Pregnancy and ‘the Other’: Nausea and Accommodation in Manila

ABSTRACT

Pregnancy is a processual dialectic that involves continual acts of tactical, responsive, and creative accommodation by pregnant women. This article is a phenomenological investigation of pregnancy experience of working-class women in Manila. In it, I provide an outline of “accommodation:” acts which vary according to the political ecology of procreation in which they are enmeshed, and which are particularly evident in unexpected or unplanned pregnancies. Accommodation constitutes the core act in which the mother-to-be is engaged as the protagonist of procreation, transforming the character of unexpected pregnancy from uncertain and troubled to stable and even joyous as acts of accommodation restore bodily integrity.

KEYWORDS:

• Accommodation
• nausea
• phenomenology
• pregnancy
• procreative labor
• the Philippines

I met Sarah during a six-week research internship in Manila in June of 2016.¹ The NGO I was working for arranged a homestay with a local family and Sarah had volunteered to host me. Sarah was fifty-six years old then, slight of build – she wore red thick-rimmed glasses and had long dark hair with gray streaks. As we walked back to her house just a few streets away from the NGO headquarters, she began telling me about life in Manila. “Life is difficult here,” she said, “It is hard to pay for everything, because we have so many living in our house.” At the time, two of three of her adult children, her eldest daughter’s husband, along with seven of her grandchildren, all lived with her and her husband, Leo. With the addition of their adopted nephew, thirteen people in total resided in a small three-bedroom house in an old working-class area of Manila City. Sarah grew up in this house. Her parents had lived there since the development of the barangay (neighborhood) in the 1950s. Sarah had made room for me in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and after I’d stayed a few days with her family, she returned home one humid evening from a trip to the market. She carried a small plastic bag containing a few bananas, a handful of three-in-one coffee sachets, and a packet of cigarettes. “I want to tell you the story of when I became pregnant with Esther,” she told me. It was typhoon season. A loud rain began to fall hard on the roof as she took me upstairs and we sat on the floor. After emptying the contents of the sachets into mugs with hot water then lighting a cigarette and offering me one, she began her story.

Sarah discovered she was pregnant when she was just a teenager. She was terrified of how her parents and the other residents of the barangay might react, so she kept her pregnancy a secret. But then her body began to change. Her tiredness and mood fluctuations, sudden bouts of nausea and apparent distaste for foods that once brought her joy and comfort, all aroused her mother’s suspicion. As the weeks wore on, Sarah reached a crisis point. She was scared and isolated. Her changing body, over which she had no control, was betraying her secret. Her mother asked her outright if she was pregnant. She denied it. One day, Sarah was feeling unbearably nauseous, so she hid in the bathroom, hoping to be sick without her mother knowing. Just as she was kneeling over the toilet, she noticed someone breathing outside the door. It was her mother. Sarah panicked. If she threw up now her mother would hear, and she would know the truth. Sarah described to me a sick feeling of profound dread at the prospect of being found out and yet she could not directly control her sickness. In that moment, she spoke to her unborn daughter. Sarah pleaded with the child growing in her belly to keep still so she would not throw up, or else the two of them would be found out. “I didn’t throw up, Esther listened to me,” Sarah said. “I spoke to her in my mind, not with my lips.”

In this article, I explore experiences and narratives of unintended or unexpected pregnancy among young women in a working-class area of Manila, the Philippines. Drawing from phenomenological literature on pregnancy and the body, I highlight the distinctive mode of bodily existence that constitutes being pregnant, specifically, that pregnancy is an ontological relation with the Other (Flakne 2016; Naka 2016; Young 1990). This phenomenological vocabulary opens up the specific social, existential, and political circumstances divulged in Sarah’s story.

Among my interlocutors, Tagalog speakers largely born and raised in Manila, the period following conception is known as one’s “lihi-lihi days” or simply lihi. In more formal Tagalog, “paglilihi” refers to the period when pregnant women experience nausea while “naglilihi” refers to the event of experiencing nausea. Among women with whom I spoke, the term “lihi” was the shorthand to refer to the time when certain bodily and affectual changes start to occur, such as cravings for different kinds of foods, weight fluctuations, dizziness, mood swings, the initial protrusion of the belly, and most saliently, nausea, which this article explores more deeply. These changes are not taken to be the arbitrary result of hormonal activity, or simply as organic reactions to the growth of the unborn. Rather, they are considered direct evidence of the specific characteristics, personality, traits, and activities of the unborn themselves. When approached through the lens of lihi, the unborn is seen as having the ability to affect features of the mother-to-be’s subjectivity, in a form of intercorporeal exchange that is always already a mode of communication between (at least) two intersubjectively endowed agents. The mother-to-be is then an intermediary, in indissoluble relation to the unborn, between the uterine world and the world of Others outside.

