by Sara Brill
When women are policed according to the public perception that they are insufficiently attentive to their children, criminally prosecuted for miscarriage, and imprisoned for self-administering abortificants, we become a society that has moved beyond the criminalization of pregnancy to the criminalization of the exercise of reproductive agency as such. Under such circumstances, to become pregnant, whether by choice or by accident or by assault, is to enter into a zone of simultaneous autonomy -fetishization and -suspension, a zone in which the amplification of one’s agency is, at the same time and via the intensified policing it attracts, a fragmentation of one’s agency. There are powerful grounds, then, for heeding Ashwini Tambe’s call to renew concerns about, “the creeping ascendency of forced motherhood in the U.S.” And, as Irin Cameron points out, when we consider a post-Roe America, we must do so not as a return to pre-Roe conditions (in which, relatively speaking, few women were arrested) but in the light of contemporary American practices of mass incarceration and, I would add, the role those practices play in supporting white supremacy. What is attested to—with striking consistency—in the experiences of women who have found themselves subject to the recent wave of anti-choice legislation in the United States is that neoliberal eugenics is market-based as much as it is policy-based. Indeed, one of the most powerful messages to come out of the recent nexus of activism and scholarship on reproductive justice is that, as a tool for measuring oppression, a focus on the politicization of reproduction is incomplete without a robust analysis of the commodification of reproduction. The solidarity required to provide effective resistance to these punitive forces must recognize their differential economic, political, and ethical effects across racial and class boundaries. As a way of supporting this solidarity building, I would like to explore here a genealogical lens through which to view the irrationalities and deformations of reason that lie at to heart of many of these practices, a lens better seen in the context of more concrete events.
In the shameful spectacle of cruelty that was the trial, conviction, and initial sentencing of Purvi Patel, the specific charges for which she was convicted shine a light on the perverse irrationality at the heart of broader efforts to criminalize abortion, miscarriage, and pregnancy. In 2013 Patel checked herself into the hospital with severe vaginal bleeding requiring surgery and was then arrested, charged, and convicted for two mutually exclusive crimes: feticide (a charge that is applied when a fetus expires in utero) and child neglect (a charge that can only be applied when a fetus has been born living). Without a robust intersectional analysis (as found here and here) that includes consideration of the extra-national and biopolitical factors involved in Patel’s case, it would be impossible to diagnose the particular rancor of this verdict, a combination of the zealousness of prosecutors who did not balk at normalizing a logical impossibility and a collective unwillingness to exercise the basic function of reason that demands that something cannot be both alive and not alive at the same time and in the same place. The vacuum created by such an ethical lethargy, to borrow a phrase from Adriana Cavarero’ s forthcoming essay “The Human Reconceived: Back to Socrates with Arendt,” (in Antiquities beyond Humanism, Ed. Bianchi, Brill, and Holmes, Oxford Unversity Press) was filled by a deep punitive impulse fed by the weighty, spectral power the figure of the ‘unborn’ has taken on in American culture, with its capacity to galvanize some of the worst recesses of the racist imaginary.
My interest here is in what this verdict can tell us about a particular anxiety about birth, one which, while deeply historically contingent, bears more than a family resemblance to other attitudes toward human natality. We can detect in the jury’s decision sign of a deep subterranean desire running throughout aspects of white American culture for immediate acceptance into the political order, for birth without a mother, for what other people in another time called autochthony. To be clear, I do not think there is anything like a straight line between ancient Greek and contemporary American misogyny. But I do think we can identify a cultural imaginary—a set of assumptions, desires, and images—coalescing into an approach to human natality that appropriates enough material from other imaginaries as to make their weaknesses useful in recognizing and attacking our own.
In order to see this connection, we must look to the elements of ancient Greek culture that refuse an alignment of the human mother with the natural, elements that treat birth from a woman as unnatural or anti-natural. That is, we must attend to those elements of the Greek imaginary that present birth from a human women not as the first but as the second (read ‘lesser’) birth. Or, as Plato hyperbolizes this attitude in the Menexenus, the woman who gives birth is the stepmother, the earth the real mother.
