Being torn: toward a phenomenology of unwanted pregnancy.

In Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation, Iris Marion Young describes the lived bodily experience of women who have "chosen" their pregnancies. In this essay, Lundquist underscores the need for a more inclusive phenomenology of pregnancy. Drawing on sources in literature, psychology, and phenomenology, she offers descriptions of the cryptic phenomena of rejected and denied pregnancy, indicating the vast range of pregnancy experience and illustrating substantial phenomenological differences between "chosen" and unwanted pregnancies.

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It is crucial ... that women take seriously the enterprise of finding out what we do feel, instead of accepting what we have been told we must feel.

--Adrienne Rich

In Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation, Iris Marion Young draws from sources in literature, psychology, and phenomenology to provide an account of the lived bodily experience of pregnancy. (1) Young limits her analysis to women in "technologically sophisticated Western societies," who have chosen pregnancy, where by "chosen," she intends "either an explicit decision to become pregnant or at least a choosing to be identified with and positively accepting of it [pregnancy]," while acknowledging that throughout human history, most women have not chosen their pregnancies in this sense (2005, 47). Young's revolutionary work paves the way for a more comprehensive phenomenology of pregnancy, one that gives voice to the multitudes of women who have not chosen their pregnancies, even in the limited sense she describes. In this piece, I underscore the need for a phenomenology of pregnancy that is inclusive of the experiences of those other women--the women whose voices we find conspicuously absent from contemporary discourse on pregnancy and abortion. By examining two often marginalized types of pregnancy experiences--"rejected" and "denied" pregnancy--I hope to stress the need for a more inclusive phenomenology of pregnancy that both problematizes and supplements Young's account, and also to gesture toward multiple avenues for future research in the phenomenology of pregnancy. By examining the phenomena of rejected and denied pregnancy,

I intend to challenge the assumption that there is a narrow range of pregnancy experience that can be captured in a single, totalizing account, while acknowledging the value of expanding theoretical discourse on pregnancy via tentative descriptive categories of pregnancy experience.

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