Maternal Paradox: When Nurturer Meets the Knife, Living Organ Donation From Daughters to Mothers in Türkiye

ABSTRACT This article uses the case of living organ donation from daughters to mothers in Türkiye to examine how maternal subjectivities are constructed, enacted, and transformed within specific cultural contexts. In Türkiye, motherhood is both culturally idealized and politically reinforced as the moral core of womanhood. Although women are statistically far more likely to become living organ donors, existing explanations often focus on structural inequalities while overlooking how subjectivity intersects with these conditions. By drawing on feminist phenomenology and interviews with eight donors, our study shows that although structural forces shape donation, daughters actively negotiate their self‐maternal subjectivities, even embodying maternal roles before motherhood. When mothers receive organs from daughters, normative ideals of selfless motherhood are unsettled, prompting both generations to reconfigure inherited notions of sacrifice and care. These exchanges become sites where maternal subjectivity is fractured, negotiated, and reconfigured by both generations. Our study contributes to feminist bioethics, motherhood studies, transplantation ethics, and the sociologies of care and donation.