Environmental Ethics

Volume 31, Issue 3, Fall 2009

Eating One’s Mother
Female Embodiment in a Toxic World

Breast milk and the placenta are phenomena of female human embodiment that challenge the philosophical notion of separate, sovereign subjects independent of other human be­ings and an objective world “out there.” A feminist phenomenological analysis, indebted to Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray, reveals placenta and milk to be intercorporeal, “chiasmic” forms of shared organic existence. This analysis is a philosophical and psychological exploration of “matrotopy,” i.e., the fact that humans eat their mothers through breast milk and placenta. This exploration, however, requires an understanding of the larger environmental field which sustains the female body and its offspring. Environmental degradation, particularly through estrogen mimicking substances in plastics and pesticides, targets the endocrine system of developing fetuses and endangers the future of the human species from the inside. Invisible organo-chemical technologies pose a new and immediate danger and ethical challenge to women and men in the twenty-first century. A “placental ethics” respects the insertion of the human being into the dynamic field of nature; it calls for an awareness that, unless we develop a changed attitude toward technology, the gradual extinction of our species continues to happen in female bodies today.