Elizabeth Kukura, Normalizing Maternal Ambivalence, 57 Ariz. St. L.J. 557 (2025)
Certain themes are common when identifying good mothers: becoming a mother is an overwhelmingly happy experience; good mothers love their children immediately; good mothers will sacrifice their own health, bodies, and other needs to serve their children’s interests; and good mothers do not feel ambivalent about their children or about being a parent. Indeed, the law reinforces this conception of the good mother by responding to perceived maternal ambivalence with scrutiny, investigation, and sometimes prosecution. Expressing ambivalence about being pregnant, giving birth, or caring for one’s existing children can be used against someone who suffers a pregnancy loss as evidence that they were responsible for the miscarriage or stillbirth. Expressing uncertainty to the wrong person about whether to choose abortion, adoption, or raising a child can be held against a mother in a subsequent determination about her fitness to parent. Sometimes, even just engaging in conduct that medical or legal authorities find unusual or uncomfortable can put a woman in law enforcement’s crosshairs. Rather than look to the realities of reproduction and parenting to explain unfamiliar behavior, including behavior related to a traumatic pregnancy loss, legal authorities are quick to assume a woman’s culpability and characterize her as an inadequate mother. Racially minoritized, low-income, and other marginalized women are at increased risk of being perceived as ambivalent and facing punishment as a result. And yet, social science tells us that having conflicted feelings about motherhood is common, normal, and healthy.
By reinforcing the social stigma surrounding maternal ambivalence, law privileges restrictive gender stereotypes about self-sacrificing mothers and women fulfilling their natural reproductive destinies by becoming mothers. Strengthening the regulatory power of these stereotypes limits women’s autonomy in decisions about childbearing and childrearing, instead vesting greater authority in health care professionals, law enforcement officials, and other state actors who transform maternal ambivalence into a legal matter. To counteract this phenomenon, this Article calls for the normalization of maternal ambivalence to bring law into better alignment with social science and to ease the harms that flow from punishing women’s conflicted feelings about motherhood.