One of the major obstacles to the theorizing of miscarriage has been a concern that doing so may undermine reproductive rights. In this article, I develop a philosophical account of miscarriage that does not undermine those rights (although it may reframe them). To do so, I consider two ways in which relationality has informed two of the (very few) existing feminist philosophical approaches to miscarriage. After elaborating on the first, I critique the second use, arguing that it is haunted by an underlying individualism that does not sufficiently take into account the intersubjective nature of pregnancy. I conclude by arguing that Rosalyn Diprose's notion of corporeal generosity serves as an effective antidote to that individualism, and can ground a phenomenological approach to miscarriage that has been lacking in previous accounts.11 The ensuing discussion will attempt to recognize, through gender-neutral language, that not only women become pregnant and experience miscarriages; some transmen can and do choose to become pregnant. Thus, I will mostly refer to “pregnant persons,” although I will occasionally resort to a female generic, both for ease of reading and as a nod to the fact that miscarriage remains largely a woman-experienced phenomenon. Also, notably missing from this analysis is an acknowledgement and analysis of the experience of the pregnant person's partner(s) in relation to miscarriage; this is a rich opportunity for analysis that I hope will be addressed in subsequent scholarship. One of the most promising approaches to miscarriage in feminist philosophy is Carolyn McLeod's work on reproductive autonomy and self-trust. McLeod is primarily interested in the relationality of self-trust, that is, the degree to which relations with others foster or hinder the development of a person's trust in their own perceptions, values, and efficacy. Although miscarriage is discussed as only one example of a situation in which women may have their self-trust (and, therefore, their autonomy) undermined, her discussion of it is rich and productive. Pregnant women must contend with cultural images of their inner bodies, of their bodily relation to their fetus, as well as with the social myths about their outer appearance. Prenatal ultrasound has introduced into Western culture the image of the fetus as a free-floating entity, as many feminists have noted … Pro-life activists also frequently display enhanced images of the baby-like qualities of fetuses to further their political agendas. By contrast, some pro-choice literature (particularly in philosophy) portrays the fetus as a parasitic being that threatens to deprive the woman of her freedom… . Any of those constructions of the maternal-fetal dyad can conflict with the way a woman experiences pregnancy and views her relationship with her fetus. If she is barraged with any particular set of images, her bodily integrity may suffer.44 McLeod, Self-Trust, 156. McLeod is certainly correct to emphasize the quantity and the political content of images regarding pregnancy, and how those images can unfairly impinge on a person's ability to construct trust-worthy perceptions of pregnancy.55 Ten U.S. states require an ultrasound prior to an abortion; fourteen require that a woman requesting an abortion be offered the opportunity to view an ultrasound image; see a report from the Guttmacher Institute titled “State Policies in Brief: Requirements for Ultrasound,” 2013, available at https://www.guttmacher.org/statecenter/spibs/spib_RFU.pdf. Legislation proposed in Virginia would have required women seeking abortions to undergo a medically unnecessary transvaginal ultrasound. Although that legislation was defeated, the revised legislation maintained the ultrasound requirement; see Erik Eckholm and Kim Severson, “Other States Take Notice of Measure on Abortion,” The New York Times (February 29, 2012, A9). She is also correct to show connections along these lines between the socially constructed phenomena of pregnancy and miscarriage. Yet there is a distinction between the two that is particularly relevant to this discussion. Pregnancy is a highly visible bodily experience, both in the sense that one can often visually identify a pregnant person, and in the sense that our culture privileges some images of pregnancy in particular ways.66 Oliver, Kelly, Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Films ( New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) . In contrast, the bodily experience of miscarriage is invisible: it is virtually impossible to identify by sight a person who has experienced a miscarriage, and images of miscarriage are nowhere to be found. Culturally familiar responses to miscarriage are equally rare; there are, as Linda Layne mentions, no Hallmark cards for the occasion.77 Layne, Linda L., Motherhood Lost: A Feminist Account of Pregnancy Loss in America ( New