Motherhood and Technology - Incite at Columbia University

Advances in genomic and reproductive care, the circulation of novel kinship structures, the entrenchment of existing global networks of power and privilege, and the politics of contested bodily sites have transformed the experience of motherhood.

Part of the Center for the Study of Social Difference, the Motherhood and Technology working group explores how technological innovations have radically transformed the biological and social experience of motherhood in recent decades.

Technological progress and development are often seen as the drivers of these changes, but the revolution in motherhood is as much a product of changes in other domains: ethics, social structures, aesthetics, and lived experiences. The group is motivated to understand how medical technologies have changed—and have been changed by—the experience of motherhood in a global context.

The field of motherhood and technology is fraught with paradoxes. Cryogenic technologies like egg freezing offer women greater flexibility in timing motherhood, yet they also reflect capitalist pressures and extended work lives. Surrogacy enables biological parenthood but often perpetuates global inequalities as women in developing countries bear its burdens. Genetic editing advancements such as CRISPR pose significant ethical concerns due to unregulated use. While new reproductive technologies redefine parenthood and family, they often reinforce market pressures and heteronormative structures, potentially undermining alternative cultural practices. These dilemmas inform this group's research on motherhood and technology.

Foremost in this group's exploration is a conviction that technology is not neutral. Rather, they believe (following Heidegger) that technology operates as a form of “un-concealment” that reveals the “forcing into being” of culture. Thus, they are particularly interested in how the production of and access to such first-world biomedical technologies of motherhood both index and create broader cultural trends across what Arlie Hochschild has called “global care chains,” in which the burden of care is borne disproportionately by women of color and women in the developing world.

This working group is motivated, then, to consider how technologies of motherhood operate among poor and working-class women, both internationally and within the first world. While India has emerged as a global nexus of commercial surrogacy, in New York City and at the US southern border alike, technologies controlling motherhood, including monitoring technology, are used to regulate incarcerated and paroled women. Fundamental to the group exploration is the conviction that these very different forms of technological intervention are working together to produce a global reimagination of motherhood.

As these questions are explored, Motherhood and Technology is guided by the interdisciplinary approach of the medical humanities. Medical humanities offers both a set of methodological approaches to address such challenges and a broad umbrella under which to study the mutual influences of medico-scientific ideas and cultural/aesthetic practices. Medicine, from intimate care to public health policymaking, has much to contribute to a humanistic understanding of the social role of motherhood; meanwhile, approaches that emerge from a humanistic framework can enrich those coming from the physician’s black bag.

The expansive view of the medical humanities allows this group to develop a scholarly intervention into debates around technology and motherhood while also producing a cultural artifact that narrativizes these dilemmas and their solutions for the public.