1. family and parenting
2. motherhood
3. pregnancy

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The Foetal Condition
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The Foetal Condition
A Sociology of Engendering and Abortion
Luc Boltanski
Translated by Catherine Porter
polity
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First published in French as La condition fœtale. Une sociologie de l’engendrement
et de l’avortement © Editions Gallimard, Paris, 2004
This English edition © Polity Press, 2013
Polity Press
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For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com
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. . . the evening star is the morning star . . .
Gottlob Frege, ‘On Sense and Reference’
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Contents
Introduction
1
1. The Anthropological Dimensions of Abortion
11
2. The Two Constraints on Engendering
39
3. Understandings
60
4. The Parental Project
90
5. Constructing Foetal Categories
125
6. The Justification of Abortion
158
7. The Experience of Abortion
193
Conclusion: Forgetting Abortion
233
Notes
Works Cited
Index
251
299
317
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Introduction
The place of abortion in the changes that have affected the
politics of life
Among the principal changes that have marked the last third of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first (including the formation
of a new ‘spirit of capitalism’, for example), one can unhesitatingly attribute
considerable importance to transformations that have affected the politics
of life, most notably changes in the conditions of reproduction, gestation
and childbirth. As women’s roles in society, representations of the family,
relations between the sexes, modalities of sexuality and affectivity and
other major aspects of private life have been transformed, our relation to
the possibilities offered by technological developments has ranged from
admiring fascination to uneasy reticence. The changes in question have been
subject all along to a great deal of analysis and commentary, because they
have been viewed, not unjustifiably, as opening the way to inflections in
our idea of what it means to be human; they have even led us to reconsider
certain aspects of Western anthropology that had previously been taken for
granted. Let us note, however, that whether the commentators have looked
upon these changes favourably or, as has often been the case, with a critical
eye, they have tended to focus on the most spectacular innovations, especially those associated with medically assisted reproduction; in other words,
practices that are relatively rare (such as the use of surrogate mothers) or
that do not yet exist (such as human cloning) have been the primary focus
of attention. Cloning, for example, has given rise to an abundant literature
over a short period of time, even though to date the process has not been
applied to humans.1
As I could not hope to address this proteiform thematics in all its aspects,
I chose to approach it indirectly, by focusing on an event that is limited in
scope but that seems to me to have played a particularly important role in
the evolution that is still under way. This crystallizing event was the legalization of abortion, which occurred in the major Western countries between
the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, precisely at a time when broader changes
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The Foetal Condition
affecting human life were either beginning to appear or becoming so significant that they could not be ignored. The role played by the legalization
of abortion in the transformations associated with the women’s movement
and in those that have affected private life in its familial, affective or sexual
dimensions can hardly be questioned. But we may also suppose that the
development of biotechnologies, and of techniques for medically assisted
reproduction in particular, would have run into considerable difficulty if the
ban on abortion had not been lifted; its disappearance removed an obstacle
to research on intrauterine life and embryos.
A second reason for taking up this topic was its very difficulty. At the
centre of disputes that have often been extremely harsh and that seem poised
to reignite at any moment, the question of abortion is the very prototype
of an inappropriate object for a sociologist, because it seems impossible to
approach with the requisite detachment. Attesting to this, in France, is the
virtual absence of publications on the subject over a period of nearly two
decades, between 1982 (when an excellent special issue of the Revue française de sociologie devoted to abortion came out, edited by François-André
Isambert and Paul Ladrière) and the early years of the new century (when
several books on abortion appeared). In contrast, publications on abortion
remained abundant throughout this period in the United States. While the
vast body of literature on the subject includes much work of great integrity
and real scientific value, work carried out most notably by anthropologists
studying contemporary societies, it also includes a large number of polemical books or articles written in support of positions favourable to abortion
(pro-choice); works supporting the opposite positions (pro-life) are much
less common, at least in the academic context. These two ways of situating oneself with regard to the question of abortion – either avoiding it or
entering into it as if charging into an arena to do battle – are indicative,
moreover, of the different ways in which the question has arisen in the
United States and in France: as a central conflict that sometimes verges on
civil war, in the first case, and as a taboo topic to be avoided, a prohibition
that could not be prudently transgressed, in the second.
My intention in this book, then, is precisely to treat abortion as if it
were a sociological object like any other, that is, to invoke the celebrated
notion of ‘axiological neutrality’. So easy to affirm as a principle and so
hard to adopt in practice, neutrality is nevertheless one of the axioms that
has allowed sociology to be constituted as an academic discipline. It can
be sidestepped without harmful consequences when the object is already
solidly established as a research topic, but it remains indispensable for
addressing problems that have not yet achieved intellectual existence except
in the rhetoric of conflict. To grasp such a problem using the methods and
language of sociology, it is thus absolutely necessary to set aside the urgency
of practical issues in order to proceed as if it were possible to consider the
matter from the outside, and, in a sense, irresponsibly, that is, while refusing
to raise, even for oneself, the questions that a ‘man of action’ cannot avoid,
according to the division of labour that Max Weber spelled out once and
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3
for all in his celebrated lectures on science and politics as vocations (Weber
2004). Distance from one’s topic, which underlies the idea of axiological
neutrality, is achieved in the work presented here by the requirements and
constraints of model construction, a task that involves taking utterances
and various other traces deposited in the social world and attempting to
organize them by testing their cohesion and their robustness. This process
is somewhat analogous to the way the so-called natural sciences set aside
precisely what we commonly call nature – for example, when we are out for
a walk in a natural setting – so as to concentrate on analysing samples that
have been selected, duly labelled and transported into the equipped space
of a laboratory.2 This is to say that at no point in this book will I formulate
what readers ordinarily expect from a work on abortion, or for that matter
from a discussion of almost any of the questions that are at the centre of
still burning conflicts: namely, an opinion, even though opinions on abortion are precisely part of the data whose logic I am seeking to reconstruct.
Having lived through the 1970s, when it was impossible to deal with a
social topic – social class is a good example – without being challenged
to reveal one’s position (‘Where do you stand?’), I am not unaware that
such a posture has every chance of encountering suspicion or rejection.
Nevertheless, it is a posture I shall maintain throughout.
Two theoretical goals
Adopting a relatively distant position with respect to the directly political
components of my topic was made easier by the fact that my decision to
study abortion was dictated at least as much by theoretical considerations
as by the attention that people legitimately expect sociologists to pay to the
contemporary social world. On the level of sociological theory, my research
had two primary goals. Both reflect a desire to re-engage with questions
that I had deliberately set aside more than twenty years earlier, when I
turned away from the problematics that had dominated the social sciences
in the 1960s and 1970s. With respect to these problematics, in my new
work I wanted to break in particular with several key oppositions: between
unconscious reality and self-deceiving consciousness, between what belongs
to structure and what stems from phenomena, and especially between the
real but hidden motives dominated by interests and the often altruistic but
illusory reasons on which actors claimed to base their actions. My intention
was to relaunch a research programme in the realm of moral sociology that
had been at the centre of Émile Durkheim’s preoccupations, but that the
structuralist positivism of the 1960s and 1970s, relying on narrow conceptions of Marxism and psychoanalysis, had rejected. Now, moral sociology
does not necessarily require that all moral references on the part of actors
be taken at face value, but it does require at the very least that sociologists
take such references seriously, in order to study the way actors themselves
deal with the gap between normative requirements and reality, whether by
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critiquing the world as it is or, on the contrary, by justifying themselves in
response to critiques.
The wish to develop a programme bearing on critical operations and on
justification – in other words, the wish to substitute a sociology of critique
for a critical sociology – led me to set aside one question, however, that
general sociology cannot ignore: how to deal with the differential between
the components of the social world that are exposed to broad daylight
at a given moment in time and those that, without being unknown, are
nevertheless not well known, as if there were a sort of tacit agreement to
close one’s eyes to them. My primary theoretical goal in this book, then,
is to take up again on a new basis, without engaging a problematics of
the unconscious in the strong sense, a question that has essentially to do
with social bad faith, with the separation between what is known officially and what is known in an unofficial or tacit mode. This question has
been a familiar one for a long time; it is at the heart of Pierre Bourdieu’s
anthropological work (in his courses, Bourdieu liked to recall, with reference to Marcel Mauss, that ‘societies always pay themselves with their
own counterfeit coinage’), and I learned to do sociology under Bourdieu’s
tutelage. The question is not completely absent from the work on critique
and justification that I undertook in collaboration with Laurent Thévenot,
where it appeared in the form of the opposition, central to the model of the
ordinary meaning of justice that we developed together, between moments
when one opens one’s eyes and those when one closes one’s eyes (Boltanski
and Thévenot 2006). Still, I find now that I did not pay sufficient attention
to this question, either in my teaching or in my subsequent work. In the
present book it will become clear how abortion, as a possibility and as a
practice, constitutes a privileged terrain for analysing the different ways in
which things that matter to society can be known and reported, as requirements or as effects, in the mode of ethical or political generalizations or
in the anecdotal mode. (In the latter case, one treats phenomena as if they
were isolated and avoids putting them in a series that would associate them
with other phenomena of the same type, so as not to have to draw out their
consequences.)
This attention to procedures of avoidance led me to place at the centre of
the present work a classic question in the social sciences whose importance
I had not fully appreciated in my earlier work on the relation between
justification and action: the question of contradictions and the social
arrangements that seek to attenuate or circumvent them. As the conclusion
to this work will make clear, the question of contradiction is linked, for
me, with the question of normativity, and I shall try to describe – obviously
without exhausting the topic – some formulas for dealing with contradiction. I shall make a particular effort to distinguish between two sorts of
solutions: those that consist in distributing various types of normative
requirements among temporally different situations and sequences, requirements that are credited with universal validity to an equivalent degree even
though they are incompatible with one another (this is to a great extent
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5
the path explored in On Justification), and those that consist in establishing a hierarchy among the various consequences of an action, in a logic of
the lesser evil (solutions of the latter sort will predominate in the present
context).
My second theoretical objective, which is not completely independent of
the first, was to try to bring together three distinct approaches associated
with intellectual traditions that often have difficulty getting along. The
first is an approach that can be qualified as grammatical. It takes hold of
facts, selected from a corpus, and seeks to organize them so as to establish
a model that will allow them to be arranged in relation to one another
according to a logic capable of integrating them intelligibly and without
remainder, rather in the way that linguistics goes about establishing distinctive features in phonology, or generative schemas whose organization
defines a model of competence in syntax.3 Such an approach, which adopts
a position of exteriority with respect to the object or, in a different terminology, which has an objectivist character, does not imply raising questions
about phenomena, that is, about the way in which persons experience the
world when they encounter the phenomena of which the model offers an
organized representation. I shall thus seek to sketch what may be called a
grammar of engendering (chapter 2), by specifying certain of the constraints
that weigh on the fabrication of new human beings so that they may take
their place without too much difficulty among the humans who are already
present, and also (at least in a number of societies) among the dead, in so far
as the latter remain present in memory. In the first chapter, I shall present
the properties of abortion that seem to me the most pertinent and also the
most intransigent for sociology. The question of abortion will serve as an
operator for working out the components of the grammar of engendering
that abortion unveils, in a way, by making these components salient in their
contradictory dimensions, which the social arrangements that surround the
engendering of human beings (and most notably kinship arrangements) aim
precisely to surmount.
The second approach that I have sought to develop in this work consists
in starting from the experience of persons in such a way as to describe the
manner in which they live in their flesh their encounter with the components
and defining features of the act of abortion that have been integrated into
the model. But, instead of emphasizing the distance between the lessons
offered by the grammatical and the experiential approaches, as one often
does in undertakings of a structural type, I shall attempt on the contrary
to show how these two approaches can converge, and how it is possible
to rediscover through experience – although the languages of description
will differ – the components whose relevance has been demonstrated by
the grammatical approach. In a radical shift of theoretical registers, I shall
then seek support in a conceptual field developed in phenomenology, in an
effort to surmount (or at least to bypass) the very lively tensions between
the experiential approach, which seeks to describe the intentions immanent
to behaviours, and the grammatical approach that I adopted initially, which
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has often been criticized from the phenomenological standpoint for striving
to reduce social phenomena to a universe that can be calculated according
to rules.4 However twisted and fraught with pitfalls this path may be, it is
perhaps the only one that will make it possible to specify the concept of
practice in order to articulate models of competence established from a
position of exteriority with regard to narratives that persons offer about
their lives, when, ‘emplotting’ these lives, to borrow Paul Ricoeur’s term
(Ricoeur 1984), they raise questions about the intentions and motivations
that lay behind their own actions. This is how the concept of flesh, put
to work in the first part of the book in a strictly structural fashion, since
its defining features are established solely in opposition to the concept of
speech (so as to establish the distinction between engendering through flesh
and engendering through speech), is taken up again and re-elaborated, with
a different orientation, in chapter 7, where I seek to account for the experience of flesh during pregnancy, as a dimension of a woman’s relation to her
own body.
The third approach, finally, has a historical character. It consists in taking
into account the way in which certain constraints that may be understood
as possessing an anthropological (and thus in a sense ahistorical) dimension, when they are operative at a specific moment in time, can generate
different states of reality. Although they can coexist, at least in part, these
states gain intelligibility when they are described in chronological order. I
seek to show how the constraints in question (which will be described in
chapters 1 and 2) have been manifested differently – and as a result have
weighed differently on the actions of persons subjected to them – in different historical contexts, the term ‘historical’ being used in a very broad
sense (this is the object of chapters 3–6). I shall then evoke factors that
can be viewed as exogenous, in many cases, in the sense that they present
themselves (to use the vocabulary of economics) as externalities affecting
the relation that persons may have with the grammatical components of
the model of engendering presented in the early part of the book, without
radically modifying these components.
Unexpectedly, my research has led me across a variety of terrains, into
various areas of social science where I am far from an expert. But for me
this was one of the most interesting aspects of the project. The generation
to which I belong is perhaps the last that will dare to manifest the ‘amateurism’ (or on whose part such a manifestation will be tolerated with a
certain indulgence) that nourished a number of works in the social sciences
considered ‘classic’ today, an approach that the professionalism of our disciplines – modelled, perhaps mistakenly, on what one imagines to have been
the evolution of the so-called hard sciences – threatens to banish forever.
The fact remains that, despite the advice generously proffered by eminent
colleagues in the disciplines touched upon here, I am aware of the very
imperfect character of the enterprise; its impeccable achievement would
have required, as they say, a lifetime.
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7
Vocabulary issues
Some clarifications regarding word choices: I have preferred, most often,
to use the term ‘abortion’ rather than the French neologism interruption
volontaire de grossesse (voluntary interruption of pregnancy) that appeared
with the Veil law of 1975; the latter term seemed too marked, historically
and socially, to fit the very general phenomenon I sought to study.5 A
problem of the same sort arose when it came to qualifying the being that
comes to be implanted in the flesh following sexual intercourse. In current
practice, several different terms are used in accordance with the state of
development of the pregnancy: pre-embryo, embryo, non-viable foetus,
viable foetus and so on. But, beyond the fact that the borders between the
beings these terms are supposed to designate are far from firmly established
(indeed, they are often in dispute), it became clear to me that making terminological judgements was part of my task; having taken on the challenge
of describing the logic of the terminology, I could not settle for adopting it
naively. Thus I chose to use the term ‘foetus’ exclusively, as a convention,
to designate the being in question. Seeking to stress the symbolic dimensions
of the events that accompany the entrance of new beings (or their failure
to enter) into the world of humans, I largely excluded from my vocabulary
terms that had medical, biological or demographic origins or connotations, for example ‘reproduction’, ‘procreation’ or even ‘womb’ (for which
I generally substituted the phenomenological term ‘flesh’). Moreover, to
designate what happens when a woman finds herself pregnant, I opted for
the term ‘engendering’ rather than, for example, ‘having a child’, for – and
this fact is precisely at the core of my research – not every being engendered
is the occasion for the birth of a child.
Finally, I use the term ‘constructivism’ to designate the method of model
construction deployed here, and the term ‘constructionism’ to speak of
approaches described as ‘the social construction of reality’.
Credits
It would have been impossible to bring this research to fruition without the
collaboration and teamwork of many individuals.
The surveys and observations conducted in hospital settings were
carried out by Marie-Noël Godet, an engineer at the Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique; over a period of eighteen months, she went several
times a week to one of the principal family planning clinics in the Paris
region and also to the gynaecological clinic of a mid-size city in the Nord
region. She was able to observe women (or, occasionally, couples) during
their pre-abortion counselling interviews or their consultations with a
doctor; she collected data on roughly one hundred cases. She was of course
not allowed to record the interviews, but she transcribed from memory the
essential elements of the conversations she heard each day, and this allowed
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her to accumulate a very rich corpus. She met separately with a number of
people working in both public and private gynaecological services. She was
able to sit in on several internal meetings during which doctors and nurses
discussed the problems they faced, and on two occasions she was admitted
to the operating room. In addition, she conducted a series of fifteen interviews with prominent individuals – doctors, for the most part – who had
played an important role in the movement leading to legalized abortion, and
she collected documents on several aspects of abortion (legal and medical
in particular) as it had evolved over a period of some thirty years. Finally,
Godet, whose training in clinical psychology and competence in the realm
of psychoanalysis made significant contributions, played a very active role
throughout my study, especially by reminding me regularly that, among
the factors that come into play in social life, some are not directly accessible via the usual concepts and methods of sociology; in other words, she
emphasized the relatively autonomous character of psychic life, especially
in its affective dimensions.
In addition to the hundred or so observations made in hospitals or clinics,
forty in-depth personal interviews (lasting one to two hours, and recorded
on tape) were conducted with women who had had abortions. (With one
exception, our interviewees were all women; one of our great regrets was
that we had insufficient resources to undertake parallel interviews with
men.) I carried out some of these interviews myself, despite the unfortunate
handicap of belonging to the other sex. Most of the interviews were conducted by Susana Bleil, a doctoral candidate at the École des hautes études
en sciences sociales (EHESS), and by Valérie Pihet, a research assistant at
the Centre de sociologie de l’innovation (CSI). Bleil and Pihet were able to
establish relations of trust with the persons they met. Although it has been
legal in France for nearly thirty years, abortion is still a life event about
which it is difficult to speak. So that the interviews could proceed under
favourable conditions, that is, so they could provide us with the knowledge
we lacked without constituting an ordeal for those who agreed to speak
with us, we chose to begin by meeting with people who already belonged to
our circle of personal relations, and then asked those individuals to introduce us to others (a ‘snowball’ sample). The flaw in this method is obviously
that it restricts the range of the social field in which the study is carried out.
Thus we reached mainly young, urban women, either students or workers in
the service sector; most of them had no religious affiliations. Nevertheless,
when we compared the data collected during the in-depth interviews with
the data gathered in the hospital context, where the spread of social classes,
geographical origins and religious affiliations was much broader, we did not
find major divergences, and this convinced us that the information gleaned
from interviews could be generalized.6 Marie-Noël Godet participated in
the analysis of the data collected in the hospital context; Susana Bleil did
the same for the interviews.
Valérie Pihet also collaborated with me on a search for images, and she
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9
collected pictures of foetal life that allowed us to set up an installation in the
context of the Iconoclash exhibition curated by Bruno Latour at the Centre
for Art and Media in Karlsruhe in May 2002.
I myself took charge of gathering most of the documentation; this led me
to make a number of excursions, no doubt often a bit erratic, into various
areas of the social sciences. I directed the working group under the aegis
of the Groupe de sociologie politique et morale (EHESS-CNRS [Centre
national de la recherché scientifique]). But my principal tasks lay in building
the analytic framework that allowed me to integrate the data collected and
to write the present book. Responsibility for this text is mine alone, and the
errors that will undoubtedly be found here are my responsibility as well.
Special thanks
Throughout the preparation and writing of this work, I benefited from the
support and collaboration of many people. Almost daily discussions with
Élisabeth Claverie played a very important role in the overall design of the
project. This book is also in part hers. Jean-Élie Boltanski helped considerably in establishing the grammar of engendering presented in chapter 2, by
applying his knowledge in the field of formal linguistics to the incongruous
object that I presented to him. I also learned a great deal from exchanges
with Christian Boltanski and Hans Ulrich Obrist about the various paths
that lead to questions of singularity and its negation from the vantage
points of sociology, anthropology and also the plastic arts and poetry.
The pages presented here owe more than I can say to Cyril Lemieux’s
comments on a series of drafts that he was kind enough to read, and to the
long discussions that I had with him throughout the entire process. I am
indebted as well to exchanges with Frédéric Keck (who is responsible for
my rediscovery of certain works by Claude Lévi-Strauss that I had read –
badly – long ago) and with Sébastien Laoureux, who shared his knowledge
in the area of phenomenology. Finally, I benefited on many points from the
counsel of friends and colleagues – especially my EHESS colleagues – to
whom I told my story and whom I did not hesitate to pepper with questions in my search for details and references. I name them here as a group:
Catherine Alès, Jérôme Alexandre, André Burguière, Philippe Descola,
Marie-Angèle Hermitte, Claude Imbert, Paul Jobin, Rose-Marie Lagrave,
Hervé Le Bras, Nicolas Offenstadt, Joan Stavo-Debauge, Anne Christine
Taylor, Isabelle Thireau. I also learned a lot from some of the participants
in my seminar at EHESS, especially Roser Cusso, Caroline Ibos, Catherine
Rémy, Bénédicte Rousseau, Anne Paillet and Isabelle Baszanger. I profited, too, from attending a seminar on ‘the secret’ led by Cyril Lemieux,
Dominique Linhardt and Emmanuel Didier, as well as seminars given by
Paul Rabinow at EHESS and at ENS (École normale supérieure).
The pages that follow also owe a good deal to those who were kind
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enough to read the manuscript ‘straight out of the box’ – Damien de Blic,
Sabine Chalvon, Ève Chiapello, Caroline Ibos and Bruno Latour; I thank
them for their critiques and comments.
Drafts of parts of this work have been presented in various colloquia and
seminars. I am grateful in particular to Mario Perniola, who invited me to
speak about my research in the colloquium titled ‘Natura, Coltura, Cultura’
that he organized at the Università degli Studi di Roma (Tor Vergata) in
February 2002 (the text of my talk was published in the journal Agalma);
Bruno Latour, who invited me to speak at the École des mines in Paris and
made room for me in the Iconoclash exhibition mentioned earlier; and
Claude Imbert, who allowed me to present my work to the anthropologists,
historians, sociologists and philosophers brought together at a colloquium
she organized in June 2003 at Trinity College, Cambridge.
This undertaking benefited from the constant support of the Groupe de
sociologie politique et morale and from that of Jacques Revel, president of
EHESS. It could not have been completed without the friendly attention of
Éric Vigne, whose role in the renewal of the social sciences far exceeds what
can ordinarily be expected of an editor.
Finally, I want to thank all those who made our research work possible,
either by welcoming us in family planning clinics or by agreeing to talk with
us. This book would not have been possible without their generosity.
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1
The Anthropological Dimensions
of Abortion
The comparatist approach of George Devereux
To refer to practices in their most general – that is, anthropological –
dimension is to invite disapproval from today’s social sciences, which have
probably never before insisted as strongly as they do now on separating
disciplines oriented towards culture from those oriented towards nature.
In the current view, the latter disciplines have full responsibility for identifying the invariants whose universal character is thought to depend on
their biological roots (and especially on the biological underpinnings of
the mind) or, put another way, on the effects that constraints determined
by the biological characteristics of human beings (who eat, reproduce, die
and so on) bring to bear on life in society. The disciplines oriented towards
culture, in contrast, have the task of establishing the inventory of what is
left over, that is, the differences between human groups that are thought
to result chiefly from their adherence to different systems of belief. In
the order of nature, everything is understood to be the same everywhere;
in the order of culture, everything is understood to be different. It was
precisely in reaction against this split, which positivism had made so compelling, that general sociology and social anthropology were constituted
over a century ago, with a project defined from the start as comparatist.
General sociology and social anthropology thus took their principal task
to be cataloguing the ways in which practices that appeared to manifest a
kind of family relationship could nevertheless be substantiated differently
in different societies (in the case of Émile Durkheim and his followers,
for example, these practices would include sacrifice, prayer, exchange,
kinship, practices of classification, oaths, crime and so on). The same
can be said for psychoanalysis: at least after its encounter with cultural
anthropology, and without abandoning its fundamental concepts (the
unconscious, repression and so forth), psychoanalysis had undertaken to
examine, for example, how different schemas for organizing unconscious
drives could correspond to different practices of socialization, or how
taking into account the tensions proper to each culture made it possible
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to trace pathways leading from collective myths to individual dreams and
vice versa.
With respect to my topic, the social anthropologist and psychoanalyst
George Devereux was the first to undertake a systematic study of the practice of abortion by considering it both in its general dimensions and in the
specific forms it has taken in different societies. As Devereux explains in his
introduction to A Study of Abortion in Primitive Society, his primary aim
was theoretical, or rather ‘methodological’ (Devereux 1955). He sets forth
four goals: (a) to provide empirical support for the validity of the ‘axiom
that cultural diversity demonstrates the tremendous plasticity and variability of human behavior’; (b) to furnish empirical data in support of ‘the
methodological thesis that the intensive analysis of the context and implications of a particular institution in a single tribe . . . can . . . yield universally
valid conclusions’ (with reference to Durkheim and Freud) and, conversely,
to show that ‘the self-same propositions could also be derived from a study
in breadth of the variations of the same culture-trait or institution in a large
number of societies’, in such a way as to justify ‘simultaneously, and by
identical means, both studies in depth and studies in breadth’ (ibid., vii); (c)
to demonstrate the compatibility of the anthropological and psychological
approaches, owing to the fact that a precise correspondence exists between
cultural behaviours and affects1 (Devereux views abortion as a practice that
lends itself particularly well to the demonstration he intends to conduct
because – and it will become clear why this feature is important for my
project – ‘abortion does not occupy anywhere a focal position in culture’
[ibid., viii], so that, not being the object of ‘culturally’ precise and explicit
prescriptions, it leaves wide open the possibility of a great diversity of individual behaviours); finally, (d) to present a more or less exhaustive set of
materials about abortion in order to facilitate future research.
George Devereux gathered (and methodically published in the annex to his
book) a corpus bearing on four hundred ‘pre-industrial societies’. He used
Yale University’s Human Relations Area Files as his principal source, under
the guidance of Ralph Linton (who joined Yale’s Department of Anthropology
late in his life), and especially George Peter Murdock, the anthropologist
who had set up the Area Files, starting in 1938, with the goal of developing
a comparative and ‘transcultural’ anthropology. Devereux completed his
documentation by drawing on his personal archives and on oral and written
communications supplied by various colleagues. The Area Files are a huge set
of dossiers derived from an exhaustive study of virtually all known anthropological literature (found in books, articles or unpublished manuscripts)
and also of what can be called an important pre-anthropological literature
(narratives written by travellers, missionaries, colonial administrators and so
on) deemed to have sufficiently reliable documentary value. The data were
recorded in these files according to a dual classification system: by cultural
zones and societies on the one hand, by themes on the other. There is an entry
devoted to questions pertaining to pregnancy and abortion and a subentry
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indexing abortion.2 Since Devereux constituted his corpus, the Area Files have
continued to grow. There is a copy in the Laboratory of Social Anthropology
in the Collège de France, in three different formats (depending on the age of
the files and the format of digital transcription): the material is available on
paper, on CD-ROMs and by subscription on the Internet, so that by consulting these files one can complete the information in George Devereux’s work
(or verify it, if doubts arise).3
The data contained in the Area Files do not lend themselves well to
systematic – let alone statistical – treatment, chiefly because the information is
very heterogeneous and of unequal value: it was collected in different periods
in widely divergent societies and according to disparate methods by people
who were as dissimilar in their ethnographic skills as in their theoretical
orientations. As Devereux notes, observations about the same society made
by different observers are sometimes in conflict. As a result, one must resign
oneself to regarding assertions drawn from these materials as assumptions
rather than as factual certainties.
Without necessarily sharing Devereux’s theoretical presuppositions or
assenting to all the developments (which sometimes contain remarkable intuitions) in a book that is rich in detail but rather disconcerting in
structure, one can nevertheless use some of the observations and remarks
included in this survey, along with the results of complementary investigations into the Area Files, as a basis for sketching out a rough framework
apt to highlight some of the principal questions that the practice of abortion raises for sociology. For my part, I have chosen to emphasize, at least
as a working hypothesis, four properties of abortion that are not explicitly
singled out by Devereux, or at least not stressed, but towards which numerous indications in his material – and also, occasionally, in his analyses
– nevertheless converge.
A practice universally understood to be possible
A first property, this one clearly affirmed by George Devereux, is the
presumably universal character of the practice.4 Devereux notes that
information about abortion is available for about 60 per cent of the societies included in the Area Files. This of course does not mean that abortion
is absent from the remaining 40 per cent; given the very heterogeneous
character of the information in the files, it simply means that ethnographers
have not always taken this dimension of existence into account in their
monographs, or that their informants did not mention it. What seems universal, moreover, is less the practice of voluntary abortion – which is very
unevenly attested, it would seem, varying according to the society and the
era (although solid statistical data can almost never be established) – than
acknowledgement of the possibility of this practice. There are no examples
in the corpus of a situation in which an informant, male or female, when
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The Foetal Condition
questioned on this point, did not know what the question referred to or
who, when an explanation was offered, expressed astonishment that such a
thing could exist. The possibility of making a foetus exit the womb before
birth for the purpose of destroying it thus seems to belong to the fundamental framework of human existence in society.
The means used to this end are themselves very numerous; they are fairly
well known today, not only in societies studied by ethnology but also in
ancient societies, especially those of Graeco-Roman antiquity, as well as in
medieval and modern Western societies,5 in China and in Japan (La Fleur
1992).6 The most widespread procedures involve the use of abortifacient
medications, usually drawn from plants (with emetic, laxative, purgative or
astringent effects among others; these are known in practically all societies
for which information is available); the use of mechanical means, either
internal (introducing a stalk or stick into the vagina) or external (jumping
up and down, striking the abdomen or compressing it with a belt, applying
hot materials such as water, ashes or stones to the abdominal wall, and so
on); or a combination of these procedures (such as introducing medications
into the vagina or manipulating the sex organs). These various chemical or
mechanical procedures have to be understood in each case in relation to the
local theories about reproduction and gestation on which confidence in the
effectiveness of a given procedure is based. Magical means are also used
(sitting under a certain tree, consuming a certain food or drink, wearing an
amulet, and so on): customarily distinguished from mechanical and chemical means, recourse to magic very often requires carrying out a transgressive
act (for example, eating a forbidden food). Devereux points out the possible
existence, among the Hopi Indians, of a means he calls ‘psychosomatic’, in
which the intense desire to abort is viewed as having abortifacient effects in
and of itself. In most of the societies about which information is available,
the means available for the practice of abortion seem to belong to common
knowledge, even if certain persons (who usually act as midwives as well) are
considered more knowledgeable or more skilful than others. In fact, many
of the means used for abortion are hard to handle and known to be more
or less dangerous. They arouse fear. And yet this does not keep them from
being called on when the need to abort appears compelling.
The object of general condemnation
A second property of abortion is that it is very often subject to condemnation.7 Only rarely is abortion accepted as a matter of principle, even in
societies where it is frequently practised. Reactions go from shocked disapproval to the most violent indignation towards this ‘shameful’ or ‘horrible’
act; moreover, its practice is often attributed to neighbouring peoples or to
the inhabitants of bordering villages while presented as unknown ‘among
ourselves’. Such indignation does not seem to be merely feigned in order to
satisfy the expectations of a foreign observer who is deemed a priori to be
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opposed to abortion (for example, in cases where the information comes
from travel narratives or missionaries’ recollections); it is also noted in
reports by highly professional ethnographers. Nor is it an attitude specific
to men, for women often manifest the same ‘horror’ when the act is mentioned, although their indignation might be interpreted as a sign that they
have internalized masculine values. Abortion is not something one talks
about, at least not without embarrassment; when people do discuss it, their
intent is most often to make clear that, even though they know that the
practice exists, it surely cannot concern their intimate circle – members of
their kinship group – or even the collective body to which they belong.