York: Routledge, 2003), 68 . I emphasize this distinction not because it contradicts McLeod, but because it can serve as an elaboration of her analysis. In the case of pregnancy, women in contemporary Western culture face a highly developed social and political institution, replete with rituals, norms, hierarchies (not all pregnancies are created equal!), knowledge systems, and values. The lived experience of a pregnant person in contemporary culture is a noisy one: the degree to which strangers, friends, colleagues, family, medical institutions, and the media feel justified in weighing in on the pregnancy can be astonishing. But the person who has experienced a miscarriage hears no such noise. She does not see her experience analyzed, visually represented, or discussed; there is no barrage of advice. While persons who have experienced miscarriages can and do experience negative responses to their expressions of their feelings, it is more likely that they find themselves, and the broad spectrum of their emotional responses, absent from cultural conversations regarding pregnancy and childbirth. The cultural silence regarding the experience of miscarriage results in an emotional isolation that is itself confusing and damaging to self-trust and bodily integrity. This is not to say that a person who has miscarried is unfettered by societal pressure. The emotions that women who miscarry are expected to have are limited in two crucial ways: scope and temporality. In terms of scope, two commonly expected emotions are: (1) Devastation-that-is-exactly-the-same-as-the-devastation-you-would-feel-if-a-born-child-had-died; and (2) Minor-sadness-that-you'll-soon-recover-from. For cases involving unwanted or unplanned pregnancies, there is a third: (3) Well-that's-a-relief. This is an extremely narrow (not to mention politically loaded) vocabulary for such a complex experience, one badly mismatched to the actual emotions that miscarrying subjects may experience. Moreover, as McLeod's analysis would imply, the narrowness of the range may well hinder the development, experience, or understanding of a larger scope of emotional responses. In terms of temporality, even if the person who has miscarried expresses one of the appropriate emotions, she is expected to experience that emotion for a relatively brief amount of time, which is itself unmarked by ritual, rendering it even more amorphous and lacking in social recognition.88 The Japanese Buddhist ritual of mizuko-kuyō is a ceremony for miscarried and aborted fetuses; its meanings have been widely debated within the field of religious studies, with particular attention paid to its potential feminist meanings (see Green, Ronald M., “ The Mizuko Kuyō Debate: An Ethical Assessment,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67, no. 4 (1999): 809– 24 ). Wilson, Jeff, Mourning the Unborn Dead: A Buddhist Ritual Comes to America ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 ) discusses how the ritual has been transformed when transplanted to the United States. Perhaps the only way that time is measured with regard to miscarriage is in terms of the physical implications of the experience, and the rampant ignorance about miscarriage, the variety of necessary or sought medical interventions, the residual effects (bleeding, lactation, and so on) and how long they can persist, does not help. Miscarriage is generally, and wrongly, believed to have happened in a moment, or perhaps a day, despite the fact that its bodily, emotional, and psychological ramifications can extend well into weeks, months, and years. McLeod focuses on interactions and larger social discourses that can undermine the self-trust of persons experiencing both pregnancy and miscarriage. In this section, I have elaborated on her insight to point out that the absence of representations of and conversational references to miscarriage is potentially just as disorienting and damaging to their self-trust as the onslaught of images, meanings, and demands that surround current social constructions of pregnancy. During ultrasound scanning, sonographers and physicians should try to avoid descriptions which suggest that they [fetuses] are self-sustaining things. Such a construction is morally problematic precisely because it can objectify pregnant women. However, it can be equally problematic to assume that all women in wanted pregnancies interpret their embodied relation to their fetus in the same way. We need a model of pregnancy as a relation, but not one that is so exact that it cannot accommodate varying degrees to which women view their fetuses as parts of them. Health care providers have to respect how individual women experience their pregnancies, rather than dictate to them what their experience is about. Whereas one might object that part of the job of an obstetrician is to offer women advice on how to perceive their