For young women who keep their pregnancies secret lihi is a turbulent time. As their pregnancy progresses, the early-stage bodily changes of lihi precipitate a crisis in their lives. As these bodily developments rub up against the socio-moral landscape of Manila, or what Ivry (2015:286) calls “the political ecology of procreative labor,” women’s outwardly changing bodies begin to reveal the fact of their pregnancy. By bravely facing the bare facts of their struggle, addressing the Other developing inside them, balance in life is restored afresh. Through developing insight into these engagements with the concept of “accommodation,” this article makes an intervention in the anthropological scholarship on pregnancy.

Broad and well-established (Ginsburg and Rapp 1991; Lappé et al. 2019), much of this literature investigates the role of technology in altering human reproductive capacities. It devotes meticulous effort to critically analyzing the expansion of biomedical practice into the domain of procreation i.e., the medicalization of pregnancy. For instance, Gammeltoft (2007) explores the apparent enthusiasm with which Vietnamese women in Hanoi have taken up obstetrical ultrasound technologies, whilst remaining ambivalent about their actual accuracy and safety. Indeed, the fetal sonogram has featured in various analyses (Georges 1996; Mitchell 2001; Taylor 2008), and while some of the most intensive scrutiny has focused on the reception and ubiquity of other assistive reproductive technologies (Bharadwaj 2006; Corea 1985; Inhorn 2015) including IVF and cryopreservation of embryos, there has been a notable emphasis on exploring the experience and politics of surrogacy (Jacobsen 2016; Pande 2014; Rudrappa 2015; Teman 2010; Vora 2012).

In this article, I contribute to a niche within the anthropology of reproduction that remains to date ethnographically and theoretically under-explored – lived experiences and cultural framings of pregnancy itself. In doing so, I respond Ivry’s (2015) critique of the near-systematic neglect of pregnancy within anthropological scholarship, as a key condition and experience of the process of human reproduction. Building from, yet moving past, Emily Martin’s (1991) call for gender-egalitarian and scientifically accurate depictions of the fertilization process, Ivry’s pregnancy manifesto (2015:279) seeks to “expand recognition of women’s contribution to reproduction way beyond their gametes.”

With a handful of exceptions (Bailey 2001; Han 2014; Ivry 2010; Ivry and Teman 2019; Longhurst 2001), anthropologists have generally refrained from taking up pregnancy as the core focus of their analysis. This article seeks to remedy this lack in two ways. First, it draws on insights from phenomenological work on pregnancy, which have yet to be brought into anthropological analysis, to formulate a conceptual vocabulary for ethnographic examinations of pregnancy’s bodily and existential ground. Second, it ethnographically foregrounds the labor pregnant women undertake in establishing a social environment which supports pregnancy. These two formulations lead me to theorize pregnancy as an art of accommodation, a multi-layered, skillful, and yet laborious maneuvering not only to make a child, but also to make room in the world for the Other, defined in the broadest sense as new human life. Upon birth, the child emerges into a world already constituted by the presence of others. With acts of accommodation, the mother has prepared them for the presence of the child, has gathered them together, secured their allegiance in the ongoing care of the child, and made way for the child to emerge and develop.

Kuwentuhan and narrativity: Notes on methodology

The year was 1977. Seventeen-year-old Sarah was living in a working-class neighborhood and then red-light district area of Manila City, the Philippines. She was secretly pregnant with her first child. Eighteen years later, Esther, the daughter with whom she had begged and pleaded while still in the womb, would also try to keep her first pregnancy a secret from her mother. Esther and Sarah were each similarly motivated by a deep fear of the social and moral consequences of being pregnant and of being found out by their parents and community. Both women went on to marry the fathers of their first-born children when their pregnancy came to light. Living with Esther and Sarah for four months in 2018, they introduced me to other women living in the neighborhood they thought might be interested in telling me about their experiences. I conducted fourteen semi-structured interviews, all with working-class mothers, aged between eighteen to seventy-two, twelve of whom had become pregnant as teenagers, before they were married. Besides these interviews, I spent most of the fieldwork period sitting on crates outside Sarah and Esthers’ house with their neighbors, sharing coffee in the mornings, and beer in the evenings, and talking about life in Manila.

During interviews, women’s communications took the form of long narratives moving between past and present. My sense was that these were stories women wanted to tell, and that they felt some relief, satisfaction, or pride in telling them. There are several significant dynamics to account for here methodologically. The first is kuwentuhan, a socially embedded, culturally inflected mode of discussion which Collantes (2017:33) describes as “an exchange of experiences.” Kuwentuhan is a conversational dynamic by which individuals sift through happenings in their life, to settle experiences within broader life narratives, and as Javier (2004:12, quoted in Collantes 2017:33) describes, to “figure out” and to “make sense” of one’s world.