The degree of disapproval expressed ultimately seems to vary not only
from society to society but also according to circumstances within a given
society, in relation to a casuistics that depends on cultural characteristics:
for example, generally speaking, disapproval may be less pronounced when
incest or coupling with an animal is suspected (among the Navajo), or when
it is presumed that the mother will give birth to an illegitimate child (especially in patrilinear societies), or when a multiplicity of potential fathers
makes it impossible to identify the true father and obliges him to marry the
pregnant woman (except in societies that recognize multi-paternity8), or
when the mother is thought to have been impregnated by a demon and destined to give birth to a monster (among the Jivaro and many other groups9).
References to attenuating circumstances based on characteristics of the
foetus – features that were unknown and unknowable before the advent of
modern imaging techniques – must not be taken too literally, moreover, as
would be the case if they were linked to specific controlled tests; they are
best viewed rather as sketching the contours of an argumentative register
that can be mobilized whenever someone seeks to attenuate the disapproval directed towards abortion. Thus the argument that a woman had
an abortion because the child she would have delivered would have been
illegitimate (in many traditional societies, this meant that it would have had
neither a name nor a kinship group10) always seems ‘self-evident’ in some
respects, even though in practice there are always other possibilities, such as
finding the pregnant woman a husband who agrees to take on the paternity
of the child she is carrying.
Tolerance for abortion
A third important property of abortion can be seen in the fact that condemnation of the practice quite often seems to go hand in hand with
considerable tolerance for it on the part of the very persons who express
indignation when it is mentioned. Although it is not hard to find examples,
in various domains, of gaps between articulated norms – or laws, in societies where a written body of law exists – and the pragmatic expression of
their implementation, in the case of abortion the gap between the rule and
its application seems particularly striking, and it seems to be found in one
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form or another in most of the societies for which information is available.
Only very rarely are serious efforts made to identify, pursue and punish
the persons responsible. And we shall see in chapter 3 that this feature is
also characteristic of Western medieval and modern societies dominated
by Christian churches whose Fathers had condemned abortion, but in
which, before the second half of the nineteenth century, roughly speaking,
the authorities could fulminate against that act or call for its prohibition
without having much concrete effect: their condemnations neither triggered
police investigations nor modified practices.11 The fact that women who had
abortions and those who helped them do so were most often not pursued or
punished does not mean that the practice went unsanctioned, however. In
many societies, the informants mention the existence of sanctions, but these
are either immanent to the act itself (such as sterility) or diffuse penalties
that affect the kinship group or even the collective body as a whole12 (for
example, in the wake of an act of vengeance carried out by the spirit of the
aborted foetus), as is often the case when transgressive practices affect the
order of the world.
A compilation of ethnographic data makes it possible to identify another
intriguing feature that is congruent with the indignation–tolerance pairing.
Where abortion is practised, it is usually carried out in secret, or at least
in the shadows. But most often it appears as what can be called an open
secret. This situation can draw our attention to an opposition that plays
an important role with regard to our object, one whose implications I shall
try to develop in chapter 3: the opposition, analysed in depth in Pierre
Bourdieu’s ethnological work, most notably in the texts devoted to kinship,
between what belongs to the official order and is endowed with a ‘public,
solemn, collective’ character, and what stems from the unofficial order and
is condemned to a ‘shameful’ or even ‘clandestine’ mode of existence.13
This opposition may involve the distribution of different types of action
or different forms of power. In Pierre Bourdieu’s study of Kabyl society,
it is associated with the opposition between men and women, between
masculine society and feminine society. Men hold official power over what
is explicitly collective and public, and in particular over representations of
kinship (Bourdieu emphasizes that the realm of kinship has an eminently
political character in traditional societies); women exercise a power that,
while genuine (especially where marriage is concerned, according to
Bourdieu), remains hidden and leaves ‘the appearance of power . . . to men’
(1972, 41).
The distinction between the world of men, the official realm of written
or common law, religion, politics and the public square – the exterior world
– and the world of women, the unofficial realm of the home, magic and
witchcraft – the interior world – has been thematized by many anthropologists who have studied forms of masculine domination,14 and it seems to be
made quite generally in human societies. It encompasses first and foremost
everything that has to do with gestation and birth, a realm that in most
traditional societies is confined to secrecy within the female context, the
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one situated in the home (inside as opposed to outside, consistent with the
private–public opposition); within the home itself there is a space reserved
for women,15 one that in many societies (for example, the Achuar, studied
by Philippe Descola [1996], or the Baruya, studied by Maurice Godelier
[1996]) is off limits to men.16 The space of the home is exempt from the
political logic of the polity, that is, from the realm of justice and, more
profoundly, from ‘society’ in the modern sense of the word.17
This distinction between the official and the unofficial, it must be noted,
is particularly relevant to my topic. Among the set of practices associated
with the feminine pole, abortion is probably one of those most forcefully
kept out of the public space; it takes place in the shadows, exclusively
among women. This explains why information about it is so scarce and
so difficult to verify, at least in comparison to the information available
about kinship nomenclature, for example; the latter is part of masculine
knowledge and can be communicated fairly readily by male informants to
anthropologists of the same sex. (Until the feminization of the profession
of anthropology over the past several decades, moreover, it is clear that
little progress could be made towards developing an anthropology of the
practices of engendering.) Expanding on Bourdieu’s distinction between
official masculine power and unofficial feminine power, I would suggest
that abortion constitutes the very paradigm of properly feminine power
(as opposed to power over kinship and its representations), especially in
traditional societies where the homologies between political space and
domestic space confer great significance on all practices related to procreation. But this power by itself remains illegitimate and hidden, whether it is
used without men’s knowledge and in order to do them harm (for example,
to avenge an infidelity on the father’s part by eliminating his progeny) or,
on the contrary – and both types of examples appear among the ‘motives’
enumerated by George Devereux – with their complicity and in their interest, notably sexual (so that men do not have to comply with prohibitions on
relations during pregnancy and lactation).
But the distinction between what is official and public and what is unofficial and tacit is not exclusive to the realm of action. It can also point to
different modalities of knowledge, as in Malinowski’s famous example of
the young Trobriander man who had violated the rules of exogamy with
his maternal cousin, the daughter of his mother’s sister. This fact was
known and condemned, but no consequences ensued until the girl’s lover
insulted the guilty man in public, accusing him of incest before the entire
community. The next morning, in sight of the assembled community, the
young man in question climbed up a coconut tree, jumped off and fell to his
death.18 What is at stake, then, does not involve a difference in information
(the facts are the same, whether they are known unofficially or officially),
but has to do with the order of accusation and, consequently, with the
imputation of responsibility. While some facts may be known unofficially
and remain without consequences as long as no one decides to make the
matter public, with the attendant risks to the accuser, the situation looks
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quite different if a public accusation is introduced, setting in motion a
process that has to proceed to a determination of the truth or falsity of the
charge and thus must go all the way to the imposition of sanctions, either
on the guilty party or on the person who made an unjust accusation. Where
abortion, although officially condemned, is said to be unofficially tolerated,
a process of this sort is involved. Abortion is tolerated not only because it
takes place in a context – the female universe – that cannot be penetrated
from the public space, not only because no efforts are made to find out
what goes on in the world of women, but also because, even though people
in some sense know perfectly well what is going on, they can behave as if
what they know is irrelevant; put another way, they can close their eyes and
behave as if they do not know.
The dearth of representations
To conclude this rapid inventory of the general features of abortion that
seem to me particularly pertinent for setting up a problematics, I shall posit
a fourth property whose existence cannot readily be demonstrated; this
of course makes my case more difficult, even though the existence of this
property strikes me as highly probable, if not certain. My hypothesis is that
abortion has been very broadly underrepresented (this may well be what
Devereux means when he asserts that ‘abortion does not occupy anywhere
a focal position in culture’). To establish the existence of a property such as
underrepresentation, one would have to be able both to rely on some sort
of inventory of all known representations of abortion and also to provide
an operational meaning for the idea that there is a somehow ‘normal’ level
of representation for various types of practices. Despite the difficulties,
however, it is hard to dismiss the impression that in this case there is indeed
a deficit of representation or, more generally, a collective reluctance to
transcribe abortion and the aborted foetus in a symbolic register.
Neither abortion nor aborted foetuses appear to have been represented in
objects or images with any frequency: not in primitive or traditional societies, not in antiquity or in Western painting. (In Japan, though, one does
find representations of the Kappa, a monster resembling a slain newborn
and/or a foetus, and there are also hekeshi, figurines representing aborted
infants to which offerings are sometimes made [Jolivet 2002].) Abortion
may be a practice difficult to depict; we might suppose that it could be more
easily narrated. Yet it seems that (at least until fairly recently) it has also
been absent in narratives, or has been represented in stories only in veiled
terms. Direct references to abortion in myths, folk tales or literary works
are hard to find, at least prior to the era of naturalist novels. In the latter, we
occasionally come across scenes involving abortion written in a critical tone
(abortion is sometimes more or less indistinguishable from infanticide).
These texts appeared after the prohibition of abortion (and thus its inscription into nineteenth-century law) had conferred legal and medical visibility
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on it as a ‘social scourge’ associated with alcoholism and prostitution in the
lower classes, according to a thematics inspired by public health reformers (we shall return to this point in chapter 3). Direct representations of
abortion in literature and film have become much more common in recent
decades. However, even now, the inclusion of abortion in a narrative or
in images is most often accompanied by political and moral justifications
that inscribe it within a critique of the existing order; it is rarely presented
straightforwardly, as if it ‘went without saying’. Although it is a common
practice (until the recent development of contraception, there was probably
one abortion in France for every two births; today the ratio is probably
one abortion for every three or four births, depending on the year and the
mode of statistical accounting [see chapter 4]), abortion is never treated as
an ordinary occurrence.
It is also noteworthy that, with the exception of texts related to medicine,
abortion is rarely mentioned in philosophical works; indeed, it is entirely
absent from classical philosophy. The possibility of abortion seems to have
had no impact at all on the concepts of the human condition developed in
Western philosophy, unlike suicide, for example (which has also been an
object of predilection for the field of sociology from the outset). To be sure,
there are references to abortion in some prescriptive Western texts from
the fields of religion, law and medicine, especially among certain Church
Fathers (we shall see examples in chapter 3), but these are relatively rare,
often scantily developed and probably reserved for a very limited audience.
Finally, abortion does not seem to be associated anywhere with any
form of ritualism or symbolism. Aborted foetuses are crudely buried,
burned or drowned, with no specific words or gestures of accompaniment.
Nevertheless, in many societies (and perhaps in nearly all), there seems to
be a belief that aborted foetuses are transformed into spirits, sometimes
particularly malevolent and dangerous ones (notably among the Hopi)
against which people would do well to protect themselves by uttering
certain prayers.19
The fact that abortion has largely been kept out of the sphere of representation can be linked with two of the properties I have already mentioned: on
the one hand, its association with the unofficial world of female practices;
on the other hand, the fact that it is generally subject to condemnation and
can thus be considered (officially) transgressive. One can find examples of
strictly female practices that have been widely represented (as have some
homosexual practices); it is even easier to find examples of unquestionably
transgressive practices that have been represented in myths, stories, pictures
and so on, owing precisely to their transgressive nature. This is the case with
incest, intrafamilial murder and also infanticide; according to Muriel Jolivet
(2002), the last of these was frequently depicted on the walls of Buddhist
monasteries between the Edo and Meiji eras, a period when the practice was
very widespread in Japan.
The underrepresentation of abortion doubtless has to be associated more
generally with the virtual absence of the foetus, until recent times (we shall
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The Foetal Condition
return to this point in chapter 5), from the field of social relations, where
we find not only living human beings but also, depending on the context,
dead people, animals or plants, supernatural beings, futuristic creatures
and so on. To be sure, many so-called primitive societies have ideas about
conception, gestation and procreation, even if they are not all developed to
the same extent (Godelier and Panoff 1998). Similarly, in Western societies, from classical antiquity on we find ideas developed essentially in the
field of medicine (with echoes in natural philosophy and theology) about
procreation and thus about the foetus.20 But these ideas remain confined to
relatively limited realms of knowledge and do not give the foetus any real
presence in society. Socially, for ordinary persons and for institutions, the
focus is predominantly on pregnant women and on infants. Until recently,
foetuses were not recognized as beings endowed with specific identities
that had value in and of themselves; this is attested most notably by the
paucity of representations of foetuses, the limited character of the legal
corpus concerning them, and the virtual absence of rituals associated with
their exit from the world of the living and their entry into the realm of the
dead, whether their departure can be attributed to spontaneous miscarriage or to deliberately provoked abortion. If we set aside figurines and
images intended for the instruction of doctors and midwives, which became
particularly abundant starting in the second half of the eighteenth century
(Gélis 1988), foetuses are strangely absent both from visual representations (religious images representing Christ in the Virgin’s womb are quite
rare21) and from poetry, literature and myth – indeed, from discourse in
general. Similarly, despite specifications in Roman law designed to settle
thorny inheritance issues (Thomas 1996), foetuses have historically taken
up very little space in law or religion; they are virtually absent from the
polity, from politics, and more broadly from the symbolic constructions
that were superimposed on the social order and that in fact constituted the
social order as such. When a foetus emerged prematurely from the womb
and did not survive, it was not given a name, nor was it the object of any
funerary rites. Now, being the object of funerary rites is a very important
index of belonging to human society (scholars of prehistory see rituals of
this type as criteria which they credit with a determining role in the process
of humanization [Tattersall 1998]). One can hardly even say that the foetus
‘dies’; it is as though one has to be born, and to be born alive, in order to
be able to die. This absence is no less remarkable in the history of Western
philosophy, where – except for certain Greek texts that deal with nature
as phusis22 and later developments of this notion in natural philosophy –
the foetal state of humanity has scarcely been taken into account. This is
particularly true of classical philosophy, which looked steadily towards the
horizon of mortality to construct an ontology, even a political ontology,23
of human beings; with rare exceptions, it completely neglected not only the
foetus, but also, more generally, the very fact of birth,24 as Paul Ricoeur
notes in his studies of the relationship between memory and history
(Ricoeur 2004, 357).
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Questions abortion raises for sociology
These brief remarks, however incomplete, suggest that several of the
properties of abortion might confer on our topic a particularly intriguing
and problematic character for a sociology of norms. In this book, I shall
try to shed light on two questions in particular. The first has to do with
the legitimacy of abortion and the place abortion occupies in relation to
the opposition between what is forbidden and what is allowed. Abortion
appears to be suspended between the order of the transgressive and the
order of the acceptable, seemingly condemned to fluctuate between these
two extreme positions. Generally disapproved in principle, it is no less often
tolerated in practice; it is as if it were both hard to admit the legitimacy of
abortion when the question of its validity is raised in a very general sense,
and also always possible to excuse it in certain situations, even to close
one’s eyes to the possibility, to ignore it.
The second question, presumably not unrelated to the first, has to do
with the relation between the widespread presence of abortion and its visibility. Probably universally known as a possibility, and doubtless also very
frequent as a practice (although to differing degrees in different societies
and periods of history), abortion nevertheless remains most often in the
dark. Morever, it is probably the fact of being left in the dark that allows
the practice to be perpetuated in an ambiguous position of moderate
tension between what is acceptable and what is prohibited. As a possibility, it can be left unmentioned. As a practice, it is most often concealed,
but in a way that oscillates between actual clandestinity (especially during
the period stretching from the mid-nineteenth century to the second half of
the twentieth, when it became illegal and subject to penalties in Western
countries) and the discreet practice that allows people who prefer to know
nothing about it to behave as if it were not happening (as was the case in
Western societies until the nineteenth century). This discretion is precisely
what makes abortion difficult to study, not only because anthropological
and historical works focused on it are sparse and laconic, but also because,
in contemporary societies where abortion is legal, those who have experienced it often prove reluctant to speak about it, even to a ‘sociologist’ who
promises them anonymity. Beyond this, and even more intriguing, is the
fact that abortion is rarely represented; in this respect it contrasts both with
legitimate practices, which are often depicted in images or narratives as
examples in a celebratory spirit, and with frankly illegitimate and transgressive practices (such as incest, murder, rape and so on), which are depicted
just as often, but in a critical spirit, to dissuade people from carrying out
such acts25 and/or (the two motives can converge) because of their spectacular character, in a logic resembling that of the ‘sublime’ and of ‘catharsis’
(L. Boltanski 1999).
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Closing or opening one’s eyes
The questions raised by the ambiguous and unstable position of abortion
in relation to the domain of normativity and its distancing from the sphere
of representation lead to more general interrogations concerning the role
that sociology ought to attribute to the tension between what is apparent
and what is veiled, between what is explicit and what is tacit, between
something that is easy to look at straight on and something from which it
seems easier to avert one’s eyes, as well as the place it should attribute to
notions such as ‘bad faith’, ‘illusion’ or even ‘the unconscious’. We know
that these notions are problematic because their deployment often seems to
imply an insurmountable asymmetry between a deceived social agent and
a sociologist in the position of omniscient observer who alone is capable of
breaking with illusions and unveiling hidden realities. The principal defects
of an epistemological position of this type are, on the one hand, that it
leads to a search for an underlying general equivalent (such as ‘interests’
or ‘power relations’) that can explain both the actors’ behaviour and their
blindness and, on the other hand, that it makes researchers inattentive to
the skills that actors themselves can access and use to form judgements and
make critiques. Hence the inverse methodological requirement of taking
seriously the actors’ justifications, their critiques, and more generally their
moral claims.26
Positing a radical distinction between a deceived agent and an enlightened analyst, however, takes the question to an unnecessary extreme. The
existence of an imprecise, fuzzy correspondence – or, perhaps, a gap –
between what is emphasized in public and what one avoids looking at can
be brought to light by following the descriptions and reports of actors, who
are generally well aware of this correspondence, moreover, even if what
people prefer not to see or to stress has only a residual character in their
reports. More precisely, while the presentation of phenomena that have the
status of public knowledge can easily take a systematic and general form
(particularly because it can rely on data that are themselves transcribed in
forms with a high level of generality, such as statistics), phenomena that
people prefer not to see are presented as incidental, fortuitous, secondary or
circumstantial – that is, in anecdotal form.
How does the distribution of assertions between these two modes
of knowing come about? I shall suggest that this distribution is at once
idealistic, oriented towards moral ideals, and eminently realistic, that is, a
function of engagement in action. What we do better not to see is first of
all what we disapprove of, or at least what we do not deem to be a good
thing, although we are not in a position to change it or, more precisely, we
are led to expect that efforts to change it would do more harm than good.
The gap between the official and the unofficial, between what it is good to
say and what it is better not to say, would then stem less from a differential
in information (although, by virtue of not wanting to see, we can end up
actually unaware of that from which we are averting our eyes), knowledge
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or conscience than from an implicit hierarchization of the different types
of evils, which leads to the logic of the lesser evil. This is particularly
true of any situation concealing a contradiction that, were it to be made
explicit, would either prompt us to reconsider the social order to which
for one reason or another we find ourselves attached (and which we view
as ‘inevitable’ despite its flaws) and seek to change it more or less radically
(although this generally seems impossible or more damaging than the harm
we seek to remedy), or else force us to face up to our own impotence and
the ambivalence of our desires.
Seen from this perspective, if there is an asymmetry favouring researchers
over actors, it has to do essentially – beyond the fact that a researcher, as
a professional, has access to resources and in particular to greater quantities of information than are available to any individual actor – with the
fact that researchers can take advantage of the protected space known as a
laboratory, where they can think and act as if they could bracket any reference to values – without worrying too much about what is good and what
is bad – and as if they could stand outside the field of action. To a certain
extent, then, by virtue of occupying a particular professional position, one
that is probably quite specific to liberal societies in their contemporary
forms, researchers can put across as legitimate the fiction according to
which they have the right to remove themselves from practical demands,
that is, to think in a way that would properly be judged irresponsible for
any other actor directly involved in the action. It is precisely to this extent
that a researcher, in the case in point a ‘sociologist’, can decide to put the
official and the unofficial on the same level, can choose to bring them into
confrontation and bring out contradictions that he cannot resolve but that
he can manipulate as though – to borrow an expression used by Jeanne
Favret-Saada in her study of witchcraft (1980) – he were not caught up in
them. It needs to be noted here nevertheless that disengagement of this sort
is probably possible only in contexts, in historical periods and in relation
to problems in which the requirement to find a solution is not posited in
an overly dramatic or urgent way, that is, in contexts where the problems
do not involve unusually violent conflicts and do not present themselves as
absolutely insurmountable. Ian Hacking’s remark about deconstructionist
undertakings seems applicable to the questions raised here by the tension
between the official and the unofficial, or by the exposure of contradictions:
it is when a belief begins to fade away or when the possibility of changing
a practice comes into view that large numbers of researchers turn up, eager
to begin deconstructing (Hacking 1999).
The social sciences and the question of engendering
I shall now let myself be guided by the idea that if the two properties of
abortion I have just identified – that is, ambiguity with respect to norms
and exclusion from representation – are to become intelligible, they must
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be examined in relation to more general tensions involving engendering,
that is, the creation of new human beings who come to take their places in
a world inhabited by already-present living beings and also by the memory
of the dead. My hypothesis is that these tensions, attenuated in the ordinary
modalities of procreation, pregnancy and birth, are manifested in situations
of abortion with particular force and in the form of a contradiction that
becomes patent and thus difficult to bear.
In the following paragraphs I shall thus provisionally set aside the question of abortion to focus on the more general question of engendering. I
shall begin by recalling various ways in which the social sciences customarily
consider this question, and this will bring to the foreground a dimension of
engendering that is often neglected or underestimated, namely, the requirement of producing beings that can be singularized. In the next chapter, I
shall go on to propose a grammatical approach to engendering, in order
to create a model for the tensions that inhabit it and by the same token to
clarify better the dimensions of abortion that are of interest to sociology.
Like philosophy, the social sciences have failed, in my opinion, to pay sufficient attention to the creation of human beings. This neglect may well stem
from the fact that philosophers, founders of the social sciences, have until
recently been almost exclusively men. But in the case of the social sciences,
sociology in particular, we must also take into account the role played by
two classifying operations in the constitution of these disciplines, whose
access to the status of ‘science’ has been subordinated to a dual requirement of autonomy (the relevant systems of causality must be internal – for
example, one has to ‘explain the social by the social’) and of generality (the
ideal being the formulation of laws independent of the circumstances to
which they apply). In the case of engendering, these oppositions have led
sociologists both to distinguish what is considered ‘biological’ from what is
considered ‘social’ and to emphasize the opposition between the ‘individual’
and the ‘collective’.
Two disciplines have divided up the field of ‘production’, or rather, to
use the most common term, ‘reproduction’, of human beings: demography,
which addresses phenomena viewed as essentially biological and uses mathematical methods to study their effects on society; and sociology, which has
been intent on asserting its autonomy with respect to biology more decisively and has thus defined its object as the study of what society does with
the infants that biology furnishes, that is, the way children are ‘socialized’.
The field of demography, developed alongside the related fields of statistics, economics and public health, has been spurred on in particular by
the fact that, from the eighteenth century on, nation-states have taken into
account the problems posed by the biological management of the populations contained within their territories. Demographers have endowed
themselves with global concepts that can be applied to human collectivities
as well as to animal groups, for example fertility, mortality and population.27 Eager to make a contribution to the problems of global management
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and planning that now confront nation-states, demography has approached
the question of engendering in terms of control, with the goal of obtaining an optimal population, either in quantitative terms (for example,
demographic decline, overpopulation, replacement of generations) or in
qualitative terms (for example, degeneration, selection, heredity).
This viewpoint is found in the rare studies dealing with abortion. Among
contemporary social scientists, demographers – and specialists in historical demography in particular – have been most interested in the practice
of abortion in traditional societies (usually in the context of studies on
contraception). Such research, designed to produce quantitative results, is
quite challenging and uncertain for reasons mentioned earlier (especially the
scarcity of sources). In this context, the question raised has been essentially
one of controlling population size in traditional societies prior to the eighteenth century. The explanatory principle invoked to account for abortion
is functionalist in nature. Abortion is presented as one of several practices
(along with contraception and late age of marriage, for example) by means
of which societies have sought to control the volume and, according to
certain studies, the quality of their population.
Without completely rejecting such functional explanations, I see them as
pointing only to the secondary benefits of abortion, without touching on
its essential aspects (to return to the example of marriage, the fact that the
age of marriage can be manipulated in view of regulating population size
tells us nothing about the institution of marriage itself). It must be noted, in
addition, that the notion of population in the demographic sense is a recent
one, linked to the gradual integration, especially from the seventeenth
century on, of medical and health-related concerns (designated by Michel
Foucault as ‘biopolitical’) into the administrative and political frameworks
of Western states, so that the explanation of abortion by the will to control
the overall population size of a society constitutes an anachronism, at least
when we are speaking of ancient societies or of those studied by anthropology. Apart from the modern state, shored up by ‘scientific’ legitimacy,
there are no historical actors apt to have occupied a position of oversight
and mastery that could have sustained the project of controlling on a vast
spatial and temporal scale the number, let alone the ‘quality’, of human
beings placed under a single authority (regulation of population size would
presuppose the deployment of measures extended over several decades).
Sociology, for its part, by identifying socialization as its object of predilection, has taken particular interest in the way societies and groups
turn out to be ‘reproduced’. From this perspective, it has attached special
importance to children, focusing on their upbringing and especially their
schooling. In the process, sociology has at least implicitly ratified a distinction between the creation of children as flesh-and-blood beings that can
be studied essentially through research in biology and medicine, and the
education of children, inasmuch as, after birth, these beings are to be taken
in hand by society as future members of a group or as future citizens whom
sociology could thus appropriately take as objects of study. This viewpoint,
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inspired by a narrow conception of the separation between nature and
culture, is seen, for example, in certain fairly recent sociological studies on
interactions among very young children: not finding the appropriate tools
in the discipline, these studies have borrowed conceptual frameworks and
methods from animal ethology.
Social anthropology, a discipline centred on so-called ‘traditional’ societies where the separation between public and family life lacks the rigidity
that it has taken on in modern states, and cultural anthropology, or at least
in those of its branches that have incorporated perspectives drawn from
psychoanalysis, have provided the portal through which sociology has
studied the socialization of children via their initial education within the
family (Boltanski 1969). But in this case, too, a problematics of socialization inasmuch as it involves the reproduction of already-constituted groups
has been dominant. The work of sociology thus consists in showing (with
linguistic socialization as a model) how groups take hold of this material
– newborn children, treated as socially amorphous and polyvalent – and
give it a specific form that will be identifiable, individual variations notwithstanding, in all the members of a group who share in a common culture and
thus have a similar ‘social identity’. What interests sociology is thus, first
of all, the fact that human beings belong to categories (ethnic, social and
the like) and are subject to operations that assign them to classes, whether
they submit to this action passively or whether, putting their reflexivity
to work, they seek to manipulate the classifications that concern them or
that concern those with whom they enter into specific relationships (Pierre
Bourdieu refers in this connection to ‘classification struggles’).
The establishment of singular identities
Each of these two approaches – predominantly demographic or predominantly sociological – has its sphere of relevance. The number of human
beings and their quality (which is no longer envisaged in biological terms
today but in terms of aptitudes or competences resulting from training and
summed up as ‘human capital’) are certainly important variables when it
comes to contemplating a nation-state’s involvement in war or in economic
competition. The fact that beings belonging to the human species can receive
an education that confers on them a specific form, the inseparable fact that,
thus ‘socialized’, they are objects of classification, and the fact that existing
classes perpetuate themselves despite changes owing to the departure or
death of individual members – in groups or institutions, new arrivals take
the places left empty by their former occupants – undoubtedly constitute
absolutely fundamental phenomena that are at the core of sociology.
Human beings in society must in fact be capable of being arrayed in sets
of the sort called categories or classes. An unclassifiable being is an asocial
being. Classes are based on a principle of equivalence (explicit or tacit) that
makes it possible to say that, in a given respect, one particular individual is
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equivalent to another. Classes thus rest on a dual metaphysics which includes
empirical specimens at one level and the criterion (or criteria) according to
which they are grouped together on another level. Inasmuch as they rely on
properties or combinations of properties (or inasmuch as they are polarized
around archetypal combinations, as in Eleanor Rosch’s model28), classes
define the places that can be occupied simultaneously or successively by
different individuals. These classes are thus relatively independent of the
individuals who compose them. ‘Relatively’ means that they are not confused with these individuals (if that were the case, the individuals could not
belong to them) but that they cannot exist for long if no member comes to
fill them so that the principle of order that defines them can be illustrated,
as it were. A class or a category for which no living example can be supplied
quickly falls into disuse. Persons are thus constituted socially through their
belonging to classes, which they reproduce by exemplifying and representing them. Finally, the existence of these categories or classes is affirmed all
the more powerfully to the extent that they have an institutional dimension,
that is, to the extent that they are endowed with an objective character
(independent of the recognition they are granted) made concrete by their
rootedness in things, signs, codes, law and the like. Despite the mortality of
individuals, these classes are thus maintained over time, from generation to
generation, provided that new individuals come to occupy the places offered.
The social fabrication of singularities
But these two perspectives – human beings treated as members of a
species and human beings considered as members of groups and objects
of classification – are insufficient. There is a third viewpoint, neglected by
the first two, that consists in considering human beings in their singularity.
In the social sciences, the invocation of singularity has a bad reputation,
because it has often been used – and often naively – against the social sciences, to challenge their relevance or to denounce their ‘inhuman’ character;
this of course has only reinforced hostility to a theme that sociologists
perceive as tainted by biases, whether irrational and spiritual or elitist and
‘bourgeois’.29
In so doing, social scientists, and sociologists in particular, have let a
process get away from them that would have been of interest from the
outset, not because it contradicts the principles on which these disciplines
are based, but, on the contrary, because it presents an opportunity to
clarify them.30 The fact of being singularized is a very general particularity,
perhaps the most general, of human beings in society. There are no human
beings in any societal context who do not bear a name – or several names
– proper to them. There are no societies in which the successive occupants
of a given place (for example in the social hierarchy) are not identified in
their own right, distinguished from one another and often compared to
one another. Comparison indeed presupposes a convention of equivalence
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without which no taxonomy could be sustained. But if the establishment
of equivalences is to allow human beings to be associated in a specific
respect, these beings have to be identified in a rigid way, that is, no matter
in what respect they are envisaged or, to borrow a formulation used in On
Justification (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006), no matter in what world they
are objects of qualification or judgement.
Human beings living in society, necessarily inscribed in different taxonomies, can also be identified as singular individuals. As such, each is
then qualified with respect to a set of which he or she constitutes the sole
member. It is thus not enough that they are specimens of a species (the
human species) or members of different categories that grasp them at every
turn by taking into account their properties (being an uncle, belonging to a
given subgroup or social class) in order to take their places in the society of
their fellow humans. Each of them also has to constitute a singular being,
that is, a unique being for whom no other can be substituted; no other can
claim to be absolutely the same. Inasmuch as an individual belongs to a
class, he or she can obviously replace another individual of the same class
in a function, a role or a position open to the members of that class. But it
will be considered self-evident that the individual is not the same as the one
being replaced, and that this difference is insurmountable (and it will most
often be considered the case, too, that a given individual can fulfil more or
less adequately than another the role he or she occupies and, in any case,
that the replacing individual cannot help but give the role a different tonality). In this sense, one may say – and in a positivist rather than an ethical
register – that each individual is by this token irreplaceable, even if multiple
social processes ensure the permanence of institutions and classes by allowing different singular individuals to occupy simultaneously or successively
one or more places defined as identical or similar.
The identification of human beings as singular constitutes a phenomenon whose universal character has been to a large extent ignored by the
social sciences,31 because singularization has been confused with another
process, developed to a particularly high degree in modern Western societies, namely, individuation. The degree to which human beings are viewed
as individuals first and foremost, that is, as autonomous beings who hold
subjective rights or, on the contrary, as belonging to collectivities whose
rights, duties and destiny they share, is of course quite variable from one
society to another. Nevertheless, even in societies deemed ‘holistic’, there
are no human beings whose singular character is not explicitly or tacitly
recognized, except for those – slaves, for example – who figure in a given
society simply as ‘things’. It is thus not overly audacious to assert that there
is no society in which human beings are not objects of a process of singularization that assigns them one or more names designating them specifically as
individuals, and that offers each one a unique place in an ordered set (most
often in a kinship system).