pregnancies, surely they can do that without enforcing alienating bodily perspectives. And although they may have to negotiate with some patients about which perspectives to adopt, avoiding negotiation altogether and being authoritarian instead undermines patient self-trust and autonomy.99 McLeod, Self-Trust, 160. Note that McLeod's analysis provides a multilayered relationality: the pregnant subject has a relation to the fetus (thus contradicting the caricature of “the” feminist approach to a fetus as merely a “bunch of cells”); the pregnant subject can have a variety of experiences of and perspectives on that relation, which endow that relation with emotions, values, and so on; and the pregnant subject is in relation with others who can validate or undermine the relevance of the subject's experience of the relation with the fetus. To be fair to McLeod, she is much more focused on the second two forms of relationality than the first; her primary concern is that a focus on the relationality of pregnancy not translate into an imposition of meanings on the pregnant woman, who may understand that relationality in a variety of ways. Nevertheless, McLeod does clearly endorse a relational model of pregnancy. On a relational model of pregnancy (and of pregnancy loss), as I conceive it, a woman and her fetus are physically connected beings, but there are contingent and severable aspects of this connection. One can conceptualize, name, and define a woman and her embryo/fetus as physically connected to each other, while still recognizing the variability in women's emotional and intellectual connections to their fetuses. We can conceptualize a woman and her embryo/fetus as interrelated on a physical level, while still recognizing the severability of that relationship, attaching as little or as much emotional significance to the relationship as each woman deems fit. Such a model recognizes that the bodies of the woman and her embryo/fetus interlock physically, but that the woman's attachment to the embryo/fetus on an emotional level can be strong, weak, or changing, depending on her circumstances, and on the extent to which she elects to attach moral and emotional significance to it.1010 Parsons, Kate, “ Feminist Reflections on Miscarriage, in Light of Abortion,” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 3, no. 1 (2010): 12. Parsons's analysis focuses on the relation between the pregnant woman and her fetus as one that is both irreducible—to be pregnant is to be in relation with another entity that is not you, that is simultaneously other and entirely dependent—and variable. The person who experiences a pregnancy as an unwanted invasion is still in relation with the fetus, as is the person who experiences the pregnancy as a deeply held desire fulfilled. Pregnancy is, thus, framed not atomistically, but as a relation between two entities which are not symmetrically positioned: the pregnant subject can endow that relation with “emotional significance,” whereas the fetus cannot. McLeod's brief mention of the relationality of pregnancy is generally consistent with Parsons's, because, although McLeod emphasizes that the fetus must not be presented as an entity separate from the pregnant woman, she would agree with Parsons that the fetus is separable. However, McLeod also notes that there are phases of pregnancy where the fetus may not be experienced by the woman as distinct from the woman's own body,1111 McLeod, Self-Trust, 157. whereas for Parsons, the fetus must be somewhat differentiated from the woman for pregnancy to be relational. Still, such a difference would only hold in early stages of pregnancy; by and large, McLeod and Parsons are in agreement in understanding pregnancy as a relational phenomenon. Such a model has much to recommend it, especially compared to the so-called pro-life model of pregnancy (which assumes that the reality of pregnancy can be revealed by images that make the pregnant body invisible) and the model sometimes implied by pro-choice positions. While it is a caricature to claim that feminist pro-choice positions reduce the fetus to a “mass of cells” undeserving of emotional investment, it is nevertheless true that feminist theorists have struggled to articulate the moral value that a fetus can have1212 Lynn M. Morgan and Meredith Wilson Michaels, eds., Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) .