[Presented at the 2023 Annual Museum of Motherhood Conference.]
Language about maternity is tricky. To be fair, this is no new insight. Adrienne Rich’s distinction between motherhood and mothering and Sara Ruddick’s prioritization of “mother” the verb over its noun counterpart both underscore the point.
This theme has only intensified in the growing appreciation for trans and gender non-conforming parents. Literature for expecting families identify “birthing parents” and their experiences in “perinatal wards,” in lieu of the gendered language about mothers and maternity wards. Movements have grown to encourage medical professionals and support staff to use terms like “chestfeeding” and “parents’ milk” in place of feminine descriptors. These are life-saving, critical developments, and we should enthusiastically welcome them.
Indeed, inclusivity is a value that mothers of all sorts have long sustained. But those who mother are also attentive to the particularities of the human experience: they care for different children differently, in ways that are appropriate to their specific needs and circumstances.
So too must we be attentive to the particularities of the human experience, in which only half of the population can do the socially necessary, literally lifegiving work of birthing. For this reason, I want to recommend that as we find our way toward more inclusive language, we avoid language that occludes the fact that only some of us are equipped to birth and lactate. This is not only about highlighting certain persons’ unique abilities to gestate and give birth, but also the dangers only those with uteruses face. Not all of us endure the most recent restrictions on reproductive rights equivalently, for example. Nor can those with the presumptive capacity to gestate and give birth turn that capacity off, so to speak; birth control and even tubal ligations can fail. According to the Guttmacher Institute, those who can become pregnant spend around three decades of their lives trying not to do so. Furthermore, half of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned.
To this end, I call for the development of new language that might name those who are (presumptively) capable of bearing children. This is not meant to exclude, but to provide a social tool for recognizing and appropriately appreciating the burdens that only those with uteruses bear. The word “woman” can no longer serve this purpose, as it names a social category that identifies much more than just the possession of a uterus. I therefore offer a somewhat tongue-in-cheek proposal that we call those who are presumptively capable of bearing children “hysterics,” as a reclamation of the derisive gendered term, analogous to LGBT theorists’ reclamation of the term “queer” and disability theorists’ reclamation of the term “crip.”
This work must be done, as so much mothering is, with care. It also must be done, as so much mothering is, in the pursuit of justice. Overlooking the work that only those with uteruses can do is unjust, in that it underappreciates that essential labor. But neither can the imperative to appreciate those essential laborers be leveraged to subjugate and further marginalize trans and gender non-conforming persons. We must complicate the binary thinking that equates attention to the bodily work of pregnancy with transphobia, on the one hand, and equates care for trans persons with a failure to appreciate our human embodiment, on the other. We can and must do better, in no uncertain terms.