Sarah LaChance Adams, Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a "Good" Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence, Columbia University Press, 2014

Woollard, Fiona (2018) Sarah LaChance Adams, Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a "Good" Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence, Columbia University Press, 2014. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 28 (1).

Abstract

When a mother deliberately harms her child, it is tempting to assume that she must be either insane (a "mad mother") or lacking the "natural" love of a mother for her children (a "bad mother"). We want to believe that such mothers have almost nothing in common with "good" mothers. Drawing extensively on empirical research, Sarah LaChance Adams' Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What A "Good" Mother Would Do shows that maternal ambivalence, simultaneous desires to nurture and violently reject one's children, is both common and reasonable, the result of genuine conflicts between mothers' interests and those of their children. Both appropriate support and deliberative agency are necessary to avoid maternal ambivalence finding its expression in filicide. As LaChance Adams shows, it is because of not in spite of these tensions that motherhood is an instructive case for ethics. When we appropriately reflect the lived experience of mothers, rather than relying on long standing stereotypes, we find a new paradigm for ethical relationships. This new paradigm reveals that we require an ethical theory that recognises human needs to care for, to be cared for, and to maintain independence.

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