Exhibition Review: Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births
The Mütter Museum, Philadelphia, PA, through May 2022
A Row of Intrauterine Devices, Designing Motherhood Exhibition 2021, Mütter Museum, Photograph courtesy of Constance Mensh and Designing Motherhood.
The worst pain I’ve ever felt was my IUD insertion. This may be shocking coming from an ex-gymnast who experienced the all-too-normal accompanying injuries and surgeries. But every day that I walked into the gym, I made a conscious decision to risk my body for what I loved; I never knew what I was walking into the day I got my IUD.
When I was in college, my mom and I decided to get IUDs together. She decided she was done having kids and wanted long term contraception; I knew kids were a long way off (if I was to have them at all). My doctor told me I should expect to feel a little pinch and afterwards some cramping, similar to a period. I’ve never been lied to so egregiously in my life. Maybe that’s why when I used to hear my friends say they were thinking about getting an IUD, I profused my horror story and subsequent experience — to make sure they knew what they were walking into. Now when I’m asked, nearly 10 years later, I rush to celebrate the decade of reproductive freedom my IUD has given me.
As its expiration date approaches, I realize I’ve spent the last decade shading my IUD in negativity: never thanking the tiny copper insertion, never thanking my body for enduring the pain to accept it, never thinking about how much worse my life would be without it. So, I was overcome with emotion when I saw it in the Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births exhibition at the Mütter Museum. Presented in a neat row alongside its peers, there was my tiny T, its metallic coils proudly shimmering under installation lights. I had never experienced anything like it: the thing inside me presented honorably for everyone to see. I pointed it out to my boyfriend who, notably, benefits from the design, too. But his reaction wasn’t like mine. He nodded in acknowledgment and continued on through the exhibition. The weight of the exhibition was flung upon me. His relationship to the designs are not like mine because his risks and gratitudes are not like mine: he cannot look at these objects and feel a visceral shot of pain in memory, or hypothesize how much worse that pain could have — and would have — been if it was centuries or decades earlier and I was forced to use one of the neighboring designs in the show. Those 18th- and 19th-century objects akin to torture devices.
“Design is an intentional act, one that has a politic, one that often belongs to an academia and institution, one with a history tangled in the racism, misogyny, and colonialism of the West.”
Designing Motherhood, although a small exhibition, is full of such objects: ones that have a tangible history with many of its visitors. And many seem to be like me, grappling with how to celebrate the freedoms they allow us, while navigating their horrific past, inequitable present, and increasingly dark future. The curators of the Designing Motherhood project, Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, acknowledge the overwhelming task they’ve set for themselves by making the Mütter exhibition just one part of a larger project. The full scope of Designing Motherhood actually includes two exhibitions (the second is now open at the Center for Architecture and Design), a book, a series of public programs with the Maternity Care Coalition, and an Instagram account in which projects, news, objects, and histories are shared daily. Sometimes what they share is extremely dark, like the Q. And babies? A. And babies (1970) poster by the New York-based Art Workers’ Coalition, which depicts the titular quote from Vietnam soldier Paul Meadlo plastered across a photograph of the Lai Massacre. This image exists on their feed alongside a 1996 baby stroller, designed by aeronautical designer Owen Finlay Maclaren to be both functional yet lightweight and transportable. The expanse of that which makes up “motherhood” is jarring, which I believe is the point: Design is an intentional act, one that has a politic, one that often belongs to an academia and institution, one with a history tangled in the racism, misogyny, and colonialism of the West. These designs have impacted lives physically, emotionally, and psychologically for good, bad, and all that exists in between.
