The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision stripped women of the constitutional right to an abortion, setting up a showdown among states that have moved either to enshrine or ban the right to terminate a pregnancy in their state constitutions. Efforts to further erode women’s reproductive rights have returned to the Supreme Court again, this time as a challenge to the availability of mifepristone, which is one part of a two-drug combination used in medication abortions. For women who no longer have access to surgical abortions, the continued availability of mifepristone is crucial for reproductive health. It is also crucial for women’s ability to control, to the degree that they can, their very identities. When women weigh whether to become parents, they think primarily about how their decision will affect who they are and who they might be in the future. This is because women’s identities in particular are heavily shaped by their reproductive decisions. Additionally, material effects—social, emotional, and financial—are imposed upon women in response to their reproductive decisions that may harm them in myriad ways. The transformation to a motherhood identity, then, must be something that women are able to choose for themselves.
Parenthood constitutes an identity shift because it is a kind of experience that cannot be imagined or projected in an informative way; one cannot know what it would be like for them to be a parent by observing others, or even by interacting with children other than one’s own. The transition to parenthood is therefore considered, along with other major life transitions, to be a transformative experience. L. A. Paul has argued that transformative experiences are both epistemically and personally transformative. They are epistemically transformative because one goes from a state of being epistemically impoverished (lacking knowledge about what it is like to undergo this experience) to a state of gaining irreversible knowledge about what it is like to have had this experience. They are personally transformative because undergoing the experience stands to radically alter important things about oneself—including one’s priorities, preferences, and self-conception—in an irrevocable way.
Becoming a parent often constitutes a transformative experience for both women and men: one cannot know ahead of time what it is like to parent one’s own child, and through the experience of parenting that child one comes to know important values, priorities, and preferences that may be entirely new or newly discovered features about oneself. That being said, the degree to which one is transformed by such an experience depends in part upon existing social norms and structures that make certain ways of thinking and conceiving of oneself possible in the first place. In this sense, undergoing a transformative experience not only brings about an extensive transformation of one’s own self-conception and identity, but also an enormous transition in how one’s identity is perceived, understood, and responded to by others. For women in particular, a transformation to parenthood—colloquially understood as motherhood—brings with it a host of cultural and social norms and stereotypes that (re)shape a woman’s self-conception (as well other’s perceptions of her) in more consequential ways than the transformation to fatherhood does for men. Crucially, the transformation to motherhood engenders responses that are often detrimental to a woman’s social, emotional, and economic well-being.
For instance, women continue to be defined economically and socially by their relationship to children. There is evidence that mothers are perceived to be less competent in the eyes of employers and are offered lower salaries and opportunities for advancement. Employers and co-workers also judge visibly pregnant women to be less committed to their jobs, less reliable, and more emotional than women who are not visibly pregnant. Men, by contrast, are not penalized by employers for being fathers—in fact, they sometimes benefit from it by seeing their earnings increase after becoming parents (this is referred to as a “fatherhood bonus”). The economic ramifications of devaluing mothers’ labor, combined with a dearth of childcare options (especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic) and limited paid parental leave, contribute to many mothers’ decisions to reduce their hours or leave the workforce entirely so that higher-earning male partners do not have to do so. Mothers therefore fall further behind women without children with respect to compensation and career advancement. Because of this, the gender wage-gap has been more recently conceived as a motherhood penalty after findings show that the greatest declines in earnings occur after women become mothers.
Additionally, the myth of maternal bliss shapes social expectations for women about what mothering should be like—joyful and fulfilling—such that women who do not feel blissful about parenting are made to feel as though they are deficient or have wronged their child. Mothers are also pressured, through intensive mothering norms, to make mothering a central life goal by suppressing their own needs, wants, and ambitions in an effort to devote themselves fully to their children, whereas fathers are not pressured to make sacrifices to nearly the same degree. In response to this pressure, mothers who feel the need to be “perfect” often wind-up experiencing significant levels of stress and, in extreme cases, burnout. Women who do not tie themselves as strictly to these motherhood ideals often face penalties for not adhering to established social norms and may be evaluated by others as “bad mothers.” In this sense, women who become mothers often find themselves unable to negotiate a satisfactory work-life balance in which they are not being penalized one way or another.