As a non-Filipino foreigner, I felt it important not to pursue potential people to interview. Being visibly foreign attracts attention in Manila; it has an effect, and I did not want to exploit this effect. I knew Sarah and her family, they trusted me, and I was dependent on them for shelter and human closeness during my stay in Manila. I minded her grandchildren while adults were out at work, took them to school, helped prepare meals, mixed up baby formula, and treated the children to small gifts from the sari-sari (variety/convenience store). Sharing in the daily life of Sarah’s family placed me also, naturally, within the orbit of daily life of the neighborhood. When Sarah would introduce me to her neighbors, they would be curious about my presence and purposes. I would explain I was a researcher interested in hearing women tell me about how they became mothers, and what it was like for them. “Come to my house this afternoon, and I will tell you my story,” they might say. Or sometimes women queried “and when is it my turn to tell my story?” I would allow story-telling about pregnancy experiences to unfold somewhat organically. If I was introduced to someone, and I outlined to them my purposes for being in Manila and they didn’t respond by offering to tell a story of their own volition, I didn’t pursue them. When often they did respond well to my explanations for being in their barangay, the cultural dynamic of kuwentuhan cradled and infused the conversations, turning the “interviews” away from being mere data extraction into something more.

That more has something to do with the nature of narratives in general. In his book, The Illness Narratives, Kleinman describes storytelling in illness as a kind of “self-deception,” making it “tolerable,” taming an otherwise “wild, disordered natural occurrence,” which mythologizes, ritualizes, and culturalizes the experience (1988:47–48).² Arguably there is a more nuanced dynamic at play in the narratives shared with me during my fieldwork in Manila. We can tease out this nuance by contrast to brief remarks from Cheryl Mattingly’s (1994) and Michael Jackson’s (2013) writings on narrativity.

For Mattingly, as opposed to Kleinman, narrativity doesn’t only occur in retrospect. In Mattingly’s words, “emplotment” (1994:812) occurs directly within the arena of social interaction. Narrativity therefore, isn’t a private, retroactive mythologizing of events but involves plotting ourselves somewhere within a sequence which stretches behind, around, and before us. Mattingly writes of an occupational therapy context, and emphasizes the role of narrativity in remaking a life story to “accommodate to a new body” (1994:814).

Jackson emphasizes another aspect of narrative, namely the “action of telling a story” (2013:182). For Jackson, seeing storytelling as an action means recognizing the imperative that stories “receive recognition from outside the immediate world of the individual” who is telling it (2013:182). Stories attempt to bridge the gap between “solitariness and sociality,” though there is no guarantee of success, with the aim of transforming the storyteller from a what (to which something happened) to a who (an agent who responded) (2013:186–187).

With these two modifications in mind, I think of the narratives women told me as continuations of accommodation in the present. I mean this in two respects. The events therein, and the life course brought about, are still being adjusted to. Occurring however long ago (for some women, decades), the events they described to me still have meaningful purchase, emotional resonance, and are sediment still to be kicked up and sorted through. Telling the stories to a sympathetic ear in the present still does work. Secondly, telling the narratives to me was part of the process of accommodating my presence as meaningful within the lifeworld of the neighborhood. The mothers with whom I spoke told me the stories of their children: what it was like carrying them, the circumstances under which they were born, and the continuities between their behavior in the womb and their behavior in the world. I could never wholly belong to this lifeworld, but at the very least, room had been made for me and my presence made sense of through women graciously sharing their stories with me.

The political ecology of procreation

Packed among a mass of tightly congregated homes with tin roofs, Sarah and Esther’s house sits at the end of a tangle of narrow alleys in a barangay that sprawls out from the intersection of two major roads, pressed up against the edge of Manila Bay in the south of the city. These cozily knitted corridors wind together in a blur of public and private space. Those who know these passages possess the intimate knowledge required to track the small passageways like capillaries between the motorway and the avenue. As one treads these tiny vessels, the presence of closeness and familiarity is palpable. I turn one corner and the volume is amplified: children playing, running, and squealing; the sound and smell of turon (deep fried banana) sizzling in a vat of boiling oil; adults locked in argument over upcoming barangay elections; a new-born litter of puppies yapping and fighting at their feet while freshly washed t-shirts and underwear, still dripping, are draped on hangers suspended from the electrical wires running over our heads, all the while the constant drone of traffic edging the periphery of this soundscape. I round another turn and the sounds dissipate and become muffled. A pair of older women sit on crates outside a house tucked in the shade of an alley corner, speaking under their breath. One of them shoots me a furtive glance.

This is the mode of conversation for sharing secrets and scandal, “tsismis,” or gossip. One seeks to avoid being the topic of these kinds of conversations, yet it can be nearly impossible to keep your business your own, given the sheer proximity of others. Consider Ate Donnie’s circumstances related to me in her story, describing her first two pregnancies as welcome. “When I didn’t get my period, I knew for myself [that I am pregnant], that was a blessing.” These pregnancies occurred before her twenties. She had married young, and her husband fathered both her children. He then left her in her early twenties, and at twenty-five she became pregnant to another man who was not her husband. Still living with her family, she told her mother and sister of her pregnancy at four months.

I was so scared. My father would be so mad because the man who is the father is not my husband. Everyone in the whole barangay knew except my father. He doesn’t leave the house much or talk to other people but everyone else knew. Here the walls have ears, people whisper about everyone’s pregnancies.

