Editors' Introduction

Abstract

Miscarriage of pregnancy is widely experienced and seldom discussed. Because of the surpassing silence on the subject, experiences of miscarriage may be misunderstood, difficult to articulate, and isolating, and attitudes toward miscarriage may be under-informed. Women are more likely to be offered cultural information on what to expect when we are expecting, than we are to be offered preparation for, or recognition of, the unexpected. Philosophers can, and should, contribute to changing that by promoting discourse on miscarriage as an experience which is meaningful, and significant to self-understanding and social awareness, and by providing a contextual realm in which related discussions of pregnancy, fertility loss, and fetal death could take place. The implications of reflections on the phenomenon of miscarriage for many lines of inquiry turn out to be multifold. To date, unfortunately, philosophers have not been central participants in theorizing about miscarriage, pregnancy loss, or fetal death outside of the confines of abortion debates. 1 We ought to be concerned about the risks of furthering the social and academic silence surrounding phenomena that so many have experienced, and that raise important questions regarding grief and loss, the social construction of pregnancy, technological developments, social recognition, and, to put it grandly, the nature of human life. As our contributors observe, one reason at least for the silence on miscarriage is obvious: addressing and conceptualizing the loss that is central to some (and not all) experiences of miscarriage may risk undermining some central principles of reproductive freedom. As feminist philosophers, we are certainly sympathetic to such concerns. We suggest that the riskiness of theorizing about miscarriage, and its implications for applied philosophical arguments with respect to abortion, seem to us to be compelling reasons why this issue is especially important to offer. The practice of philosophical investigation includes the social practices of cooperatively facing our reasons for ignoring some topics while devoting attention to related issues. Existing accounts of meaning in reproductive contexts-especially those put forward in debates concerning abortion-tend to focus on the (moral) status of the fetus. This is true even of relational accounts aimed at promoting reproductive autonomy by highlighting the ways in which the fetus is inseparable from the woman who carries it. It will probably not come as a surprise that we hope this issue on miscarriage, pregnancy loss, and fetal death accomplishes a shift this conversation, in the direction of pushing past embryo-centric value

Placental beginnings: Reconfiguring placental development and pregnancy loss in feminist theory

“…Indeed, some 15-25 per cent of pregnancies that have been medically recognised end in miscarriage (Stephenson and Kutteh, 2007); the numbers for pregnancies that end in miscarriage before they are recognised are assumed to be far higher. Despite this frequency, pregnancy loss has been largely undertheorised within feminist theory (Layne, 2003;Keane, 2009;Cahill et al, 2015), and, as I attend to within this article, has been almost entirely missing from discussions that take pregnancy -specifically the placenta -as a theoretical foundation. I am interested in what happens if we focus on the possibilities of that other outcome, on negotiations of living with another that might not succeed or that might not succeed in the ways we expect them to.…”