Pregnancy and 'the Other': Nausea and Accommodation in Manila.

Pregnancy is a processual dialectic that involves continual acts of tactical, responsive, and creative accommodation by pregnant women. This article is a phenomenological investigation of pregnancy experience of working-class women in Manila. In it, I provide an outline of "accommodation:" acts which vary according to the political ecology of procreation in which they are enmeshed, and which are particularly evident in unexpected or unplanned pregnancies. Accommodation constitutes the core act in which the mother-to-be is engaged as the protagonist of procreation, transforming the character of unexpected pregnancy from uncertain and troubled to stable and even joyous as acts of accommodation restore bodily integrity.