These whispers are oral diaries, hushed tones shared between young and old, and men and women. They are the ledgers of moral infraction, running commentaries inscribed in the margins of the community. One of the women sitting on the crates, Ate Di,³ calls me over. I awkwardly crouch next to her as she whispers to me: “Did you know about Kaylin? Pregnant again!” “Different father this time,” chimes in Ate Mara. “We know it isn’t Angelino, he moved home to Parañaque, hasn’t been back here since.” “How far along is she?” I ask. “Not sure,” says Ate Di:

Can’t be more than two or three months. What does she think she is doing, running around with those boys from the market-side school? That poor beautiful daughter of hers, they’re already putting strain on Lola Luci, she doesn’t need another belly to keep full. I hope she goes to confession.

I thought about Kaylin, and I couldn’t help but feel a pang of guilt. When I first came to the barangay two years prior in 2016, she was sixteen years old and her daughter, Lily, was one. When I returned in 2018 for fieldwork, Lily was three. During the first week, Kaylin asked me what I was doing back in the barangay. I explained that the last time I visited, Sarah had told me about when she first became pregnant with Esther and that I was hoping to learn more about other women’s experiences. Kaylin said she would consider an interview, but that her story would be difficult to talk about. I didn’t push further, but we still chatted from time to time over the following weeks.

Eventually, I got the impression Kaylin was avoiding me. When she saw me sitting outside the canteen near her house, she would take the long way around to get to the market, instead of passing by me. One day, she more-or-less stopped leaving her house, except to go shopping. None of this registered as overly significant however, until the conversation with Ate Di and Ate Mara when I learned she was expecting. After my conversations with other women who had also conceived outside of the formal bounds of marriage, I could begin to imagine the anguish and shame she was feeling. I felt guilty for my presence. For her, maybe I was another set of prying eyes, looking to whisper information about her private life. What was she doing to get by? Had she talked to the baby, like Sarah and Esther had, to elicit help – to feel like that someone inside was also on her side? Did the very fact of the possibility of this relationship with her unborn child allow her to see the value of its life, a human life, a gift from God, as had been the case for Sarah and Esther?

The answers to these questions are part of the process of accommodating pregnancy and a new human life as a young mother-to-be in this lifeworld. It is often a struggle. Immediate local community factors outlined above are linked with broader political tensions surrounding fertility, modesty, womanhood, and nationalism in the Philippines. As Collantes (2017:13–14) notes, Filipino women face particular expectations when it comes to their sexual behavior; they are seen as responsible for producing ideal Filipino citizens. She explains that the model woman is closely linked to the Virgin Mary, and so if women engage in any sexual activity that does not occur within the bounds of marriage they are morally sanctioned and judged. Religious sentiment infuses (though does not wholly determine) the nature of reproductive health politics in the Philippines (David et al. 2014). Collantes’s (2017:19) formulation of the “reproductive dilemma” is pertinent here. ⁴ Maneuvering through these dilemmas is itself part of the work of pregnancy for my interlocutors. In bringing new human life into the world, Kaylin, and the other women I interviewed, all faced choices and problems specific to their lifeworld. Ivry (2015:286) terms the particular eco-socio-structural environment in which women move through pregnancy the “political ecology of procreative labor.” The work of pregnancy is always embedded within “broader ecosystems of local and global order” which cohere and tangle in specific ways in time and space, constantly intertwining and crossing the porous boundaries of the body, “infiltrating the intrauterine environment” (Ivry 2015 :286).

For women in Manila who are young, unmarried, dependent, and financially insecure, the event of pregnancy is existentially fraught. They describe feeling trapped, afraid, alone, unsure of who to trust, scared of being harmed, and scared of being judged. Keeping pregnancy a secret is in part an attempt to forestall the reality of it, but also to avoid the relational consequences of judgment and gossip, and in some situations, familial abandonment. However, the physiological alterations particular to pregnancy and keeping pregnancy a secret are fundamentally irreconcilable.

The political ecology of procreative labor is rendered visible not only in the stories they tell, but in the very experience of being pregnant itself. Decades of poorly executed, classist, medicalized, and nationalist family planning programmes (FPPs) aimed at controlling and curtailing women’s fertility are felt at this level (Lopez and Nemenzo 1976; Mojares 2006). Mathews (2019) even goes so far as to argue that these FPPs were never intended to be successful, that in fact, the working class’s failure to reproduce the habitus of the competent bio-citizen is precisely part of the dynamic which allowed the rise of the middle class from the 1960s onwards. The nascent Philippines nation state was bent on building a modern industrial economy which required an excessive population to serve as rank-and-file excess unemployed. The lower classes maintain the aspirational disposition of the middle-class, but without any of the structural supports to facilitate it becoming a reality. In becoming pregnant outside the confines of marriage, there is a felt sense of failure on multiple grounds. A failure to live up to the standard of the demure, virtuous, and feminine ideal of the Virgin Mary. A failure to embody a middle-class aspirational habitus: to look, feel, and live as though one were in control as an individual citizen, in control of one’s reproductive cycle, one’s financial and educational future, and one’s desires. A failure to God, evoking a kind of cosmological shame, one tied to the prospect of being out of favor with one’s Creator. And finally, a failure to one’s family, a felt sense of embarrassment and shame, the most immediately pressing sense, being the least anonymous, the least abstract and with the most imminent, severe repercussions. To summarize this argument succinctly, in the words of Clifford Geertz (1993:204):

