ABSTRACT
In the film Then She Found Me, written and directed by Helen Hunt, a successful talk show host, Bernice Graves, is confronted by her birthdaughter as to the reason for her relinquishment. The discourse of naturalized motherhood that surrounds birthmothers enables people to look at how women’s agency is effaced by bio-essentialist views of motherhood within and without adoption, search, and reunion discourse. In the simplest terms, it is a mode of knowledge that casts women as innately driven toward motherhood and bio-narcissistic nurturing. It understands women primarily in relation to their reproductive biology, and its success or failure, which is treated as the cause of women’s natural inclination toward motherhood. This chapter interrogates the bio-essentialism of the dominant birthmother narrative: it examines its relationship to entrenched notions of feminine gender, and its re-inscription of a naturalized imperative of motherhood that forecloses women’s possibilities and freedoms.
