Phenomenology of Pregnancy – How Pregnancy Ambiguates and Reaffirms a Mother’s Identity

In this paper, I explore the changes in the mother’s identity during pregnancy. I primarily focus on the factors that ambiguate and reaffirm the mother’s self-identity. The factors that ambiguate the mother’s identity are (a) the lack of spatial difference between her and her fetus, (b) her ability to impact her fetus’ development directly, (c) her ability to feel her fetus’ movements and witness its development, and (d) the concept of “the public fetus,” such that a mother’s private experience of her fetus is exposed to the public. The factors that reaffirm the mother’s identity are (a) her existence beyond womanhood as a mother, (b) her ability to create new human life in her body, and (c) her prenatal attachment with her fetus. This paper builds on prior work on the phenomenology of pregnancy and argues that pregnancy is a unique case in phenomenology that warrants further study.