The word “mother” traditionally meant a woman who bears and nurtures a child. In recent decades, changes in social norms and public policy as well as advances in reproductive technologies and the development of markets for procreation and care have radically expanded definitions of motherhood. But while maternity has become a matter of choice for more women, the freedom to make reproductive decisions is unevenly distributed. Restrictive policies, socioeconomic disadvantages, cultural mores, and discrimination force some women into motherhood and prevent others from caring for their children.
Reassembling Motherhood brings together contributors from across the disciplines to consider the transformation of motherhood as both an identity and a role. It examines how the processes of bearing and rearing a child are being restructured as reproductive labor and care work change around the globe. The authors examine issues such as artificial reproductive technologies, surrogacy, fetal ultrasounds, adoption, nonparental care, and the legal status of kinship, showing how complex chains of procreation and childcare have simultaneously generated greater liberty and new forms of constraint. Emphasizing the tension between the liberalization of procreation and care on the one hand, and the limits to their democratization due to race, class, and global inequality on the other, the book highlights debates that have emerged as these multifaceted changes have led to both the fragmentation and reassembling of motherhood.
- Table of Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. Negotiating “Mother” in the Twenty-First Century: Between Choice and Constraint, by Yasmine Ergas, Jane Jenson, and Sonya Michel
- 1. Certain Mothers, Uncertain Fathers: Placing Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Historical Perspective, by Nara Milanich
- 2. Assisted Reproductive Technologies and the Biological Bottom Line, by Linda G. Kahn and Wendy Chavkin
- 3. Multiple “Mothers,” Many Requirements for Protection: Children’s Rights and the Status of Mothers in the Context of International Commercial Surrogacy, by Claire Achmad
- 4. The Borders of Legal Motherhood: Rethinking Access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Europe, by Letizia Palumbo
- 5. Pregnant Bodies and the Subjects of Rights: The Surrogacy–Abortion Nexus, by Yasmine Ergas
- 6. The Motherless Fetus: Ultrasound Pictures and Their Magic Disappearing Trick, by Anne Higonnet
- 7. Contracting for Motherhood: Postadoption Visitation Agreements, by Carol Sanger
- 8. Relinquishment and Adoption in Tamil Society: Mothers’ Experiences with De-kinning, by Pien Bos
- 9. Marginalized Mothers and Intersecting Systems of Surveillance: Prisons and Foster Care, by Dorothy Roberts
- 10. Care and Gender, by Martha Albertson Fineman
- 11. The Double Lives of Transnational Mothers, by Sonya Michel and Gabrielle Oliveira
- 12. Euro-Orphans and the Stigmatization of Migrant Motherhood, by Helma Lutz
- 13. The New Maternalism: Children First; Women Second, by Jane Jenson
- Afterword: Crossing into the Future, by Alice Kessler-Harris
- Contributors
- Index
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