. Johnson, Elizabeth A. Johnson, Maxwell E. Johnson, Sarah Johnson, Mark D. Johnston, F. Stanley Jones, James William Jones, John R. Jones, Alissa Jones Nelson, Inge Jonsson, Jan Joosten, Elizabeth Judd, Mulambya Peggy Kabonde, Robert Kaggwa, Sylvester Kahakwa, Isaac Kalimi, Ogbu U. Kalu, Eunice Kamaara, Wayne C. Kannaday, Musimbi Kanyoro, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Frank Kaufmann, Léon Nguapitshi Kayongo, Richard Kearney, Alice A. Keefe, Ralph Keen, Catherine Keller, Anthony J. Kelly, Karen Kennelly, Kathi Lynn Kern, Fergus Kerr, Edward Kessler, George Kilcourse, Heup Young Kim, Kim Sung-Hae, Kim Yong-Bock, Kim Yung Suk, Richard King, Thomas M. King, Robert M. Kingdon, Ross Kinsler, Hans G. Kippenberg, Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Clifton Kirkpatrick, Leonid Kishkovsky, Nadieszda Kizenko, Jeffrey Klaiber, Hans-Josef Klauck, Sidney Knight, Samuel Kobia, Robert Kolb, Karla Ann Koll, Heikki Kotila, Donald Kraybill, Philip D. W. Krey, Yves Krumenacker, Jeffrey Kah-Jin Kuan, Simanga R. Kumalo, Peter Kuzmic, Simon Shui-Man Kwan, Kwok Pui-lan, André LaCocque, Stephen E. Lahey, John Tsz Pang Lai, Emiel Lamberts, Armando Lampe, Craig Lampe, Beverly J. Lanzetta, Eve LaPlante, Lizette Larson-Miller, Ariel Bybee Laughton, Leonard Lawlor, Bentley Layton, Robin A. Leaver, Karen Lebacqz, Archie Chi Chung Lee, Marilyn J. Legge, Hervé LeGrand, D. L. LeMahieu, Raymond Lemieux, Bill J. Leonard, Ellen M. Leonard, Outi Leppä, Jean Lesaulnier, Nantawan Boonprasat Lewis, Henrietta Leyser, Alexei Lidov, Bernard Lightman, Paul Chang-Ha Lim, Carter Lindberg, Mark R. Lindsay, James R. Linville, James C. Livingston, Ann Loades, David Loades, Jean-Claude Loba-Mkole, Lo Lung Kwong, Wati Longchar, Eleazar López, David W. 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Yee, Viktor Yelensky, Yeo Khiok-Khng, Gustav K. K. Yeung, Angela Yiu, Amos Yong, Yong Ting Jin, You Bin, Youhanna Nessim Youssef, Eliana Yunes, Robert Michael Zaller, Valarie H. Ziegler, Barbara Brown Zikmund, Joyce Ann Zimmerman, Aurora Zlotnik, Zhuo Xinping
- Edited by Daniel Patte, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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- The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity
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- 05 August 2012
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- 20 September 2010, pp xi-xliv
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The Safeguarded Self
- Amy Mullin
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- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie / Volume 34 / Issue 1 / Winter 1995
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- 13 April 2010, pp. 45-60
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Nietzsche writes about the common temptation to take the capacity for consciousness as constituting the “kernel of man; what is abiding, eternal, ultimate, and most original in him. One takes consciousness for a determinate magnitude. One denies it growth and intermittences. One takes it for the ‘unity of the organism’.” The very description of the nature of this unified organism is indicative of reasons one might wish to believe in it. It is “abiding” and “eternal.” Nothing in the world poses a threat to its existence or survival. This temptation and Hegel's complicated response to it are the subject of this essay. In particular I will investigate the accuracy of Adorno's claims that Hegel is untrue to his own insights into the dialectical nature of the self, and that Hegel's self-betrayal is due to the the fact that “like Kant and the entire philosophical tradition including Plato, Hegel is a partisan of unity.”
Parents and Children: An Alternative to Selfless and Unconditional Love
- Amy Mullin
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I develop a model of love or care between children and their parents guided by experiences of parents, especially mothers, with disabilities. On this model, a caring relationship requires both parties to be aware of each other as a particular (not interchangeable) person and it requires reciprocity. This does not mean that children need to be able to articulate their interests, or that they need to be self-reflectively aware of their parents’ interests or personhood. Instead, parents and children manifest their understanding of one another as unique, irreplaceable individuals, with identifiable needs and interests through their interactions with one another.