In short, to assume that the Greeks simply thought of the material conditions of birth as natural is to overlook Greek efforts precisely to call the naturalness of women into question, to align women not with nature but with artifice and expedience (mechanē). As Nicole Loraux observes, if the subsequent history of Greek tragedy presents an alignment of the maternal with the natural, its very excesses with respect to this trope suggest the power of the poetic impulse it was attempting to conquer: “the constant overfantasizing of the artificial dimension of women,” the tendency to view “woman as ‘machine.’” The resulting tension is the dynamic animating much of Greek poetic and philosophic imagination. Thus, in order to get a handle on ancient Greek attitudes toward natality we must trace the concerted, although certainly not entirely successful, effort to render birth from a woman as unnatural. Below, I will do so in large strokes; for finer detailer, the five-part series on childbirth in antiquity on the classics blog Eidolon is a great place to start.
If Silenus’ infamous wisdom—that it is better not to be born at all, and second best to go whence you came—flirts with a denial of the value of natality, we find plentiful evidence of a related sentiment, an effort to sever natality from human maternity, throughout Greek poetry and prose, across genres, audiences and political contexts, in medical texts, elegy, epic poetry, philosophy. We see it in Hesiod’s infamous account of Pandora, with its figuration of fertility as consumption, of birthing as eating. While Chronos consumes his children, Pandora makes children who consume and waste a man’s ‘substance,’ an early figuration of the anxiety of what Penelope Deutscher calls “undisciplined reproductive excess” undergirding the reproductive futurism to which Lee Edelman draws attention, and which finds particularly vivid contemporary expression in its racialized form, in those figures like ‘the welfare mother,’ whose alleged hyperfertility, to borrow from Loretta Ross, proved so valuable for shoring up white supremacy in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. We see it in Pericles’ exhortation to widows to be spoken of as little as possible (Thucydides, 2.45.2). The antagonism the author of the medical text ‘On the Nature of the Child’ imagines between mother and fetus has its source in these larger cultural fantasies:
[Birth] comes about when the child tears some of the internal membranes with its hands and feet by moving and thrashing about. And when one [of these membranes] is torn, the power of the remaining ones is weakened. And when the membranes are torn, the fetus is freed from its bond, and goes out in a rush; for no longer is there any strength [to hold it] once the membranes fail and have been carried away, nor does the womb have the power to restrain the child. (Hong translation)
What holds this account together with Pericles’s silencing of women and Hesiod’s paranoia about female fertility is the fantastical alignment of women not with birth but with death, not with natality but with mortality. This is particularly striking in the medical passage—in order to win life, the fetus must escape from the mother, as though she holds not the possibility for its being but the possibility for its failure to be; living is the violent rending of and rending from the mother. We could read these lines as an early formulation of, to borrow from Deutscher, the ‘thanatopolitization’ of women’s reproductive capacities and evaluate them in light of the line of Black feminist thought that has been on the vanguard of this issue, from Hortense Spiller’s work on the misnaming of black women, whereby, “the provisions of patriarchy, … exacerbated by the preponderant powers of an enslaving class, declare Mother’s Right, by definition, a negating feature of human community” to Dorothy Roberts’ observations about the reproduction of slavery, to the work of Loretta Ross and other members of the SisterSong collective. Here too, I am painting in broad strokes. A more comprehensive study of natality in black feminist thought would have to look more closely at work inspired by Orlando Peterson’s analysis of slavery as social death, work like Sara Clarke Kaplan’s “Love and Violence/Maternity and Death: Black Feminism and the Politics of Reading (Un)representability.”