What is viewed collectively as structural inconsistency is felt individually as personal insecurity, for it is in the experience of the social actor that the imperfections of society and contradictions of character meet and exacerbate one another.

When combined with a phenomenological lens, as I undertake below, the political ecology of procreative labor offers foundations for understanding the significance of Sarah and Esther’s stories, and the existential ground of pregnancy itself as not only the making of human life but making sure it is welcomed into the lifeworld.

Nausea, phenomenology, and intercorporeality

One day I was talking with Esther and Sarah about why women feel nauseous during pregnancy and what causes them to be sick. They talked back and forth for a few seconds and agreed that it is because of the baby. “It is moving around and taking the energy of the mother,” Sarah said. “It is because of their movement, like when you have an upset tummy and everything feels like it is moving around and wants to come out, that’s the same as the baby when you are pregnant and feel sick.” Henriette, a masseuse and mother of two who lives a few houses down from Sarah, said the nausea started around the fifth week of her first pregnancy and that she experienced nausea and vomiting almost every day up to the fourth month, mostly in the afternoons. “He was a very active (likot) baby,” she said. “From very early he was active, and it made me sick almost every day.” The word likot translates literally as motile, but is intended to mean restless, or fidgety, and has connotations of mischievousness. She continued, “I was told if I talk to my baby, I can become very close to him, and that maybe that will calm him down. So, I am always singing and talking to him, ‘mahal kita anak’ (I love you my baby), ‘your mommy and daddy love you very much.’” I recall Lola Ba’s response when I asked her why women experience changes in their bodies during lihi. She said it was because the baby was growing, and that the baby was “doing something.”

In women’s descriptions of lihi, a kind of agency is attributed to the fetus, an agency made evident through the mother’s body. Here there is a close overlap between women’s descriptions of nausea and recent phenomenological literature on pregnancy which specifically develops the theme of pregnancy as a relationship with “the Other.”

Iris Marion Young’s essay “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation” (1990), is one of the earliest sustained attempts to provide a phenomenological description of the specific bodily experience that has largely been omitted from discursive renderings of pregnancy. Echoing Emily Martin’s The Woman in the Body (1987), Young demonstrates how medico-scientific treatise frame pregnancy not as something that belongs to the woman, but rather to the fetus. The woman is a container, while pregnancy is a condition under the jurisdiction of medicine, to be observed, scrutinized, and treated.

Medical discourse is not the only target of her criticism. Describing key characteristics of bodily existence particular to pregnancy, she offers an important corrective to the strict distinction between immanence and transcendence found within traditional phenomenology. Immanence in phenomenology refers to the capacity we all possess of experiencing our bodies as objects like any others in the world – this would occur, as Sartre would have it, particularly when we are caught in the critical gaze of others.

Young argues that it is unnecessary to choose in such a strict manner between these two modes of existence and provides an alternate formulation whereby the pregnant subject’s awareness may be oriented toward her body, but not necessarily trapped by it.

More recent phenomenological writings build on Young’s interventions. Naka characterizes reproduction as a relation to the Other since it “consists in giving birth to another being” (2016:120). Invoking Levinas, she says it is “the occurrence of that which is beyond us, beyond our comprehension or control” (2016:120).

The risk here is drawing on a phenomenological tradition which somehow imagines that “Others,” in their appearance before us, are utterly distinct from the “Self,” as in the work of Sartre, as well as his key interlocutor, Simone de Beauvoir, whose writings on human reproduction are directly relevant here. For de Beauvoir, it is not the mother who makes the baby, rather “it makes itself within her, her flesh engenders flesh only” (1997:513).

For both philosophers, any mode of attending to the Other that grants them the status of a subject, establishing what Sartre calls a “We-subject,” remains at the level of a “psychological, subjective event in a single consciousness” (Sartre 1957:425). It fails to serve as a legitimate foundation for an “ontological relation with others” (Sartre 1957:425). The “Other” in their formulation is a private, mental phenomenon – a solipsistic event. Descriptions of lihi push back against such a designation, and to understand how, we need an adequate description of pregnancy nausea and intercorporeality.

While Sartre and Levinas famously write of nausea as an inescapable exposure to oneself, the trap of immanence, Flakne (2016:104) argues pregnancy nausea is altogether different, and here I quote in full:

In pregnancy nausea, the Other announces itself to us through interoceptive sensations that destabilize old bodily habits, directing us toward new ones. Instead of nausea leading to a smothering collapse of the self into self or into immanence, nausea may instead indicate an intrusion of the Other into the intimate space of our bodies.

