Phenomenology of pregnancy: moral consequences for abortion

Pregnancy has a profound impact on individuals’ lives, yet the subjective experience is often absent from the discourse on reproductive rights and ethics. Although pregnancy is an epistemically transformative experience, phenomenology can help us describe common structures in the many different subjective experiences of pregnancy. Doing so shows that the effects of pregnancy go beyond the physical symptoms; they invade the experience of the self and the world and transform identity. If someone wants to formulate an argument against abortion, they will have to include the existential impact of pregnancy. This article adds another existential dimension to the abortion debate. Through a phenomenological analysis of birth mothers, this article will demonstrate that after birth their world has fundamentally changed in a world-with-child and that after adoption their world may not return to the way it was before pregnancy. As the case of ectogenesis will show, this existential dimension goes beyond embodiment and further phenomenological research is necessary to accurately determine its existential impact.