Given these considerations, I have argued that for women in particular, parenthood may be the kind of transformative experience that constitutes a harm because of the material effects that accompany such a transformation. Elizabeth Barnes argues that the social or cultural context in which a transformative experience occurs can make that particular transformation constitute a harm because it leaves the transformed in a worse-off sociocultural position. Upon transitioning to motherhood—regardless of the method by which one becomes a mother—women experience social, emotional, and economic penalties that are the byproduct of the contexts in which they undergo this transition. These contexts shape how mothers conceive of themselves, but also—crucially—how others perceive and respond to mother identities, often in harmful ways. (That being said, women who choose to remain child-free also face social and economic penalties, including been perceived as lacking leadership qualities and as being dysfunctional and less feminine). While aggregate concerns about the environment or overpopulation receive a lot of attention, the motherhood identity—and all that comes with it—is often the primary concern for women who are deciding whether or not to become parents because of the myriad ways that the motherhood identity may negatively impact them. Having the ability to decide whether to undergo such a transformative experience is therefore essential not only for respecting women’s autonomy and self-determination, but also for protecting against the potential harms that a transition to motherhood may bring.
To be clear, I am not arguing that becoming a mother is always harmful, nor that the harms that a transition to motherhood may bring cannot be outweighed by the beneficial aspects of motherhood and intimacy in relationships more generally. Rather, I am arguing that, because a transition to motherhood has the strong potential to produce harmful material effects for women, women must be able to control, to the greatest extent possible, their reproductive lives. This is especially important when considering that nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended, with many of those unintended pregnancies occurring absent any corresponding desire to become a mother. In the case of an unintended pregnancy, the knowledge one comes to have about being pregnant is not general knowledge about pregnancy, but knowledge specific to the circumstances in which one finds oneself—circumstances that influence the values one finds important and how one sees oneself acting at that time in their life. One must consider how their physical and emotional health will be impacted, how their financial situation (including educational and career goals) will be affected, and how their relationships with others will change in a matter of months. One cannot know ahead of time how they would act in this kind of situation until the situation is actually upon them, and a decision about how to act must be made relatively quickly.
The freedom to act on one’s assessment of priorities and preferences in such urgent circumstances must be an indispensable right. Important factors that influence a woman’s self-conception and the ways that others perceive her—access to an education, equal employment opportunities, career development, and the ability to control family size—depends upon women’s ability to control fertility, including by abortion. Retaining the right to terminate a pregnancy is crucial, especially considering that no method of birth control save abstinence, including the pill, is 100% effective at preventing pregnancy. And even abstinence-only education has a low success rate with pregnancy prevention: the more that abstinence is emphasized in state laws and policies, the higher the teen pregnancy and birth rate.
After the Dobbs decision, safe access to surgical abortion in the United States has declined substantially, with the procedure banned in almost all circumstances in at least fourteen states. Medication abortion, because it is safe and effective and can be administered outside of clinical settings, now accounts for a majority of all abortions in the U.S. The two-drug combination of mifepristone and misoprostol remains available by prescription, for now, through the mail nationwide. (CVS and Walgreens pharmacies have recently begun filling prescriptions for the drugs, but only in a few select states where abortion remains legal). Medication abortion therefore represents an alternative for women who live in states where surgical abortions are prohibited (though women with access only to medication abortion are not able to fully exercise their reproductive freedom, as they should be able to choose surgical abortion when necessary). The Supreme Court must ensure that it remains widely available and easy to access; any other decision signals that women’s identities are not their own to choose.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
Laura Wildemann Kane
Laura Wildemann Kane is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Worcester State University and a faculty fellow for the Clemente Course in the Humanities (Worcester branch). Her research examines social phenomena such as families, states, and social media networks through a feminist lens. Recent publications have appeared in Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, The Journal of Social Philosophy, and The Journal of Applied Philosophy.
