‘I’m… Your… Mother’

‘Gravity of Tenderness’ by The Fabler.

While the term ‘mother’ is not strictly defined in international law, normative constructions of ‘motherhood’ (encompassing the socially constructed and prescribed expectations placed upon mothers) emerge through law’s regulations of related categories in health, labour, reproductive, family and welfare law. In this context, law operates as a translational practice that does not merely regulate social life but actively produces gendered identities and norms. In this post, we explore three cases in which motherhood as an institution has been shaped through legal categories and discourses in ways that reflect and reproduce prevailing ideas about class, race, gender, and sexuality.

Motherhood, Mothering and the Law

Mothers are having a moment (which, if you happen to be the lucky bearer of the moniker of ‘mother’, is a rare thing indeed). No, we’re not referring to an actual moment in your overburdened daily schedule of wiping bums, washing clothes, and scraping porridge into the bin that make up, on average, 64% to 73% of household labour carried out by mothers in the home. Rather, mothers are having a cultural moment. From debates surrounding tradwives to Lucy Jones’ wildly popular Matrescence, a book charting the psychological, physiological and social impact of giving birth, to ethical discussions of biotechnologies surrounding fertility, motherhood is a hot topic.

This cultural preoccupation reflects the intensely political stakes at the core of motherhood – a topic recently explored in Helen Charman’s Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood. As Charman argues, motherhood and mothering are both socially constructed and historically contingent, shaped in every sense by socio-economic and cultural factors, yet predominantly presented as a biologically determined phenomenon. A major preoccupation of feminist theory and activism over the past century has therefore been to cleave women’s biological capacity to conceive, gestate, give birth, and lactate from socially constructed ideals of motherhood, asserting that ‘[m]otherhood is not a natural condition’ (Smart, p. 37).

Law’s role in this context rests on its ideological and coercive capacity to bring particular identities into being, including gendered identities and legal subjectivities such as ‘the mother’, as well as categories of ‘motherhood’ or ‘mothering’ (see, for instance, Smart), both constructing and normalising a set of ideas about motherhood. For Adrienne Rich, ‘motherhood’ comprises two interrelated elements: ‘mothering’, based on a mother’s relationship with her children, and ‘motherhood’, which encompasses the socially constructed and prescribed expectations placed upon mothers (Rich, p.13).

When articulated through law, motherhood governs reproduction, family formation, and intimate relationships across legal and institutional boundaries and cultural contexts. In doing so, it carries deeply embedded assumptions about legitimate kinship, appropriate parenting, and acceptable family arrangements. These assumptions shape whose relationships are recognised, whose reproductive choices are protected, and whose claims to parenthood carry legal significance. As Martha Fineman explains, motherhood is a colonised concept, something physically occupied and experienced by women, but defined, controlled, and given legal content by patriarchal ideology (p. 38).

Articulating Motherhood in Law

Perhaps aware of the cultural contingency of the notion and the political implications of affixing a particular definition to the term, international legal frameworks have largely refrained from defining ‘mother’ or ‘motherhood’. As Basak Cali has recently underlined in response to a call for input issued by the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls, which wrongly asserts that under international human rights law ‘a mother is defined as a woman, understood in its ordinary meaning to be a female of childbearing ability, who gives birth to a child’, not one international human rights treaty actually defines a mother. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) does not even employ the term, referring only to women’s equal right to guardianship of children. One of the only exceptions is the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) that provides for ‘special protection’ for mothers after childbirth, but refrains from defining the term. Unfortunately, this largely absentee ‘mother’ in international human rights discourse, also reflects the lack of clearly defined rights afforded to both all parents and carers at both the domestic and international level (a phenomenon our colleague Celine Brassart Olsen explores in her new ERC project).

And yet, even without a fixed definition, law retains the capacity to ascribe dominant ideologies of motherhood, the proper way to perform motherhood, and who is eligible to become a mother through its regulation of related categories such as health, labour, reproduction, personal status, welfare and family; a process we have explored elsewhere as a form of legal translation. The result is a regulatory ‘third space’, or ‘legal borderlands’: spaces of socio-legal relations at the intersection of and in frictions between established legal regimes and conceptual binaries; categories which are linked to socio-economic hierarchies of oppression, including race, gender, class and migrant status. Multiple examples of this existing regarding motherhood. One only needs to look at the restrictive labour laws surrounding mothers’ access to the labour market across national jurisdictions to see that appropriate motherhood has often been constructed as mutually exclusive with wage labour – framed in the interest of the health and happiness of the family.

The relationship between motherhood, particularly eligibility demands, and particular economic models is also prevalent at the international level. For example, one of the first human rights instruments to refer to reproductive rights – the 1968 Tehran Declaration – proposed a normative expectation of parenthood as one grounded in the fulfillment of economic duties or otherwise restricting the number of children. The Declaration declared family planning a human right, yet in the same breath its preamble starkly noted: ‘[t]he present rate of population growth in some areas of the world hampers the struggle against hunger and poverty […] thereby impairing full realization of human rights’ – countenancing the importance of family planning to ward off poverty. Parenthood in this formulation is one tied to a particular economic and family model; one that was very much racialised and tied to concern surrounding third world development.

Outlawed Motherhood

A long and burgeoning literature has explored how motherhood as an institution has been shaped through the conjunctions of patriarchy and colonialism. The mobilisation of the nuclear family model and placing demands and restrictions on the role of mothers, was central to the imperial enterprise, often under the guise of ‘modernising’ reforms. Bound up in race and class-based eugenics discourses, the resulting injustices involved both forced motherhood and the denial of motherhood.

