Cultivating the Maternal Future: Public Health and the Prepregnant Self

On Valentine’s Day 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched a public health campaign aimed at getting young women to think about their reproductive futures. Slated to run through Mother’s Day of the same year, the “Show Your Love” campaign touted the importance of women’s health prior to pregnancy, known as “preconception health.” In this essay, I give a critical reading of this campaign, highlighting its feminized as well as racialized depictions of reproductive responsibility among women of childbearing age. Not only are all young women socially positioned as future mothers, thereby extending the ethos of maternal self-sacrifice, they are also assumed to embody future motherhood. The campaign additionally employs a future-oriented gift rhetoric, charging women with the responsibility of showing affection to future babies through current behaviors. I argue that the rhetoric in the Show Your Love campaign thus aims to cultivate among nonpregnant women an ethic of anticipatory motherhood and a prematernal selfhood that centers on producing love for a phantom fetus. I also discuss evidence of a stratified reproductive discourse around reproductive intentionality, with white women depicted as “planners” and women of color as “non-planners.” The campaign message reifies dominant tropes about women as mothers and about the kinds of women who exhibit reproductive responsibility. I end by discussing the implications of the Show Your Love campaign for current feminist debates about motherhood in the public sphere.