Maternity. The Paradigm of Care in the Doctor–Patient Relationship

The main purpose of this article is to analyze the category of maternity from a philosophical point of view. This concept has been developed in continental philosophy, especially by Emmanuel Levinas and Adriana Cavarero, who interpret it as an image of ethical subjectivity based on responsibility for the Other. Also, the Ethics of care, developed in the United States since the 1980s, has often used the paradigm of the mother-child relationship to describe the main features of its perspective. Against universal, principled thinking and the impersonal, abstract idea of justice, care thinkers instead value relational, contingent, and particular thinking, which focuses on responsibility towards others, especially the most vulnerable. This paradigm undoubtedly has several critical points, which have been highlighted by care thinkers themselves. These problematic aspects are mainly related to a possible biologistic interpretation that would reduce the woman to a mother and to the only person responsible for care tasks. However, with these risks in mind, the idea of motherhood can be very useful in counteracting the reduction of inter-human relations to power relations or instrumental/economic relations. It is particularly in the field of health care that it can be useful in describing the doctor-patient relationship. In this article, I will propose a model of the doctor-patient relationship called “maternalism”. This term is rarely used, and when it is evoked, it is often wrongly understood as a form of soft paternalism or, on the contrary, as a total cancellation of the doctor’s will. Against these interpretations, I will show the importance of this model, which values neither medical authority alone nor the independence of the patient, but rather their ethical relationship. The article will be divided into three parts.