By interoceptive awareness, Flakne means the perception or awareness of the internal state of the body. In the early stages of pregnancy, the mother-to-be experiences the “incipient body” (2016:114) of another being beginning to form within her. Nausea is then one of the first announcements of its coming, an “interoceptive annunciation” (Flakne 2016:116). The pregnant body is not a substance being leached upon, as in de Beauvoir’s articulation, instead it is a “meeting place” (2016:105). In this sense the Other is not purely psychological as in Sartrean self/Other relations.

For Merleau-Ponty, the body is both the vehicle for being in the world and the general medium for having a world. The corollary follows that the body of the other person too is a “vehicle of a form of behaviour” (Merleau-Ponty 1962:406). Merleau-Ponty probes the paradox of the existence of other first-person perspectives on the world, the incommensurability of a plural “I.”⁵ His solution is to push inter-sociality back to the foundation of our very sense of self, but here he also offers anthropology a resolute incorporation of the body into this social inter-relationality. In perceiving others via our sensory functions, as they appear in our visual, auditory, and tactile field, we are already in communication. As soon as another living body has entered our perceptual field, the objects around us adopt a new layer of meaning. They don’t belong solely to me, but possess a quality determined by what this other body, this other pattern of behavior could make of them. The Other is not merely a “fragment of the world,” but a “certain ‘view’ of the world” in its own right (Merleau-Ponty 1962:406). As much as this other vehicle of behavior which I perceive is an “object,” I too become an object for them, among the objects of the world that we share. But is this not a contradiction? Merleau-Ponty asks “How could there be an outside view upon this totality which I am? From where could it be had?” (1973:134). He moves on with the tension unresolved: “To the infinity that was me something else still adds itself; a sprout shoots forth, I grow; I give birth, this other is made from my flesh and blood and yet is no longer me” (1973:134).

It is not simply that the language here is pertinent – in fact one could argue that pregnancy and birth are precisely the images that Merleau-Ponty is drawing on. His phrasing is not merely germane to relationality in pregnancy but is derived from the experience of pregnancy itself. Yet it remains implicit, and the feminine nature of intersubjectivity goes unacknowledged. Nonetheless, this forms the basis of his model of intercorporeality. It is my body which perceives the body of another and discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world. As the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the others are two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace hereon inhabits both bodies simultaneously, all of which makes another living being (1962:412). Pregnancy isn’t simply passively waiting while the developing fetus “makes itself” (de Beauvoir 1997:513) in the receptacle of the woman’s body – it involves the constant accommodation of this incipient being.⁶

However, women’s descriptions of lihi complicate the model-like formulation of even Merleau-Ponty’s account. For the reader, his language anchors us sufficiently to conceptually sit with a stable, caricatured version of their experience. The unruliness of the lihi period subverts any attempt to wholly render sensible, in phenomenological language, the subtleties and ambiguities women tried, sometimes in vain, to describe to me. If anything, the phenomenological theorizations I pored over after fieldwork were my attempt to accommodate the stories I had heard, as someone who has never, and will never, experience pregnancy and birth firsthand. I find in Merleau-Ponty an inferior replica version of a woman’s reason, her immediate bodily experience, to account for her unborn as an agent whose movements she interprets, reports, and accommodates. Even as women tell their stories to me in the present, long after they have experienced these movements, the language of lihi is far more apt to narratively accommodate the truth of their experience than my phenomenological interpretations of their words. Sarah’s words set me forth to try to understand what it means to communicate with the unborn, and it is to her story I now turn.

Sarah’s story in full

Sarah told me about a memory of hers as a young girl, roughly ten or eleven, watching television with her mother. On screen was a program about teenage girls becoming pregnant outside of marriage. Her mother turned and said, “If you ever do that, I will kill you.” Years later, she became sexually active with Leo. When she noticed that her menstrual cycle was delayed, panic set in. After the second month, her period had still not returned, and she “felt different” in her stomach. “I felt stuck between ‘I am pregnant’ and ‘I am just delayed’” Sarah told me, describing the ambiguity of suspecting before confirming she was pregnant. Struck with the imagination of a future with a child, here is when accommodation began. The disruption of anticipated cyclicality that constitutes the absence of menstruation triggers a deviation not only in regular bodily temporality, but in Sarah’s sense of her life narrative. When the nausea begins, she accepts that she is pregnant and moves out of the state of ambiguity. Recalling the memory of her mother’s words years prior, sitting watching TV together, Sarah listed for me her options as she saw them: “What could I do? Run away? Hide the baby? Somehow find someone to terminate the pregnancy?” She decided to keep it a secret from her mother. This became tremendously difficult once her body started to change even more. Every time her mother cooked it made her dreadfully sick and she was interrogated. “Every time I cook, you run out of the house” Sarah said, quoting her mother. She explained to me:

It was because I didn’t want to smell the garlic, and the onion, because the smell was not good, it was a strong smell. And then you know misua? It’s like a noodle soup. When my mum cooks that it is my favorite, with meatballs, always, but when she cooked that for me when I was pregnant, the smell was too strong, I couldn’t eat it. I ran out of the house to vomit. My mother confronted me, “Every time I cook, you run out of the house! What is going on? Tell me!” I told her, “Nothing ma, I’m just not feeling well, nothing is wrong.”