5 - Mothers and Others
- Amy Mullin, University of Toronto
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- Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare
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- 14 March 2005, pp 119-153
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INTRODUCTION: FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY AND THE IDEOLOGY OF MOTHERHOOD
In the first four chapters of this book, I discuss two stages of reproductive labor, pregnancy and birth, which are available only to women. I turn now to a third stage, childrearing. This form of reproductive labor is still predominantly performed by women, both as unpaid and as paid caregivers. However, it is a kind of labor that can be performed by men, and one that not only can be but is undertaken by men, many as unpaid caregivers of their own children and a few as paid caregivers. In this chapter I examine the impact of the ideology of motherhood on the provision of childcare, an ideology that we have seen to have pernicious effects on women's experiences of pregnancy and birth. I approach childrearing from a perspective informed by the ethics of care, which also influenced my ethical analysis of pregnancy. As was the case in my study of pregnancy, an ethics of care perspective considers the needs and interests of caregivers and care receivers and considers questions about who gives care and how caregiving work is allocated. I begin my discussion in this chapter with an analysis of motherhood, but this leads to a much broader focus on childcare work in general, paid and unpaid.
Feminist philosophers have presented sharply contrasting analyses of motherhood. Shulamith Firestone in the Dialectic of Sex (1970) argued that women cannot be free until the biological family is entirely eliminated.
3 - The Ethical Significance of Pregnancy
- Amy Mullin, University of Toronto
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- Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare
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- 14 March 2005, pp 72-105
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INTRODUCTION
By now I have given an account of some misconceptions of pregnancy found in lay and academic culture, in chapter 1, and provided a corrective account of women's embodied experiences of pregnancy in chapter 2. This second chapter stressed both the planning and purposes that can guide pregnant women, and the accommodations they must make to features outside their control. In neither chapter did I focus attention on the relationship between a pregnant woman and the fetus inside her. I turn now to this relationship, which must be considered in its social context, as I ask about the ethical significance of pregnancy. In speaking of ethical significance, I mean to indicate anything that is relevant to practices of moral evaluation and moral judgment.
While many aspects of pregnancy have been ignored by philosophers, ethical questions about it garner considerable attention. However, most of this attention has been focused on situations where women and fetuses are posited as adversaries: either where abortion is considered or chosen or when pregnant women engage in behavior that harms fetuses. Ethical questions about pregnancy tend to be presented as questions about whether women are morally justified when they make decisions without taking into consideration the welfare of their fetuses. As feminist philosophers Vangie Bergum, Eugenie Gatens-Robinson and Catriona Mackenzie, demonstrate, this is not how most women think about abortion.
Index
- Amy Mullin, University of Toronto
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- Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare
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- 14 March 2005, pp 213-214
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Notes
- Amy Mullin, University of Toronto
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- Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare
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- 14 March 2005, pp 191-196
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6 - Caring for Children, Caring for Friends, Caring by Children
- Amy Mullin, University of Toronto
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- Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare
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- 05 June 2012
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- 14 March 2005, pp 154-185
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INTRODUCTION
In the previous chapter, I argued that, rather than thinking about caring for children on a model of mothering, we should recognize and theorize about the different ways in which children receive care. In this chapter I ask what thinking about children and their caregivers in this broader context can reveal to us about other kinds of caring relations. This is in keeping with one of the overarching aims of this book, which has been to recognize the relevance of experiences with reproductive labor to other kinds of experiences.
In this chapter, rather than making a very general claim about connections between caring for children and all other kinds of caring relationships, I choose to compare relations between children and their caregivers with friendships between mature and morally competent adults. My discussion in this chapter is positioned with respect to a debate within feminist theory over the relevance of the mothering relation for thinking about the ethical nature of other human relationships. I distinguish my position both from those who claim that the caregiver-child relation should have a privileged role in theorizing ethical relationships and from those who argue that this relation serves best as a point of contrast to caring relations between adults, rather than a paradigm for them. The concluding section of the chapter examines the way in which “young carers” – school-aged children who provide care to their parents – have been made into a social problem.
Conclusion
- Amy Mullin, University of Toronto
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- Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare
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- 14 March 2005, pp 186-190
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Throughout this book I have argued for increased recognition of pregnancy, birthing, and childrearing as social activities that involve simultaneously physical, intellectual, emotional, and moral work from those who undertake them. This work calls for a number of skills and also requires broad social support if it is to be done well by pregnant women, birthing women, and male and female providers of childcare in a number of different kinds of social circumstance.
The first three chapters of this book were devoted to philosophical analysis of pregnancy. I argued that pregnancy is a subject that has been overlooked or distorted by an emphasis only on ethical issues that arise in unwanted pregnancies. This discussion was followed by a brief chapter on birth in which I argued that focus on the medicalization of birth needs to be supplemented by increased awareness of how privatized women's experiences of birth are encouraged to be and how we should not think of birth as involving minds controlling bodies to the greatest extent possible. The following two chapters were devoted to the next stage of reproductive labor, caring for children once they are born. In chapter 5 I argued that our understanding of caring for children needs to be extended to include the many different situations in which children are and can be cared for and that we need to consider the needs of both care providers and care receivers in evaluating these different situations.