Now, this singularization of human beings could not occur apart from,
or in opposition to, the social realm (although this is what is implied when
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someone – often someone looking critically at the social sciences – contrasts
‘singularity’ defined as a quality of ‘authentic’ subjects, those capable of
resisting social pressure, with the ‘conformity’ that characterizes subjects
who submit passively to the existing social realm). On the contrary, singularization is an operation that takes place within the melting-pot of social
life. Where the question of identity is concerned, sociology must thus not be
limited to describing the processes of forming one’s ‘social identity’, understood as the entirely real modalities according to which different individuals
recognize that they have something essential in common owing to the fact
that they share the same way of life and belong to the same group or class,
one whose relevant taxonomic features are incorporated into symbols with
which they can ‘identify’. Sociology must also confront the question of
personal identity and study the processes through which each human being
is identified individually, without any possibility of being confused with
another.
By taking as our object acts of engendering, the acts responsible for
bringing new human beings into the social world, I believe we can find a
path that will provide access to the processes of singularization. But this
approach requires us to give up the idea that the work of sociology begins
with the study of socialization and early education, as if infants were socially
amorphous beings furnished by biology to society so that society could
take them in hand and socialize them.32 For, as I see it, the singularization
of human beings occurs in the course of a process involving conception,
pregnancy, birth, integration into a social group and subsequent phases
of socialization, a continuous process in which gestation (which has been
relatively little studied by sociology until recently) constitutes a particularly
important stage.
To find the elements that will allow us to pursue this approach, we need
to turn towards a different discipline, namely, social anthropology. First,
because anthropologists have attended more closely than other scholars
to acts of engendering and to concepts of generation developed in societies different from our own; in addition, they have described the modes of
socialization of children most carefully. (These two developments were both
stimulated by the encounter between anthropology and women’s studies,
which made it possible to go beyond the specifically masculine viewpoint on
children as virtual members of political society.33) Finally, anthropologists
have been most attentive to the social processes of singularization of human
beings. In anthropology, as in sociology, the question of singularity has not
been broached head on. Nevertheless, its path has been traced by way of
two other intrinsically related questions that have played a very important
role in the history of the discipline: the question of kinship and the question
of proper names, whose attribution is subject to rules that vary from society
to society. Through these two other types of problems, a reckoning with
singularity has arisen indirectly from the interest accorded to processes of
classification.
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In relation to the issue of abortion, the interest of the literature generated by social anthropology (although this discipline, as we have seen, has
seldom addressed the question directly, at least not in a theoretical mode) is
that it does not place exclusive stress on quantitative questions of population size and management; it also considers problems associated with the
vast realm of the symbolic, and kinship in particular, as a system of symbolic relations. This displacement is essential if we are to come to grips with
the gap between a problematics of the reproduction of humans as a species
and a problematics focused on the creation of new human beings and their
insertion into pre-existing collectivities.
I shall offer two examples here of the way anthropology approaches the
question of singularity, first via the study of kinship, and then via the study
of the relation between classificatory terms and proper names.
Singularity and kinship
The vast realm of kinship is situated at the junction between two sets of
phenomena that can be distinguished analytically. The first have to do with
the reproduction of human beings, and consequently of human societies.
The second have to do with kinship systems, terms and relations. The question raised by the relation between reproduction and kinship is generally
associated with the problem of articulation between the ‘biological’ and the
‘social’. Given that the human species, like all other living species, is subject
to the biological constraints of birth and death, so that it has to reproduce
itself in order to persist in being, how must the reproductive function be
arranged so that the collective forms – associated with specific modes of
coordination – that we call ‘societies’ can develop? The usual answer to
this question is that the constraints of kinship, superimposed on those of
reproduction, ensure the subordination of the ‘biological’ to the ‘social’.
According to this logic, sexual intercourse, on which reproduction depends,
finds itself framed and constrained by kinship, which thus transforms a
biological phenomenon into a social process.
The constraints of kinship, organized in systems, are generally ordered
along two axes: that of filiation and descendance, and that of marriage. The
axis of filiation ‘is the one that defines and commits to memory what comes
from the individual’. It connects a particular individual to a more or less
considerable number of ancestors.34 As for the axis of marriage, ‘it specifies
whom it is permissible for an individual to marry’, or, when the system is
prescriptive, whom that individual must marry.35
Since the publication of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Elementary Structures
of Kinship ([1949] 1969), the question of filiation has been largely subordinated to that of marriage. The requirement that marriage must occur
outside the family conceived as a biological unit (rejection of incest) is
associated with the necessity for exchange, gifts, mutual dependency and
circulation. At stake here is the cohesiveness of more or less extensive
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groups of human beings who, owing to the very fact of their relative difference (inscribed in kinship structures) and their mutual dependency,
find themselves associated, so that relations of violent competition – wars
between small units (which can regress towards wars of all against all) – are
replaced by more peaceful relations in which competition and cooperation
are combined.36 Thus the necessity for alliance by marriage, that is, the
constitution of groups of a particular type whose cohesiveness is assured by
means of an exchange between differentiated but dependent segments (this
is what distinguishes them clearly from animal groups), is, in this view, the
mark of the social.
From this perspective, the question of how human collectivities – composed as they are of mortal individuals – are perpetuated (a question that is
at the core of political philosophy in societies that take the form of states)
is also governed by the logic of marriage. Since every segment of the group
is at every point in time in debt with respect to another segment, and thus
awaiting a return, as it were, to the ‘next move’, the form of cohesion
produced by kinship, far from being instantaneous, is inscribed in time and
constitutes a continuous self-maintaining process. In this sense, the logic
of marriage absorbs the logic of filiation. From this point on, the problem
confronting anthropology becomes essentially how to articulate the biological with the social via the relation between reproduction and marriage. A
biological substratum common to living species, to mammals, to primates,
is in the case of humans immersed in a system of marital alliances, and ‘the
social’ grows out of this articulation.
Described at this level of generality, the study of kinship does not seem
to break in any way with the premise of a clear separation between what
belongs to ‘biological reproduction’ on the one hand and to ‘social reproduction’ on the other, nor does it break with an approach oriented towards
classification. However, I should note here that kinship can be described
in two different ways: either with respect to the logic of a system, when
kinship terms are submitted to terminological analysis, or through an
analysis that emphasizes kinship relations and describes them by means of
diagrams whose origin (ego) is always a singular individual. The questions
raised by an association between these two types of descriptions open the
way to problematizing the singularization of human beings.
It is by relying on the premises I have summarily recalled here – the prohibition of incest and the requirements of marriage – that Maurice Godelier,
in Meurtre du père, sacrifice de la sexualité, a text written in dialogue with
the psychoanalyst Jacques Hassoun (1996), constructs a scenario that seeks
to connect the genesis of social life with the process of singularization of
human beings.37 Godelier relates the process of individuation to the institution of kinship, which he associates in turn, following Lévi-Strauss, with
the rejection of marriage within the close family circle, and, consequently,
with the ‘sacrifice’ of a form of expression of sexuality that appeared during
the evolution from primates to humans. This sexuality, freed from certain
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biological constraints that weigh on primates (especially female oestrus), is
‘polymorphous’and ‘polytropic’. It ‘functions’ in the ‘imaginary’ and can
be directed towards any being at all.38 ‘Desire’ in such cases is ‘partially
or completely detached from the process of reproduction of the species’
(Godelier 1996, 29). Imperative, its accomplishment based on force, such a
sexuality, which ‘has no social meaning in itself’ (ibid., 30), is a permanent
factor of violence, dissension and disorder (here Godelier rejoins Freud’s
origin story from a different direction). The ‘work of domestication’ of this
sexuality (Godelier also speaks of its ‘curve’) is developed within the family
during the early education of children, who are not allowed to take any of
the beings present in their family circle as sexual partners (father, mother,
brother, sister, whether they belong to the other sex or the same sex, are
excluded, as are domestic animals) and are thus incited to look elsewhere
for objects capable of satisfying their sexual desires (ibid., 34).
‘Kinship relations’ are thus deployed ‘as a network of relations among
individuals of both sexes or groups of individuals’, which presupposes that
‘the relations of individuals with the individuals from whom they descend
have been identified and recognized and that the relations among these relations are also understood’. Finally, ‘the set of recognized relations is always
centred on an abstract self, on an individual characterized only by his or her
sex, that is, one who is defined as a man or a woman and who in all cases
is presented as the point of arrival and the point of departure of a certain
number of relations with others’ (Godelier 1996, 36–7).
Godelier develops the idea of a necessary link between the requirement
of seeking sexual objects outside the family circle – which is at the origin of
kinship – and the process of singularization of individuals. In fact, he says, if
‘the prohibition on finding a partner at home . . . is applied generation after
generation, then the individual in a society is obliged to identify and commit
to memory what is the self and identical to the self and what is not, to keep
in memory the men and women from whom each descends, while identifying the individuals and groups with whom one can and will henceforth have
to make alliances’ (1996, 36). In a social world like that of chimpanzees
(and Godelier says that, according to the available ethological data, we may
consider that world close to the one ‘primitive humanity’ knew [ibid., 24]),
organized in ‘bands’ without sexual division of labour or prohibited sexual
relations, there would have been no reason to push the effort of identifying
singular individuals beyond what was necessary to maintain a transitory
attachment between a male and a female and a female and her young.
Finally, Godelier stresses a process that accompanies the establishment
of kinship relations and the singularization of individuals, which is the
partial disjunction between what he calls ‘desire sexuality’ and sexuality
inasmuch as it ensures the reproduction of the species (1996, 29). What
is at stake, along with the institution of kinship and the accompanying
singularization of individuals, is not the ‘biological reproduction of men’,
which could be accomplished just as well by a non-‘domesticated’ sexuality,
but ‘the reproduction of the order that has to reign up to a certain point in
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human societies for there to be society’ (ibid., 33). From this point on, the
reproduction of individuals who make up a society is, as it were, uncoupled
from sexual intercourse. Sexual relations are of course always necessary to
make new beings, but value is attached to these beings – in the linguistic
rather than the economic sense of the term – only to the extent that their
provenance can be identified, and to the extent that, if this provenance is
deemed valid, it enables beings to occupy a singular, identifiable place in
a cluster of interwoven relationships. This is to say, too, that in the very
large set of conceivable non-prohibited sexual relations (and in many societies such relations actually occur, but on the margins of kinship relations,
during adolescence, for example), only certain ones can be selected in order
to ensure not the reproduction of the species, which is not at stake here, but
something we might call, to mark the difference from biological reproduction, the regeneration of society, that is, the engendering of beings capable
of being identified individually and of occupying a singular place.
Let us note that the uncoupling of sexual intercourse and engendering
(which is a consequence of what Maurice Godelier calls the curve of sexual
intercourse), while it takes a particularly clear form in contemporary societies in which the development of contraceptive techniques on the one hand
(sexual intercourse without engendering) and of techniques for medically
assisted reproduction on the other (engendering without sexual intercourse), nevertheless hardly constitutes a radical innovation. It can even
be viewed as a horizon towards which most societies tend, with greater or
lesser success. In his study of abortion, George Devereux develops a theme
quite similar to the one I have just borrowed from Maurice Godelier’s work,
but he does so, in a sense, from the point of view of the actors. On the basis
in particular of work he devoted to the Mojave Indians (but using examples
from other societies as well), Devereux devotes several pages to the tension
between what he describes as two radically different uses of sexual intercourse (Devereux 1955, 111–25).39 The first, which is not at all oriented
towards engendering, pulls sexual intercourse in the direction not only of
pleasure, precisely in the sexual sense, but more generally in the direction
of entertainment, exploits, excess, ‘fun’, excitement and so on; this occurs in
societies where, in the absence – as Devereux says rather humorously – ‘of
the theater, the concert, the novel, the Sunday concert, the TV show, and
the Saturday evening “binge”’ (Devereux 1955, 115), sexual intercourse
constitutes the chief remedy for boredom. In societies where the constraints
of collective life are very demanding, our author says, the sphere of sexual
intercourse as entertainment is also virtually the only sphere available for
‘private’ and ‘personal’ relationships (ibid., 119–20). The second use of
sexual intercourse, which is on the contrary subservient to engendering, in
a way, is achieved in the framework of the legitimate relations instituted
by kinship, since in traditional societies kinship is at the centre of political
relations (which are influenced by relations of marriage and filiation), in a
public framework. This use of sexual intercourse is thus associated with
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seriousness, responsibility, fatigue, collective constraints and frustrations
(in particular owing to the frequent taboos on intercourse during pregnancy
and nursing). While such an opposition often distinguishes between juvenile
and adult sexuality, it nevertheless cannot be entirely superimposed on age
classes; rather, at all ages of life it presents relatively antagonistic alternatives with which one nevertheless has to come to terms, since, owing to a
sort of fatality inherent in the destiny of the human species, this enjoyable
thing of which one never tires – sexual intercourse – has also become the
thing on which the development of social life, and thus of properly human
life, has come to rely, with, in consequence, a very awkward and uncomfortable position between the contingent and the instituted, between play
and ritual, between the instantaneous and the lasting, between the individual and the collectivity, between what is least sacred and what is most
sacred in daily life.
Terms of classification and proper names
Starting with the study of classifications, and more precisely with the challenge that the proper names by means of which human beings identify
themselves seem to pose to the classificatory logic that symbolic social
forms appear to obey in a very general way, Claude Lévi-Strauss, too, ends
up replacing the classic opposition between what belongs to the order of the
general (reputed to be the only possible object of science) and what would
be properly singular (abandoned to art or literature) with an analysis of the
continuous shifting between these two modes of grasping human beings in
society.
In The Savage Mind (1966, especially pp. 191–216), in a discussion
with the linguist A. H. Gardiner (who takes up Bertrand Russell’s idea
that a proper noun is a label that designates a particular object and can
thus be opposed to names of classes, which are predicates), Lévi-Strauss
seeks to show that one can almost always move in both directions between
class nouns (each of which includes an indefinite number of specimens)
and proper nouns. The principles of classification can be used, at the price
of various transformations, to move either towards universalization or
towards a particularization that extends to proper names. The anthropologist concludes that one cannot oppose signification, an operation at work
in the logic of classification, to nomination, a different operation that characterizes the logic of proper nouns and through which beings ‘were named
only because they could not be signified’ (ibid., 172). He shows on the
contrary how classificatory logic can be extended to individuation, so that
it is always possible to deploy operations that allow one either to go from
proper name to clan or to do the opposite and move from clan to proper
name (‘one can, with the help of transformations, pass from the horizon of
individuation to that of more general categories’ [ibid., 174]).
Pathways between indicators of class and singular marks of identification
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can thus be found, provided that these latter ways of designating are seen
as ‘types or varieties of species’, that is, ‘a synthesis of ideas and modes of
behaviour as exclusive and irreplaceable as the one a floral species develops’, existing only in the ‘mono-individual’ state (which is ‘probably not
found in nature’, as Lévi-Strauss adds40), in such a way that this ‘variety’
disappears ‘with the death of a personality’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 214). The
proper name can thus be viewed as the name of a class that includes only
one specimen, and this is so with no change in logic. It applies to human
beings in that each one of them belongs to a ‘type or variety including only
a single specimen’, in the sense that each of them is encouraged to ‘develop
a personality’ that confers on him or her an ‘irreplaceable’ character (even
if others can occupy a particular place that they themselves have occupied).41 Thus one shifts without a break in continuity from a classificatory
logic referring to classes whose members are replaceable – they may have
a numerical identity, but this is considered secondary (in the case of birds,
it can be marked by a number inscribed on a ring or band) – to a logic of
proper names, which stresses the singularity of each being and its irreplaceable character by treating it as if it were a species. In fact, if individuals are
replaceable within a species, species on the contrary cannot be replaced
by other species (the species of warblers will not be said to be extinct and
replaced by that of blackbirds).
Far from opposing classification, which would belong to the social, and
singularization, which would escape the social, this analysis thus aims to
show, on the contrary, that the process of singularization constitutes one
of the possible operations that present themselves to classificatory thinking
– or, put differently, that it is precisely because the appearance of infants,
who must be named, poses a problem to the system of classification, threatening it, that the names that are attributed to children and that singularize
them always include ‘a signifying element that can enter into a differential
relation with other elements in a system of classifications’.42
Increased generality and increased singularity
The two examples I have just recalled suggest that envisaging human
beings in terms of singularity is no less foreign to the ‘social sciences’ and
no less ‘scientific’ than envisaging them in so far as they belong to the
human species (a temptation of demography) or in terms of their belonging to classes (the customary viewpoint of sociology). From its foundation,
no doubt owing to a wish to be associated with the hard sciences and to
distance itself from philosophy, sociology has made the error of seeing
the distinguishing feature of the social sphere in the attachment to classes
composed of substitutable members; under the influence of a reductionism
inspired by the way it understood biology, sociology has sometimes even
chosen to focus preferentially on membership in humanity as a species,
relegating the processes of singularization to a space outside of the social
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sphere, as if the existence of individuals as singular beings (which was conceded only reluctantly, moreover, if not simply challenged as an ‘idealist’ or
‘spiritualist’ illusion) did not belong to its field of inquiry.43
The way social life shapes the human condition consists in a constant
back-and-forth movement between generalization and singularization. The
fact that beings belong to humanity is recognized; they are associated with
equivalence classes, according to explicit or implicit features that are capable
of bringing out resemblances among them in such a way that, grasped in a
certain respect, they can be considered as relatively substitutable; but they
are also, and by the same operation, singularized, in such a way that each
one of them, inasmuch as he is himself or she is herself, cannot be replaced
by any other. Proper names refer to the ‘rigid’ character (to borrow the term
Saul Kripke [1980] uses in speaking of ‘rigid designators’) of the identity
available to human beings, which stays with them as they are attributed
to various classes and as they shift into different worlds (in particular in
the sense in which the term ‘world’ is used in On Justification). One may
suppose, moreover, that without the existence of such forms of rigid identification the attribution to classes and the traversal of worlds would very
quickly prove untenable, owing to the impossibility of articulating and
coordinating the various dimensions of social existence, or else – I shall
come back to this theme – the impossibility of recognizing one and the same
individual in a particular person endowed with a human body when he or
she is thrust into a succession of different worlds (rather like what happens
when, encountering someone by chance, we recognize the person without
being able to identify him or her – to ‘know who it is’ – because the person
in question is one whom we are accustomed to seeing in a particular context
(at the grocer’s shop, say), and yet we find ourselves suddenly face to face in
a different context (for instance, at the opera).
Let us note in passing that, in describing the operations that allow us to
go back and forth between the most general and the most singular poles,
it would be preferable to avoid the metaphor (even though it seems to be
a self-evident trope for an interpreter accustomed to the logic of Western
law) of verticality, as when one speaks of a ‘rise in generality’, starting from
a singularity that would be inferior to it, or underlying it, in a quasi-spatial
relationship. Such a metaphor indeed suggests the idea, common to Western
political philosophy and largely taken up by sociology (I have often used it
myself), according to which singulars would be, as it were, the basic elements, the ‘building blocks’ one would have to assemble in order to ‘pass’
from the ‘individual’ to the ‘social’, by constructing ‘collectives’ conceived
as entities on a more general level and more precisely as equivalence classes,
making it possible to bring the singular elements together and give them
some cohesion. Such a metaphor, whose basis can be found in the construction of the modern nation-state, thus presupposes that the basic elements,
the building blocks, that is, the singulars, would be less ‘social’ and, at
least implicitly, closer to a biological or even an animal state of humanity
than the general entities, the ‘collectives’ among which they find themselves
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included. Now, the singularity of each human being taken individually is
no less a creation of society than are the equivalence classes within which
singulars can find themselves integrated. It is thus just as reasonable, but
from a different perspective, to speak of a ‘rise in singularity’ as of a ‘rise in
generality’ (Heinich 1998, 47).
I shall now present the outline of a model of engendering centred on the
question of how human beings, from the moment of their creation, are
not only attributed to classes but also endowed with singularity. To design
such a model, I shall adopt a kind of grammatical approach, in the sense
that I shall look into the constraints that may weigh on the action that
consists in introducing new human beings who come to take their places
in the social world. Rather than treating abortion as if it were a separate
problem, unconnected with the most general conditions of engendering,
or as if aborting were simply the opposite of engendering (which is also
undeniable, from a certain vantage point), I shall seek to show how the
question of abortion turns out to be incorporated, in a sense, within that of
engendering, but in a different way depending on whether it is envisaged as
a possibility or as a practice.
My argument will be developed in two phases. First, I shall seek to show
that taking into account the possibility of getting rid of the beings that result
from sexual intercourse is a condition for the creation of new human beings
who, having come to be inscribed in flesh, must be taken up again in a symbolic mode, that is, in speech and, as it were, adopted, in order to become
singular beings. It then follows that, in the case of human beings, engendering, in its affirmative dimension (that is, inasmuch as it creates worth),
incorporates the possibility of its own negation (that is, in particular, the
possibility of abortion). Then, in a second phase, I shall develop the idea
that, for reasons stemming from the preceding constraint, the destruction
of engendered foetuses, no longer envisaged now as a possibility but as an
achievement, constitutes a problematic act, tendentially transgressive and
difficult if not impossible to legitimize.
If my argument holds up, it follows that the grammar of engendering,
grasped in its most minimal expression, rests on two constraints that
contradict one another and that thereby enter potentially into tension. The
very problematic character of abortion as an achievement would then arise,
among other things, from its power to reveal this contradiction, which must
remain, as much as possible, in the shadows. Now, for this to be the case,
the presence of abortion as an accomplished act has to fade out. Concretely,
this means either that abortion has to be avoided or that it must be carried
out as discreetly as possible, preferably kept out of sight, but if it is brought
into view for any reason there has to be a way to represent it as contingent,
as an event arising from circumstances and not as the manifestation of a
rupture.
I shall then examine the specifications that must be introduced (and the
corresponding social arrangements) so that the tension between the two
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constraints that I initially identified is attenuated and so that abortion, as an
accomplished act and even as a possibility, leaves the fewest possible traces
in the semantic field in which engendering turns out to be immersed.
This line of argument will allow me, I hope, to shed light on the curious
properties of abortion that we disentangled earlier: on the one hand, its
unstable position between condemnation and tolerance and, on the other,
its relative distance from the world of representation.
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Engendering
Making human beings: a set of specifications
To sketch a model of engendering and identify its principal constraints, I
shall adopt an approach that can be qualified, paraphrasing John Rawls, as
constructivist.1 The initial step is to determine the minimal set of specifications that must be respected to make human beings. I have identified three
fundamental requirements.
First, the beings made must be recognizable as members of the human
species. Until quite recent times, the process of making human beings
necessarily presupposed sexual intercourse between a man and a woman;
however, the role of other agents, especially spirits, was often taken into
account. Some of the beings engendered in a woman’s body could be
characterized as monstrous, or alien – for example, when the person who
played the role usually imparted to a man turned out to be an evil spirit
that had penetrated the woman’s body. In such a case, the question of
whether the being engendered belonged to the human species or not was
problematic, and was often addressed through the examination of external
signs. Membership in the human species is a phenomenon of the tangible
order, involving evidence that can be seen or touched, that is accessible to
the senses.2
Second, the beings made must be susceptible to arrangement in classes; it
must be possible to consider them from a perspective that establishes them
both as equivalents of certain beings belonging to the human species and as
distinct from other beings whose belonging to the human species is equally
tangible and recognized. Taking into account the difference between the
sexes – which also has a tangible character – and attributing beings to one
sex or the other are the simplest and probably the most primitive operations
of classification.
Finally, the beings made must be susceptible to singularization. This third
requirement cannot be satisfied as such either by sexual engendering (on
which belonging to the human species depends) or by taking sexual difference into account (as the archetype of classification). Yet it is an absolutely
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necessary condition for instituting a difference capable of qualifying human
beings as such.
The constitution of difference
Where does this difference come into play? Social anthropology has taught
us that we would be imprudent to locate it between the world of humans
living in society on the one hand, and on the other hand the rest of nature
(including the supernatural), which is populated by beings perceived as real
or fictional according to the situation (animals, plants, rocks, rivers, spirits
and so on). In fact, this particular distinction is highly dependent on the
way Western societies conceive of the break between society and nature,
between the human world and natural or supernatural universes (Latour
2004). Anthropological literature offers many examples of societies in
which such distinctions are either not made at all or are not located where
we are used to finding them. This is the case with the Achuar, studied by
Philippe Descola; for them, ‘the idea of nature as the domain of all phenomena occurring independently of human action is completely foreign’
(Descola 1994, 93).3 Instead, among the various beings that make up the
world, they see a ‘vast continuum of postulated consubstantiality’. While
there are ‘internal borders’ within the continuum, these are delimited by
their ability, or their lack of ability, to establish an ‘exchange of messages’
(ibid.).
For us, it is equally unsatisfying to conceive of the relation of fully human
beings with other beings by evoking a differentiating principle that would
separate the less human from the more human, crossing the boundaries that
we attribute to humanity as a species. Such conceptions are fairly common,
and members of many societies consider themselves more truly human
than members of other societies with which they are acquainted. But the
members of a single society, even a very hierarchical one, generally tend
to recognize something like a common human quality in one another. The
frequent existence of very unequal treatments inflicted on members of the
same society does not necessarily imply (although it is sometimes the case)
that a system of classes has been instituted according to the degree of membership in humanity, with members arrayed in a hierarchy, for example as
subhuman, human, and superhuman.
If it is located neither between the human and natural realms nor
between hierarchically distributed classes of humans (between those who
are more and less human), where does the difference that makes humans
human lie? I posit that it lies within each human being.4 Each human can
be considered in two lights: inasmuch as he or she is human through flesh,
that is, inasmuch as he or she has emerged from a woman’s body, flesh
made fecund by a man (or, in certain societies, several men) through sexual
intercourse, and inasmuch as he or she is human through speech. In all societies, new human beings are not only received in a passive mode but also
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actively confirmed as members of the human group that welcomes them
by means of gestures or rituals marking recognition of their humanity and
accompanying their insertion into collectives, that is, into a set of symbolic
relations. Within these collectives, the new beings are at once connected to
a plurality of classes (depending on the light in which they are envisaged)
and singularized.
Moreover, singularization is what makes multiple membership classes
(or worlds, to borrow the vocabulary of On Justification) possible, in a
sense. Without singularization, there would be no way to recognize that the
same human being is acting in one place as a man, in another as a warrior,
in a third as belonging to a given lineage, and so on. Without singularization, every time an individual acted in a different context or world, or
was deemed equivalent to others in a certain respect, the being in question
would be viewed as absolutely other. Nothing would ensure his or her
pertinence among worlds, let alone over time. People would be astonished
that a certain man was not participating in a festival, without recognizing
that he could not possibly do so, for he had been killed some hours earlier,
a few metres away, in a different situation where he had been manifested in
a different relation.
When flesh and speech are separated: humans through flesh but
not through speech
I have said that the difference between being human through flesh and
human through speech is located within every human being. But among
human beings who have been instituted through speech, in most situations the difference is minimal. To understand the significance of this fact,
we must look closely at cases in which these two modes of belonging to
humanity, normally merged, turn out to be disconnected.
The first example that comes to mind is that of infanticide, through destruction or exposure; we know that this is a frequent practice in many societies.5
The general (archetypal) schema is the following. The birth occurs in a
secluded spot, cut off from the bonds of collective life. The woman giving
birth is surrounded by women who have close relationships with her, and
men keep their distance. The destruction is accomplished, often by suffocation, immediately after the infant emerges from the womb (Firth 1957).6 No
rite of passage from life to death accompanies this act. The body is simply
made to disappear. Accomplished apart from public life, the elimination
does not need to be justified. It is as though the child had not been born, and
thus as if the destruction had not taken place. The suppressed infant leaves
no trace in the collective memory. It is only flesh.
In contrast, such destruction is no longer legally possible once the infant
has been ritually confirmed in its humanity by a symbolic gesture: depending on the society, this may occur when the child has been put to the breast
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in the presence of others,7 presented publicly (in certain Eskimo societies
[Condon 1987 (AF)]8), picked up by the father (in Rome9 and among the
ancient Germans), given a name,10 and so on. All these symbolic gestures of
recognition mark the child’s entry into human society: first into a kinship
group, and, secondarily, into the polity, where it is supposed to benefit
from treatment similar to that of its family members and, more generally,
similar to that of the other children in its kinship group: in other words, the
child enters a universe governed by norms of justice, even if the reference to
what is just very often changes meaning depending on whether the context
is interior (inside the home) or exterior (outside the home and thus in the
public world).
Although infanticide is subject to legal reprisals in the modern West, we
find traces of a period of latency, which in many societies precedes the entry
of a newborn child into the social world, in the nineteenth-century legal
definition of this crime and in court rulings. As Annick Tillier reminds us,
the definition of infanticide was set forth in article 300 of the 1810 French
penal code: ‘The murder of a newborn child is qualified as infanticide.’ The
reference to ‘murder’ implies that there was premeditation and that the
child was born alive. As for the state of ‘newborn’, while it was not defined
by the law, court practice considered that the term applied to the period
between the birth of a child and the declaration of its birth to an officer of
the civil state, a declaration that had to be accomplished, according to the
Civil Code, article 55, within three days. After this period, the act is generally requalified as the crime of murder rather than infanticide (and is often
met with greater severity on the part of juries). ‘There is thus infanticide’
– according to a decree of the Cour de cassation (Court of Appeals) dated
24 December 1835 – ‘so long as the life of the child is not yet surrounded
by common guarantees, and so long as the crime can eradicate the traces of
[the child’s] birth’ (Tillier 2001, 23–5).
A second example is self-evident: that of slavery. The arrangements in which
slavery is inscribed and those that authorize infanticide are closely linked,
moreover, and slaves can be compared to infants kept apart from the kinship
group and thereby left without protection. This is not simply a metaphor.
In ancient Rome, newborns who were left to die by exposure, human beings
without kin – that is, brought into a world that lacked a pre-established
place for them – were taken away from the mother as soon as they emerged
from the womb. When they remained alive for a certain period of time, they
were often recuperated by slave merchants who brought them up for the
purpose of selling them (Néraudau 1984, 198–911). Similarly, as shown by
Jean Bazin’s remarkable work on the kingdom of Ségou (1975) and Claude
Meillassoux’s study of slavery in precolonial Africa (1991), slaves were
most often procured as plunder or in raids. Children were carried off as far
away as possible,12 preferably at a young age (so they would lose all memory
of their previous identity). This kidnapping wrested them from the kinship
group in which each was someone with a name and a defined place. They
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were then designated by terms approximating what we mean by ‘street children’13 or ‘nobody’s children’, to highlight the fact they they were no longer
capable of occupying a singular place, in a pertinent context (here, kinship),
marked by the bestowing of a name designating each one in particular.
When raids were insufficient to satisfy the demand, young unmarried people
were sometimes placed in situations that would bring them together sexually, and the offspring of these engenderings, who were not inserted into
kinship groups, were brought up as slaves destined for sale.14
Another indicator of the way that wrenching people away from kinship
groups could detach them from membership in humanity is the fact that
slaves who died were not objects of any funeral rites but ‘were evacuated,
in the literal sense, like garbage, social and cultural trash’ (Memel-Fotê
1996, 48).15 Similarly, they could not marry. ‘When the master tolerated or
even imposed the union of two slaves, the general rule was that it was not a
“marriage” in the proper sense of the term . . . The union could be dissolved
at any time. Among the Anyi, union between slaves took place without
any ceremony “since they are like chickens and cocks who keep each other
warm”, according to their masters’ (Meillassoux 1991, 82). Traces of this
quasi-object status are found in the Christian West in the case of illegitimate
children, who were destined for the lowliest jobs and often used in view
of procuring sexual services that it was hard to ask of beings legitimately
inscribed in the kinship order. Thus in the Margeride mountains in the
Massif Central, well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these
children, even though they were baptized, were given names of objects such
as ‘chair’ or ‘window’ (Claverie and Lamaison 1973).
As Florence Dupont and Thierry Éloi have shown (2001), the categories
according to which sexual practices were organized in ancient Rome refer
less to the difference between men and women or between heterosexuals
and homosexuals than to the difference between free and servile bodies.
