Reproduction and Alienation

How a pregnant belly turns into a public good.

Every year, 11 to 20% of women suffer some form of postpartum depression following the birth of the infant they have just carried for nine months. Common symptoms of this sort of depression include feeling overwhelmed by motherhood, feeling a lack of bond to your new baby, possibly resentment toward it, and feeling disconnected from the world around you. I’d argue that these new mothers have begun to function as zombies, going through the motions of what a new mother “should” with a feelings that their child is not theirs and they are not adequate for the role of mothering.

I’d argue that this is a feeling of alienation.

Feminist theorist Gayarti Spivak presents to us the idea that the womb is a site of production. A woman’s body has the ability to push out a valuable product for society. That means that the product is a new life. That means that the labor is carrying this new life in your body for nine months, and continuing to assist it’s growth for years afterward. It also entails that there is a value to a woman’s ability to reproduce, considering that apart from building a “beautiful family,” she is in essence contributing a new member into society.

However, where there is labor and production there is room for alienation.

That being said, it is fairly easy for a pregnant woman to feel a disconnect from her efforts in producing a child as well as from the product itself.

From the minute a woman becomes pregnant, her body is no longer just hers. She now has a new life in her womb that is subject to the public. The state will try to control the existence of the thing inside her through birth control and abortion laws. It wants a stake of power in her production process. The people around her will try to give her advice and control what she eats, how much she sleeps, when and where she goes. All for the good of her baby they will say, for the improvement of her product. Complete strangers will come up to her to ask what she is having, often breaching a boundary of contact when they take it upon themselves to feel up her belly. It is a public commodity after all.

Her body is no longer hers, it belongs to the public and anyone and everyone has a say in the happenings on her womb. What used to be a part of her body is now a public means of production.

When her baby is born, she is tasked with rearing a child that will have to be an active member of society. That means the commodity she has just spent nine months producing is not to be enjoyed by her, rather it is a product to be further developed to become a consumer and later producer. The child is not hers because it is to be developed for the purposes of continuing the systems and institutions it was born into.

The mother is overwhelmed at the thought of having to do the work of raising a new life; she doesn’t feel like she could ever take that role on successfully after all the criticisms and opinions of the public. The new mother feels a disconnect with the creature that started this whole endeavor in the first place. The life in her hands is to be raised for the purposes of the system, it does not belong to her. She feels disconnected. What she is doing is no longer for herself, she doesn’t even have full control over her body or it’s products.

So, the pregnant woman is alienated from her body and the new mother is alienated from her child.

Is this not what postpartum depression is? Is this not an outcome of the woman’s womb as a site of production?

If the womb is productive, it becomes a public commodity, and along the way, the woman who possesses it is stripped of her bodily autonomy and loses connection to her baby and herself.

We need to give the owners of wombs back their autonomy.