The rollercoaster of emotion is set before entering the exhibition. To access Designing Motherhood, one must walk through the Mütter Museum’s permanent collection, which situates the history of obstetrics and gynecology through a series of abnormal or diseased anatomical specimens. There are a number of miscarried or aborted fetuses with different developmental issues suspended in formaldehyde alongside “deformed” pelvises described as “funnel-shaped,” “flat rachitic,” and having rickets. Inadvertently, the museum’s collection situates Designing Motherhood within an all-too-familiar history for pregnancy: a site of spectacle. But walking into the crisp, white-walled exhibition space, leaving behind the dark, somber permanent collection, offers the opportunity to revisit our understanding of this past and the way it shapes our experiences. A new opportunity to reject drab nipple guards and don Maria Eife’s shamelessly ornate nipple jewelry, Dress Flanges (2019), reminiscent of luxurious lace lingerie.
Dress Flanges (2019), Maria Eife, Designing Motherhood Exhibition 2021, Mütter Museum, Photograph courtesy of Constance Mensh and Designing Motherhood.
While part of the exhibition reveals shortcomings in design, like the ongoing “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck” project at MIT, the true genius of Designing Motherhood is that it contextualizes design as just one part of the experience of reproduction; the fact is that these objects cannot actually be contained within the design world because design is tangled with other forces of our society, like medical power dynamics, language, and a capital market. An entire section dedicated to midwives reveals a medical system that intentionally drove out pregnancy and prenatal care in exchange for medical cure as it pursued a monetized practice that ostracized the same Black and Indigenous women who largely delivered their generation.
Because of the speed at which politics regarding pregnancy and motherhood move, an exhibition like Designing Mothering, i.e., one that platforms a quotidian life experience normally shunned to private quarters, feels long overdue, but also somehow simultaneously dated. Take, for example, the name: Designing Motherhood. At once people who identify as mothers feel the satisfaction of finally being seen and heard, their labor appreciated. But although the curators worked to craft their own definition of the word mother, which they apply as a “noun, verb, and beyond the confines of biology and gender,” it is hard to extricate such a deeply felt word from long-held associations between gender and reproduction. It also infers an outcome or end-result to many objects it presents that contradicts their very purpose: I use an IUD explicitly not to become pregnant and others have used the Del Em Device (Lorraine Rothman, Carol Downer, and the Los Angeles Self-Help Clinic, 1971) for the same reason. Although some users of the objects are mothers, many are not.
These issues have profound political ramifications in a year when Roe has been effectively gutted and anti-transgender legislation is at an all-time high. As I write this, the US government is suing the state of Texas over SB8, a new law that has effectively eradicated abortion in that state. This legislation is dependent upon the very notion of changing the definition of motherhood to include the pregnancy that proceeds it and prematurely separating a pregnant person from a part of their own body, resulting in a state-sanctioned loss of autonomy. (In fact, the bill goes beyond legal sanctioning. It also allows private citizens to act as vigilantes and sue anyone they believe to have had or be involved with helping someone procure an abortion.) For the first time since 1973, women in the United States are legally being denied abortion care.
“These issues have profound political ramifications in a year when Roe has been effectively gutted and anti-transgender legislation is at an all-time high.”
The rhetoric we have built around reproduction that allows us to discuss these very design objects repeatedly reveals its deficiencies. In our conversation, curator Amber Winick acknowledged the group’s struggle with language throughout the project, noting that there are not many words that adequately encapsulate the vision and scope of their objects. Instead, they forged a path forward in hopes of creating new definitions for old words. These deficiencies are a catch-22 that make it hard to celebrate things that deserve it. It is the same overwhelming and confusing arc of emotions and pain I have navigated through my decade with my IUD: perhaps there isn’t room for joy and appreciation without pain and sacrifice because we haven’t designed our world to make room for one without the other — yet.
Designing Motherhood presents many of its objects, including a series of pessaries, in groups that span centuries, making design improvements visually legible. But their vitrines also leave a little negative space, a space for designs yet to come, a space for hope that a different future is possible. The best way to bring forth that future, and ensure its designs serve those who need it the most, is to start talking about it now. To shape it with our words, our hopes, and our needs, and to do so we must bring that which feels private into the public realm. I thank everyone involved in the Designing Motherhood project for giving us a place to start.