Between a free man and a free woman born to free parents, all sexual
relations were taboo outside of marriage, and between married couples
sexual relations were subject to norms of ‘decency’. Similarly, homosexual
relations between free men were discouraged and condemned. In contrast,
in relations with a slave or former slave, male or female, nothing was
forbidden to a free man or woman.16
What is at issue here is certainly not whether slaves belong to the human
race. With respect to the tangible,17 what can be seen, heard and touched,
nothing distinguishes them from other humans. It is moreover the capacities they had as human beings that were exploited for sexual pleasure or, in
other circumstances, for labour. It was likewise possible and even necessary
to attribute these beings to classes, if only to mark their specialization in a
certain activity. But these were humans through flesh (only), not through
speech.18 Their singularity was taken into account only as a contingent or
indexical property, recognizable at certain moments and in certain situations but denied in others, when it became important to replace them, to
buy or sell them.
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A third example – unlike the two previous ones, however, in that the reduction to flesh is not definitive but transitory – is offered in Victor Turner’s
work on rites of passage (1969), and especially in the description of the
ritual that marks the installation of a sovereign chief (Kanongesha) among
the Ndemu of Zambia. During this ritual, the future chief is torn away from
the singular place that he occupied previously and reduced to the state of
human through flesh, to the status of anyone at all, or even of less than
nothing, before he is installed by the power of sacred speech in the position of chief. He is dressed in a tattered loincloth, accompanied by a ritual
spouse (often a slave) who is similarly dressed, in a way that negates the
difference between the sexes. Both are treated as infirm. The applicant has
to crouch down with a shamed look and accept insults without flinching;
he must not respond, but rather behave as if he were deprived of the use
of speech. The neophyte, according to Turner, is treated as ‘a tabula rasa,
a blank slate’ (ibid., 103). Those who are to occupy the place of great men
must be shown in this way that ‘they are clay or dust, mere matter, whose
form is impressed upon them by society’ (ibid.).
When flesh and speech are separated: humans through speech but
not through flesh
In the three examples of dissociation just evoked, beings that are human
through flesh do not benefit from the speech that can confer on them a
singular existence. They are indeed ‘human’ from the standpoint of the
tangible, but this humanity is not confirmed. Can one find, conversely,
examples of dissociation where beings are invested with their humanity
through speech without having a fleshly identity? In such a case, a single
being, human according to speech, could find itself filled with different,
mutually substitutable fleshly entities. This hypothesis would presuppose
shifting attention from tangible traits such as facial features to traces of
identity such as signatures, seals and titles that are inscribed on external
supports, can be deposited in corpuses and can be recognized by others
– that is, they always take some form of legally recognized inscription.
Recourse to something like a legal system is in this case absolutely indispensable, considering that one function of law is to exempt human beings
(and through the intermediary of their attachment to humans, other beings,
whether ‘natural’ or ‘artefactual’) from the lability of circumstances in such
a way as to confer on them a constant, fixed identity that makes it possible
to follow them as they traverse an indefinite multiplicity of different situations. Without recourse to legal inscription and without the establishment
of a ‘legal fiction’ in Yan Thomas’s sense (1996), it is impossible to give
body to a being treated as singular by appealing to speech alone, even
though one can still recognize such an entity in the tangible features of a
fleshly being towards which the references concerning it may converge.
Such a dissociation has been thematized in Ernst Kantorowicz’s work on
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the ‘king’s two bodies’, with the distinction between a fleshly – and therefore mortal – body and a political (idealist in inspiration) or rather mystical
body, capable of maintaining itself in immutable fashion independent of
the beings in which it finds itself incarnated, and which are consequently,
in this respect, treated as replaceable. Recent controversies (particularly
the Perruche affair, to which we shall return in chapter 5) provoked by
the encounter between the evolution of medical technologies having to do
with pregnancy and changes in the legal framework surrounding abortion
have led legal experts to reactivate this dissociation. In a recent work, for
example, Marcela Iacub proposes to separate ‘birth’ from the ‘circumstances
of birth’, that is, to attribute the property of being human only to the child
that is to be born; this being, engendered by the desire of the progenitors,
can remain unchangeable no matter how many foetuses have had to be
produced and destroyed for the child to come into the world (2002b). Iacub
seeks to extend the principle of ‘substitutability of biological bodies in relation to the legal person’ (ibid., 91), and to justify the destruction of foetuses
that might be handicapped in the interest of the child to be born, who is
viewed as the only being apt to have rights. Extending this line of reasoning,
she considers that it is entirely legitimate to create a ‘right [for handicapped
persons] to be compensated to the extent of the harm that has been caused
[to them] by preventing [them] from being born otherwise’ (ibid., 86). In this
case, it is in effect the child to be born who lodges a complaint, legitimately,
she says, because the defective foetus from which it issued was not replaced,
before the irreparable act of birth, by another more satisfactory foetus.
Through this example we see an effort – idealist in inspiration – designed to
use the power of legal speech to constitute the ‘child to be born’ as the only
truly human entity, associated with subjective rights and dissociated from
the fleshly beings in which this entity may find itself engaged, or not; these
beings are treated as replaceable support structures.
Towards a first constraint on engendering
I shall define a well-formed human being (in contrast to the examples of
dissociation that we have just examined) as one that has issued both from
engendering through flesh and from engendering through speech. In this
case, we can speak of confirming, through speech, the humanity of a being
engendered through flesh. This conception presupposes a reference to
two different movements. The first lies in the possibility of distinguishing
between what originates in flesh and what originates in speech. If such a
distinction could not be made, it would not be conceivable. Yet it has to be
conceivable if engendering through speech, in its opposition to engendering through flesh, is to play a role as an operator of difference. The second
movement is that of the convergence of these two entities into a single one
that is unique: a being, human through flesh, finds itself confirmed in its
humanity through the action of speech.
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Starting from this premise, I shall posit a first constraint on engendering
(C 1), which can be formulated as follows: the difference between beings
engendered through flesh and beings engendered through speech must be
marked.
This constraint requires differentiating between the products of sexual
intercourse and the beings that come to take their places among humans.
Women become pregnant in the wake of sexual intercourse. The beings apt
to be produced by sexual intercourse, a priori very numerous, form a virtual
set (a): the set of humans who will be human through flesh. A second operation requires selecting from among the beings that make up set (a) those
who, forming set (b), are introduced into the world of symbolic relations:
these will be human through speech. The operation of selection confers on
these latter a distinctive value (in the linguistic sense): members of set (b) are
defined by the difference that opposes them to members of set (a).
The process of confirmation through speech of beings engendered
through flesh is not consecutive to birth, as might be suggested by the
example of infanticide that I used to make this distinction clear. The process
of confirmation continues throughout the process of engendering, from
beginning to end. In this sense, engendering comes into tension with sexual
intercourse, even though the latter is its vector. When it comes to making
humans, sexual intercourse is at once indispensable and insufficient. In
the perspective envisaged here, it is the relative indeterminacy of sexual
intercourse with respect to the conditions that must be satisfied to make
humans that renders engendering problematic. And, conversely, it is the
fact that it is the instrument of procreation that makes sexual intercourse
problematic. Completely uncoupled from sexual intercourse, engendering
could be taken over almost entirely by the symbolic function, as is, for
example, the designation of individuals who are destined to hold certain
types of responsibilities. Completely uncoupled from engendering, sexual
intercourse could be an essentially ludic practice, governed by norms, to
be sure, like all human practices, but certainly not subject to a control as
meticulous and difficult to exercise as the one that governs human sexual
intercourse in all known societies.
Tangible humanity and humanity singularized (through speech)
What gives humanity through flesh its confirmation through speech? This
confirmation does not modify – or scarcely modifies – the features that
confer on beings born of a man and a woman the quality of humans from
the standpoint of the tangible, whether these features derive directly from
flesh (the beings have the bodies of humans, and not of humanoids, as in
science fiction: they have hands, feet, faces and so on) or from primary
socialization and education (they stand upright, speak, sing and so on).
Features of the latter sort do not in themselves imply confirmation by
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speech: slaves can be educated and taught to play the lyre; concentration
camp inmates can be deprived of their humanity but still be obliged to
play Beethoven sonatas, and so on (although, if the learning process has
been pushed past a certain point, the fact that the humanity of beings who
possess these finely honed competencies has not been fully recognized may
appear strange, even openly scandalous19). Confirmation through speech
is not indispensable, either, for the achievement of the process that almost
always accompanies the access of a being, whatever it may be, to a collective, that is, its attachment to a class and, more broadly, its insertion
into a categorical system that can be manipulated by means of symbols (in
particular, by counting). In contrast, only confirmation by speech confers
on beings a property that is essential to their recognition as human beings,
namely, singularity.
The same thing can be said if we resort to the categories of the replaceable and the irreplaceable. Inasmuch as they are engendered through flesh,
or inasmuch as they belong to classes, human beings are replaceable. One of
the problematic peculiarities of sexual intercourse as a mode of engendering
is its extreme generosity: it can produce human beings in large numbers
and at a sustained rate. Through sexual intercourse, destroyed beings are
rapidly replaced (in the sense in which demographers speak, as we have
seen, of the ‘replacement of generations’). As for classes that include n
specimens, it is part of their logic that they render beings substitutable for
one another, replaceable at least in the sense that the beings are by definition equivalent. Similarly, a dead slave can be replaced by the purchase of
another slave, even if the being in question was a familiar one to which the
owner may have become attached over time (as happens with pets). In contrast, when someone is said to have ‘replaced’ a spouse or a deceased child,
the comment is always metaphorical and conveyed with a nuance of scorn
or criticism. The members of the French Academy who serve as secretary
are replaceable only in so far as they occupy a specific slot. As beings confirmed in their humanity, each one is viewed as unique and is never either
totally identified with the position held (one can comment, for example, on
the particular ‘style’ with which the Academician has ‘played the role’) or
completely obscured by the person of a successor.
This also means that neither sexual intercourse nor attribution to a
category suffices to make human beings. The third element, the one I
have called singularity, is a requirement if our set of specifications is to
be fulfilled. How, then, is it to be provided? I shall argue that singularity
must always be transmitted, and that it can be transmitted only by a being
whose own singularity is recognized. Thus singularity can be conceived in
somewhat the same terms as authority. Unlike power, which refers to the
application of force, authority refers to the force that legitimizes the application of force. Now authority is acquired only through transmission. It
cannot arise on its own; it can neither be bought nor conquered by violence.
Thus when someone holds authority, there is always a back-reference to
another holder of authority from whom the current holder has received the
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authority that he or she may in turn transmit.20 Borrowing a formulation
from semantics, we may also say that authority always holds the position
of an utterance formulated by a prior speaker whose discourse the current
speaker is reporting.
As for singularity, the fact that its presence can only result from transmission by a being already invested with singularity can be seen even in the case
of objects, especially objects produced in a standardized way. Characterized
by a high level of sameness, objects may nevertheless take on a weak form of
singularity owing to the fact that they are the property of singular persons.
Once in my possession, my pen (a Sheaffer ‘white dot’, a very common
model) acquires a semblance of singularity to which it could not lay claim
when, alongside thousands of examples of the same model, identical to it in
every respect, it circulated on the conveyer belt of an assembly line. It can
lose this singularity if, having been mislaid, it finds itself in the anonymous
promiscuity of a lost-and-found department, or if, following a series of
incidents, it turns up early one morning among the odds and ends spread
out for sale under an overpass near the Saint-Ouen flea market on the edge
of Paris (Sciardet 2003). It is from their attachment to human beings that
objects draw their singularity, and, for some of them, their value, as we see
in the extreme case of relics or in the case of gift cycles involving goods on
which traces of the giver remain imprinted (Mauss 2002).21
Confirmation through speech of the child to be born: its adoption
by the mother
In order to manifest singularity, human beings have to receive it from a
being whose own singularity is undeniable. This process can be described
through the metaphor of adoption. Given that the presence of the being in
gestation in a woman’s flesh is initially known only to her, and that it can
remain unknown to anyone else for several months, I shall consider, at least
at this stage of the argument, that the adoption in question is the mother’s
doing when she acquiesces to what is happening to her in pregnancy.22 The
mother’s adoption of what she is carrying is thus presented as a confirmation through speech of the humanity through flesh of the being in question.
This confirmation, even if it is not explicitly verbalized in public, can be
compared to a speech act as first described by J. L. Austin ([1962] 1975).
Considered in the respect in which it resembles a speech act, such confirmation unquestionably has features in common with a promise, inasmuch
as, beyond its properly illocutionary character (which, in the case that
concerns us, may not be manifested or may remain confined to the register
of inner language, in a sense), promises have, as pragmaticists would say, a
perlocutionary character that is not secondary but constitutive: a promise
is immediately oriented towards action and signifies the intent to modify a
state of the world in a lasting way. Detached from this situation, it would
lose all meaning.23
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By the same token, this confirmation initiates the process of singularization. While products of sexual intercourse, flesh embedded in flesh, appear
replaceable, as attested by the frequency of spontaneous miscarriages
followed by successful pregnancies, beings confirmed by the mother’s
recognition are introduced into a process of singularization. We may say,
borrowing one of Paul Ricoeur’s terms, that the emphasis is placed on
the ‘thingness’ of the beings in question (Ricoeur 1992). These beings are
referred to an origin, oriented towards a place, prepared to receive a name
that awaits them, and so on. In this sense, the mother’s confirmation of the
humanity of the being taking shape within her anticipates and prepares
the way for the child’s access, after birth, to a singular position in society,
whether this position is established with reference to kinship relations, as is
the case in many societies, or takes place in a different framework.
By insisting on the mother’s acquiescence to what sexual intercourse has
brought about in her, I am not principally concerned with the mother’s
interests, with her interest in autonomy or, as the language of the moderns
would have it, with her right to ‘choose’ to be a mother – or not – by
making respect for this right a condition for respect for her humanity.
Although the two matters are certainly linked,24 in the current context I
want to stress the conditions required for making new humans rather than
those required by respect for the autonomy – in the sense that this term has
taken on since the eighteenth century – of the individuals who compose a
political society. Now, one of those conditions, no doubt the main one, is
that a being engendered by flesh and destined to take a place among humans
as a singular member of a collective must be instituted by speech during the
very process of engendering. It is the adoption of this being by the mother
carrying it that gives it the necessary confirmation.
How does confirmation by the mother come about?
During pregnancy, what will distinguish beings growing in flesh (a) from
beings confirmed by speech (b)? Nothing. Nothing, at least nothing at the
tangible level or, to borrow another term from Paul Ricoeur, at the level
of ‘sameness’. Let us recall, first, that the foetus is (or rather, was, until the
appearance of the modern techniques of visualization whose effects we shall
examine later on) a complete stranger. Even now, its properties are largely
unknown, and this is just as true for beings confirmed through speech as
it is for beings engendered through flesh. It is thus hard to say why certain
beings through flesh are confirmed and not others, hard to provide reasons
based on qualities belonging to the former but not to the latter.
In addition to the fact that confirmation cannot be based on any tangible
property, if it is to be effective it must take place under a veil of ignorance.
In fact, if the members of class (b), beings confirmed through speech, were
selected on the basis of previously identified properties that differentiated
among various classes within (a), beings engendered through flesh – as
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would be the case if (a) included both (a) and (a′) members, the latter being
confirmed but not the former – then confirmation would only recognize and
reproduce a pre-existing difference, existing in the mode of a given, with
respect to which it would be contingent (this is what happens, as we shall
see, in the case of eugenicist selections). In this case, confirmation would not
in itself create any distinctive worth. It would only constitute different hierarchical states of humanity, by following pre-existing divisions. We would
find ourselves in the situation I have rejected, one featuring a differentiation
between several categories of beings that are more or less human and of
unequal worth.
That the (a)s are replaceable and the (b)s singularized
The principal effect of the mother’s confirmation of beings engendered in
her flesh arises from her substitution of singularized (and thus irreplaceable)
beings for replaceable ones. Any foetus growing in her flesh can be viewed
as replaceable, and thus, as long as such beings have not been confirmed by
speech, one can be substituted for another, whereas a foetus that has been
‘adopted’ will be treated as an absolutely singular being for which a name
will be chosen, for example, even before its birth. It follows that loss or
destruction of the latter foetus will be viewed as incommensurable: what is
an ‘accident’ or a ‘necessity’ in the first case becomes a ‘loss’ that is hard to
‘make up for’ in the second.
But what is meant, precisely, by the declaration that unconfirmed
foetuses, beings through flesh, are ‘replaceable’? To clarify the use of this
term, it is necessary on the one hand to introduce the dimension of time or
the notion of a series, and on the other hand to adopt the viewpoint of the
person who is engendering, that is, the mother.
In fact, to say that an unconfirmed foetus is ‘replaceable’ is to refer
implicitly to a series of engenderings through flesh of beings that may or
may not be confirmed through speech. One then adopts the viewpoint of
someone who might say: ‘I have in my possession (at time t 1) a foetus
through flesh that I may or may not confirm through speech. If I destroy it,
I am sure that later (at time t 2) I shall once again have in my possession a
foetus through flesh that I shall be able to confirm through speech. In the
long run, I shall indeed engender a being through flesh that I shall transform
through speech, but I will postpone that action rather than performing it
today.’
Several implicit postulates underlie this position.
The first is a belief in the ‘prodigality’ of human life, to borrow Georges
Bataille’s formula (1986, 59–61); more precisely, this hypothesis implies
that mothers have confidence in their own fertility: ‘A foetus through flesh
will always be available to me.’
The second is confidence in the permanent character of one’s own capacity to confirm through speech a being engendered through flesh: ‘Regarding
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this being through flesh to which I shall have access later, I shall continue to
have the possibility of confirming it through speech.’
The third is that foetuses existing through flesh can be brought into an
equivalence class. It is precisely inasmuch as they can be gathered together
in an equivalence class that they can be treated as replaceable, that is, as
substitutable for one another. They are the sort of being that a woman
(often) has inside her when she has had sexual intercourse with a man (a
condition deemed insufficient in many societies where, for example, some
dealings with spirits also come into play). Saying that these beings are
replaceable does not mean that they cannot be identified by number within
this class. A foetus engendered in time t 1 is known to be different, in the
numerical sense, from the foetus engendered in time t 2. But, at the very
general level of the work of model creation at which we are situated for
the moment, this is of little importance. Again, we need to recall that at
least until recent times these beings have been unknown. Without recourse
to modern technology, nothing can be said of their qualitative identity;
they have no tangible character (such as having eyes or hair of a particular
colour); in themselves, and if we set aside the question of the father for
the time being, they are distinguishable only in temporal terms: a first one
was engendered in time t 1, a second will be (or has been) engendered in
time t 2, and so on. They are ultimately established as equivalent in the
respect that matters most here, that is, inasmuch as they are all equally
apt to be transformed, through their confirmation by speech, into singular
beings.
Unlike foetuses through flesh alone, those that have been confirmed
through speech lose this character of substitutability. If an infant, or
perhaps even a foetus (although to differing degrees according to the circumstances), that has already been ‘adopted’ and thus has been launched
on the process of singularization does not survive, and the mother, pregnant
a second time, reconfirms the foetus she is carrying, this new being will be
treated as different from the previous one; for example, it will be given a
name different from the one chosen for its predecessor.
The operation of confirming thus not only has the effect of constituting a distinctive value (in the linguistic sense); it also marks an opposition
between beings whose highly unequal intrinsic worth is appreciated differently. Members of the first category – foetuses through flesh alone – are not
valued in themselves (an absence of worth expressed most transparently by
their destruction); they are valued only inasmuch as they may ultimately be
the object of a confirmation that, without their prior existence, would have
had no object to which to be applied. Members of the second category –
foetuses confirmed by speech – acquire a worth that can be called ‘infinite’,
not in the sense in which it would be the supreme worth in a hierarchy, but
in the sense in which it is not susceptible to evaluation: grasped as singular
beings, these foetuses find themselves in a sense exempt from placement in
an equivalence class.
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How to understand adoption by the mother: the possibility
of abortion
If the mother’s adoption of the being she is carrying is to have its full
force, we have to consider the possibility that this adoption will not take
place: the mother may not give her assent and thus may fail to confirm
the child to be born. In other words, the distinction between beings of
flesh produced by sexual intercourse and beings whose humanity has been
confirmed by speech would be meaningless if these two entities could not
be distinguished, or could only be seen as separate in one of those odd
thought experiments that philosophers of mind occasionally undertake
(when they imagine, for example, that my body is on earth but my brain is
on the moon). Consequently, if this distinction is to be made in the symbolic
mode, there has to be a possible world in which there is a corresponding
separation in which bodily existence is at stake.
It is at this stage of model construction that abortion, taken in its formal
dimension, comes into play as a possibility (one that is known to virtually
every society, as we have seen), through which non-confirmation of what
has come to be inscribed in flesh can be linked to the quite concrete prospect
of interrupting a pregnancy, of expelling the foetus and destroying it, even
if this possibility is only rarely, or even never, put into practice. In fact,
if all the beings engendered following a sexual encounter – whatever its
conditions – necessarily reached full term, were born and took their places
in society according to an ineluctable process, then this acquiescence would
have a character of necessity that would contradict it as acquiescence. By
the same token, the beings engendered in this way would not be traversed
by the radical difference between their membership in humanity through
flesh and their membership in humanity through speech. They would by
this token be deprived of the profound duality that is constitutive of their
humanity (a duality that, manifested at the level of model construction
where we are currently situated, can and doubtless in some sense must – as
we shall see in the following chapter – be attenuated or blurred by means of
understandings embedded in empirical arrangements, so that new humans
can come to be inscribed in the collective of the living and the dead).
It is true that, even if the possibility of abortion were unknown, such
a separation could be achieved by infanticide. In this case, the selection
of beings that matter, beings destined to occupy a singular place, would
be made after birth. This possibility cannot be totally ruled out, and in
a number of so-called primitive or archaic societies, there seems to exist
a sort of cognitive continuum between abortion and infanticide in which
the two practices are not sharply distinguished from one another. Thus
in pre-modern Japan a single term, mabiki, designating the selection of
young shoots, especially in rice fields, was used to speak of ‘sending back’
to the gods both aborted foetuses and infants killed at birth (La Fleur 1992,
99–100). However, in the case of infanticide, the being destroyed is no
longer a completely unknown being, as it is in the case of abortion. The
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fact that a newborn appears at the tangible level with at least some of the
features that characterize human beings makes its relegation outside of full
humanity more difficult and thus tends to institute a hierarchical plurality
of humanities within a given social group that leads towards the kinds of
situations encountered in the case of slavery. This is clearly apparent in the
fact that the decision to kill a child after its birth almost always takes into
account some of its tangible features, for example when it is perceived to
be abnormal (in many cultures, abnormalities in a newborn are attributed
to the intervention of evil spirits that have taken over the role of the human
father) or (among the Inuit, for example, but most notably in India and
China) because the newborn is of the female sex.25
Towards the definition of a second constraint
One should not conclude from these remarks that I am making abortion,
let alone infanticide, the pillar on which the humanization of human beings
would necessarily rest; this would correspond to a rather bleak vision of
engendering (and doubtless of the human condition altogether) as wholly
defined in negative terms. On the one hand, as I have already emphasized, it
is chiefly the possibility of abortion that matters here, not its practice. And
we shall see later on how certain social arrangements surround engendering
in such a way as to blur the difference between humanity through flesh and
humanity through speech, and especially to repress what might associate
this distinction with a separation of the bodily order.
On the other hand, I have to confront a major difficulty here. The line
of reasoning I have followed up to now hinges on the opposition between
humanity through flesh and humanity through speech. It thus directs our
attention towards a dualist conception of humanity. Now if it is true that
such a dualist conception maintains a privileged bond with everything that
allows us to establish a material separation between beings that are confirmed and those that are not, then abortion, at least as a possibility, ought
to occupy a prominent place in the arrangements that mark the specificity
of human societies. It ought to be fairly easy to find examples of such
arrangements over which women would exercise control. Confronted with
men, who can always prove to be rapists (and whom nothing prevents, if
we settle for a biological vision of conception, from propagating the species
by rape), women would thus hold a sort of sovereignty over the creation
of new human beings who come to be inscribed in the lineage. The control
that men exercise over exchange and, consequently, over political relations between groups (that is, over marriage, in societies in which kinship
structures are dominant) would have as its counterweight the control that
women can exercise, as a last resort, over the arrival of human beings in the
world.
But if there were arrangements such as these, playing such an important
role, it would be incomprehensible that they should remain isolated from the
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symbolic function. In consequence, since abortion would play a privileged
role in such arrangements, reference to its possibility would presumably be
virtually institutionalized,26 or at least ritualized, and in any case abortion
would not be subject to the considerable deficit in representation which,
as we have seen, constitutes one of the most prominent and most curious
features surrounding this practice.
My first hypothesis, bearing on the existence of a constraint that makes
it necessary to distinguish between humans through flesh and humans
through speech (C 1), is thus insufficient. I shall now seek to show that,
starting with the hypotheses developed up to this point and thus without
altering the analytic framework, it is possible to complete my grammatical
outline by writing a second constraint (C 2).
That (C 2) brings about an association among the beings
distinguished by (C 1)
The additional constraint I am introducing here is constitutive of the
common meaning of engendering on the same basis as the first, I believe,
even though the two are in contradiction. This second constraint emphasizes the impossibility of distinguishing beings through flesh from beings
confirmed through speech and, consequently, maintains that one cannot
justify submitting these two types of beings to radically different treatments,
since, according to (C 1), the former, stripped of intrinsic value, can be
destroyed, while the latter, endowed with infinite value, must be carefully
preserved.
We can express (C 2) with a lapidary formula: beings through flesh
cannot be distinguished from beings through speech, so that you must not
impose on the former a treatment that you would not wish to impose on the
latter. What we have here – to use language that is not entirely appropriate in this context, the language of theories of justice – is a constraint of
non-discrimination.
But first of all, what does it mean to affirm that beings that exist only
through flesh (a) are not distinguishable from beings confirmed by speech
(b)?
My argument will be that that utterance is a consequence of the way in
which, in (C 1), the difference between class (a) and class (b) is constructed.
I shall thus return to certain points of this construction to clarify (C 2).
A first element is that beings through speech are selected from a preexisting set, that of beings through flesh. In fact, humans confirmed through
speech are necessarily humans through flesh (even if not all humans through
flesh are confirmed). One cannot confirm through speech beings that are not
already human through flesh and introduce them into humanity by giving
them singular places. The operation of confirming cannot be carried out
successfully if it is applied, for example, to puppies, trees, tables or computers. (We can certainly find examples that resemble accomplishments of this
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type, but it can be shown that, in such cases, confirmation through speech
functions in the mode of metaphor: these disparate beings are confirmed
as if humans through flesh were involved – somewhat in the way children
act as if their stuffed bear were a real baby – and the belief on which this
acting as if rests is extremely fragile.) It follows that the mark – to borrow a
term from linguistics – that qualifies these beings through speech as singular
entities endowed with infinite worth cannot be attached to just any type of
being at random, but only to beings that are already human through flesh;
thus there has to be something special capable of connecting the former and
the latter.
A second point derives from the way in which the beings whose humanity will be confirmed through speech must be chosen from among the much
larger set of beings that are human through flesh. We have seen that, if
the difference between beings through flesh and beings through speech is
to be a pure difference constitutive of the latter’s full humanity, the selection must be made under a veil of ignorance (which coincides with the fact
that the foetus is, or was until recently, a completely unknown being), that
is, without taking into account properties already attached to the beings
through flesh that have been selected, properties that the beings through
flesh that have been rejected would not possess. We have seen, indeed,
that if the selection process followed and confirmed a prior discrimination
between (a)s and (a′)s – as is the case in eugenicist selection – the difference
introduced by the operation of choice would be contingent. It would only
validate a pre-existing difference (for the moderns this would be a difference of ‘nature’; according to an ‘archaic’ mode of thought, it would be a
difference resulting from the involvement in flesh of various ‘spirits’, but
this distinction is not important here), so that the success of the operation
leading to the institution of a pure difference – that is, a difference that finds
its principle in itself – would not be ensured.
In different terms, one can say that, to satisfy the constraints I have
posited, difference has to be instituted in a strictly arbitrary way, the term
‘arbitrary’ being taken in its etymological sense: that is, by taking into
account only the movement provoked by an ‘arbiter’ that, through this
gesture, transfers its own singularity onto another (beings through flesh are
not the agents of their own transformation into beings through speech). But
it follows that the choice from which certain beings through flesh benefit
could just as well have been made in favour of others (since this choice
is ‘arbitrary’), so that the humanness of any being through flesh could be
confirmed by speech on the same basis as that of any other such being.
All of them could fill the bill. Put another way, any human through flesh
confirmed through speech could be replaced by any other human through
flesh subjected to the same treatment. Seen in this light, humans through
flesh and humans through speech can thus be considered in terms of what
they hold essentially in common: they can be placed in the same equivalence
class.
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The contradiction between (C 1) and (C 2) and the question
of reversibility
The second constraint that I have just isolated has the particularity of
emphasizing a conception of humanity that is no longer dualist but monist,
and this puts it in contradiction with the first constraint whose properties
we have been exploring. The two constraints constitute a system: they are in
a dialogic relation such that the second contradicts the first, while the first
in a sense anticipates the contradiction. The two nevertheless maintain a
relation that is not only one of opposition or conflict but of incompatibility,
and they lead towards radically contradictory positions between which no
compromise is possible.
This last assertion can be interrogated, even challenged. Does not each
of the two constraints merely grasp the same beings in different respects,
or plunge the same beings into different worlds? In other words, can we
not subject the problem raised here to the type of treatment I adopted in
an earlier work to construct a model of the sense of justice? Can we not
consider that the same persons could legitimately be the object of different judgements in a plurality of worlds constituted according to different
principles for establishing equivalencies among persons and things, worlds
associated respectively with diverse situations, as in the case of a cadre in
a business who moves in the course of a single day through an industrial
world (in the engineering department), a market world (during a discussion with clients), a civic world (if she participates in a union meeting), a
domestic world (when she goes home for dinner with her family) and an
inspired world (abandoning herself to emotion, that evening, at a concert)?
In each of these worlds, the cadre faces different tests that challenge her
with respect to certain of her qualities. And the judgements carried out in
each of these worlds are indeed, in a way, conflictual, since the very qualities through which her worth is manifested in one world – the one in which
these qualities are appreciated – constitute a sign of mediocrity in another
world, where they are denigrated (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006).
Two problems keep us from following this path. The first has to do with
a question that is not subjected to thorough examination in the framework
whose broad outlines I have just recalled: the question of knowing what
we mean when we consider that persons can traverse different worlds.
For either we follow the logic of possible worlds to the end and must then
consider that the same persons are not involved, which more or less does
away with the issue of compatibility among worlds, and even with the
issue of their relationships, and as a result, with the question of justice
that the framework was designed to address; or else we consider that the
same persons are indeed involved, but we grasp them according to different qualifications or in different states, and then we have to question the
way in which a minimal sameness – absolutely necessary to the coherence
of the model – is established. Now it is precisely to the examination of
this question that I am devoting the analysis developed here, by seeking to
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problematize the notion of common humanity, a notion that is posited as
an axiom in the framework of ‘economies of worth’.
The second problem, directly connected with the preceding one, concerns the reversibility of states. If we say that we are dealing with the
same persons (in the minimal sense implicit in the analytic framework of
‘economies of worth’, where they are defined by their association with a
constant body and a rigid designator marking their ‘identity’), who traverse
different worlds and who are subjected to divergent judgements in these
worlds, this presupposes that the states – however deficient they may be – in
which persons are evaluated in each of these worlds are reversible, and that
the treatments to which persons are subjected in a given world are never so
degrading as to deprive them definitively of the possibility of acceding to
worth in an alternative world.27 Now, in the case that concerns us here, we
are dealing with an irreversibility of an even more radical nature. In fact,
establishing the difference between beings through flesh and beings through
speech implies maintaining the possibility that certain beings through flesh
may end up destroyed. It is thus not a question, in the case of these latter
beings, of a simple change of state or qualification, since, grasped in terms
of one particular qualification, they can lose even the minimal bodily integrity that would be necessary for them to reach a higher state of worth. One
of the most salient features of abortion, which comes up constantly in the
statements of people personally familiar with this practice – whether these
are doctors, psychologists who conduct counselling sessions, or women
who have had or have contemplated having an abortion – is precisely its
irreversible character.