One day, she was feeling unbearably nauseous and so she hid herself in the bathroom. Right before she was about to be sick, she noticed that someone was listening outside the door – it was her mother. Knowing that her mother had been growing more suspicious of her strange behavior, she had to suppress the urge to empty her stomach. So, she spoke to her unborn child. “I spoke to her in my mind, not with my lips,” Sarah said. She pleaded with her baby, “please don’t move, you’ll make me feel sick, you need to keep still so I don’t throw up.” This wasn’t just a casual pleading. As Sarah was explaining this to me, she mimed looking down at her stomach, speaking to it, desperately asking, “please be still, if I throw up now, we will be caught.”

The baby did as it was asked, as Sarah’s nausea subsided. Sarah didn’t throw up, but her mother was not deceived. She recalled her mother’s words. “Sarah, come out of there now.” She opened the door and stepped out. “I’m going to ask you a question, and if you lie to me, bad things will happen.” “Ok mama.” “Are you pregnant?” “Yes mama.” Sarah acted out her mother’s rage. It was implied from her performance that the reprimand was physical and coupled with a brutal tirade. Sarah’s mother arranged for a hilot (traditional birth attendant) to terminate the pregnancy. She pleaded with her mother, explaining that she was to have Leo’s child. Her mother insisted they be married. After a few weeks, her and Leo’s parents agreed that the two could be wed. Once the wedding was over, Sarah’s belly began to protrude. She told me quite succinctly, “Esther knew that everything was ok now, so she showed herself.”

Sarah told me this story in 2016 when I was still an undergraduate anthropology student. Until this point, I nursed aspirations to move into an anthropological research career but had little sense of where I might like to do fieldwork, or in what kind of area of the discipline. Over the course of my internship, I felt consistently frustrated with the NGO workers, medical personnel, and other academics I had met, who all voiced similar sentiments – that poor, lower class Filipino women would be better positioned in life if not for their superstitious beliefs, Catholic morality, and lack of knowledge about reproductive health. I had a sense that there was something much deeper at play in Sarah’s story, something which I was yet to understand, something about pregnancy itself, which prompted Sarah to negotiate with her unborn child.

Her constant interpreting, decision making, pivoting, negotiating, and communicating were all crucial to the process of Esther coming into the world as a welcomed presence. Speaking to Esther in that moment of crisis, confessing to her mother with an attitude of humility was brave, and marrying Leo before Esther was born, were all pivotal steps in Esther coming to be known and loved as a daughter and granddaughter. The world to which the unborn is accommodated is not a neutral or static world but a world of yet more Others. Accommodating new human life involves relational work, for example, the work of the marriage ceremony. For Esther to be brought safely and securely into the world, certain others in Sarah’s relational networks demanded placating, in a felt, dispositional sense, not simply in the sense of the “rules” of her community. Marrying Leo during the pregnancy functioned to put the gossiping, the fear and shame of being gossiped about, and her parent’s disapproval and anger, to rest. It put to rest her guilt that she was living in sin, that Esther would be born into a sinful relationship. Wedlock created a sense of security for her, that her relations could be counted and depended on. Indeed, when Esther, some nineteen years later would also become pregnant as a teenager, she too turned to marriage as a way of ensuring the world of Others around her could be counted on for support. “Once the ceremony was over, that was when my belly got bigger. My son knew it was safe to show himself.” Accommodation is not only about making room within the body, nor simply “in the world,” but importantly, among others.

Decades later, sitting on the floor of her house, with her enormous and beautiful family in the room next door, Sarah is free to reflect on the events that occurred, to be grateful to God for gifting her with that first child (as she puts it), to look forward to accommodating more grandchildren and great grandchildren, and to tell the story with gusto to a guest and a friend over coffee and cigarettes, an act of hospitality which seals his presence as meaningful and welcome within her lifeworld.