—a struggle framed by a continued assault on women's reproductive autonomy that renders any attempt at subtlety politically dangerous. Nevertheless, there are difficulties with the relational model of pregnancy that Parsons and McLeod are utilizing. My concern (one that resonates with Lynn Morgan's assessment of feminist, relational defenses of reproductive freedom)1313 Morgan, Lynn M., “ Fetal Relationality in Feminist Philosophy: An Anthropological Critique,” Hypatia 11, no. 3 (1996): 47– 70 . is that such analyses rest implicitly on a problematic degree of individualism. Specifically, I want to argue that the relationality that McLeod invokes and Parsons describes is ontologically misplaced, and as such reveals an individualism that leaves the phenomenon of miscarriage significantly undertheorized, or, alternatively, overrelativized, so that there is very little that can be said phenomenologically about it. Insofar as Parsons emphasizes the ethical relevance of the meanings that a pregnant woman attaches to the relation and McLeod emphasizes the context in which a pregnant woman develops those meanings, both position the meaning-making pregnant woman as prior to, or at least separable from, the pregnancy itself. The relation that the pregnancy constitutes is constructed here as an object of the pregnant person's attention, choice, emotions; what is missing is a recognition of how pregnancy is transformative of a pregnant person's subjectivity, and how the transformative nature of pregnancy is central to the lived experience of miscarriage. [Anna, a woman who experienced a miscarriage] might have been confused about her feelings and about the occasion that triggered them because of the lack, or presumed lack, of sympathy from others. One theory of feelings explains why that may have been the case. According to Sue Campbell, until others give “uptake” to our feelings, that is, until they recognize them as the same sorts of feelings as we do, we often cannot be certain what they are feelings of… . This theory is helpful in understanding the difficulty that women have in sorting out their feelings about miscarriage when those feelings clash with the way society expects them to react emotionally.1414 McLeod, Self-Trust, 55. McLeod is certainly correct to emphasize the relational nature of emotions themselves, such that without uptake from others, emotions can remain murky and unrecognizable. However, it is also possible that miscarriage, as a lived, embodied experience, is itself existentially destabilizing (or, to put it more neutrally, transformative). For McLeod, it is the relation between the miscarrying woman and other persons where self-trust can be affected, not the relation between the miscarrying woman and the fetus. In privileging the former rather than the latter relation, she constructs the experience of a miscarriage as something that happens primarily to an individual, and that then must be taken up by that individual (in the context of relations with others) to make meaning out of it. But she does not construct the experience of miscarriage as itself relational; nor (more central to my point) does she construct the meaning-making person as someone who has already experienced and been substantially marked by that relational phenomenon. Existentially speaking, the relationality that McLeod is most concerned with kicks in after the miscarriage has occurred. It is not a misnomer, I believe, to call both the fetus and the pregnant woman “developing beings,” and to recognize that termination of the fetus involves termination of many other developing processes within the pregnant woman's body. A relational model accounts for the fact that the boundaries between a woman and her embryo/fetus are, both literally and figuratively, more fluid than we often recognize. But this model allows an individual woman to determine, to an extent, what those boundaries are, certainly on an emotional level, and ultimately on a physical level as well.1515 Parsons, “Feminist Reflections,” 15. Here, the pregnant person is positioned to determine both the very boundaries between the pregnant person and the fetus, and the meanings of those boundaries. (Parsons qualifies her claim with “to an extent,” but does not clarify what might limit that boundary-determining ability.) The deciding self, then, is existentially prior to the relation; or, at least, can exist at a sufficient distance from the relation to make determinations about it. The individual who is pregnant can be separated from, in its role as determiner of boundaries and their meanings, the relation itself. While both McLeod and Parsons recognize that relations are crucial to traits that are central to individuals' flourishing, nevertheless they retain a place for individual experience prior to relations, and perhaps most importantly, do not understand (or focus on) miscarriage itself as a relational event. Because of this underlying individualism, their analyses tend to ascribe the confusion and liminality of the experience of miscarriage primarily to social factors—as if the primary site of the emotional meanings associated with a miscarriage is the individual who has experienced that miscarriage. The implication here is that a more supportive, ethical response by health care workers and others would be sufficient, by and large, to ameliorate the emotional confusion that