“Désir d’enfant - devoir d’enfant”

• Main Authors: Charlotte Debest, Irène-Lucile Hertzog
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université Catholique de Louvain 2017-12-01
• Series: Recherches Sociologiques et Anthropologiques
• Subjects: ageing; health; desire for a child; social pressures to conceive; the MAP option; the gender system
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/rsa/1907
• ISSN: 1782-1592; 2033-7485

Based on two field surveys in sociology, one studying people who are voluntarily chil- dless and the other on the interrelationship of women’s professional lives with their re- course to medically assisted reproduction, the article attempts to question the role of the State and institutionalized medicines in exerting a social pressure to procreate that women bear the brunt of. Socially, symbolically, economically, and identitarily, they have to answer for the absence of a child. Focusing on the discourses of women who are not mothers, whether that results from a choice or reproduction difficulties, allows us to see afresh that children – whether they be present, absent, desired or dreamt of – remain a “woman’s affair”. Since maternity continues to be thought of as a constituti- ve stage in femininity, every circumstance contributes to those who are not mothers being relegated socially or taken charge of medically.