Conclusion

In an initial analysis of this material, I thought of Sarah turning inward to address her unborn child as a speech act whereby her performative utterances establish Esther as a valuable person in that moment. Indeed, there has been recent scholarship which argues in this vein, that it is through such acts that the ethical value of things (lives, bodies, relationships, objects, etc) are constituted. Drawing on Austin (1965) and Rappaport (1999) for example, Michael Lambek (2013:145) describes these acts as “occurring under specified felicity conditions that bring something conventional into being.” Performative utterances are found at the heart of ritual activity. Acts of this type are both canonical in their unfolding, that is their form is an iteration of past acts and are therefore not singular, yet their indexicality is singular; the who, what, when, where of the performative act constitutes a unique temporal event. Hence these acts place a description upon events, as kinds of “meta-action,” that is, “action as text or commentary” which locate it in a lineage yet with its own timestamp (Lambek 2013:146). However, regarding Sarah’s performative utterance, although women explained to me that there is a kind of historical precedence by which women are supported in speaking to their babies, a kind of semi-private speech act in the minor mode perhaps, there is a prior set of relations already at play here, before Sarah speaks to her daughter, which are thoroughly corporeal; the nausea and other “symptoms” of lihi. In this way, Esther was always already a kind of subject in relation to Sarah’s body, who came to be known through this inner mutual touching over time, rather than in the moment of Sarah’s speech act.

Pregnancy is not a singular moment of creation of a life, as in the imaginary of sperm and egg, or in a speech act. We can never identify a particular singular event when the unborn definitively achieves the status of subjecthood.⁷ Pregnancy is a dialectic which involves the ongoing accommodation of this emerging Other. The pregnant woman as key protagonist caught in this dialectic performs continual acts of tactical, reactive, responsive, and creative accommodation, all of which vary according to the political ecology of procreation in which she finds herself enmeshed. This is particularly evident in unexpected or unplanned pregnancy, though all pregnancy exhibits this character. Further ethnographic research in different lifeworlds will certainly reveal the varying kinds of accommodative acts women perform to ensure new human life enters the world safely, facing open arms.

Pregnancy is a visitor showing up on one’s doorstep; a new human life demanding acknowledgment, sustenance, embrace – one goes to great lengths to accommodate them. Accommodation transforms the character of unexpected pregnancy in my interlocutor’s stories from uncertain, ambiguous, and troubled to stable and even joyous as acts of accommodation restore bodily integrity. Pregnancy then is not just the making of the child at the level of sustaining the growth and development of a fertilized egg; it is making room for the Other, first in the very space of the body, then in the lifeworld amidst the company of yet more others. Accommodation constitutes the core act in which the mother-to-be is engaged as the protagonist of procreation.

Ethical Approval

Ethical and scientific approval has been granted for this project to be conducted by Mr Daniel Tranter-Santoso under the supervision of Associate Professor Kalpana Ram by the Macquarie University Human Research Ethics Committee. Approval and reference number: 5201700984.

Acknowledgments

The material for this article is based largely on chapter two of the Master of Research thesis: Daniel Tranter (2018) ‘I spoke to her in my mind, not with my lips’: Pregnancy, nausea, and fetal personhood in Manila City, The Philippines. Macquarie University. Thesis.

I gratefully thank Banu Şenay and Sophie Chao who read early versions of this article and gave crucial feedback. I also kindly thank Kalpana Ram who supervised the thesis out of which this article emerged. Without her erudition and pedagogical style, this piece would not have been born at all. Finally, I thank Sarah, her family, and their community for being so accommodating and helping me feel at home in the world during my stay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Daniel Tranter-Santoso

Daniel Tranter-Santoso is an anthropologist from Sydney, Australia.

Notes

1. For the protection of my interlocutors’ privacy and identities, all names used throughout the article are pseudonyms.

2. In referencing “illness” narratives here, I don’t mean to say that pregnancy is an illness. I only mean to suggest that in the same way that a life course is disrupted in illness, and one’s taken-for-granted reality is suddenly made visible and immanent, so too in pregnancy a life narrative takes a turn (however unanticipated) and the assumption of a direct correspondence between reality and experience is warped and tested, such that conscious experience is thrown back on itself. Storytelling functions to restore continuity between self and world in both illness and pregnancy.

3. Ate means “older sister” and is a term of politeness and respect for women who exceed one’s own age. Sarah and Esther didn’t like me using Ate when I addressed them, so I haven’t used the term here. Kuya is the masculine equivalent.

4. Based on her own fieldwork in Manila, Collantes argues that when it comes to reproductive politics in the Philippines, notions of choice or decision carry too much connotation of clear calculation of reproductive action. On the other hand, “dilemma better captures the back and forth, the what ifs, the hesitancies, ambiguities, and the changeableness of views … ” (2017:19).

5. “How can the word “I” be put into the plural, how can a general idea of the I be formed, how can I speak of an I other than my own, how can I know that there are other I’s, how can consciousness which, by its nature, and as self-knowledge, is in the mode of the I, be grasped in the mode of Thou, and through this, in the world of the “One”?” (1962:406).

6. Not to mention all manner of active bodily processes which facilitate and directly constituted the development of the fetus, outlined in more detail in Ivry’s (2015:280–281) “Pregnancy Manifesto.”

7. This notion of ethical value of the person emerging at a given moment or stage of development is an example of “fixed personhood,” in contrast to “processual personhood” (Bulloch 2016:199). The latter is much more in keeping with the phenomenology of pregnancy and how women understand and experience personhood among my interlocutors.