Abortion is thus situated at the nodal point of contradiction between the
two constraints that I have sought to deploy. Caught between these two
constraints, founded as a possibility in relation to the first, but arbitrary
and thus unfounded, even transgressive, in relation to the second, it can
be neither decisively prevented nor really legitimized. And this is also the
reason, as I see it, why abortion tends to elude representation, at least in
its literal expression, and no doubt, more generally, why it is subject to a
sort of avoidance: people avoid practising it and, when the act presents
itself nevertheless (for reasons that we shall examine later on) as having to
be accomplished, they avoid revealing it in public; they avoid ensuring its
representation, avoid even thinking about it. If this is the case, then we are
dealing with a particular case of the aversion to contradiction that inhabits systems of representation and beliefs, one that constitutes a powerful
driving force for elaborating and transforming symbolic forms, especially
modes of classification. It is as if the taxonomies in use were charged with
keeping as far apart as possible beings whose association would unavoidably lead to unveiling the contradictory character of the treatments to
which they are subjected, and, in consequence, the contradictory character
of the norms that can be invoked to justify these treatments. This is one
definition of ideology.
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The difference between (C 1) and (C 2): two viewpoints on the
meaning of ‘replaceable’
Although both rely on a similar axiomatics, there is nevertheless a profound
difference between the first constraint (C 1) and the second (C 2); in an
initial approximation, we can say that a difference in viewpoint is involved.
The difference is particularly apparent with regard to the use that can be
made in each case of the term ‘replaceable’ (whose meaning, in so far as it is
attached to the question of singularity, is at the heart of my research).
We have seen, in developing the first constraint, that beings through flesh
can be viewed as replaceable, or as substitutable for one another, when a
woman says, in effect: ‘If I do not adopt this being through flesh now, I shall
nevertheless have at my disposal another being through flesh later on that
I can then singularize by confirming it through speech.’ This certainty can
be compared with that of an artist who has enough confidence in his own
power to think that he can always engage it once again in a creative act: ‘If
this sculpture that I have just made is destroyed, if the clay not yet hardened
by fire falls from the stand and loses the form I have given it, I shall be able
to gather it up and mould it again to recreate that form or at least use it to
shape another work.’
But, by deploying the second constraint, I have used the term ‘substitutable’ to cast doubt on the validity of the operation that consists in choosing
certain beings through flesh for the purpose of confirming them by speech,
to the detriment of others, and to contest the fact that the beings chosen and
the ones that are not can be objects of such radically unequal treatments,
whereas in the respect that concerns us here there is no way to distinguish
between them, in the sense that any rejected being whatsoever could be
substituted for any chosen being without any modification at all in the
operation of choice.
This aporia is dissolved if we see that the first constraint adopts a viewpoint that belongs to the ‘I’, that is, the viewpoint of the creator mother,
who deploys it from inside the phenomenon (in other words, a ‘subjective’
viewpoint), while the second constraint adopts the viewpoint of an observer
(‘one’ or ‘he’) who considers the problem from the outside (in other words,
a strictly grammatical – or ‘objective’ – viewpoint). It is in fact from the
viewpoint of the person who engenders, and who adopts and confirms,
either that foetuses through flesh can be judged ‘replaceable’ (if they are
rejected), because she can produce others, or on the contrary that they can
be treated as absolutely singular and endowed with infinite value, if she has
adopted them.
Conversely, it is from the position of an external observer (an ‘impartial
spectator’, to invoke Adam Smith [2002]) that one can raise the question of
the similarity between beings through flesh and beings through speech and,
consequently, the question of the inequality of the treatments to which they
are subjected. The second constraint thus presents, in relation to the first,
properties that associate it with constraints of justification.
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This distinction in viewpoint also confirms the dialogic character of the
relation between the two constraints. The first constraint, which expresses
the position of the person who engenders and who transfers her own singularity onto a new being, is answered by the second, which directs the gaze
of an external observer towards the question of engendering; this observer’s
position can be occupied by anyone at all: by another woman, certainly, but
also by a man, even though he has not been endowed with the possibility of
bearing a child. But, as in the model set up by Adam Smith to describe the
logic of ‘moral sentiments’, in which the ‘impartial spectator’ is internalized, so that he is also the observer of himself and his own behaviour, this
second position can also be adopted by the woman who is engendering,
when she extends the range of her reflexivity and grasps what is happening
to her. And it is finally in the synthesis that she brings about, that is, in the
dialogue that she entertains with herself, that the tension between the two
constraints can reach its peak. We shall see, when we pursue the outline
of grammatical analysis developed here via a phenomenal and pragmatic
approach, by turning to conversations with women who have had to confront the problem of abortion directly, that it is precisely this oscillation,
often in very brief phases, between the broadly contradictory viewpoints of
an ‘I’ and a ‘he’, that characterizes the debate that these persons carry out
with themselves.
And, similarly, an individual not directly concerned (for example, a
man) may also have access to both viewpoints and bring them together
in such a way that the relation between the two incompatible positions
towards which they engage action also turns out to be in crisis. For if, in
this case, the viewpoint on which the second constraint (C 2) rests – that of
a ‘he’ – turns out to be most immediately accessible, it is still possible, for
this external interlocutor, to approach the first viewpoint (C 1) – that of an
‘I’ – through the ‘imagination’, as it were (as Adam Smith says to specify
the relation that the one who does not suffer – the spectator – maintains
with the one who suffers), and this is often done by borrowing the path of
metaphor – that is, as I have done myself (following an ancient tradition of
philosophy), by comparing the creative act of a woman to the creative act
of an artist or craftsman.
It follows that, while from a grammatical approach that has been
broadened, in the sense that it encompasses the viewpoint of the ‘I’ and the
viewpoint of the ‘he’ in a single system (which has been my own tendency
up to now), the tension between the two constraints I have isolated is clearly
unveiled in its insurmountable aspect, that is, in its tragic dimension, we still
need to understand how the possibility of living with such a contradiction,
which cannot be resolved through compromise, can be managed. I shall
examine this question by adopting various ‘viewpoints’ in turn, that is, by
shifting between a ‘macro’ historical or societal viewpoint and a ‘micro’
viewpoint (in chapter 7) centred on the phenomenal relation to engendering
and on the pragmatics of action.
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Understandings
Understandings that obscure the tension between the
two constraints
The objection will arise that, under the usual conditions, childbirth has
nothing like the tragic character suggested by the two constraints I have
placed at the centre of the model I am proposing. Mothers do not ask themselves with each pregnancy whether they are going to confirm the being
they are carrying or reject it. Abortion is not constantly on the horizon of
engendering.
Must we deduce from this that I have taken a false turn? On the contrary, I consider that placing these two contradictory constraints at the
heart of my model offers, at a minimum, the advantage of orienting the
investigation towards the understandings or arrangements that make it
possible to weaken or obscure the tension between these two constraints,
given the impossibility of surmounting it. These understandings can thus
be made salient and problematized. They will be exempt from the banality
that obscures them when they are taken for granted, and this is just as true
whether we consider them to be either in the nature of things or belonging
to the realm of morality, as do those who make use of these understandings,
or whether we account for them by invoking culture or convention, as do
those who view them from the outside. What is more, by pursuing the constructivist mode of model-making that I began to deploy in the preceding
chapter, I can bring together in a single framework understandings whose
similarities and differences go unnoticed when each of them is treated as a
unique occurrence or (but this amounts to more or less the same thing) as
proper to a specific historical phase or culture.
In what do these understandings consist? Opting intentionally at this
stage of the analysis for a very general formulation which I shall make more
specific later on, I posit that they organize the relation between sexual intercourse and engendering. On this basis, then, they overlap to a large extent
with the constraints on marriage identified by the anthropology of kinship.
But I shall envisage them from a different perspective, one that allows them
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to be extended to different societies in which – as is the case for our own
– kinship no longer plays a preponderant role. While the constraints on
marriage are considered in relation to a requirement of exogamy and associated with the prohibition of incest, the understandings I have in mind are
considered from a standpoint that gives them a different orientation. They
converge in replacing one alternative – either confirming or not confirming
through speech beings conceived through flesh – with another – either not
engendering or engendering under certain conditions that ensure the access
of the beings thus created to singularity. (This singularity is often materialized by the possibility of making a place for the beings created within a
frame of reference which may be, for example, a kinship group or a society.)
These conditions define the legitimacy of childbearing. If these conditions
are respected, every being engendered by flesh is reputed to have been
confirmed by speech, that is, confirmed in its humanity and singularized;
such confirmation need not be relayed by an intentional orientation, either
during pregnancy (with abortion as the alternative) or just after birth (with
infanticide or abandonment as the alternatives). Conception stands for
confirmation, and everything unfolds as if the being thus conceived were,
as it were, preconfirmed. As for the beings that cannot be the object of such
preconfirmation, they are simply presumed not to have been engendered
and thus not to exist.
The distinction between engendering through flesh and confirmation
through speech is not abolished, but it takes on an abstract character,
because no real being exists, or rather no real being is supposed to exist, in
which these two modes of engendering are not combined. By the same token,
because selection has taken place prior to pregnancy, the tension between the
two constraints I have identified seems to have been abolished. As for abortion, it is pushed back from the horizon. Moreover, nothing would rule out
thinking, from one perspective – to be sure, a functionalist or structuralistfunctionalist perspective, and thus deplored today – that at least one of the
roles that such understandings are called upon to play is to make the disconcerting question of abortion fade away in so far as abortion is – as we saw in
the previous chapter – both necessary to conceptualize human difference and
also, through the arbitrary violence that it exercises, unjustifiable.
The understandings that I am about to examine have a common tendency: they do not abolish the difference between engendering through
flesh and engendering through speech (corresponding to the first constraint
developed above), but they tend to blur it and thereby to eliminate or to
limit, at least officially, any tension with the second constraint (that of
non-discrimination). To achieve this result, all beings who arrive in flesh
must be already confirmed or confirmable by speech; this amounts to dissociating sexual intercourse from procreation and/or to controlling sexual
intercourse more or less closely, especially in the case of women, whose
role in engendering cannot be concealed. Sexual intercourse, as a punctual,
circumstantial act, must not engender beings who will not be candidates for
institution through speech in a lasting way.
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Taking such understandings into account leads me to complicate my
model and to modify it in several respects.
The mother’s power is subordinate to an external authority
A first feature of the model involves the mother’s role in confirming through
speech the being that, following sexual intercourse, has been implanted in
her flesh.
It is my contention that the mother is the one who confers singularity
on the being she carries, in so far as singularity is a property that can be
acquired only by being transferred from a being already reputed to be
singular.1 In this sense, singularity may be compared to a donation. The
mother, inasmuch as she has the most intimate relation of proximity to the
postulant to humanity growing in her womb, is the most credible candidate
for bringing about this transfer of singularity.
I also contend that in the final analysis this power of confirmation indeed
belongs to the mother, because she alone has the power to withhold it – the
power not to adopt the being that she is carrying – and in the most radical
fashion, that is, by aborting. And this power, as is shown by the universal
character of abortion, can never be completely denied her.2
A second aspect involves the authority necessary to exercise this power.
Certain acts seem to manifest a power capable of being exercised without
any specific authorization, coextensive with the fact of being a living being –
for example, eating – or with the fact of being a human being – for example,
speaking. Even if, in the case of human beings in society, the question of
authority comes up as soon as one raises the question – to pursue the same
examples – of who can eat what, or who can say what, the fact remains
that, in many circumstances, the acts accomplished manifest a certain
power even though the issue of the authority needed to exercise it is never
explicitly raised (when I am hiking, I have, and use, the power to move aside
a branch that is blocking my way).
Acts that require no specific authorization sometimes have to be justified
(but only if they have had unfortunate consequences from which it has been
deduced that their author has broken a rule); in this case, the justification
can rest on the relation between the power revealed by the act and the
circumstances in which the act was accomplished (as would be the case if,
when I moved a branch out of the path, I dislodged a coconut that then fell
on the head of the hiker behind me).
Other acts, on the contrary, require more than the simple power to carry
them out. Whatever the circumstances, they can only be accomplished if
the person who carries them out has the authority to act. The possession of
this authority then determines the legitimacy of the exercise of the power
to act. Now this authority, unlike power, is not inherent in the one who
acts. The principal characteristic of authority thus results from a donation
made by someone else who is in turn only its repository, having followed
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a chain of authorizations that generally leads back to a fictional being – an
ancestor, a collective, a deity and so on. It is this characteristic that defines
institutions as fictional sources of authority and, by extension, as the set of
those who have received a share in this authority and can transmit it. In a
case like this, the justification of an action cannot stop with the examination of the relation between a power to act and the circumstances. It has to
refer, in addition, to the authority with which the one who acts is (or is not)
invested, in his or her own eyes or in the eyes of a third party.
The ability to engender can be characterized in the same way. While
engendering through flesh manifests the concretization of a woman’s power
in the first place, inasmuch as she is a living being, confirmation through
speech is embedded in a relation of authority. It cannot be otherwise, given
the role that this confirmation plays in the establishment of human difference, whose structure is itself of the institutional order, as we have seen.
It follows that no human being can possess in and of herself the authority
necessary to create a new human being and deposit it in the world. This
authority is received from another, who must be credited if the recipient is
to act. But this other, in turn, is only the repository of an authority whose
reference is not an ordinary human being.
The understandings having to do with engendering that make it possible to obscure the tension between the two constraints examined in the
preceding chapter consist in displacing the operation of confirmation in
such a way as to move it back from the mother (who nevertheless alone has
the power to carry it out) and as close as possible to the agency that is the
source of authority. The need to rely on an institution in order to transmit
authority is tied, at least in part, to the tension between what stems from
the inevitably changing circumstances and what has to be established in a
durable way. An institution is precisely something that is supposed to be
maintained permanently, protected from accidental or chaotic changes that
arise from changes in circumstances.
These temporal differences play an important role in the case of engendering. While engendering through flesh may be the result of a specific sex
act tied to determined circumstances (such as, most notably, an act of rape),
the being engendered through speech is confirmed in its humanity in a
lasting way: at least for the time of its life on earth, and, in societies in which
religious belief is firmly established, even beyond. It follows that, through
the intermediary of confirmation by the mother (who always has the power
not to grant it), the authority of another is also manifested. This other
comes to confirm the power of confirmation exercised by the mother and
offers, as it were, a guarantee of the lasting character of the confirmation
through speech, inasmuch as this confirmation also engages other persons
who make the explicit or tacit promise to recognize durably (once and for
all) the humanity and the singularity of the newly created being.
The operation I am seeking to understand thus consists in transferring to
others, through a chain of mediations, the authority necessary to confirm
through speech the beings that have arrived through flesh. We may consider
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that the mother is, in a sense, thereby dispossessed of her power or at least of
the authority that legitimizes her exercise of that power. In fact, in the case
in point, the confirmation given by the mother only renews, by concretizing it, a previous act of confirmation to which the mother, in a way, gives
her consent. This acquiescence has an obligatory character, given that the
only options recognized as possible are either not to engender or to adopt
what is engendered through flesh. In this sense, and if we take a ‘modern’
viewpoint that defines the mother as an ‘individual person’ through her right
to ‘autonomy’, we may say that the understandings I am about to describe
in broad strokes always converge to dispossess the mother of the authority
she would require in order to exercise her power of confirmation in broad
daylight. But, from another point of view, one can also consider that,
through these arrangements, the mother finds herself relieved of the burden
of having to use her power of selection in her own right. However this may
be, she authorizes herself to engender by relying on another (and we shall
see further on that, when abortion is the object of a justification, which was
no doubt rarely the case before it was criminalized and then decriminalized,
the process of justification also entails a reference to some other authority).
The question of the others
What is this other, or what are these others, whose authority is exercised
over the power to engender? When we envisage the intervention of a concrete individual, endowed with his or her own power, we obviously think,
especially in patrilineal societies, or in those with patriarchal tendencies, of
the fathers, that is, of the mother’s father and of the man who is presumed to
be the father of the mother’s child. The transfer of authority from the mother
to another would then simply be a euphemism for masculine domination.
However, even in this case (not all societies are patrilineal or even founded
principally on kinship), fathers themselves authorize reference to someone or
something of higher rank and of the institutional order such as, for example,
lineage. In addition, in many societies, a belief prevails that other, nonhuman beings intervene in the implantation of a new being in a woman’s
body (and this belief is also present in our own society, if only in a marginal
form today). I thus consider that the reference to beings that are not ordinary
human persons is a constant in legitimate engendering in human societies.
And, correlatively, that the impossibility of pinning down this reference in a
recognized form (the alterities in question and the ways of tracing the reference are variable, as we shall see) is a good reason not to engender.
The official and the unofficial
In the foregoing pages I have recalled the idea, a banal one moreover,
that one of the main problems human societies have to face is inseparable
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from the pairing of sexual intercourse and engendering, activities that
nevertheless obey their own systems of logic (which are perhaps mutually
antagonistic systems, at least in certain respects). As we have seen, the
understandings envisaged must converge to govern the relation between
sexual intercourse and engendering. The solution obviously consists in controlling sexual intercourse. But this solution does not suffice, because strict,
effective control over sexual intercourse is an objective that has never been
achieved in any society (even though societies differ greatly in this regard)
and is quite probably unattainable. It follows that the understandings about
which I am thinking must also include practical maxims concerning the way
in which failures to control sexual intercourse must be assimilated and the
way in which what results from these failures must be made to vanish.
This is why such understandings are structurally invested with a gap
between what is public and what is hidden, between things that can appear
in broad daylight and things from which one must avert one’s eyes; or, to
borrow categories developed by Pierre Bourdieu, between what is official
and what is unofficial. It is even probable that this gap, whose field of
application is obviously very broad, finds its matrix in the difficulties of
pairing sexual intercourse and engendering; the very notion of legitimacy,
to which we customarily assign a political meaning in particular, may well
be rooted in the question of childbirth achieved under acceptable conditions, as opposed to childbirth that takes place out of bounds. The interest
of these oppositions is that they do not designate different events or even
asymmetrical information; they designate the same events or the same
information considered in different lights. In fact, what is unofficial may be
known to all, and the fact that an event becomes official or public does not
necessarily go hand in hand with a surplus of information; still, we can close
our eyes to what is known unofficially, while we cannot do so in the case
of something known officially. The opposition between closing or opening
one’s eyes has something to do with the accusations, judgements and sanctions that confront reprehensible actions. In the case of something to which
we close our eyes, ‘rumours’ may well circulate. But no actor makes a public
accusation which, were it made in person before others, would have as the
necessary outcome either exoneration or punishment of the person who is
designated as at fault. If there is punishment, it is non-explicit and diffuse,
and it affects the person’s reputation.
Since the types of orders towards which understandings about engendering tend can never be fully achieved, such understandings are also
characterized by the nature and importance of the failures that ensue and
by the way these failures are hidden. ‘Hypocrisy’ and ‘bad faith’ are among
their structural properties.
The use I am making of moral categories such as ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘bad faith’
is not intended to reintroduce surreptitiously into the description a judgement
or, worse still, a denunciation. But these categories are the only ones available
to describe the back-and-forth movement between the position or moment in
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which actors ‘close their eyes’ and the one in which ‘their eyes are open’. In
everyday life, it is in fact always in the mode of reproach or moral indignation
that both of these two regimes are redescribed when they stop being apprehended as self-evident, as if they were ‘natural’; actors who view them from
the perspective of a possible alternative regime most often evoke an alternative
solution, however vague and imaginary, to the problems that appear when
‘one’s eyes are open’. Thus it is not by looking down from above, but starting
from a position corresponding to the unstable moment of passage between
two regimes that my analysis is deployed. One could also say that I envisage
the problems addressed here by adopting the position of an actor who is
placed, structurally, on the border between the official and the unofficial, and
who is therefore, more clearly than would be the case of an actor immersed
in the official world (for example someone exercising public responsibilities),
apt to shift back and forth between viewpoints associated with each of these
two modes of relation to the social world. This structural position is moreover, very generally speaking, probably the only one from which sociology is
possible.
These failures are manifested by the advent in the flesh – and, if they are
not destroyed before birth, by the advent in the world – of beings who have
been conceived under conditions in which the exercise of sexual intercourse
does not allow their preconfirmation by speech. A regime of engendering
is thus also characterized by the type of practical solutions it offers for
handling such situations. These beings may be destroyed before or after
birth, abandoned (often an indirect form of destruction), or relegated to
a subaltern position in which their chances of remaining alive are inferior
to those of recognized children; occasionally, they may be adopted, on the
pretence that they had been engendered under conditions deemed satisfying.
It is as if this sort of failure were tolerable up to a certain level (provided
that actors and observers close their eyes to the dissonant aspects of reality),
so that the existence of beings conceived outside the frameworks that ensure
their preconfirmation through speech can be rendered as invisible as possible. But when the number of such failures rises above a certain level deemed
tolerable (a level that varies according to the types of understandings and
according to the historical situations in which the understandings are operative), it seems that the contradiction between the two constraints we have
identified can no longer be ignored, and this tends to call the prevailing
understanding back into question.
Without seeking to cover the ground exhaustively or with historical or
ethnographic precision, and while continuing to follow a constructivist
approach, I shall offer some examples of these understandings, reduced to
their identifying features or their ideal types (several typical understandings may coincide, having been associated by compromises at a particular
historical juncture). I shall focus on types of understandings that can be
traced in modern Western societies (thus leaving aside a very large number
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of other types that could be constructed on the basis of anthropological
literature). I shall first envisage three types of understandings whose models
can be established by relying on classic studies of the history of fertility, the
family and childhood under the Old Regime in France, or on the history
of reproductive policies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; then, in
chapter 4, on the basis of interviews my colleagues and I have conducted on
the subject of abortion, I shall outline a new understanding that seems to
have been developing over the last several decades.
To distinguish among these various understandings, I shall emphasize, on
the one hand, the way the typical relation between sexual intercourse and
engendering is orchestrated, and, on the other hand, the character of the
agency external to persons whose authority is invoked so that the child to
be born can be considered preconfirmed (or not). This agency may be vested
in (a) a divinity, (b) a kinship group, a line of descent or a ‘household’, (c)
an industrial nation-state, or (d) a project).3
A spiritual understanding with the Creator
In one possible form of understanding, the role of God as creator in the
engendering of beings that come in the flesh is emphasized, and every being
who comes in the flesh is viewed as already preconfirmed in its humanity
as a child of God, made in God’s image, and thus called to salvation. This
belief does not deny the role of sexual intercourse in engendering, but
it takes into account the fact that sexual relations are not always fertile,
according to a necessary and ineluctable mechanism (Flandrin 1979, 179).
When engendering does ensue, it is thus because God, the ultimate reference, willed this manifestation and because, even though human beings are
free to have or not to have sexual intercourse (through which the Adamic
seed is transmitted, and thus without which no new humans could be
engendered), God knows for all eternity those who will come in the flesh
even if he has not created them before their conception.
This mode of preconfirmation is associated with an emphasis on the
value of engendering in relation to sexual intercourse. Intercourse, subservient to engendering, is only fully justified to the extent that, by transmitting
the Adamic seed, it achieves and inscribes in time a humanity created
once and for all in Adam. Engendering itself is invested with a spiritual,
quasi-sacramental character.
The spiritualization of engendering is reinforced and manifested by
baptism as a spiritual engendering and thus as a new birth, the water of
baptism being the ‘symmetrical inverse of the blood that acts in carnal conception’ and thus ‘the spiritual equivalent of the maternal womb’.4 Baptism
(re)generates every new human being by associating a relation of filiation
with God and ‘social recognition of the carnal filiation by the attribution
of a name and the entrance into the world, that is, into society’. It follows
that, in baptism, ‘sexual intercourse [and] ordinary carnal generation’ are
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‘shunted aside in favour of the action of the Word, the Holy Spirit, and
caritas’.
Placing the emphasis on divine as opposed to human kinship and on the
spirituality of carnal engendering (reinforced and manifested by the spiritual engendering accomplished through baptism) produces a framework in
which all flesh, since it is already preconfirmed by God, has equal value – a
conception on which the egalitarian idea of common humanity is based.
This mode of preconfirmation thus goes hand in hand with a monist (as
opposed to a dualist) view of humanity.
All beings who come in the flesh have equal value inasmuch as they are
all, in principle, capable of being saved (because by descending into hell
the Redeemer recapitulated the entire Adamic lineage, including the human
beings who were born and died before his advent as well as all who were to
follow his passage on earth). This fundamental equality, conceptualized in
the register of fraternity, is manifested by the universal vocation of baptism
(whereas circumcision excludes women) and also by the possibility available to any human being, lay or cleric, Christian or non-Christian, in cases
of extreme urgency, of conferring valid baptism, because each person ‘is a
creature of God, of whom the one who baptises is an image’.
In its official principle (although not in what it allows unofficially), the
type of understanding founded on reference to the Creator is all-inclusive,
and it consequently rules out the very idea of selecting among the beings
who have come in the flesh. This is why Anita Guerreau-Jalabert challenges the validity of inserting baptism, as many anthropologists do, into
the opposition attested in a great many societies between ‘biological birth,
associated with the role of the woman and the mother’ and ‘social birth/
recognition, staged by a group of men or of men and women’. Now it is in
the interval between the moment of birth and that of public recognition of
the newborn child that infanticide can be practised, or that the newborn can
be left to die by exposure, as happened in ancient Rome. These practices are
no longer tolerated once the pater familias, ‘as a citizen’, ‘raises up the child
he recognizes as his son in order to ensure the reproduction of the polity in
a domestic rite that also has a social value’. Because all beings that come
in the flesh have been preconfirmed and promised to redemption, they all
escape the omnipotence of any secular authority.5
For the same reasons, this type of understanding, which subordinates
sexual intercourse to engendering and stresses spiritual engendering, thus
tends, as Flandrin notes (1979, 176), to limit the legitimacy of secular agencies of power over one’s progeny, whether it be that of the state, the kinship
group or the progenitors themselves. The practice of choosing among the
beings engendered through flesh and selecting those who can be confirmed
through speech cannot, in this type of understanding, be legitimized by
relying either on the authority of the state (as was thinkable in antiquity
and again in the West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), or
on the authority of kinship (as is the case in the domestic arrangements
we shall examine later on), or on the desire that the progenitors have
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manifested to each another (as in the case of contemporary understandings
based on a project). As a counter-example, with respect to the power of the
state, we can recall Herod’s ‘massacre of the innocents’. The requirements
of kinship may be limited, as they were, for example, in France until the
sixteenth century, by encouragement to keep illegitimate children at home
and raise them. The power of selection held by the progenitors is countered
in particular by the valorization of collective responsibility for abandoned
children (Boswell 1988).
I have indicated that this type of understanding, which is based on a monist
conception of humanity and which rejects selection, is all-inclusive. All
beings that come in the flesh, since they are preconfirmed by a universal
agency, are worthy of adoption. This understanding has clear implications for abortion. Widespread in classical Hellenic and Roman societies
(although not, it seems, in Jewish antiquity: see Gorman 1982, 33–46),
abortion was unanimously, but incidentally, condemned by the early
Church Fathers on the same basis as other practices, such as circus games,
viewed from a Christian (and Jewish) viewpoint as typical of pagan barbarity, although these condemnations, treated as self-evident, were not based
on carefully reasoned justifications.6 At the same time, however, theological
reflections on the foetal condition began to develop, spurred on by the need
to defend the possibility of an incarnate god brought forth from a woman’s
body, in an environment of unbelief and disgust (Claverie 2003).
These reflections, highly complex and impossible to summarize concisely
here, included a debate on the quickening of the foetus. The central question was essentially how to determine at what moment quickening occurs.
This question was privileged for theological reasons (related in particular
to the problem of how original sin is transmitted) that have nothing to do
with the object of our study. The fact remains that, when a debate over
abortion did develop in the nineteenth and especially the twentieth century,
and Christians sought to craft arguments based on the Patristic texts, the
moment of quickening was foregrounded (whereas other forms of problematization would have been possible), though it was retranscribed into
modern language as the question of precisely when the embryo becomes
a person. As we shall see later on, this formulation is apt to give rise to
particularly ambiguous and contradictory (if not simply meaningless)
responses, especially in the light of the multiple meanings the term ‘person’
can be given today.
Still, we cannot avoid paying some attention to the Patristic debates
on the question of when and how quickening occurs, because before the
appearance of arrangements that allowed engendering to be encompassed
by technology, both the learned discussions of quickening and the ordinary
experience of engendering seem to have entertained the possibility of a
fuzzy, indeterminate period of latency between the moment of intercourse
and the moment of quickening when the foetus manifests itself through
movements that only the mother can perceive,7 shortly before the moment
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of ‘showing’, when the roundness of the belly reveals the being’s presence to
outside observers and pregnancy shifts from the subjective to the objective
realm.
In the debate over quickening (summarized schematically here), three
possibilities are presented:8 an (eternal) soul pre-existing the body; a soul
created (or transmitted) at the same time as the body; or a soul created (or
transmitted) after the body. The first possibility, neo-Platonic and Gnostic
in inspiration, radically dualist, presupposes eternal souls that are alienated
upon contact with matter, owing to their fall into bodies where they find
themselves imprisoned (this is the solution adopted by the Gnostic followers
of Origen). The second possibility (inspired by the Stoic idea of vital breath
and used against Gnosticism and its horror of bodies) admits the existence
of a soul arising immediately from the corporeal substratum, transmitted
through the intermediary of seed starting with Adam’s, in the same way as
the body (this view appears especially in Tertullian). The soul is then – like
the body – transmitted by the parents and not created by God (traducianism). This position was criticized by the creationist school (which relied
on St Jerome); for adherents of this school, each soul is created directly
by God9 (this was to become the official thesis of Western Christianity
starting in the fifth century). But creationism leaves open the question of
the moment of quickening (which, for traducianism, is associated with
conception). The third possibility – that of quickening after the body is
formed – found support in Aristotle and in the Bible. It held that the foetus
receives a soul when it has been configured. The delay between conception
and quickening was seen to correspond to the delay between the shaping
of Adam’s body and the infusion of his soul: quickening occurs after an
organized body has been formed in the mother’s womb. Thomas Aquinas
retained this third view when he distinguished between the vegetative soul
associated with conception, the animal soul into which the vegetative soul
is transmuted, and the rational soul given by God, which replaces its two
predecessors once the body is organized, after a period of forty or eighty
days. (In contrast, the idea of immediate coexistence between soul and body
won out in Eastern Christianity.)
In the absence of pregnancy tests and regular medical attention, in
contexts in which the harshness of daily life goes hand in hand with an
ethos that disallows paying close attention to one’s own body, where births
are frequent but where – for all sorts of reasons (especially prolonged
breast-feeding) – amenorrhoea is frequent as well, where miscarriages are
numerous (and hard to identify, moreover, in the early stages of pregnancy),
how is one to know when a being has actually been inscribed in flesh, if it
does not manifest its presence by movement or by the form it gives the belly
as it grows?
There is thus, in the West, a very widespread belief that was maintained
in women’s culture long after it was abandoned by doctors, in the early
nineteenth century,10 that the moment of quickening – that is, the moment
when the mother perceived the movements of the foetus in her womb – was
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a threshold point starting from which she could see herself as truly pregnant and could make her pregnancy public (Duden 1993).11 Moreover,
this moment coincided more or less with the moment when the change in
her appearance owing to her pregnancy became visible. By the same token,
the months separating the moment when the halt in menstruation could
no longer be ignored from the moment of quickening could be treated as
a fuzzy span of time whose interpretation was relatively open, so that it
was only with reference to procedures carried out after quickening that it
was appropriate to speak of abortion (ibid.; McLaren 1984, 102). When
the woman herself, or those around her, hoped for the birth of a child, she
might think that she was pregnant but refrain from making her state public,
chiefly out of fear that a spontaneous miscarriage might disappoint the
expectations placed on her, or, on the contrary, she might interpret the lack
of menstruation not as a sign of pregnancy but as the symptom of failure in
her reproductive capacities.