miscarriage can cause, mostly by reflecting and affirming the emotional meanings produced by the person who has had the experience. As indicated by the first section of this article, I agree that social responses to experiences of miscarriage are ethically relevant, and that there is vast room for improvement on that front. However, rendering miscarriage a wholly or primarily individual experience leaves us unable to develop a phenomenological analysis that could articulate the philosophical meanings inherent in this lived, embodied experience. A theory of the self that grounds human experience and existence even more profoundly and directly in both embodiment and relationality is better suited to that specific philosophical task. In the following section, I deploy Rosalyn Diprose's notion of corporeal generosity to begin to gesture toward just such a phenomenology of miscarriage. Generosity … is not reducible to an economy of exchange between sovereign individuals. Rather, it is an openness to others that not only precedes and establishes communal relations but constitutes the self as open to otherness. Primordially, generosity is not the expenditure of one's possessions but the dispossession of oneself, the being-given to others that undercuts any self-contained ego, that undercuts self-possession. Moreover, generosity, so understood, happens at a prereflective level, at the level of corporeality and sensibility, and so eschews the calculation characteristic of an economy of exchange. Generosity is being given to others without deliberation in a field of intercorporeality, a being given that constitutes the self as affective and being affected, that constitutes social relations and that which is given in relation. On the model developed in this book, generosity is not one virtue among others but the primordial condition of personal, interpersonal, and communal existence.1717 Ibid., 4–5. For Diprose, corporeal generosity refers to the necessary openness to others that human existence requires. It is the ontological fact that no body can exist, no identity can come into being, except through relations with other bodies and other beings. As human beings, we have no choice about this generosity, and so we cannot decide whether to extend or withhold it—it grounds our existence and our identity. And so the self is always indebted, always beholden to the other, always dispersed into without being engulfed by the other. However, this debt can be and is often forgotten. The dependent, affected self can be represented and even celebrated as self-made, self-contained, and self-moving, and sociality itself can be perceived as the result of decisions made by independent agents. That forgetting is not symmetrical; the corporeal gifts of subordinate groups tend to be glossed over, or rendered invisible, while the gifts of dominant groups bask in attention and gratitude. “It is in the systematic, asymmetrical forgetting of the gift, where only the generosity of the privileged is memorialized, that social inequities and injustice are based.”1818 Ibid., 8. It is important to note here that Diprose's positioning of generosity as prereflective and necessary to human sociality and identity could raise some difficult ethical problems, particularly for feminist theorists. That is, if corporeal generosity is prereflective, and ontologically necessary, and if the identity and existence of the other is always somehow implicated in my own body, then how could corporeal gifts ever be refused? Would not the act of refusing the other a corporeal gift (say, declining to be an organ donor) be an undermining of that which constitutes the human being, and thus, at least ethically suspect? And finally, perhaps the question is moot: as corporeally generous beings, are we not giving and receiving corporeal gifts all the time, whether we choose to or not? Is the notion of the ethics of the gift a contradiction in terms? It is not the case that I first exist in control of my body then decide to give my body away. Rather, it is because my body is given to others and vice versa that I exist as a social being. Hence, corporeal identity is never singular, always ambiguous, neither simply subject nor object. Second, it is through this ambiguity of bodily existence that new possibilities for existing are open to me. Whether learning a new skill or inheriting someone else's kidney, my possibilities are borrowed from the bodies of others, always with an incalculable remainder. Hence, my ‘freedom’ to act in becoming what I am is compromised rather than guaranteed by keeping my body to myself. Finally, as the ‘alienation’ of corporeality grounds rather than follows after the constitution of the self, then the difference between consent and coercion is at best indeterminate. For the most part, I do not choose, and so neither consent to, nor are coerced into, the process of