I wanted to respond to Trinity's post since I also looked at that passage, but it was a bit long so I made it into an impromptu double-post that I will separate. Response: I feel that Heaney’s experience is less about motherhood alone and more about caregiving. Of course, in Heaney’s perspective, motherhood is what literally changed her view, but also the unavoidable emotional aspect of care work. However, I believe that aside from giving birth, care work from people such as NICU staff, teachers, daycare workers, and babysitters would have an identical effect on their experiences of the world. I try my best to speak from a place that is less biased since I myself have three kids, so please forgive me if my opinions seem too biased, but I find the point about connecting more to other children solely because she had kids to be hard to wrap my head around. I question why this ability to empathize on that level wasn’t possible before parenthood, and similar to Trinity's response, wondered why she did not give much thought to the parents who cannot love and care for their children. It seems that without experiencing a similar horrific loss, she would not be able to lose the abstraction of the parents’ horrors. Going back to my original point about caretakers; I believe that those who are depended on by vulnerable groups are more apt to losing abstraction for any horrors far away, as there is a certain privilege is simply being paid to support life and seeing others being endangered to support even their own life. Those who engage in care work develop a strong relationship to global suffering. My Heaney passage: What is gestation to the gestator? This simple, essential question is largely unanswered in public discussion because it is largely unasked. In its place is the interminable repetition of other questions. As the original origin point, the eternally renewable emblem of all beginnings, philosophers andpundits assign pregnancy the burden of holding the most fundamental religious, philosophical, and ethical truths (Heavey, 3) This passage stood out to me because it begins to analyze or question the erasure of lived experience in public discourse. The government, and sometimes society, seems to replace the physical, emotional, and bodily reality of the individual with theoretical debates. Instead of learning about the actual labor and experience of the person gestating, pregnancy is turned into an abstract symbolic morality debate. The text argues that the person who is actually creating the life being argued about is rendered nearly invisible in these talks (with the exception of punishing the creator). Pregnancy is then stripped of it human element and all of the weight that comes with the experience is ignored and neglected. By centering ideological and theoretical debates, public discourse escapes the most obvious question: what does it mean to be the person whose body is actively tasked with supporting life?