While states no longer outwardly wear their social engineering badge with pride, law’s ability to govern the role of mother and ascribe entire groups of women as unfit for motherhood based on their social location or social identity persists across legal frameworks. In the following, using several short case vignettes drawn from a Danish context, we point to several examples of how law implicitly regulates motherhood in ways that reflect and reproduce prevailing ideas about class, race, religion, gender, and sexuality.

In Western contexts, dominant discourses often ‘reveal ideal mothers who are heterosexual, white, protestant, middle class, medically compliant and economically dependent upon a husband’ within a nuclear family model (Diduck, p. 471). The differential impact of legal regulation on mothers thus depends on their socioeconomic and personal circumstances, including class, race, sexual orientation, and whether they are disabled or able-bodied (Boyd, p. 267). While all women may be adversely affected by dominant legal norms, those who depart from the normative model of white, middle-class, heterosexual motherhood are subjected to closer scrutiny and more coercive treatment than women who are able to conform (ibid, p. 267).

The first case concerns Danish IVF regulation between 1997 and 2007, which institutionalised heteronormative understandings of legitimate motherhood. This is particularly striking given that Denmark was the first country in the world to legally recognise same-sex registered partnerships in 1989. Despite this move towards formal equality, the 1997 IVF regulation explicitly restricted access to assisted reproduction to women in heterosexual relationships, stipulating that, ‘Artificial insemination must only be offered to women who are married to or who live in a marriage-like relationship with a man’ (Law on Artificial Insemination, §3), effectively excluding single and lesbian women. This formulation translated the cultural ideal of the heterosexual nuclear family into legal categories that appeared neutral yet functioned to exclude alternative family forms and sexual identities. The phrase ‘marriage-like relationship’ extended reproductive rights beyond formal marriage while maintaining the central requirement of male partnership. In doing so, law translated prevailing social norms into legal form, reinforcing dominant imaginaries of kinship, biology, and motherhood (Stormhøj). Advocates for restricting IVF access to heterosexual couples repeatedly invoked the ‘normal way’ of reproduction and the ‘natural order of things’ (ibid., p. 46), thereby reasserting a moral hierarchy of family forms. Within this hierarchy, fatherhood was presented as a marker of social stability and moral legitimacy. Women seeking conception outside heterosexual partnerships were portrayed as selfish or irresponsible, and their reproductive choices as contrary to ‘the best interest of the child’.

The second case concerns the coercive inception of intrauterine devices (IUD) in Greenlandic Inuit girls and women by Danish medical officials in the 1960s and 1970s (the so-called ‘coil campaign’).  The revelations exposed that, at the campaign’s height around 1970, approximately 4,500 Greenlandic Inuit women and girls (around half of all women of reproductive age) had IUDs inserted, many without meaningful consent and some as young as twelve. Following three centuries of colonial rule by Denmark, Greenland was reclassified from ‘colony’ to a part of the Danish realm in 1953 with the acceptance of the UN, a process that remains controversial. The IUD program was thus carried out under the guise of ‘family planning’ and ‘welfare modernisation’, framed through the idiom of social progress and welfare reform. Victims described being pressured, misled, or coerced, with several articulating the procedures as experiences of sexual violation, leaving chronic pain, infertility, and persistent psychological trauma. Seen against the broader international development discourse, which emphasised ‘overpopulation’ in so-called developing regions, Denmark’s intervention should be seen as a continuation of the administrative, racial, or epistemic hierarchies that had structured Danish colonial rule for centuries.

Within this institutional and discursive context, the fertility of Greenlandic Inuit women was constructed as a demographic problem requiring intervention. Inuit kinship practices and reproductive autonomy were reinterpreted as indicators of cultural immaturity or lack of rational family planning. Policy documents depicted Greenlandic women as excessively fertile, sexually undisciplined, or lacking foresight, which reflected racialised and gendered tropes inherited from earlier colonial knowledge production. Presented through demographic expertise, medical authority, and welfare-state paternalism, these claims legitimised the IUD campaign as a rational instrument of societal progress.

The third case involves another example of motherhood structured through hierarchical distinctions between centre and periphery, where Danish normative standards of legitimate motherhood become benchmarks against which Greenlandic practices are judged, producing enduring inequalities. In several recent high-profile cases, Greenlandic mothers have had their children removed shortly after birth based on the result of so-called ‘parental competency assessments’. These child-protection assessments and family interventions have been shown to disproportionately target Greenlandic parents. Psychological testing tools and parental competency assessments – developed within Western, individualist cultural paradigms – translate collective, relational Inuit practices of care into forms legible only as deficiency or dysfunction.  As a result, Greenlandic children are removed from their families at dramatically higher rates than Danish children, and many are placed with Danish-speaking foster families, severing linguistic and cultural continuity. These practices constitute another form of colonial legal translation, transforming indigenous forms of kinship into administrative categories that justify intervention and separation. The use of these parenting assessment tools extends the gendered and racialised hierarchies embedded in earlier reproductive governance. These contemporary interventions, like the IUD campaign before them, illustrate the afterlife of colonial translation in shaping whose reproductive and parenting practices are recognised as legitimate within the Danish welfare state.

Concluding Remarks

These cases underline how, in shaping the recognition of motherhood and family formation, law does not merely reflect social realities but actively produces them. And they are far from unique, reflecting broader patterns of systemic discrimination against marginalised populations globally. Tracing how law and the state shapes who gets to mother – and how – highlights the silences, biases, and contradictions embedded in legal and normative constructions, while opening possibilities for resisting and reinterpreting systemic injustices. Charman’s Mother State ends by sketching a vision of a ‘babyful’ world – a society liberated and deeply supportive of mothering. A starting point must also surely be a more liberated definition of motherhood.