corporeal generosity that makes me what I am. For the most part giving corporeality happens without any thought at all… . So the ethics of giving blood, gametes, sexual pleasure, or children to another is not decided on the basis of whether these gifts are alienable, unconditionally and universally, and therefore whether giving them puts one's freedom at risk. Rather, our freedom to give in any of these ways is limited by the habits and capacities we have developed as well as those of the bodies with whom we dwell, limits guided by the social significance of the corporeality in question. More generally, insofar as we tend toward sex-specific projects, any consent or coercion involved is grounded most fundamentally in the social constitution, through the law in all of its forms, of differences between sexed bodies.1919 Ibid., 54–55. Precisely because the human embodied subject is always and already corporeally generous, open to (and distinct from) the other at the most fundamental level of existence, human beings develop different sorts of tolerance (Diprose's word) to certain bodily projects, and different modalities of embodied experience that make certain corporeal gifts more or less possible. When women's bodily gifts are forced, as they are so frequently, women's corporeal generosity is hidden, and the transformative nature of the gift is undermined.2020 Ibid., 58. Diprose's theory of corporeal generosity allows for an ethical critique of phenomena such as sexual violence and the limitation of reproductive rights without reliance on a model of the self that is fundamentally autonomous, self-contained, and in possession of the body. In a similar way, it is a rich resource for an understanding of miscarriage that similarly does not fall prey to individualism. In viewing miscarriage through the lens of corporeal generosity, the pregnant body shows up as simultaneously receiving and giving corporeality. The person experiencing pregnancy is undergoing, as Diprose puts it, “corporeal reconstitution,”2121 Ibid., 58. a bodily transformation that will bring new subjective possibilities to her experience. This corporeal becoming is the result of the human body of the fetus that is at the same time receiving a corporeal gift from the pregnant person: the gifts of nutrition, warmth, and blood. Just as Diprose indicates, this corporeal generosity has an ineluctable ontology to it, one that is in effect even before the knowledge of the pregnancy is made manifest, certainly before any decisions regarding the pregnancy are undertaken by the pregnant person and others. Because I am focusing here on the lived experience of the pregnant subject, I am choosing to privilege the moment when one becomes aware of a pregnancy rather than the moment of conception (which is not a lived experience; that is, the experience of conception is not felt as such by the pregnant subject) as transformative to one's identity. Of course, the physical phenomenon that is pregnancy has transformative effects, some of which are not directly experienced but which can have significant effects on the pregnant subject's life, even beyond the pregnancy itself.2222 See, for example, Barinaga, Marcia, “ Cells Exchanged During Pregnancy Live On,” Science 296, no. 5576 (2002): 2169– 72 , for a discussion of the transferring of cells between the fetus and the maternal body. So it would certainly be possible to argue that it is the fact of the pregnancy, and not the knowledge of it, that is transformative; indeed, such a line of argument would be more in synch with Diprose's theory of corporeal generosity. While I am privileging knowledge in my account, I consider the two approaches to be complementary rather than contradictory. From the moment that a person becomes aware of her pregnancy—whether that pregnancy is sought after or not—her embodied subjectivity becomes enmeshed with the fact of the embryo/fetus's existence. The knowledge of the existence of the embryo/fetus launches a new set of possibilities for her identity, some immediate (she now sees, and starts to experience, herself as pregnant) and some future-oriented (she now must engage with the possibility of adopting the identity of a parent).2323 The transformative effects that the knowledge of a pregnancy can have are not unique to this particular bodily phenomenon. The knowledge that one has a disease, for example, or that one has been cured of a disease, or that one has developed the ability to run a marathon: all of these can have a profound effect on one's identity. Indeed, even her past identity and experience may be understood in dramatically new ways by virtue of this new bodily phenomenon. The realization that one is in relation to an embryo/fetus necessarily constitutes a subjective reorientation, a change in the trajectory of the pregnant subject's identity. Any decision made regarding that embryo/fetus