It is not difficult to see how the alignment of maternity with mortality would give rise to a desire for a coming to be without the material conditions of birth. This desire is especially vivid in the mythic framework of Athenian autochthony. The birth of Erechtheus to Ge herself (the divine personification of the earth), and his subsequent upbringing by Athena, erase the need for human maternity and express the fantasy—traces of which can be seen spanning from Hesiod’s Golden Age to Plato’s critical appropriation of it—of a birth without women. The birth of Athena from Zeus brings this gesture to its logical conclusion, severing the woman not simply from the title of mother, but from the act of giving birth itself, and thus severing even the hint of obligation to her. As Aeschylus envisions it, in casting her lot for Apollo against the Erynues, Athena states, “No mother gave me birth. I honor the male in all things but marriage. Yes, with all my heart I am my father’s child” (Fagles 750-752). This is but the final blow to a gesture performed first by Orestes, and second by Apollo, who asserts, “Here is the truth, I tell you—see how right I am. The woman you call the mother of the child is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed, the new-sown seed that grows and swells inside her. The man is the source of life—the one who mounts. She, like a stranger for a stranger, keeps the shoot alive unless a god hurts the roots” (665-671, Fagles trans and line numbers, 658-661 standard). Like a stranger for a stranger—this second killing of the mother renders her as other.
On the surface, it would seem that the Patel case operates according to a very different set of attitudes about human natality than the ones we have been tracing. Far from being removed from agency, Patel is subject of a hyperbolic agency. She is damned both if the fetus was born alive and if it was not. Far from reducing her to a mute and anonymous biological subject, to bare life, the dehumanization of Patel is accomplished precisely by an errant and excessive will to moralize that is particularly vicious when its gaze is directed at the bearers of black and brown bodies, by a phantasmatic alignment of ‘the Mother’ with death and corresponding apotheosis of ‘the Child’ along the lines of the fetishization of the fetus to which Rosalind Petchesky and Lauren Berlant call attention. And as Rajani Bhatia and Priya Kapoor point out, Patel is caught at the interstices of two religious traditions. The excesses of her punishment serve as a clue to the context in which Patel’s actions are imagined and judged. She is condemned not because she committed a crime but because she desecrated the sacred. She is punished for ‘failing’ to accomplish the only action for which she is valued—the realization of the ‘miracle’ of birth. The silence around reproductive loss, complication, and even success, the halo that surrounds birth, supports (if it does not create) this attitude, this sacralization of birth. In the case of Patel, it is divine agency that is acknowledged; the woman’s agency exists only as a cursory justification for punishing her for failing to properly acknowledge and support her divine ‘gift.’ Hyperbolic agency, it turns out, is no agency at all. Received as a failed baby-maker, her sole remaining worth is to provide a site for the venting of a particular form of rage—the rage of would-be autochthones, whose material conditions for existence prove intolerable and act as a deep wound to the ego of the Capitalocene white American psyche.
We hear echoes of this rage in the fetus’ violent uncoupling of itself from its mother, in the venom with which Hesiod spits out his invective against Pandora, in Athena’s calm dismissal of maternity. Fertile enough to be punished, but not trustworthy enough to be believed, Patel is condemned as another version of the unnatural woman—the mechanical woman, the cold, unfeeling, murderous mother—by a collective operating within the envelope of child-like ambivalence, enacting the desire for self-generation, for unmediated reception into the political community, for autochthony.
But the value of this observation lies less in pointing to a familiarity, an uncanniness, at work on the Patel case than in the tools for analyzing misogyny it provides and in the cautionary tale it tells about the ease with which an emphasis on generativity can occur hand in hand with a deep, structural misogyny. In Patel’s reception by the state we encounter a misogyny that does not seek consistency, that does not care about the law of non-contradiction, that is, at its heart, a hatred of the reminder the mother provides of the vulnerability of birth, and that seeks, wherever it can, to repudiate this vulnerability via the satisfaction of the simultaneous and contradictory desires to deny the material conditions of human birth (to not be born) and to find a fantastical birth (to be born without woman). It finds this satisfaction in the tense contradiction that is the unborn. And neither a displacement of the scene of natality nor an emphasis on female bodily generativity is sufficient for deconstructing this object and defusing the punitive impulse it feeds. What tools there are to reconfigure this imaginary remain to be seen, but at the very least in charting its history we know better the desires that must be contended with and where the focus of efforts of resistance must lie: in finding a natality uncoupled from a punitive theology that sees punishing the mother as the next best thing to denying her existence.
*The author would like to thank Namita Goswami and Kris Sealey for feedback on an earlier version of this post.
