'One of the major interventions of the decade' - Sophie Lewis author of Abolish the Family
'An astonishing achievement written with the propulsiveness of a novel' - Jordy Rosenberg
author of Confessions of the Fox 'A fierce and luminous revelation' - Anne Boyer poet and
author of The Undying What does it feel like to experience your body cleaving into two while
public discussion of reproductive healthcare centers around the viability line: the fantasized
moment when a fetus could feasibly be extracted from a uterus? What happens to the psychology
of parents who spend years scrolling through photographs of children crushed in war while
babies sleep beside them indistinguishable from the dead children in expression and bodily
habit? Emma Heaney addresses these questions situated between the particular historical
moments of her pregnancies and the transhistorical continuities of sensations emotions
socialities and conceptual provocations that have long accompanied gestation. She focuses on
the embodied realities that are mystified in the sentimentalization of motherhood a political
process that enables the material abandonment of those who do the labor of gestation and care
as well as of children. As a result gestation is revealed as a process against cisness wage
work and the death cult of war.
