Specter(s) of Care: A Symposium on Midwifery, Relationality, and Reproductive Justice To-Come

Abstract

Abstract: Nearly 2.5 thousand years ago, Plato wrote a symposium about love. This symposium was attended by Socrates, the founder of “maieutic” philosophy, a name owing to the comparison of his profession to that of his mother, a maia , meaning midwife in ancient Greek. By now, the kind of relational continuity of care that midwifery could have represented in ancient times, is something that we have long lost, if we ever had it. In most medical institutions, relational care is but a specter haunting us: something that we long for but is refused to us on account of it being a practical and material impossibility. The symposium below, written 2.5 thousand years later, is an attempt to reconceive of care for fertility, abortion, pregnancy, and parenthood. Through a combination of hauntology, critical fabulation, and decolonial empirical methodology (Rhee 2021; Gordon 2007; Hartman 2019), a specter of care is staged in the figure of midwife Phaenarete, Socrates’ mother, who is engaged in dialogue with current day midwives and mothers. Following Derrida (2006), there is only one reason to “talk” to a specter, namely if it is for a justice to-come . This notion of the “to-come” is taken seriously as the horizon of reproductive justice, invoking a direct poetics of opacity, receptivity, and creolization (Glissant 2010; 2020a; 2020b) in order to imagine relational care that can ensure reproductive justice for all .