Frontmatter
- Amy Mullin, University of Toronto
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- Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare
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- 14 March 2005, pp i-vi
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References
- Amy Mullin, University of Toronto
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- Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare
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- 14 March 2005, pp 197-212
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2 - Reconceiving Pregnancy
- Amy Mullin, University of Toronto
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- Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare
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- 14 March 2005, pp 35-71
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INTRODUCTION
As I suggested in the first chapter, it can seem that we have great respect for pregnancy, at least those pregnancies that occur in the context of approved relationships and that involve the reproduction of people considered socially desirable. But while a pregnant woman may be held to be of more value and interest because of her pregnancy, this is because of society's interest in the child she may give birth to, rather than an interest in what she experiences between conception and delivery. Very little attention is paid to pregnancy as an experience.
Pregnancy as an experience is chiefly thought of as something uncomfortable and inconvenient that women must manage or endure. Nature is far more likely to be presented as an agent (as we speak of letting nature take its course) than pregnant woman are. The only way women appear to act reflectively with respect to their pregnancies is by choosing to continue with or to end those pregnancies (if they in fact have those options). In this chapter, I wish to challenge both misconceptions of pregnancy I outlined in the first chapter: the assumption that pregnancies are significant only because they can lead to the birth of a child and the assumption that pregnancy is chiefly a bodily event, either a passive period of expectation or a time in which a pregnant woman and/or medical professionals practice surveillance and control over her body, out of concern for her health and for fetal well being.
4 - What about Birth?
- Amy Mullin, University of Toronto
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- Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare
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- 14 March 2005, pp 106-118
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INTRODUCTION: THE OVEREMPHASIS ON BIRTH
As I mentioned in the introduction to this book, although I write about three important stages of reproductive labor – pregnancy, birth, and the provision of child care to young children – I do not devote a full-length chapter to birth, for several reasons. First, it is striking that only childbirth typically gets called “labor,” while the other, more time-consuming aspects of reproductive labor, which require sustained effort and considerable skill and expertise, do not. A pregnant woman is described as “going into labor” when she begins to give birth to a child or having a labor that lasted nineteen hours, as if the previous months have not involved reproductive labor on her part and as if the labor will end when the child is born.
Next, probably because of the dramatic nature of birth, women's conscious experiences and accounts of pregnancy are already focused more on birth than on either the preceding nine months or the transition to becoming a parent. A study of 329 Finnish women reveals that women's fears relating to pregnancy and childbirth are mainly associated with childbirth (Melender 2002), especially concerning pain and distress during labor, their risk of caesarean section, their treatment by health care staff, and the health of their newborn babies. In addition to fear and anxiety, many women expect to feel great joy at birth, and so this emotionally loaded brief period can come to dominate their thoughts during pregnancy.
Introduction
- Amy Mullin, University of Toronto
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- Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare
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- 14 March 2005, pp 1-9
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Summary
Both pregnancy and the provision of childcare are socially valued only (if at all) in relation to the child borne or reared. There is very little interest in the experiences of pregnant women or in the few men and many women who are primary providers of childcare, either paid or unpaid. There is some social interest in questions about how to increase the likelihood of positive outcomes for pregnancy and the provision of childcare, but these positive outcomes are thought of solely in terms of the types of pregnancy and childcare that are most beneficial for the children, either expected or already born.
Very little attention is paid to what these experiences mean to pregnant women or to the men and women providing childcare and to what can make those experiences better or worse. Moreover, these experiences are thought to be of interest only to those who have them. It is assumed that those who are not and never plan to be pregnant and those who do not and never plan to provide childcare have nothing to learn from reflecting on those experiences.
This is so partly because the experiences are misconceived as belonging solely to the natural rather than also to the social realm, and in fact any challenges to the naturalness of these experiences, particularly when the role of biology is separated from the activity of caring for a fetus or a child, are harshly critiqued and presented as undue interferences of the social order with the natural order.
1 - Pregnancy Misconceived
- Amy Mullin, University of Toronto
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- Book:
- Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 14 March 2005, pp 10-34
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
This book is devoted to rethinking pregnancy and the provision of childcare from a feminist perspective. Representations of these experiences in popular culture and philosophy alike have too often distorted them. As a backdrop to my revisioning of these experiences, I present, in the opening sections of this chapter, some philosophers and artists who have what I see as troubling approaches to pregnancy. I choose these philosophers and artists not because I claim they have had widespread influence on popular culture, but instead because they serve as more extreme, and therefore more obvious, versions of similarly troubling views of pregnancy present in the larger culture.
Feminist theorists have for many years now lamented the absence of accounts of pregnancy from women's own point of view. Writing in 1984, feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young argued: “We should not be surprised to learn that discourse on pregnancy omits subjectivity, for the specific experience of women has been absent from most of our culture's discourse about human experience and history” (1984, 45). More recently, Moira Gatens suggests that experiences such as pregnancy are largely absent from the public arena not only because they are experiences of women, but also because they are bodily or, as she terms it, embodied experiences. She writes that the public arena “will not tolerate an embodied speech” (1996, 26).
Acknowledgments
- Amy Mullin, University of Toronto
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- Book:
- Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 14 March 2005, pp ix-x
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Contents
- Amy Mullin, University of Toronto
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- Book:
- Reconceiving Pregnancy and Childcare
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 14 March 2005, pp vii-viii
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