Motherhood

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Machines of Mercy

From Motherhood: Twelve Essays, by Inessa Pécheux:

Sometimes I imagine myself following the matrilineal line up against the river of time, to the lives of my distant great-grandmothers. I try to imagine the sheer horror of motherhood - the agony of childbirth, the risk of death with every birth, the certainty of losing some of one's children.

To us, now, the loss of a child is a horror almost beyond words, a grief so deep it seems almost insurmountable. I try to imagine what it meant to live in a world where it was a ubiquitous reality. Where you could only choose to respond with either an ever-deepening pain or an inhuman numbness. And all of it tied to the foundation stone of your existence: the body.

This journey to the past reminds me that my freedom as a woman is on some level technological. Without medical technologies, I am reduced to the cruel logic of Nature, which cares about nothing except reproduction. Without machines, I become a machine.

Only machines allow us to be more than machines ourselves.