But there was still another alternative, probably quite a common one,
that was marked by the woman’s ambivalence towards her own state, or,
viewed from a different perspective, by the displacement of the tension
between authority and power, between the official and the unofficial,
that lay at the heart of the internal debate. The woman involved could
‘unofficially’ fear being pregnant while acting ‘officially’, with regard to
herself and without ever making this tension public, as if the halt in her
menstruation had a pathological cause against which she needed to struggle
by using appropriate remedies. Angus McLaren notes that in seventeenthand eighteenth-century England, numerous recipes, presented as more
or less medicinal but most often derived from women’s popular culture,
were designed to ‘bring the period back’, to ‘combat amenorrhoea’ or to
‘strengthen the blood’, this last in principle so as to stimulate the reproductive capacities. In reality, these remedies were based on substances that
could trigger an abortion (McLaren 1984, 102–3).
Even quite recently, the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who
undertook a long-term study of mothers’ responses to the birth and death
of their children in a favella in northeastern Brazil, reports that the nuns
who administered the local dispensary gave girls who no longer had their
periods a product that was supposed to ‘strengthen their blood’ and restore
their menstruation; this product was actually a powerful abortifacient borrowed from the Indian pharmacopoeia. But the girls in question must not
have been completely blind to the real effects of this medication, since some
of them explained to the investigator that this product could be used if no
more than two months had elapsed since the last period, but that it wasn’t
‘good’ to take it if more time had passed (1992, 334–5).
A second possibility – again in the register of ambivalence – for bypassing
the requirements stemming from the Creator’s preconfirmation of beings
who had arrived in the flesh is more closely related to infanticide; it was
offered by the spiritualization of engendering and by the importance
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attributed to baptism as a second birth. Evidence of this importance can be
found in the fact that, during the early Middle Ages, the destruction of an
unbaptized infant was a more serious crime than the destruction of a child
who had been baptized (Alexandre-Bidon and Lett 1999, 17). While the
fate of the former in the afterlife was problematic, to say the least (hell?
limbo? [Lett 1999]), the latter was promised to celestial beatification,
owing to the innocence reinstated by baptism. Another piece of evidence is
the importance attached to the ‘respite’ miracle (a newborn who had died
before baptism came back to life during the few moments needed to baptize
it [Alexandre-Bidon and Lett 1999, 17]). But, correlatively, given the understanding that the death of a baptized infant took that innocent being to
dwell with the angels, where it was better off than among humans, a certain
negligence that might lead to the child’s passing was acceptable, especially
if the infant was perceived as manifesting a weak will to live. The death of a
very young child was such a common phenomenon until the late nineteenth
century, moreover, that in a way no one felt obliged to look for the cause.
Another example of an arrangement that both encompassed the possibility of an ambivalent relation to engendering and allowed – without leaving
the framework of the understanding with the Creator – the destruction of
inconvenient newborns, preferably before baptism in this case, is supplied
by the study Jean-Claude Schmitt devoted to changelings and to the ritual
– against which the official church fought – to which they were subjected
(1983). Changelings were seemingly human children born to humans but
thought to have been exchanged in the hours or days following their birth
by ‘spirits’ (fairies, dwarfs, demons of the forest) who stole them away and
deposited their own children in their stead. This operation had the greatest chance of occurring during the liminary period when the newborn had
not yet received a name or had not yet been baptized (it existed in the flesh
without having been fully confirmed by speech). These changelings were
similar to human children, but certain signs made it possible to detect their
affiliation with the spirit world (the infant fell ill, or was always hungry
and yet failed to thrive, and so on). A specific ritual designed to trade the
infant back for the child who had been taken away included phases that
were very dangerous for the baby’s life, so that some interpreters have seen
it as a disguised form of infanticide to which unhealthy or puny children
were subjected. ‘But we need also to take into account the implications of
belief in changelings’, Schmitt adds. ‘The children who died were not the
children of these mothers, they were the children of devils. If the rite had
a function, it was to select or, in the fullest sense of the term, to recognise
the real children. . . . This clearly illustrates both the threefold function of
belief in changelings and its limits and contradictions. First, it was a means
of explaining sickness or abnormality. Secondly, it allowed parents to suppress social reality and the burden involved in raising a sick child, not by
curing the illness, but by changing the identity of the sick child; once he
had become the devil’s child he could be removed with impunity from the
human collectivity. Thirdly, . . . this belief provided a means for mothers
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to avoid reproaching themselves for the death of their children. . . . The
mothers certainly felt it to be a life-saving rite for their children, when in
fact it ended up by killing the weakest of them’ (ibid., 82).
Scheper-Hughes, in the work cited above bearing on the death of children
in a slum in northeastern Brazil, gives examples of mothers who thought
that their infants, puny and poor eaters, manifested by their behaviour that
they did not wish to remain on earth but wanted to rejoin the angels. In one
striking anecdote on this theme she explains that, facing a case of this type
during her first stay in the favella, she decided to abandon the anthropologist’s customary stance of neutrality: she picked up one of these children,
who was at death’s door, and took him to the clinic. When she returned
fifteen years later for a second round of field work, she found that the child
was now an active and responsible adolescent providing support for his
widowed mother, visibly her favourite child. (This adolescent was killed in
a fight during Scheper-Hughes’s second stay [1992, 342–51].)
A domestic understanding with the kinship group
The next type of understanding I propose to describe – at least as schematically as the previous one – has numerous variants in a great many societies;
it can be presented in a stylized way in the case of Western Europe, especially from the seventeenth century on, by articulating it according to the
opposition between legitimacy and illegitimacy. In an understanding of
this sort, the agency on which the preconfirmation of the child to be born
depends is the kinship group. A being that has appeared in the flesh is
confirmed and identified in its own right when it can be expected to find a
singular place in a kinship network whose branches can be traced outward
from its person, just as could be done for any other human being belonging to the same set. This being will thus be inscribed in a filiation that, in
modern Europe, is predominantly based on shared ancestry. The being will
be endowed with siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins; it will bear a name
manifesting both the lineage to which it is attached and the particular place
it occupies in this lineage. The kinship network is structured by marriage,
which establishes a stable and publicly recognized relation between a man
and a woman the two customarily live in the same place and jointly manage
a patrimony, and their sexual intercourse engenders legitimate children
who will be inscribed in the kinship group, will bear family names and (to
varying degrees according to the nature of the succession arrangements)
will be able to claim an inheritance. Legitimacy counts as preconfirmation.
The legitimate mother does not hold the authority that she would require in
order to confirm and adopt the being that arrives in her flesh. She of course
always has the power to get rid of it, either on her own initiative or in collaboration with the legitimate father or at the latter’s instigation, but at her
own physical and symbolic risk; if the affair is made public, she can expect
only disavowal and disgrace.
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An arrangement of this type goes hand in hand with a particular way
of organizing the relation between sexual intercourse and engendering, in
which these practices find themselves at least partially unlinked. This form
of organization is based on a convention that places men and women in
different and asymmetrical positions in this regard. It can be schematized
as follows.
Men may be single or married (the proportion of single men in relation to
married men depends largely on the rules for transmitting patrimony; thus
in societies organized around ‘households’, the role of single men is greater
than in those that allow the patrimony to be shared among first cousins). In
both types of societies, men can orient their sexual activity either towards
their legitimate spouses (who then engender legitimate children) or towards
other women. Whether a man’s sexual activity takes place in the context
of a legitimate union or outside of this context is not, in itself, a relevant
criterion for distinguishing among different categories of men.
Women, in contrast, are distributed in different sets in terms of the
modalities according to which they engage (or do not engage) in sexual
activity. Either a woman is not bound to a man in a legitimate marriage,
has no sexual activity (or is presumed to have none) and does not engender,
in which case she remains a single woman, one of the ‘old maids’ who often
live in subaltern positions in a sibling’s household; or she is bound to a man
in a legitimate marriage, and as an ‘honest woman’ she is expected to engender legitimate children (sexual intercourse, necessary to achieve this goal, is
rarely discussed); or else she is not bound to a man in legitimate relations
and engages in sexual activity, in which case she is included in the category
of ‘lost’ or ‘fallen’ women.
This last category, which in the normative logic proper to the type of
understanding based on legitimacy ought not to exist, was in fact necessary,
so that men who remained unmarried in large numbers either temporarily,
owing to norms that delayed the age of marriage, or definitively, owing to
arrangements that excluded them from transmitting patrimony12 (but this
category also included many married men whose legitimate union did not
suffice to satisfy them sexually), could engage in sexual activity; the desire
for such activity was viewed as irrepressible, and men were considered, at
least tacitly, to have a right to it. The existence of ‘fallen’ women (or, when
their sexual activity was organized and recognized, ‘public’ or ‘common
girls’) was thus the object of both official condemnation in principle and
unofficial tolerance in fact, as we see, among countless examples, from
the presence of houses of prostitution protected by municipal authorities
in every major city. (In the eighteenth century the French city of Aurillac,
studied by Claude Grimmer, counted eleven bordellos, or one for every five
hundred inhabitants [1983, 76–7]. Similarly, we know that, in the fifteenth
century, the cities in the Rhône and Saône valleys each had its own ‘public
house’,13 a ‘municipal brothel to which there were often added bathhouses
and a number of other more discreet places for prostitution’ [Flandrin 1979,
188].) These ‘fallen’ women were tolerated to the extent that the service
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they rendered was deemed useful, so that the sexual activity of unmarried
men would not target ‘honest’ women – that is, so that the conditions of
legitimate engendering would be protected. Social arrangements permitted
the production of ‘fallen’ women in large numbers. In the absence of other
resources, poverty forced women to fall back, for survival’s sake, on the
sole possession that is lost only with one’s life, that is, their bodies; other
procedures left ‘defenceless’ women (these were most often either women
without relatives or, especially in ‘household’ societies, women in the position of younger daughters with no dowry14) apt to land in the category of
the fallen. This was the case with the collective and public rapes perpetrated
on victims accused of ‘debauchery’; these events probably had the function,
according to Flandrin, of putting them ‘into the category of girls “public
and common to all”’ (ibid., 189).15
The understanding that relies on the convention I have just outlined
clearly varies from one historical era or geographical location to another.
However, it includes a particular provision that is absolutely necessary
to its maintenance, a provision that, considered from the inside (by those
who close their eyes), can be described as an ideal, and from the outside
(by those who open their eyes) as a fiction.16 By fiction I mean, here, the
reference to a state of things towards which one can behave, officially, as
if it went without saying, or at least as if it constituted an attainable ideal,
whereas, unofficially, everyone knows, or can learn from experience, that
the state in question does not correspond to reality. Nevertheless, the fiction
is maintained because it is necessary, since everyone is more or less clearly
aware that, if the fiction were revealed as such, the social order could not
be maintained, yet no one has the slightest idea how that order could be
modified or amended. The collective fear of a collapse of the social order is
what keeps the fiction alive.
Schematically, in the case that concerns us, the fiction holds that, when
sexual intercourse takes place under legitimate conditions, it engenders
legitimate offspring (this is its purpose); under other circumstances – for
example, when it brings together an unmarried man and a ‘fallen’ woman
– engendering is not supposed to occur. Here we can speak of social
construction. Two types of sex acts are distinguished, each with its own
specific properties: the legitimate act, which engenders, and the illegitimate
one, which does not. This fiction (or, from another viewpoint, this ideal)
correlates with the commonplace belief, maintained until the nineteenth
century, that the less frequent the sex act is, the more it is apt to engender,
which explains why ‘prostitutes very rarely conceive’.17 Novels produced in
Western societies during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries
offer striking examples of this fiction: works that depict the family romance
in which sexual intercourse unfailingly leads to childbirth (whether this
is an occasion for dismay or happiness) contrast with those that focus on
amorous or erotic relations where sexual intercourse does not engender.
Now, the sex act, which is scarcely affected by the constructions developed around it, continues to engender with tenacity, regardless of the social
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conditions under which it is performed. This was true at least until the
development of contraceptive methods, with the slow spread of coitus interruptus starting in the second half of the eighteenth century,18 and especially
with the appearance of contraceptive techniques, whether mechanical (the
IUD, the diaphragm) or chemical (the pill), in the second half of the twentieth century. While it is known that professionalized prostitutes, so to speak,
those whom we meet in erotic literature, could use contraceptive procedures
(such as tampons imbued with an acidic product),19 this was certainly not
the case for most ‘fallen’ women; they were probably even more exposed
to pregnancy than ‘honest’ women were, because their partners did not risk
having to deal with the consequences of a birth.
A domestic understanding is, by this token, associated with a series of
asymmetrical arrangements intended either to allow the discreet elimination
– during pregnancy or immediately after birth20 – of beings that have come
through flesh but whose confirmation through speech is problematic owing
to their illegitimacy,21 or, when these beings have come into the world
and maintained themselves there for some time, to allow their relegation
to marginal and inferior situations (comparable to varying degrees to the
situation of ‘nobody’s children’, forcibly removed from kinship groups and
destined for a servile condition, in the slaveholding societies mentioned
earlier), but also sometimes to allow their reintegration into legitimacy
through recognition or adoption.22 These arrangements make it possible to
ignore the undesirable beings who have arrived in the flesh but for whom
the conditions of confirmation are not guaranteed, and to behave as if they
had never existed, or at least to recognize them as existing only on an inferior level, basing these behaviours on the distribution of human beings into
unequally valorized classes whose members have unequal access to dignity
and even survival.
Abortion is thus very present, and in a way called for, in the context of
a domestic understanding in which it substitutes for infanticide, the latter
being much more difficult to hide.23 The dissimulation of abortion relies on
a sharp separation between men’s and women’s worlds. Abortion is one
of the practices of women’s culture that are carried out in secrecy, kept
out of the public sphere and more generally excluded from the universe of
official relations, where authority is essentially held by men (judges, priests,
doctors, administrative officers, policemen and so on). This has allowed the
masculine holders of authority to close their eyes to the practice – in other
words, to tolerate it. Angus McLaren notes that almost no traces of abortion are found in English legal archives, or in the records of the ecclesiastic
tribunals under whose auspices this transgression fell up to the seventeenth
century; research into the ‘Select Trials’ of the Old Bailey in the eighteenth
century, trials rich in ‘moral crimes’ such as rape, sodomy, infanticide and
bigamy, also came up with few references to abortion (McLaren 1984,
118–23).24 The scarcity of traces left by abortion obviously does not mean
that it was unknown or exceptional. To take only the case of the women,
often very young, who worked in municipal bordellos, according to Claude
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Grimmer we may suppose that they found themselves pregnant roughly
once a year; their pimps took care of arranging abortions (1983, 76–7).
Nevertheless, as long as it was not public, abortion was not, or was only
rarely, treated as a problem, and certainly not (even if in principle it was
viewed as a crime by the civil authorities) as a ‘political’ or ‘social’ problem
in the sense that these terms took on starting in the nineteenth century.
In the context of such an understanding, there are other possibilities for
getting rid, postnatally, of beings through flesh whose confirmation is problematic. In addition to infanticide, which is an extreme solution in modern
Western societies because there are criminal sanctions, these possibilities
include abandoning the child, turning it over to a wet-nurse, or keeping
it in the household with an inferior status that does not allow access to
legitimate reproduction. According to John Boswell, abandonment became
increasingly prevalent in the second half of the eighteenth century (marked
by an increase in the birth rate); in the major cities in France, Italy and
Spain, one child out of every three or four was abandoned; in some cases
(as in Florence), the rate of abandonment reached 43 per cent of births.
And even these figures, as Boswell makes clear, take into account only the
‘notorious’ and ‘declared’ instances of abandonment. As some abandoned
children were neither declared nor baptized, their disappearance went
unnoticed (1988, 13–22). The mortality rate of foundlings was very high
(up to 90 per cent), much higher than that of children reared by their
parents. Similarly, the mortality rate of children placed with wet-nurses was
double that of children reared in urban families (Flandrin 1979, 204).
The large number of men excluded from legitimate reproduction who
were looking for women, and the large number of women born into illegitimacy or more or less abandoned by their relatives (as was often the case for
younger daughters) to whom sexual access was open, resulted in the birth
of numerous illegitimate children. As tolerance towards concubinage disappeared in the modern era, these children had no access to a singular place in
a kinship group: without kin, thus without protection and with no place to
live, they constituted a set of human beings available for any purpose and
eminently replaceable. When they survived, they could give birth to illegitimate children in turn, thus reproducing a set of humans through flesh,
numerous, weakly identified, needy, obliged for survival’s sake to put their
ability to work or their sexuality at the service of others.
This virtually inexhaustible resource of human beings through flesh, who
had all the tangible properties associated with membership in humanity
– language, a skilful body able to learn, to feel emotions, and so on – but
who lacked the right to reside in a world where no recognized place had
been reserved for them and who were viewed as readily replaceable when
death took them away, supplied a considerable workforce in sectors such
as the navy, the army, day labour, prostitution and domestic labour (not
to mention the incalculable number of vagabonds with neither hearth nor
home). It is among this group that factory workers were first recruited with
the rise of capitalism, which took on a scandalous character only when the
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‘great transformation’ induced by the unbridled extension of market logic
brought about the ruin – as was the case in England – of established small
farmers, detaching them from kinship groups and from their lands, dropping them into a situation comparable to that of those other beings without
status.25
In France and in England, then, the considerable growth in the rate
of illegitimate births, which began around the mid-eighteenth century,
reached a peak between the beginning and the middle of the nineteenth
century (even though the age of marriage fell during the same period).26
The increase in the number of illegitimate births (presumably along with
an increase, more difficult to measure, in abortions and infanticides) went
along with urbanization, pauperization and the collapse of the forms of
control of sexual intercourse that depended on domestic understandings.27
The increase was particularly high among domestic workers, whether
this involved girls placed in service and impregnated by their masters, in
asymmetrical sexual relationships, or – even more often – sexual relations
among domestic servants who were prevented by social conditions from
leaving their positions to marry and establish their own households.28
Now these domestics, who were present in the ‘family’ understood as the
set of people living under the same roof but whose subordinate status
allowed them to be exploited both through their labour and sexually, were
extremely numerous in French society under the Old Regime. Peter Laslett
has calculated that, in Western Europe, roughly two children out of five
became servants during adolescence (1977, 43). Thus when eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century novelists made persons of illegitimate birth central
figures in literature with a social message, they were basing that choice on a
powerful sense of reality.
As the foregoing remarks suggest, a domestic understanding represses the
tension between the two constraints I identified in the previous chapter. On
the one hand, it does so at the price of a fiction (the opposition between
legitimate sexual intercourse, which is intended to engender beings who can
be supposed to be preconfirmed in some sense before their conception, and
illegitimate sexual intercourse, which is not intended to engender and is presumed not to do so); on the other hand, by dissimulating, or by conferring
an at once contingent and ineluctable – that is, ‘natural’ and quasi-‘normal’
– character on the elimination of beings that have arrived in the flesh under
unacceptable conditions, it does so at the price of considerable bad faith
and hypocrisy, along with increased tension between statutory realism and
a requirement of common humanity.
If an understanding of this type is to be sustained, it seems that fiction
and bad faith have to be maintained by convergent efforts, so that even if
everyone suspects that reality is not what it claims to be, and suspects that
others have the same suspicions, all can cooperate to prevent this knowledge,
which is tacit (that is, not communicated, except in the form of rumours,
which dispense with accusations and proof), from becoming explicit. It is as
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if the actors shared a belief that such a transformation from the unofficial to
the official realm would result in rendering meaningless the world in which
they live and in relation to which their own activity (which is nothing less,
here, than the fabrication of human beings) can have meaning. 29
But the maintenance of this blindness is not only a matter of ‘belief’. It
also presupposes factual conditions that are necessary for transgressions
to be viewed as exceptions and, more precisely, as exceptions subject to
the test of an immanent justice, that is, justice associated with an order in
which they are capable of being qualified as such. For example, in the case
that concerns us, the maintenance of blindness presupposes that beings
engendered under conditions that do not permit their singularization in a
given place will not be too numerous; that their destruction – before or after
birth – or abandonment will not be too visible; that the cognitive tools and
the instruments of categories needed to associate separate cases and place
them in a series will be lacking; that cases of transgression will not have a
‘scandalous’ character – that is, as Jean-Louis Flandrin judiciously notes,
that they will not come from ‘society’s upper ranks’ (for that would both
make them visible and leave them unpunished30); that not only men but
also women – much more consequentially in the case of engendering – will
not claim the possibility of exempting themselves from the demands of
legitimacy.
A socially useful understanding with the industrial nation-state
The understanding to which we now turn has never actually been put into
practice in history, at least not in its totality or on a grand scale. However,
it has been developed in considerable detail on the theoretical level, and it
has also been the source of a great number of measures adopted by Western
nation-states during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Despite its relative failure (but the same thing could be said of the understanding with the
Creator in its Christian form), it seems to have played an important enough
role and to have inspired enough projects, ideas and concrete measures to
warrant our attention.
In this type of understanding, the agency on which the preconfirmation of
the child to be born depends is neither the Creator nor a kinship group but a
nation-state. The being that comes in the flesh is confirmed and identified in
itself when one can expect it to occupy a place in the national society and to
play a role that is useful to the collectivity. Attributing great importance to
social utility, this type of understanding places greater emphasis, compared
to the other two types we have examined, on the idea of personal merit,
and thus it acknowledges in a less euphemistic fashion the need to make
merit-based selections. But since neither foetuses nor even newborns have
the ability to show what they will be capable of doing once they are thrust
into the world, this third type of understanding must therefore be based on
specific bodies of knowledge: on science (primarily medicine, but also the
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moral and political sciences – demography, statistics, economics, sociology)
that allow predictions to be made as to the future utility of beings engendered in the flesh. It must also rely on a body of specialists – doctors – who
are able to move back and forth between the private places where procreation takes place and the state space where the public good is managed; they
must be capable of implementing the science of selecting beings that matter,
either by setting forth general prescriptions or by making decisions on
individual cases.
The ideal of state control of engendering has practically never, except
perhaps in certain so-called ‘utopian’ forms of socialism, been pushed to the
point of advocating the abolition of the family or its replacement by collective
institutions of procreation and education; this latter measure is very widely
considered impossible to implement. But in this utopian model the family
was disconnected from the kinship group and reduced to a basic nucleus for
engendering and beginning to educate children. The question then arose as to
how the family could be articulated with society, in a context where the family
was understood as a place where the requirement to maintain a ‘private’ space
(that is, above all, a space where the state does not intervene directly) had to
be respected, where ‘private’ interests could be pursued freely, where decisions
could be made that arose only from individual free will, and where society
was understood as an agency of the collective interest, the common good, that
is, with regard to the procreation of human beings, the common good of the
population included in the nation-state as a whole. Doctors (on the same basis
as attorneys in the case of economic interests and the circulation of material
goods), assisted by social workers, once the structures of the welfare state had
been developed, were practically the only persons capable of constituting this
intermediary body, to use Durkheim’s language, between the state responsible for the welfare (biological in particular) of the population and families,
between the public and the private spheres. In fact, by virtue of their functions,
they had legitimate authority to penetrate private space and, within this space,
to penetrate the intimacy of the body, which made them the holders of family
‘secrets’. But from another standpoint, their competence and their authority conferred on them a social eminence that made them natural advisors
to governing agencies, in all areas related to hygiene, health, mortality and
reproduction – in other words, they had influence over a considerable number
of political decisions. This position of intermediary between the broadest
public space, that of laws, and the most intimate private space, that of families
and bodies, was made possible by a new emphasis on medical ‘confidentiality’,
which meant in practice requirements of anonymity, desingularization and
generalization, in the passage between the individual cases with which doctors
were familiar and the way they might refer to these cases either in scientific
publications or as advisors on general measures.
As for the organization of the relation between sexual intercourse and
engendering, this type of understanding envisages sexuality in terms of
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utility, that is, in terms of the quantity and quality of the beings whose
engendering it allows. While it does not cast a dubious eye on sexual intercourse itself, this understanding nevertheless proves to be highly normative;
it aims to eliminate from the conditions of ‘normal’ engendering any acts or
persons apt to have a negative effect on population quality.
The new idea that developed within a modernist, progressive elite at the
end of the eighteenth century and during the century that followed was
that population management (a notion that was taking on new meaning
[Foucault 2003a]31 along with the notion of society [Nisbet 1966]32) was
a matter that concerned the public good, and therefore the state.33 The
authority that ensured the preconfirmation of children to be born (and thus
also, at least implicitly, their selection) was no longer vested in the kinship
group, as in the past, but rather in the nation-state. The replacement of
an order governed by kinship – now deemed both archaic and unjust – by
an order governed by society constituted one of the chief problems that
nineteenth-century innovators had to confront. A new social logic depended
on a levelling of kinship positions, at least in so far as these were ontological markers. Beings were then defined in relation to the places they would
be able to occupy in society. These places were no longer predetermined by
kinship; the paths taken by human beings towards their future roles were
formally presented as open. Societal positions, too, are obviously of unequal
value, but the very fact of occupying a position – even the least valorized
– in society cannot be taken for granted. This type of understanding thus
presupposes a disconnect between beings – of unequal value – and similarly
hierarchized places in terms of their relative value, even though none is
absolutely devoid of value (since citizenship is a value in and of itself); thus
the achievement of a just order depends on controlling as closely as possible
the association between the value of beings and the value of positions. The
more or less just character of the social order is then defined with respect to
individual destinies – and from this standpoint it is meritocratic, in the sense
that society owes the best places to the best individuals – and with respect
to society as a collective good: a society is the best one possible, even for
the least well endowed who occupy the least valorized places, when the best
individuals occupy the best places and thus play the leading roles.
This ideological displacement, from kinship to society, had several
consequences. First, it increased the dissociation between the qualities of
persons and material goods. Material goods continue in large measure to
be transmitted according to the logic of kinship, but the qualities of persons
were no longer presumed to follow the same path.34 By the same token, the
enormous advantages that persons drew from inherited property could be
denounced more and more often as illegitimate, especially when the owners
proved to be unworthy of their goods. A second consequence, of critical
importance for our topic, is that it made the matter of selecting human
beings one of the chief issues that the state had to address. This issue arose
in two distinct domains: engendering and education. The question was then
how to articulate the action of two different agencies, the familial agency on
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the one hand and an agency under state control or capable of being articulated with the state on the other, that is, schools in the case of education,
and the medical establishment in the case of engendering.35
This perspective presupposes, on the one hand, a sharp dissociation
between kinship, devalued as a general social order, and the family, valued
but only as a nucleus for reproduction and child-rearing, and, on the
other hand, a displacement of the separation between the ‘private’ and
the ‘public’ spheres, between what belongs to households (‘civil society’)
and what belongs to the ‘state’, and the establishment of new boundaries
between domains whose management is placed under the authority of families and those that may be subject to public intervention. These boundaries
are in question today. They are debated in the economic domain, that is, in
the realm of production of material goods, but they are perhaps even more
contested in the production of human beings destined to take positions in
society. These disputes are attested both in debates over education (what
are the limits of state intervention in educational matters in relation to the
family?) and in debates over procreation (what limits should be imposed
on the sexual and reproductive desires of individual persons by the medical
profession, with the support of appropriate legislation?).
Policies concerning procreation are ultimately directed at the population included in the framework of the nation-state (‘society’). This target
population has a dual aspect: both quantity and quality are at issue. Each
can be the object of statistical measures that allow the state to orient its
efforts at population control. Censuses measure quantity, while quality
can be assessed indirectly by means of indicators derived either from the
realm of physical or mental health (epidemiology) or from that of criminology. Theories of degeneration36 make it possible to establish connections
between these two series of indicators.37 Depending on the historical period
and on the state in question, greater stress may be placed on quantity or
on quality.38 But the two objectives are most often linked, especially when
there is a prevailing fear of increased numbers in the sectors of the population where humans are reputed to be of lower quality (the ‘dangerous’
classes as a deviant subset of the ‘labouring’ classes [Chevalier 2001]), and a
correlated fear of decreased numbers in the sectors in which human quality
is presumed to be best. As eugenics properly speaking emerged and spread
in the second half of the twentieth century, with the work of Francis Galton,
this problematics brought a new question to the fore, one that eludes
statistical testing: namely, what conditions of biological reproduction are
favourable to the selection of ‘geniuses’, exceptional beings, leaders whose
contribution to the common good will be maximal and without whom
society would head towards collapse.
To obtain a large enough population of good quality, policies governing
education and those governing procreation have to be linked. Their relative
importance, their boundaries and their modes of articulation have been
subject to intense debates aligned with scientific disputes over the relative
importance of innate and acquired traits. What good does it do to spend
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time and money trying to educate beings that are badly constituted from the
start – beings that, according to one way of thinking, are badly constituted
in their intrinsic biological, intellectual and moral existence – and thereby
unable to compete even for a minimal share in the collective happiness?
Between engendering and education, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there arose the vast field of puericulture, which sought to
appropriate for itself a territory ranging from conception (in what physical
and moral state must the future parents be at the moment of the sex act
so that the being engendered will be of good quality?) to the hygiene of
pregnancy and childbirth and finally to the rearing of infants and toddlers
(Boltanski 1969; Carol 1995, 38–51).39
This field is associated with two other projects. The first, considered
to be crucial but hard to implant among peoples whose members for the
most part continue to attribute great importance to kinship relations,
aims to allow the state to intervene, via doctors, in the selection of future
progenitors, so as to keep unsatisfactory progenitors, bearers of hereditary
defects, from producing children of poor quality. In addition, since such
parents are themselves defective and unfit for any useful work, they would
prove incapable of educating their offspring, so that the burden and cost of
rearing them would fall on the collectivity.40 Since it so happens that these
defective beings are most often detected in the ‘lower’ social classes (where
they have been relegated by natural selection), the project of excluding them
from engendering extends the idea Malthus proposed in the late eighteenth
century of controlling access to biological reproduction for poor people
who lack the means to feed their offspring.
The goal of producing only children whose preconfirmation by a state
enlightened by science would be an assurance of good quality was not easy
to achieve. The sterilization of the incompetent, beyond the fact that it ran
up against resistance, was not technically possible, on a large scale, until
the first half of the twentieth century (Carol 1995, 172ff.; Weindling 1989,
441–570).41 Planning thus went in the direction of controlling access to
marriage42 (this too was difficult to put in place effectively) and controlling
sexual intercourse outside of marriage, an activity that was not subject to
any administrative registration and thus escaped the power of the state,
favouring the anarchic engendering of unqualifiable beings. The aim, in this
case too, was thus engendering without remainder, engendering that would
not produce beings of flesh that no speech came to confirm.
Abortion in the eyes of the state
The second project was easier to implement, or at least appeared to be;
it targeted the education, or more precisely the domestication, of girls. It
was a matter of preparing them for their roles as mothers and educators
(often complemented, when they belonged to the lower classes, by the role
of civilizing agents for their spouses), but also of protecting them against
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themselves by putting an end to bodily practices that put their lives and
health in danger and also affected their reproductive capacities, whether
they carried out these practices on their own initiative or put themselves
in the hands of charlatans. This project was accompanied by a struggle
against ‘popular’ prejudices and practices in the realm of reproduction and
child-rearing. Its promoters were doctors, often backed up, at least where
the education of children was concerned, by the schools. The idea that it
was the state’s responsibility to promote a biological politics of population
management and to supervise population quantity and quality presupposed
that mothers were to be deprived of their power over procreation, that their
knowledge was to be disqualified and their practices controlled. This project
tended to support the corporate interests of doctors, who were engaged in
a process of professionalization, struggling to distinguish themselves from
the charlatans and, more generally, from the claim of non-doctors that they
possessed knowledge about the body and could develop practices relating
to the body. Throughout the nineteenth century, doctors were thus on the
offensive, in a process begun in the second half of the eighteenth century,
against midwives and ‘matrons’ (the distinction is not always very clear)
whose competence was recognized in matters of pregnancy and childbirth
(Gélis 1988). These women were accused of practising abortions that often
had fatal consequences for the mothers.
