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The Ethics of Choosing Children pp 81–106Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Maternal Gift of Life

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Ethics and Public Policy ((PASEPP))

Abstract

This chapter seeks to recover a thought of maternal giving, beginning with Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of the gift and the idea of its distinctive realisation in self-sacrificial death as eluding the possibility of reciprocation. A similarly radical structure of giving occurs in birth, where the child is fundamentally unable to return the gifts of air, corporeality and time to the mother who gives. This points to plausible accounts both of the patriarchal fixation upon death, and of recent feminist and maternal thinking about ethics that identifies in our giftedness at birth a source of our ethical calling to responsibility for others.

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  1. Keele University, Newcastle-under-Lyme, UK

    Simon Reader

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  1. Simon Reader
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Correspondence to Simon Reader .

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Reader, S. (2017). The Maternal Gift of Life. In: The Ethics of Choosing Children. Palgrave Studies in Ethics and Public Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59864-2_4

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