By: Elizabeth Kukura.
Normalizing Maternal Ambivalence argues that law’s cramped and punitive understanding of maternal ambivalence causes harm by signaling that mothers who fail to conform to idealized notions of the good mother should face stigma, scrutiny, and even punishment. In practical terms, punitive legal regulation of maternal ambivalence can rupture families by causing the displacement of family members through criminal law or child removal processes. More broadly, by reinforcing the social stigma surrounding maternal ambivalence, law privileges restrictive gender stereotypes about self-sacrificing mothers and women fulfilling their natural reproductive destinies by becoming mothers. To counteract this phenomenon, this Article calls for the normalization of maternal ambivalence to bring the law into better alignment with social science and to ease the harms that flow from punishing women’s conflicted feelings about motherhood.