This is the context in which abortion took on the quality of social
problem requiring political measures. The criminalization of the practice,
which was introduced in France and in England early in the nineteenth
century but which took effect only gradually and was directed above
all at the ‘charlatans’,43 was presented as a measure of social hygiene or
public health, intended to combat a ‘scourge’ that was often described in
epidemiological terms (comparable to tuberculosis, alcoholism or syphilis)
and whose ravages were viewed as destined to keep on growing if nothing
were done to put a stop to the practice44 (the epidemiological register
that dealt with abortion was maintained until the mid-twentieth century
[Dourlen-Rollier 1963]). It was precisely the invocation of this scourge that
was to maintain, throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of
the twentieth, the demand for a reinforced struggle against abortion; the
increase in the number of abortions, despite criminalization, was attributed
to excessively lax political and legal practices.45
Historians agree in thinking that the practice of abortion probably increased
in the first half of the nineteenth century, when urbanization and pauperization
were accompanied by a weakening of parental controls over sexual behaviour.46 But the fact that abortions were most often carried out in an urban
environment probably made the practice more visible, because women in cities
who experienced a disastrous aftermath ended up in hospitals. Abortion also
became more visible because it was more frequently performed by specialists,
of whom a good number were doctors. These abortion professionals seem to
have flourished starting in the mid-nineteenth century (1840–50), as Leslie
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Reagan (1997) points out for the United States, and Agnès Fine (1986) and
Annick Tillier (2001, 330–1) for France.47 According to Tillier, the phrase
faiseuse d’ange, ‘angel-maker’, appeared in France around 1880.
In this ‘battle’, doctors were in the front lines. They were responsible
for applying biological policies, for the corporatist reasons mentioned
earlier, and also for reasons that had to do with the evolution of medical
knowledge. In the nineteenth century, doctors no longer saw the moment
of quickening as a ‘scientifically’ relevant threshold in foetal development;
since they viewed the importance attributed to this moment of gestation
as a prejudice on the part of the populace, they undertook to interpret as
patently abortive measures all sorts of acts that were performed prior to
quickening with the excuse of ‘strengthening the blood’.48
But the criminalization of abortion was not only a measure of social
hygiene. It was also inscribed in the context of a politics of engendering
that placed the foetus under the control of the state. If the state, giving
priority to medical science and political science rather than to the Creator
or a kinship group, holds the authority with reference to which the child
to be born is preconfirmed in its humanity, then it is the state’s responsibility to oppose the power, assumed without any legitimacy whatsoever,
of ordinary women not only to harm their future fertility by aborting49
but also to operate a blind selection between beings in the flesh that are
made to disappear through abortion (possibly exceptional beings owing to
their hereditary patrimony) and beings that, once born, would be society’s
responsibility (too often good-for-nothing creatures).
This tendency is illustrated by the fact that progressive doctors aimed
less to prohibit abortion completely than to deny non-doctors the right to
practise it, making it the exclusive province of doctors, as long as they operated under the control of the medical establishment (in practice, this meant
after discussing the matter with a colleague). It fell to doctors to trace the
boundary (variable from country to country50) between ‘criminal abortions’
– those performed by non-doctors – and ‘therapeutic abortions’ – those
performed by doctors. Angus McLaren notes that ‘doctors had managed
the remarkable accomplishment of creating a taboo that only they could
violate’ (McLaren 1984, 143).
In England, the difference between these two types of abortions was
above all procedural. The decision to go ahead with a therapeutic abortion was backed up by a medical justification that took the risks to the
mother into account, and it had a collegial, if not quite public, character:
the fact that it was made by several doctors jointly provided cover for the
one who carried it out. McLaren remarks that he found no examples of ‘a
doctor in harmony with his colleagues who was ever pursued for abortion’
(McLaren 1984, 143). In practice, these procedural conditions, which were
by no means strictly codified, could give rise to somewhat varied interpretations that opened up the possibility of a casuistics. Thus John Keown cites
the case of English doctors in the first third of the twentieth century who
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justified therapeutic abortion by referring not to the mother’s physical
health but to her mental health (Keown 1988, 59). Similarly, Leslie Reagan
shows how a woman could try, sometimes successfully (for example by
manifesting or simulating alarming symptoms), to convince her doctor to
perform a ‘therapeutic abortion’ deemed medically necessary and therefore
‘legal’ (Reagan 1997, 61–70).
The existence of a clear boundary between criminal and therapeutic
abortions opened the door to another significant possibility, that of
eugenicist abortions. This possibility did not attract wide notice until the
development of predictive medicine, when the foetus stopped being a perfectly unknown being; however, it was evoked well before that time in cases
of intercourse between progenitors with hereditary defects.51 This type of
abortion, too, was viewed as the state’s responsibility. It began to be taken
seriously only in the first third of the twentieth century, for technological
and political reasons. Technologically, before the development of more or
less secure sterile methods, recourse to medical abortion was available in
cases of emergency, but this technique could not be advocated on a large
scale. Ideologically, in the Catholic-majority countries of southern Europe,
the struggle on the part of state power to take control over engendering
away from women, and especially to deny them the possibility of abortion,
encouraged an alliance between two elite groups: on the one hand, traditionalists who were attached to compromise understandings established
with reference to the Creator and to kinship groups but strongly opposed to
Darwinism and to harsh forms of eugenicism;52 on the other hand, progressive modernists eager to see the state control the reproduction of citizens
with a view to favouring the progress of the human species. Eugenicist uses
of abortion were thus envisaged rather late, especially in the Anglo-Saxon
countries and in Germany.53 These uses were followed with interest in
France, as we can see from a mid-twentieth-century example, a book by
Jean Sutter published in 1950 under the auspices of the Institut national
d’études démographiques (INED; National Institute of Demographic
Studies), in which a chapter devoted to ‘legal abortions for eugenic purposes
and social causes’ discusses experiments carried out in Sweden, Denmark,
Switzerland, Japan and the Soviet Union (Sutter 1950).
The official and the unofficial in the case of understandings
with the state
Like the two other understandings we have examined, the understanding based on preconfirmation by the state aims at engendering without
remainder. Meticulous control of sexual intercourse (considered not as
an individual or private practice but as a matter that concerns the state)
is intended to result in the constitution of two groups: on the one hand,
individuals who have no sexual practices (or, having been sterilized, have
practices that do not engender), and, on the other hand, selected individuals
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whose intercourse engenders high-quality children for whom a place is
reserved in society.54 This arrangement may be qualified as official with all
the more legitimacy in that, when it is established by state policies, it is presumed to be based on law and backed up by a police force that will punish
infractions. This was the spirit behind measures such as the prenuptial
certificate or the criminalization of abortions performed outside the official
medical context.
In its unofficial aspects, this understanding runs into two very different
types of snags, which can be seen as exceptions in one case, misfires or
failures in the other. The exceptions involve abortions and infanticides that
have to be tolerated, under cover of medical secrecy, because what is of the
order of nature can never be subject to a wholly rigorous prediction: foetuses without merit can be produced even by biologically ‘healthy’ couples.
But abortion and infanticide in these cases do not enter into tension with
the first of the two constraints we identified in the previous chapter, because
they are not carried out under a veil of ignorance but rather with full knowledge of the facts. These practices, which are prevented from acquiring an
official character only by the existence of tenacious prejudices, according to
the eugenicists, thus count among the state’s instruments for selection and
preconfirmation.
The same cannot be said for the failures that occur under this type of
understanding. They have to do with the difficulty of controlling sexual
intercourse – an activity that takes place in private – by means of a state
apparatus in societies in which the project of rationalizing the conditions of
engendering, even in places where it was taken seriously, had no practical
consequences, because its aims were weakly internalized. In late nineteenthcentury novels we find examples of men who refuse to marry for fear of
transmitting hereditary defects to their progeny, but the novels do not
indicate whether they abstain from all sexual activity with ‘fallen’ women.
Such ‘elite natures’, moreover, may be presumed to have been rather rare
in reality.
Similarly, the criminalization of abortion, an important measure in the
institution of policies of engendering, was a total failure. Although the
number of clandestine abortions performed each year in France until that
practice was decriminalized cannot be known with precision, it is estimated55 that between 1930 and 1939 it probably reached several hundred
thousand (400,000 to 600,000 seems to be a plausible range, but figures
as high as 800,000 were mentioned during an interview with one of the
founders of Planning familial [Planned Parenthood]). The rate had probably
never been as high in the past, when the state did not purport to regulate
the way in which individuals placed under its governance produced (or
did not produce) their children. Abortion, formerly hidden or forgotten,
but henceforth out in the open under the scrutiny of the law, was destined
to disappear once again, and for good. However, the more the need to
eradicate this scourge was stressed, the more the scourge prospered. The
only effect of criminalization was to make the practice more and more
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brutal, dangerous and violent as efforts to enforce the law increased; abortions were performed clandestinely by professionals, often under inhumane
conditions. Justified at the outset as a measure of public health intended
to protect women’s lives and health, criminalization succeeded mainly in
increasing the number of women who suffered injuries or death resulting
from abortions.
The resistance to measures for controlling reproduction in the population
was manifested not only by frequent recourse to clandestine abortions. In
cases where women who had had abortions were taken to court, resistance
was also expressed by a very considerable indulgence towards them on
the part of juries. Moreover, this is why the laws passed in France in 1920
(establishing prison sentences for inciting abortions) and 1923 (establishing prison sentences for abortion itself), which sought to compensate for
the demographic losses occasioned by the Great War and thus reinforced
criminalization, transferred abortion from cours d’assises, where the most
serious crimes were heard by a jury (and the accused was often acquitted),
to tribunaux correctionnels, where less serious crimes were subject to the
competence of a single judge (and the accused was generally convicted) (Le
Naour and Valenti 2003, 160–4). The fact remains that, during this entire
period, cases that gave rise to criminal sanctions made up only a small
percentage of abortions: ‘The number of women condemned oscillated
between a few dozen and several thousand during the first four decades
of the twentieth century’ (ibid., 14). The July 1939 decree included in the
family law code established by the Vichy government increased the penalties provided for abortion, ‘the practitioner of abortion being much more
heavily penalized than the woman who had the abortion’ (ibid., 186). From
1940 to 1943, the number of guilty verdicts grew steadily, from 1,225 in
1940 to 4,055 in 1943. These figures, however large they may appear,
‘remain trivial with respect to the number of actual abortions’ (ibid., 198).
Still considerable in post-war France, the number of guilty verdicts in abortion trials (involving abortion providers as well as women who aborted and
their ‘accomplices’) was 3,845 in 1948. But it fell to 434 in 1959, ten years
later, with the number of actual abortions during the same period estimated
as some 400,000 per year at the least, that is, roughly half the number of
births (Dourlen-Rollier 1963, 142 and 75).
Abortion is difficult to criminalize for more or less the same reasons that
it is elusive for historical or anthropological research. Anne-Marie DourlenRollier, an attorney who militated in favour of decriminalization and who
carried out two studies of ‘clandestine’ abortions, remarked in the 1960s
that abortion was ‘one of the rare crimes that provokes no complaint on the
victim’s part’ (Dourlen-Rollier 1963, 70), that is, women who underwent
the procedure lodged no complaints against the persons who performed
it. Rarely denounced, and then generally by a close friend or relative, but
also often anonymously, abortion left few traces, no bodies, no proofs that
might allow a public minister to intervene; such interventions were in any
case difficult to carry out without the expenditure of considerable resources
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(and this never happened). Only an abortion that led to the death of the
woman who was its victim had a chance of being identified (ibid., 69–70).56
These observations suggest several remarks. First, the gap between official
requirements and unofficial practices is probably never as obvious as in the
case of the understanding that relies on the state. Criminalization, which
brought abortion out of the privacy of the home both to project it into
public space and to reject it, to consign it to illegality, went hand in hand
with a reinforcement of abortion as a practice that was both clandestine and
tolerated in fact.
It is hard to comprehend how hypocrisy on such a scale could have
been maintained for more than a century without arousing more protests,
at least on the part of a broad public, unless one takes into account the
strength acquired by the nation-state, especially in France in its progressive
republican form during this period. On the one hand, the eradication of
abortion was only one element of a much larger project aimed at rationalizing society through state action, and on this basis it constituted a
never-to-be-completed task for a state oriented towards the future. On the
other hand, what was important in the first place was not so much that
abortion should disappear, but that the state should make it unmistakably
clear that the domain of engendering, that is, fabricating human beings, fell
under its authority (as did the right to send citizens en masse to their death
on battlefields). The primacy of the state’s will to keep a firm grip on the
practices of engendering in relation to measures taken in the area of abortion, which was manifested in the second half of the nineteenth century and
in the first half of the twentieth, is even more clearly apparent in the case of
Communist states that, like Soviet Russia or, later, Romania, successively
decriminalized and then recriminalized abortion in relation to demographic
requirements that the state intended to incorporate in its planning – to say
nothing of Fascist states in which a harsh struggle against abortion as practised by ordinary women was coupled with encouragement for the practice
of eugenicist abortion and sterilization performed by doctors.
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A new type of understanding?
None of the understandings identified in the preceding chapter has been
completely abandoned today. We still find women who think that the
Creator has something to do with pregnancy (for example, women who fear
they may be sterile and go on a pilgrimage in the hope of getting pregnant1);
we still find couples who are not put off by the fact that those close to
them associate their sexual activity with the arrival of children who will be
inscribed in the context of kinship (as is attested at more or less ‘traditional’
weddings by the custom of throwing rice, which evokes a fertility ritual,
and the allusions and jokes made by parents, siblings or other relatives and
members of the wedding party referring to the fertility of the new spouses).
Nor has the state completely withdrawn from the domain of engendering,
even if the project of rationally managing population quantity and quality
has been dropped, for the most part. Abortion has been decriminalized.
even quasi-legalized, but on the condition that its practice be framed by
state regulations and carried out under state control. It has not been privatized, at least in France: the possibility of sterilizing persons deemed unfit
for reproduction, under medical control, has been recently reintroduced in
legislation,2 and the government is still implementing a policy designed to
encourage births by means of various benefits (parental leave, subsidies and
so on).
Nevertheless, where the creation of human beings is concerned, the
last few decades have been marked by major changes, most notably
the legalization of abortion. Unlike the situations that prevailed under the
understandings evoked earlier, the possibility of abortion no longer seems
either to be kept out of the political and legal realms and rejected (as it was
in the understandings with the Creator or with the kinship group), or to
be introduced into law but prohibited and, in principle, penalized, at least
when the act of abortion is performed outside the medical institution (as it
was in the understanding with the industrial state); on the contrary, it has
now received official recognition.
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It is thus as if, today, women’s right to choose among the beings
implanted in their flesh after sexual intercourse, their authority to identify
the ones they will adopt by confirming them through speech, has been fully
recognized (although in a compromise with state authority). Does this recognition not contradict the hypothesis proposed in chapter 2 according to
which the two constraints on engendering (the first requiring and the second
excluding the possibility of selection) are in tension? If this were the case,
the deficit of representation, which we have seen as a structural feature of
abortion, could be explained as resulting simply from a historically situated
cultural prohibition or, to use the now-consecrated formula, a taboo, that
the liberating powers opened up by modernity had finally made it possible
to surmount.3
Similarly, the preconfirmation arrangements referring to the authority
of supra-individual agencies, which are at the heart of the understandings
previously evoked, would have been mere artifices designed to dispossess
women of their power over engendering (and, correlatively, intended to
block their access to unconstrained sexual activity). The legalization of
abortion in the modern world would then be one manifestation among
others of the liberation of individual autonomy, and, more precisely, of
women’s autonomy, which had been previously shackled by institutional
powers in the hands of dominant groups (clerics, the ruling class, men and
so on). The question of abortion would have been only the question of its
prohibition. With the removal of the prohibition, the principal problems
that the practice seemed to have raised would have disappeared.
I do not think this is the case. I shall try to show, on the contrary, how the
recent changes trace the contours of a new understanding centred on specific beliefs and arrangements that nevertheless retains the structure of those
we have already examined. I shall posit, first, that this understanding, like
the preceding ones, implies a specific organization of the relation between
sexual intercourse and engendering; second, that this new framework, like
the others, entails reference to an agency for preconfirming a child to be
born; finally, that in this new understanding there is also a tension between
an official form and unofficial practices.
The arguments the women we interviewed used to justify their abortions
will provide the basis for presenting this understanding, which is centred on
the notion of a parental project.
The parental project
This understanding, like the previous ones, dissociates sexual intercourse
from engendering. Unlike the other three, however, the parental project
privileges sexual intercourse over engendering. Striving to have successful
intercourse is a legitimate requirement; engendering is a possibility that
may or may not be realized. The dissociation between intercourse and
engendering is ensured, on the technological level, by advances in means of
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contraception (and, secondarily, by new technologies of medically assisted
reproduction4) and, on the legal level in an increasing number of modern
societies, by the guarantee that these means, whatever they may be, can be
accessed freely, that they are available to all without regard to financial
resources and without discrimination; they require only the authorization
of a health professional – a doctor, a nurse, a pharmacist – and not that
of a personal holder of authority such as a parent, guardian, hierarchical
superior and so on (although there may be some restrictions for minors).
Legalized abortion is included in this arrangement provided that it is
performed within a specified time period (variable from country to country:
twelve weeks since the last menstrual period in France before the revision
of the Veil law, twenty-two weeks in the Netherlands and Spain under
certain conditions, twenty-four weeks in England) and that it is performed
under medical control in the framework of an agency certified by the state.
Abortion is primarily intended to compensate for ‘failures of contraception’.
With abortion, sexual intercourse is completely dissociated from engendering. Earlier, when coitus interruptus was the chief means of contraception,
responsibility for this dissociation fell to men; today, it rests almost entirely
with women. Women have the responsibility – and the duty – of taking the
pill, having an IUD inserted, using a diaphragm, or else (in many cases)
verifying that the partner has a condom, the only masculine means of
contraception, and that he has put it on correctly and at the right time.
Given the effectiveness of the means of contraception available today,
abortion should have a marginal role in this understanding; it should function as a rarely needed guard-rail. Moreover, the feminist militants (for
example, in the context of Planned Parenthood)5 who called for the decriminalization of abortion (Le Naour and Valenti 2003, 213–16)6 envisaged a
decreasing use of this practice, owing to the development of contraception.
In this understanding, if one is to have sexual intercourse without engendering, the need to ensure the reliability of the contraceptive method used takes
on the aspect of a duty. Those of the women we interviewed who said that
they had felt ‘responsible’ or ‘guilty’ at the prospect of having to abort often
related this feeling of guilt to the fact that they had had unprotected sexual
relations (rather than to the abortion itself; abortion often aroused intense
emotions, as we shall see, but not those typically encompassed by the term
‘guilt’, with its reference to established relational or social norms).
Jeanine7 spoke about an abortion she had when she was a student, at age
22. The abortion ‘really wasn’t a problem’ for her, except that she was ‘physically ill’. But she blamed herself for forgetting to take her pill: ‘First I saw
a psychologist, who was really really cool, who asked me about it, in what
context, quote unquote, it happened, so I explained that I wasn’t in love with
the person, that for me that embryo was not a human being, so I was just a
little bit disappointed in my attitude; I thought it was dumb of me, in the twentieth century . . . well, to have screwed up with my pill, because I find that it’s
really pretty easy to take the pill every day, that’s the only thing that bothered
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me, but except for that, I thought that psychologically, it wasn’t a problem for
me to have an abortion.’ Similarly, another student, age 19, declared during a
counselling interview: ‘I took the pill for five years . . . I was just going to start
again, actually, when I found out I was pregnant . . . There’s no excuse, we’re
well informed’ (Paris hospital). And here is Leila, age 26, speaking of her two
abortions: ‘The question I ask myself most often is just why I got pregnant
twice in practically the same way. I feel guilty, because if the first time I could
blame it on bad luck, on chance, etc., the second time I think that I, maybe not
consciously, I knew what I was doing, but I think that basically, yes, I could
very well have foreseen it, very easily . . . What can I say, I think I really was
aware of what was happening.’
In the context of this new understanding, how does the confirmation of
the child to be born come about? The answer that immediately comes to
mind is that, unlike what happens in the other three types of understandings we have examined, where the foetus is preconfirmed with reference to
an external supra-individual agency (Creator, kinship group or state), in
this fourth case preconfirmation reverts directly to the mother. One might
suppose, then, that the legalization of abortion had the effect of restoring
to mothers not only the power to confirm – or not – the being they bear in
their flesh, but also the authority on which this power can rely. Only in this
last type of understanding, then, would the model we presented in chapter
2 (and over-generalized) be valid.
This recovery of authority would be manifest if women who have abortions were to take sole responsibility for giving birth or for eliminating the
being growing in their flesh. However, this is not in fact the case. Not that
they do not make the decision themselves, ultimately – but they often do so
while suggesting that they have done it reluctantly. In such cases, they justify
their decisions by arguing that the biological father has refused to assume
paternity of the child to be born, or that he is unfit for the task (some do not
inform the father of the pregnancy; others are not even sure who the father
is). Abortion is then presented as ultimately in the best interest of the being
who would have been unable to experience normal development or achieve
happiness, under these conditions.
The father’s defection is a theme that came up frequently during counselling
interviews. Thus Aline, age 27, a medical secretary, reported: ‘I just said that
my period was late and he said that I had him up against the wall, and he left
without a word; we’d been together for six years and a few times we’d even
talked about getting married.’ Another woman, age 38, an asylum-seeker,
spoke in similar terms: ‘He asked me not to keep it and that was something
against my will.’ Another woman, age 30, director of a sales department, who
had one child and was going to have her second abortion, complained about
men in general: ‘You know, men today, there really aren’t many mature ones;
he pays, but he doesn’t make any promises.’ Still another, age 29, did not want
her child to have to suffer being ‘without a father’: ‘It’s an image that I have
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for a child, I mean, that he has a father and a mother; the worst thing for a
child is an unknown father, that’s the bottom line’ (Paris hospital).
What ‘father’ is at issue here? Certainly not the father considered from
the standpoint of the kinship group in its traditional forms, inasmuch as that
group is able to guarantee the child a legitimate filiation within the institution of marriage. And, similarly, the justifications of these persons do not
refer to the opprobrium that, in an understanding oriented towards kinship,
would until recently have been heaped unfailingly on the illegitimate child.
My hypothesis is that the ‘father’ to whom these arguments refer, although
he does not represent the kinship group as a supra-individual agency, is not
viewed in his empirical individuality, either. He is the vector through which
another form of externality is designated, namely, the project.
The term ‘project’ designates here the agreement through which a
man and a woman bond together with the intention of creating a child.
This is not to say that they necessarily bond ‘for life’, or with a view to
putting in common an indefinite but presumably large number of goods
or practices, as in the old model of marriage.8 Several of the women with
whom we spoke said insistently that they did not expect to form, with
the man who would be the father of their child, a couple destined to
‘last forever’. These remarks were made in a tone of strong self-evidence
(‘obviously’), as if to show that the speaker knew the norm and adhered
to it. The norm prescribes engendering through a project that, to be made
salient, has to be clearly distinguished from the one that presided over
marriage as traditionally defined. The project of creating a child does not
necessarily presuppose marriage, or even cohabitation, and certainly not a
total sharing of activities. It is a specific project that engages partners with
reference to a precise object. But this commitment is deemed indispensable
if the being that arrives in the flesh is not to find itself there, as it were, ‘by
chance’, and unable to develop in a way that will fully realize its humanity. In this logic, it is as though, in the absence of any reference to the
project that presided over its conception, the being would forever retain a
contingent aspect that would impede its singularization. Or, conversely, it
is as though the fact of being the outcome of a project, that is, of a specific
commitment on the part of its progenitors, were the condition for the
successful transfer to the newly created being of the singularity capable of
conferring on that being a character of necessity, and thus of inscribing it
fully in a world in which its advent would define a place of which it would
be the sole occupant.
Leila, age 26, had finished her studies. She had had two abortions, the first
three years earlier and the second a month before our interview. She stressed
the similarity between the two stories – in each case an affair with someone
inappropriate – and she evoked the type of relations, different from ‘traditional marriage’, that are supposed to be instituted today between a woman
and a man if the project of creating a child is to be feasible: ‘The decision, both
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times, I made it right away . . . I got pregnant both times under practically the
same conditions; I was with people I liked a lot but it wasn’t anything serious,
they were young guys who didn’t want any sort of commitment, so . . . I’d say
that both times, with guys who were pretty indecisive about everything, actually, they never made any decisions, they didn’t know what they were doing.
In the first case, it was with someone I’d been with for a little while, a couple
of months, a year earlier. We saw each other again after a year and spent a
night together. And the second time, I’d known the guy for a month. So these
were both stories that weren’t going anywhere.’ Leila then talked about the
conditions in which she could have a child. ‘I don’t know if it’s specifically the
desire to have a child that would make me have one. I have the impression that
I want a child, sometimes, but it’s almost a whim, it’s like wanting a new car
or some new clothes. But it seems to me that, in spite of everything, if I really
met a person with whom I could see myself in the future, I might have that
desire. I don’t see myself having a child just for me. I have a hard time understanding it when I see women who choose to bring up their children alone; and
also, for sure, knowing that at a certain point contraception was a possibility.’
Leila, whose parents were divorced, distinguished the ‘family’ of her parents’
day from the new ‘couples’ relationships: ‘In my parents’ generation, there
was an awareness of the family, and at a certain point, when they separated,
the family broke up. My generation makes more of a distinction between the
couple and the parent–child relationship, as if there were two quite separate
axes . . . Maybe there’s a need to tell yourself that there’s a long stretch of time
ahead, if you’re going to start a family, but I also think you can stay together
and have children together and then separate one day. Still, I have a sense that
it can come to an end and that it’s not necessarily a problem that it comes to
an end as long as you can really manage things. You cope with the fact that
you’ve had a past together, that you wanted to have children together, that
you had them, that you brought them up, and that each of us can still be a
parent for them, but at some point if we want to separate and live our own
lives as woman and man, we’ll be able to do it. Not necessarily, but it’s possible.’ Leila emphasized, finally, what is absolutely necessary for the project of
having a child to take on substance: ‘You have to have a minimum of admiration for the other person, if you’re really going to want to have a child. I’m
not thinking so much about the question of childbearing as such, but about
the child afterward. A child is perfectly aware of the fact that you don’t admire
its father, that you don’t love him. You have to be able to tell the child that,
if he or she has got there, it was because you admired the father, because you
wanted to do that with the father.’
Julie, age 27, a teacher, had just had an abortion after a one-night fling with
a ‘person who was inappropriate’, and she had a strong desire to have a child.
She explained the conditions under which that would be possible (neither a
one-night stand nor a lifetime commitment): ‘For me, it has to go together,
being with a man and being with a child. I don’t want to have a child all by
myself, I want to love someone and have a child together. Really, to start a
family, even if that’s just an expression. I don’t have any desire to get married
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or anything like that. And I certainly don’t tell myself that I’ll spend my whole
life with the man I’ll have a child with, because my parents separated. So,
when I think about that, I tell myself: you make a child at one point, and then
you separate. You don’t know how long you’ll stay together. But let’s say that
I want it to be with someone I love, and I want us to raise the child together.’
A similar comment by Sophie, who had had two abortions and wanted to have
a child with the man she was with at the time: ‘I know that not all lives are
necessarily stories of couples who’ll stay together forever. I know that with
Paul, whatever happens, it’ll always be good. If we have a child, it will be a
person who’ll really have a father and a mother.’
So we can consider that the project of having a child, or, as the legal texts
that surround the fate of the foetus now put it, the parental project,9 constitutes the supra-individual agency of preconfirmation of the child to be born,
and this is so even if the bond that unites the progenitors in other respects
ends up being broken before the child resulting from the project reaches
adulthood. Even if this agency is the result of the reciprocal commitment of
two individual persons in a plan of common action, it unquestionably takes
on a supra-individual character, following the model of a contract, in the
sense that those who make the commitment are no longer free to undo it
in reaction to changed circumstances. The project thus takes on externality
with respect to the persons involved; in particular, it has a temporal dimension of its own. This externality is reinforced, in the case of the parental
project, by the fact that the goal is not simply the creation of a new object
(like a book or, to take a classic example of project management, a car
[Midler 1993, 28–36]), but a new person who, without having made an
autonomous decision to do so, becomes an active party in the project that
led to his or her birth.
The project polity
To specify the features of this mode of engendering human beings, I must
recall briefly the more general framework within which it is defined, that of
the ‘project polity’ that Ève Chiapello and I developed in an earlier work
(2005). The description we proposed of this new sphere of relevance, in that
context, was primarily based on data derived from economic activity, from
the world of work and business under the conditions of the new spirit of
capitalism. But we suggested that it probably had a broader extension and
that it ought to be possible to observe its emergence as well in the sphere
of intimate, friendly, familial, sentimental and sexual relations (this sphere
being increasingly difficult to dissociate from that of professional relations,
moreover; such a dissociation would correspond to an effacing, or at least
a re-demarcation, of the separation between the private and the public
spheres).10
The project polity (a designation modelled on the term ‘project
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management’11) sketches islets of order (organized, in the work world,
around arrangements of justice) capable of legitimizing, even while imposing limits on, a world whose self-representation is based on the metaphor
of networks. A universe of this type valorizes mobility, understood as the
establishment of numerous and varied connections, and activity, understood as the multiplication of bonds and commitment to enterprises that
are always new, whatever their purpose; such a universe is constantly
threatened by opportunism and fragmentation. This threat weighs not only
on organizational frameworks but also on persons whose life trajectories –
made up of heterogeneous sequences – and whose subjective components
are difficult to put together in a coherent form.
In a networked world of this sort – which can be characterized as
connectionist – individual persons are largely defined by the bonds that
attach them to others, in such a way that they find themselves harbouring two more or less opposing anxieties. The first is that they will not
succeed in creating bonds, or will lose the bonds that they have managed
to establish and not find others; they fear being gradually shunted aside,
marginalized (in the world of work, this means being ‘shut out’, excluded).
The second is that they will lose themselves in the multiplicity of activities;
they fear that the unity of their personal lives will dissipate (a phenomenon
attested by the recent development of neuroses called ‘multiple personalities’) and that these personal lives will no longer exist, in a way, either
for others or for themselves, as stable reference points that can resist the
metamorphoses (real or imaginary) that accompany changes in bonds
and partnerships. The often anguishing requirement of ‘being oneself’
(Ehrenberg 2010), a new moral imperative taught today from childhood on, thus includes a contradictory character generative of powerful
tensions. In fact, self-realization requires commitment to transitory and
diverse activities and projects whose multiplicity and anarchic accumulation constantly threaten one’s selfhood. Hence, no doubt, at least in part,
the increasing valorization of ‘creation’, the concern for leaving something
‘behind’, something like a ‘work’, which is tending to stretch beyond the
narrow circle of artists to a growing number of people, as if to deposit
in external objects the principle of identity and permanence that can no
longer be incorporated in oneself.
What I have described, going back to the framework of orders of worth
developed in On Justification, as a new polity, the project polity, is adapted
to a connectionist world whose values of mobility, activity and lability it
adopts even as it imposes requirements of reciprocity and reliability in a
limited framework and over a certain predefined period of time, so that
a given project can be completed without being abandoned or mired in
disputes by participants who deem themselves injured or engage in opportunism. The same arrangements are capable of ensuring that persons have a
minimum of identity, which at least in the context of a specific project will
provide them with resources for resisting fragmentation.
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Personal relations in a connectionist world
The sentimental and sexual trajectories of many of the women we interviewed or met in hospital settings (for the most part, these were women
between the ages of 20 and 40, living in an urban milieu, students or
employees in the tertiary sector – services, communication, the arts and so
on – marked by a certain economic precariousness) confirm the hypothesis presented in The New Spirit of Capitalism of an extension of the
connectionist world beyond the sphere of work into private life. These
trajectories most often include a series of relationships between women
and male ‘friends’, relationships taking variable forms among which it is
hard to detect a dominant model. They generally presuppose cohabitation
(although not necessarily) and they can be quite variable in length, going
from a few months to several years. In these sequences, marriage can mark
a stopping point or, as often happened in the cases I examined, a point of
passage, followed by divorce and by the establishment of a new relationship, itself of variable duration. Finally, the men and women who enter into
these relationships may be already married but no longer living with their
spouses, or only sporadically, and they may or may not have children from
previous relationships who live with them or with their former partners.
Professional instability or the requirement of professional mobility and the
geographic mobility that often is a corollary constitute powerful factors of
bonding and separation, if only to the extent that the ‘friend’ is sometimes
someone with whom one works. It follows that the plurality and the precariousness of activities tend to favour a fragility in emotional relations
which, as they are not institutionalized and are weakly instrumented by
common attachments (to a property, a kinship group and so on) do not
stand up very well against distancing, whether in geographical terms or in
some other dimension of existence.
This description is something of an ‘ideal type’, to use Max Weber’s
expression. It seeks to present in stylized form some emerging modalities
of emotional and sexual life so as to systematize and highlight what seems
to me to be specific to an era in relation to those that have gone before,
while attaching more importance to the variations than to the constancies.
But I do not claim that this emerging model has general currency; it may
not even be the dominant one today.The fact remains that most statistical
indicators attest to a trend towards a displacement of emotional and sexual
life from so-called traditional marriage towards a ‘project’ organization
characterized by complex alternations between living alone, living together,
marriage, divorce and so on.12
We know that between 1972 and 1994 the number of marriages in France
went from 416,000 to 254,000 per year, whereas the number of divorces
went from 61,300 to 121,300 between 1975 and 1995 (the marriage rate
was 6.2 per thousand in 1980 compared with 4.9 per thousand in 1997, and
the divorce rate was 22.5 per cent in 1980 as opposed to 38.3 per cent in
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1996). At the same time, ‘free unions’ were increasing in number. In 1990,
one third (31.9 per cent) of young couples in which the man was under 35
were not married, compared to 2.6 per cent in 1968. Finally, persons living
alone were more and more numerous: the number rose from 3 to 6 million
between 1968 and 1990. This evolution was paralleled by an increase in the
marriage age and in the average age of first-time mothers, and by a decrease
in the fertility rate (from 2.47 in 1970 to 1.70 in 1995 – 1.9 children per
woman in 1980 against 1.7 in 1997). We also know that births outside of
marriage went from 8.5 per cent in 1975 to 39 per cent in 1996. The proportion of single-parent families also increased (13.2 per cent in 1990, the single
parent being divorced in roughly half the cases), and there were more blended
families including a couple and at least one child from a different relationship
(660,000 in 1990).13 All indications show that ‘life in couples is less frequent’
and ‘less stable’ (Déchaux 1998). We also see that unmarried couples living
together separate more often than married couples; 58 per cent of the unions
of this type that began in 1980 dissolved within ten years, as opposed to
12 per cent in cases where living together began with marriage; moreover,
the precariousness of such unions is tending to increase: ‘11 per cent of the
unions of this type formed in 1970, 23 per cent of those begun in 1980, and
according to a prospective calculation, 34 per cent of those begun in 1990
have dissolved or will have dissolved in less than ten years’ time’ (Nizard
1998, 2).
By drawing this picture in broad strokes, I do not mean to say, either,
that among the 220,000 abortions performed in France in the mid1990s,14 none, or very few, took place in the context of a stable long-term
relationship or in the framework of a solidly established, ‘old-fashioned’
marriage. Indeed, in our interviews we met women who had been in such
situations when they decided to have abortions. Nevertheless, several
indicators suggest that the maintenance of an almost stable abortion rate
since the beginning of the 1980s, despite the growing availability of effective contraceptive methods, was linked to the multiplication of complex
emotional and sexual trajectories. Thus we see that the proportion of
married women among the persons who underwent abortions went down
by nearly half between the second half of the 1970s and the mid-1990s,
a change that cannot be attributed to an increase in abortions among
younger women (under 20), for the distribution of abortions by age
remained more or less stable during that period, with the peak coming
between ages 20 and 30. We may also suppose that the increase during
the 1990s in the proportion of persons who underwent several abortions
(more than 20 per cent, that is, almost twice as many as in the 1980s) is
not unrelated to the bumpy paths that involve a succession of commitments and disappointments.
The estimated number of abortions in France remained above 200,000
during the last twenty years, going down from 262,000 in 1980 to 220,000
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in 1996, that is, 32.7 abortions for every 100 live births in 1980 as opposed
to 30.0 in 1996 (the last year for which fairly complete statistics have been
published by the Institut national d’études démographiques [INED: National
Institute of Demographic Studies]). While the overall abortion rate has gone
down slightly, the proportion of women who have undergone more than two
(declared) abortions is on the rise (from 3 per cent in 1980 to 9 per cent in
1990, 11 per cent in 1997). The rate of abortion per 1,000 women, which
was 179.9 for 19-year-olds, reached its maximum with 20- to 24-year-olds,
then went down (170.3 for 25- to 29-year-olds). It is weak at the younger ages
(34.6 per 1,000 for women below age 18) and after age 40 (47.9 per 1,000
for women between 40 and 44). The maintenance of a significant number of
abortions thus cannot be attributed primarily, it seems, either to a lack of
protection during early sexual relations or to a concern for limiting births at
advanced ages.15 The abortions reported in 1996 were first abortions in 74 per
cent of the cases, and in 38 per cent of the cases they occurred after at least one
live birth. Finally, the women who had abortions that year were married and
living with their spouses in 26 per cent of the cases; 58 per cent were single
women (of whom 24 per cent were living with a partner); the remainder were
split among divorcées, widows and women separated from their spouses (9
per cent). (The family situation of the woman was unknown in 7 per cent of
the cases.) The proportion of married, non-separated women having abortions
has diminished regularly, going from 55 per cent in 1976 to 45 per cent in
1994, 36 per cent in 1989, 30 per cent in 1993 and 25 per cent in 1997.
As this schematic picture suggests, the imperious requirement to have a
sexual life, that is, to have a normal life, does not lead to ‘free love’ or promiscuity but to the search for a stable bond for a certain period of time. As in
the case of professional life, but probably even more intensely, the fear of
solitude – defined by exclusion from all bonds – is predominant here. This
is why the moment of passage from one relationship to another constitutes
an ordeal that is as agonizing (but also, of course, as exciting) and as central
as is, in the context of professional life, the passage from one project to
another – with the aggravating difference that the passage of time, which
can be associated in one’s professional life, in the best case, with an increase
in competence and thus can have a positive value, is experienced instead, in
the context of the emotional trajectory, as a threat: ageing in fact goes hand
in hand with increased chances of finding oneself shunted to the margins
of the networks of access to intimacy with others. Women who have had
no children and realize belatedly that they would like to start a family find
themselves with reduced chances of fulfilling that wish.
The parental project in the context of the project polity
Commitment to what I have called the parental project must be understood, then, in relation to the constraints of a connectionist world. In such
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a context, the fact of bringing a child into the world cannot be justified
with reference to a demand for continuation of the family or household
lineage and for the transmission of patrimony, as is the case in a world
where the arrangements of the domestic polity are solidly implanted and
based on kinship. It cannot be justified, either, as it is in the framework
of a compromise between the civic polity and the industrial polity, with
reference to the citizen’s debt to the nation-state, nor can it be justified by
the meritocratic hope of advancement spaced out over several generations
(the parents accepting sacrifices so that their children will reach a higher
educational and social level than their own), which presupposes the existence of structured and quasi-institutionalized social itineraries.16 These
latter types of justifications (which were the principal underpinnings of
the notion of ‘reproductive strategy’ that aimed to integrate the fabrication of human beings into a sociology centred on a logic of interests) are
replaced, in a connectionist world, by the search for a commitment to a
more robust project, longer and more difficult to undo than the affective or professional projects in which individuals might have previously
participated.
The parental project thus turns out to be a rampart against fragmentation, and constitutes one possible path in the search for a more ‘authentic’
life. In this context, authenticity is no longer conceived, as it was in older
philosophies of life, as the movement through which an autonomous consciousness pulled away from the viscosity of constraints that were imposed,
as it were, from the outside (the opinions of others, ‘norms’, gossip, pressure to be serious, and so on); on the contrary, it is conceived as a way of
binding oneself to a necessity that will impose itself henceforth and that one
will no longer be in a position to reject as opportunities and short-term projects come along.17 It is as if, in a world where heavy emphasis is placed on
autonomy and choice, commitment to a state of being, ideally as lasting as
life itself, and associated with necessities that impose themselves forcefully,
constitutes the refuge of an ‘authentic life’ because it relieves people of the
obligation to make choices at every turn.
Nevertheless, if this necessity is to be valid, it must be capable of standing in the way of the multiplicity of opportunistic choices; it must itself be
the result of engagement in a project. It has to present itself as both desired
and imposed, so as to forge a compromise between the new definition of
authenticity and the earlier ones. The ‘gratuitous’, ‘uncalculated’ choice of
an event or a change of ‘incalculable’ dimensions is thus contrasted with
ordinary, transitory, ephemeral, self-interested choices that, even when
they do not translate immediately into monetary terms and even when
they bear upon relations with others and not on things, remain so close
to what constitutes the choice par excellence, in our societies – that is, the
consumerist choice – that they always risk being assimilated to it and being
denounced as impersonal, calculated, standardized, factitious – that is, as
inauthentic.
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The unofficial aspects of engendering through a project
The arrangement whose broad outlines I have just sketched is supposed
– on the same grounds as those I identified in the previous chapter, but
with greater assurance – to leave no remainder. In principle, the way the
relation between sexual intercourse and engendering is organized permits
an effective dissociation based on reliable contraceptive techniques. This
dissociation, at least in principle, opens up access to unconstrained sexual
activity. Associated with the existence of an agency of preconfirmation
based on the parental project, its result ought to be that only beings apt to
be confirmed by speech come to be inscribed in flesh.
More than thirty years after its legalization by the Neuwirth law of 1967,
contraception has become widespread in France. It is expressed chiefly in the
use of the pill; sterilization is less common in France, where 5 to 6 per cent
of couples of childbearing age are sterilized, than in many other countries
(Brazil or Canada, for example). More than two French women out of three
between 20 and 40 years of age (69 per cent) use a contraceptive method (the
remainder are mainly women who are sterile, without a partner, pregnant or
trying to become pregnant; it seems that only 3 per cent of women fall into
none of these categories). The pill is by far the leading method of contraception, with 36 per cent of users. The proportion of pill users is highest among
women between the ages of 20 and 24; after that it decreases regularly with
age. IUDs come in second place, with 16 per cent of users; here most are
in the 35–44 age bracket. The other methods are used much less widely
(condoms, 5 per cent; abstinence, 4 per cent; withdrawal, the traditional
method until the 1960s, is now reported by only 2 per cent of couples). For
every 100 women aged 20–49 who practise contraception, 56 take the pill,
25 use IUDs and 19 use another method. Around age 30, 90 per cent of
women have already used the pill at one point or another. On average, each
user relies on the pill for ten years or so. For about half of these, the IUD
then takes over. Its rate of use overtakes that of the pill before age 40. The
average length of use of IUDs is nearly fifteen years, which thus exceeds the
average noted for oral contraception. Condoms, whose use increased with
the AIDS epidemic, are often used in combination with another contraceptive
method.18
It should be noted that, where contraception is concerned, the differences between social categories are not very pronounced. In France today,
we observe almost no differences in rates of pill use according to socioprofessional category, educational level, place of residence, or even the
importance attached to religion (but the IUD is used less often in workingclass or farming environments, by women with little education, and by women
who report that religion is important).19
If we add up the proportions of pill users and IUD users, we note that
France is probably one of the countries in the world where drug-based contraception is the most widespread.
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In the parental project type of understanding, infanticide, abandonment, consignment to a wet-nurse, and negligence towards newborns have
no reason to occur and indeed have become rare. They are also probably
more difficult to hide; prospective witnesses are less and less inclined to
close their eyes to these misdeeds, and, when the practices are attested, they
arouse much stronger repugnance and indignation than was the case when
the other forms of understandings were dominant. Correlatively, the child,
from birth and even, with the development of perinatal medicine, while still
in its mother’s womb, receives a level of consideration that, even if the idea
of a weak attachment to children in traditional society is being questioned
today,20 has probably never been higher. A host of books, documentary
films and newspaper articles devoted to disseminating recent contributions
from the field of psychology have popularized the idea that ‘there is no
longer any doubt about it: a baby is a person’.21 In the framework of this
understanding, children thus constitute the supreme value, priceless and
without equivalent (a value superior even to that of works of art, whose
quasi-sacred character today has often been noted); there is no object to
which it would be acceptable to subordinate or sacrifice this value.22
In the context of this understanding, however, there is one practice,
abortion, whose position between the official and the unofficial realms
is ambiguous. Abortion does belong to the official dimensions of this
understanding, since it is legalized and organized within the framework
of the medical institution. Nevertheless, I shall explore the idea according
to which abortion, in the margins of its official recognition, bears the full
weight of what, in the context of this understanding, arises from failure,
the unrepresentable, the unofficial, so that its structure is formally similar
to that of the understandings evoked earlier. Abortion plays an unofficial
role in engendering through a parental project in at least two different
ways.
First, it falls to abortion to compensate for the failures of this new
understanding, that is, to do away with the beings who have come in the
flesh but who, in the absence of a project, cannot be confirmed by speech.
But, second, as we shall see, far from being accomplished in broad daylight,
this task is an operation confined to specialized arenas and carried out discreetly; those who undergo it do not talk about it, except to a quite limited
number of persons (usually just one or two) to whom they are close.23 The
difficulties encountered by sociologists seeking to carry out interviews on
this theme are testimony in themselves to this discretion. In addition, while
the operation itself has been legalized and, consequently, represented in
law, it has succeeded in becoming normal only at the price of an ontological
manipulation of the foetus, as if to sweep away all traces of what abortion
causes to disappear (I shall develop this point in the next chapter). Abortion
is really inscribed in the ordinary course of events only provided that it is
the abortion of nothing. Abortion, which was more or less hidden in the
understandings I evoked earlier, has come to the surface. But now it is the
foetus that has to disappear.
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From ‘failures of contraception’ to failed engendering
The main role allotted to abortion in this understanding is to ensure the
completion of the arrangement by taking care of failures of contraception.
Abortion finds its place precisely to the extent that contraception, which has
taken on the function of dissociating sexual intercourse from engendering
and of ensuring that the only beings that come in the flesh are those apt to
receive the confirmation of a project, depends on techniques that, however
reliable they may be, do not totally exclude the possibility of a misfire. This
type of understanding thus draws abortion towards contraception; while,
ideally, the two ought to be able to merge completely, in fact abortion is
also assigned the marginal role of last resort.
In this context, the question of the number of abortions practised and
their causes is important for the actors who exercise authority in the
biopolitical domain; these actors are led to wonder whether abortion is
doing a good job in the role it has been given to play. Although no one can
say what a ‘normal’ abortion rate should be, or precisely what the right
‘causes’ ought to be, there does seem to be an implicit norm with respect
to which estimates are made, generally by state institutions of demography
or health, as to the more or less satisfactory character of the social policies
implemented in the realm of human reproduction. However, ‘legislators’
desires to see modern contraception imposed as the only technique for
regulating births have not been realized’ (Bajos 2002, 4).24 The average
annual number of abortions is thought to have been stable from 197625 to
1980, then to have gone down slightly from 1981 to 1988; since then it has
remained steady at about 220,000 per year, that is, an annual rate of about
15 for every 1,000 women. We have seen that most women of childbearing
age use contraception, and the proportion of women who declare that they
do not want children but who use no method of contraception is very small
(2.6 per cent). However, despite the reliability of the most common contraceptive methods (the pill or the IUD), the number of pregnancies about
which people declare, in response to demographic inquiries, that they were
‘unplanned’ remains relatively high. Finally, for every hundred unplanned
pregnancies, a third, according to the declarations of interviewees, resulted
from ‘failures of contraception’.26 The ‘failure of contraception’ category,
which in reports by our interviewees associates very different types of
events, has a fuzzy character: the number of ‘failures’ is surely overestimated, at least if this term is meant to designate mechanical failures (the
doctors in charge of abortion clinics whom we interviewed tended to reduce
this figure, convinced that a very small number of ‘unplanned pregnancies’
were actually attributable to ‘failure of contraception’ in the technical sense
of the term; the paradigmatic explanation, which recurred in numerous
interviews that we conducted in a hospital setting, is that ‘the condom
broke’). At all events, we can speculate about the circumstances in which
the other two-thirds of the declared ‘unplanned pregnancies’ came about.27
The circumstances of the recourse to abortion, as they can be constituted
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on the basis of our interviews or observations in hospital clinics, corroborate the results of the major studies conducted under the auspices of
INSERM (National Institute for Health and Medical Research) by Nathalie
Bajos, Michèle Ferrand and the GINÉ team, notably when an author
remarks that ‘in France, abortion does not compensate for an absence of
contraceptive practice’ (Bachelot 2002, 79). If we set aside the cases of
abortions following the initial instance of sexual intercourse, which for 12
per cent of young women occur without contraception28 and for which the
abortion rate seems to have gone up slightly (from 6 per cent to 7 per cent
for 15- to 20-year-olds between 1990 and 1997) but which nevertheless
remains among the lowest recorded in Europe (ibid., 3–4), a number of
abortions seem to follow what can be summed up as ‘failures of engendering’ rather than ‘failures of contraception’ in the sense of mechanical
failure.
Two dimensions seem especially pertinent here. The first entails the
subjective states that accompany the onset of pregnancy and then the decision to abort. These states are not easy to characterize in terms of a binary
opposition; one cannot say unequivocally of women in these situations
either that they have really ‘done everything they could’ to avoid creating
a child (since they did not actually take adequate protective measures to
keep this from happening) or that they sought deliberately to get pregnant
(by discontinuing all contraceptives). These situations are thus marked by
‘ambivalence’; pregnancy and abortion can both appear either as ‘misfires’
or as successful actions (Bachelot 2002, 100). A contraceptive act, although
in principle intended, ‘misfires’ if pregnancy occurs. But abortion in turn
‘annuls’ the act that consists in treating contraception negligently, as if to
leave open the possibility of a pregnancy that can be interrupted. We may
wonder, as Annie Bachelot does, about the nature of the ‘desire’ that is
manifested here, and distinguish the ‘desire to be pregnant’ from the ‘desire
for a child’ (ibid., 109–15). The former, especially obvious in women who
have been protected by an effective contraceptive method for years (for
example, a 25-year-old woman who has been taking the pill since she was
15), would express anguish about loss of fertility. Getting pregnant would
be a way for these women to reassure themselves by testing their capacity
to engender. But this ‘desire’ would conflict with conditions that incite a
woman not to involve the being that has come to implant itself in her flesh
in a ‘parental project’.29 She may associate these conditions with other
projects with which the arrival of a child would interfere, such as pursuing
her studies or committing herself to a professional project requiring a high
degree of availability (I shall return to this tension when I deal with the
experience of abortion).
A young woman about 25 years old declared during a counselling interview: ‘I stopped taking the pill, which I’d been taking for eight years, and I
was afraid of being sterile because of it, so I stopped so I could have a child.
Basically, I wanted a child, but I saw that I wasn’t ready. I didn’t think it
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would work right away, and I don’t think it’s good to get pregnant right after
quitting the pill.’ A student, age 19, explained, similarly: ‘I only had my period
from when I was 11 to when I was 13. I didn’t think I was fertile, and I was
happy even though I knew we couldn’t keep it.’ Her companion added: ‘Yes,
and she wanted to have periods that weren’t controlled by the pill.’ (Paris
hospital)
The second dimension that seems to intervene quite often in failures
of engendering has to do with the parental project itself, the project that
constitutes in the framework of this understanding, as we have seen, the
agency of preconfirmation for the child to be born. Moreover, taking this
project into account makes it possible to shed additional light on the ‘misfires’ I have just evoked. What turns out to be ‘missing’ in the series of acts
leading to abortion is first of all the possibility – sometimes excluded at the
outset, sometimes set aside as soon as the pregnancy is known and sometimes maintained in suspension for a time – of confirmation of the being
implanted in the flesh with reference to a parental project.
For the logic of the project to be implemented, in the sense this term has
in the architecture of the ‘project polity’, it has to be possible for the project
to result from an encounter; consequently, its formation has to involve
two or more individuals in relation to whom it will come to occupy the
overarching position that signifies its supra-individual character, since each
individual engaged in this arrangement, who would not be involved except
by his or her own will, is still subjected to its constraint, as if the will to act
were being imposed from the outside. In the case of the parental project,
given that supra-individual beings (such as the Creator or the state) have
been shunted aside, and that reference to the kinship group as an entity
irreducible to the individual persons who make up the ‘family’ has been
more or less abandoned, this commitment concerns first and foremost the
two progenitors.
The misfire whose outcome is abortion will thus be presented most
often, in the framework of this understanding, as associated with an act of
engendering (through flesh) from which the logic of the project is excluded
from the outset (and that will be constituted in the register of accidents
attributed to chance circumstances and often associated with a mechanical
failure of the means of contraception, thus as external to will), or else as
associated with a project, but with a clearly marked distinction between the
current unrealizable project and a deferred project that will give it body in
the future (which presupposes an agreement on the deferred commitment).
Alternatively, and this is the most frequent case, the misfire will be attributed to a project that has aborted, as it were, because the convergence of the
intentional aims – necessary for the project to be endowed with a substance
that is both autonomous and durable – could not be achieved.
Under different modalities, it was indeed the absence of a parental project
(often designated as a matter of economic precariousness or instability: ‘we
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aren’t a stable couple’) that was most often invoked during counselling
interviews to explain why the pregnancy could not be continued, not only for
material reasons but also for reasons of a moral order, as if a child conceived
under the prevailing conditions could not attain completeness: ‘We’ve been
friends for eight months, the relationship hasn’t been worked out, it’s not
stable. We want to have a child together, but not now. We’re making the
least bad decision, it’s not the best, because we really do want a baby. We
don’t know what to say because we’re not a stable couple’ (age 34, social
worker); ‘I already have a 2½-year-old daughter, and he has a 7-year-old
girl, and we really don’t want to have any more children; we’ve known each
other four months’ (age 30, a saleswoman); ‘I haven’t been with my partner
very long and I’m not in a good position to keep it; my relationship is too
recent and I broke off a six-year-old relationship with a man four months
ago’; ‘Me, I’d like to have children, but first we have to have a good understanding. I’m not going to bring a child into the world on my own, just to
please myself’ (age 28, flight attendant); ‘The father I got pregnant with isn’t
very steady, I didn’t want him, there wasn’t any love there at all. It’s hard,
because I don’t want to do it, have this abortion, but the way things are it
can’t be helped; it’s very hard for me’ (age 20, student); ‘I’ve never wanted
to have a child; it’ll happen only when everything falls into place; this time,
it’s a mistake, forgetting a condom; no, we haven’t been together long; we’re
not really in love, we’re really just friends’ (age 23, student); ‘It’s a way for
me to have no more contact, because every time I see that child I’ll think of
him. He’s telling me not to tell anyone that he’s the father . . . he’s asking me
not to keep it . . . I understand that he has money problems, but he hasn’t
been honest or open. Frankly, he disgusts me. If I agree to get rid of it, it’s
so I won’t have to keep any connection with him’ (age 38, an asylum-seeker,
interviewed in a provincial hospital); ‘When my son was 18 months old, I
was expecting another child, but my husband didn’t want it and he said: “If
you keep it I’ll leave”’ (age 35, nurse); ‘He told me: “It’s not my problem,
you do what you want, in any case I’m not going to recognize it” . . . We
were getting along well, for my part, I was ready to commit for life’ (age
27, unemployed); ‘I live with my parents and they don’t know. And then
anorexia, depression, with all the pills I’m taking, it’s as though the baby
had lived through all that; I prefer to wait’ (age 20, cashier; interviewed in a
Paris hospital).
The failure of the project can be attributed to a refusal of commitment
either on the part of the male progenitor or on the woman’s part. But we
shall see that, when the refusal to commit is on the woman’s side, the
woman almost always justifies it (at least in the context of our interviews,
which involved only women) not only by invoking material difficulties
(no job or income) or the fact that a birth would condemn other projects
(studies, professional plans and so on) to failure, but also with reference
to some inadequacy on the part of the male progenitor who, for various
reasons but especially owing to his ‘immaturity’, is seen as failing to satisfy
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the conditions of access to paternity. Generally speaking, in these cases,
the ultimate justification refers to the unhappiness of the being that would
have been born if abortion had not interrupted its development, an unhappiness from which abortion had thus preserved it. A woman who has not
been a mother invokes her reluctance to bring a ‘fatherless’ child into the
world, which must be understood as the expression of her conviction that
one cannot fully conceive a child outside of the logic of the parental project
(doing so would constitute a ‘grammatical error’, to use Cyril Lemieux’s
terms [2000]). Still, in fairly rare cases this possibility is evoked. The person
being questioned expresses it by speaking of ‘producing a child for oneself ’.
But this eventuality is presented as a last resort, in the face of the evasiveness
of men who are incapable of committing to the project of having a child,
and it is expressed in a mode of quasi-protest regarding a transgression
assumed as such.
Anna is 65 years old, a retired language professor. She had an abortion
when she was 25, under very difficult conditions, at a time when abortion was
still a dangerous clandestine act. She belongs to the generation that militated
for the legalization of abortion and she participated quite actively in that
movement. She had lived through a period in which the understanding with
kinship was still too present to allow for the possibility of raising a child on
one’s own, mainly for reasons of propriety; later, following the sexual liberation of the 1970s, that possibility was presented as part of the normal order
of things; finally, in the contemporary period, with the establishment of a new
understanding centred on the parental project, she saw that possibility once
again largely rejected. Anna had never had a child, and she suffered from this.
She very much regretted that she did not keep the child with which she had
been pregnant in her youth and raise the child on her own. (The man involved
was married and did not want to assume his paternity.) This is how she saw
things, in retrospect: ‘At the time, [abortion] was the only possibility. I think
that, ten years later . . . I had friends, two friends, who wanted children when
they were 40 and wanted to have them on their own. I was violently opposed.
I was convinced that it just wasn’t possible to bring up a child alone, on
purpose, and in both cases, now, I see that I was mistaken . . . It was a real
success as an adventure, as motherhood, too. Ten years later, I might have
kept a child under those conditions. But back then I didn’t feel capable of
telling a child that I had produced it without a father, with a biological father
but not a social father.’
One woman we met in a hospital in the context of a counselling interview
the day she came in for an abortion did in the end choose to keep her child and
rear it alone: ‘I discovered my pregnancy, I had a moment of panic, a shock.
. . . I made an appointment here, because I didn’t want to keep it, and then
I had time to think everything over and I changed my mind, but I wanted to
come here anyway. I’m going to be a single mother, and it’s a big responsibility’ (age 39, biologist; interviewed in a Paris hospital).
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Accidental pregnancy in the absence of a project
In our interviews, pregnancies attributed to ‘accidental’ circumstances after
‘one-time’ sexual encounters and terminated by abortion occurred during
adolescence. When they were reported by women who had had subsequent
abortions, the first one was described as less ‘difficult’ or less ‘painful’. The
reason seems to be that, in the initial case, the pregnancy happened before
there had been time to work out any sort of project. No expectations, not
even tacit ones, had been invested, at least not concerning the possibility
of having a child with the progenitor. The boy, usually about the same
age, was almost a stranger. The possibility of keeping the child was not
envisaged ‘seriously’ (although, as we shall see in chapter 7, pregnancy
can still be very troubling emotionally) and abortion seemed to impose
itself without discussion. Sometimes the boy was informed, sometimes not.
Sometimes he accompanied the girl through this ordeal, and sometimes he
stayed away. In either case, he was almost absent from the narrative, as if
he didn’t count, as if he were a non-adult, a quasi-‘child’ himself on whom
it would be absurd to rely.
To the question, during the social interview, ‘Why didn’t your friend come
with you?’, a young woman, age 24, a biologist, responded: ‘It doesn’t interest him; it’ll be a child without a father.’ Another student declared, under the
same conditions: ‘He has nothing to say . . . at one point, I wanted to keep it,
and he pushed me to have an abortion, and that upset me.’ To the question,
‘Do you plan to talk to him about it?’ a journalist, age 27, replied: ‘No, definitely not, I don’t see the point; I don’t feel the need, it’s my business . . . for
him it doesn’t change anything, he’ll wake up tomorrow and it won’t change
anything.’ (Paris hospital)
Deliberate stress is placed on the opposition between ‘adults’ and ‘notyet-adults’ who have to face a problem that is too much for them. The
support of an ‘adult’ is sought. The pregnancy is treated as a ‘stupid mistake’
of adolescence, an ‘accident’, a ‘problem’ handled by ‘adults’ who ‘get rid
of it for you’. If the adolescent maintains a ‘trusting relationship’ (or a
relationship of subordination) with her mother and dares to talk to her (or
feels she has to talk to her), abortion is handled by the latter, who makes
the necessary arrangements and accompanies her pregnant daughter to the
hospital, when she doesn’t decide on abortion herself, on her own authority
and sometimes in an ‘authoritarian’ fashion.30 The establishment of such a
‘connivance’ (which can exclude the father and which sometimes includes an
element of constraint) presupposes on the part of both mother and daughter
a shared adherence to the norms of engendering through a project. Often, on
such occasions, the mother reveals to her daughter that she herself had once
had an abortion.31 The situation is obviously different, and more difficult,
when mother and daughter are immersed in different cultural environments
(notably in the case of girls from North Africa or sub-Saharan Africa).32
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Chloé was 22, a student. She had had two abortions, the first at age 15, the
second at 20. She told us about her first abortion: ‘I was 15 and I got pregnant
the first time I made love with my boyfriend. But it wasn’t hard because my
mother took charge of everything. I told her and she did what had to be done.
She checked me into the hospital, with her own gynaecologist whom she knew
really well, and so I didn’t think about it at all, and it wasn’t really a difficult
experience, because I was 15, so the doctor didn’t really question me. He
didn’t say: “You’re sure you’ve really thought about this?” and all that. There
weren’t any other choices. So . . . Also, I had a general anaesthetic. So you go
in and you come out. I didn’t experience it as a baby. I didn’t think about it.
And anyway I was too young.’ (Later, when she was 18, her mother told her
that she herself had once had an abortion.)
When the mother replaces the boy who was the source of the ‘problem’
as the principal partner in the ordeal, the possibility of a commitment, even
a reluctant one, to the pregnancy that is under way is inhibited. One cannot
be pregnant via the body of another woman, one’s own progenitor. The
problem is clearly evident in cases in which the mother proposes to bring
up the child herself, or at least to participate actively in the process, that
is, to substitute herself for the absent father, which triggers a reaction of
rejection. In fact, such a situation would either be equivalent to restoring
the power of preconfirmation to the kinship group, by placing the pregnant
girl’s mother in the position of principal agent of filiation, or, in the logic
of the parental project, it would be equivalent to setting up a transgressive
project in which the two main partners would be not a man and a woman,
previously strangers to one another and brought together by an encounter,
but a mother and her daughter, the first in a position of power with respect
to the child to be born, usurping the place of the potential father (and parodying, in her behaviour, the model of masculine domination), the second in
a dominated position evoking the most traditional modalities of femininity,
a situation that today seems to be interpreted as a new form of virtually
incestuous relations.33
Florence was 26. She was studying dance and working evenings in a restaurant to earn her living. She had her first abortion when she was 20. She
got pregnant by the boy she’d been with for two years. She was living with
her mother at the time. The boy was a musician and he too still lived with his
parents. Florence described him as ‘not very mature’. The boy told Florence:
‘It’s your heart, it’s your body; you decide.’ Florence replied: ‘No, it’s my
body, but it’s our child, so we need to decide together.’ Then he said: ‘OK,
but for me it’s really up to you to decide.’ ‘So’, Florence said, ‘I told myself: if
that’s the way you think, I can’t do it; if you’re not with me deciding to keep
it, if it’s not our child, I don’t want it, because I don’t want to have a child all
by myself.’ At that point, Florence’s mother broke in: ‘You can have the child,
I’ll change everything in the house, you can stay with Pedro in my room, we’ll
tear down a wall, that way we’ll have a big house and you’ll have your side,
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I’ll have mine.’ ‘My mother never went against me, she was always on my side,
she was my best friend, I can say that, but this time . . . she said: “Florence,
you’re going against your nature”, because normally I wouldn’t have had an
abortion. So I told her: “Mum, I’ve made the decision.” . . . I said: “My dream
is to leave, to go to Paris to dance”; she said: “You can leave it with me”; I
said: “I don’t want to leave my child, it’s mine.” And that’s how it was: it
was clear that I wanted a father for my child, a family, I didn’t want to have a
child like that, I knew that I could count on her, but I didn’t want it to be like
that, so I decided to have an abortion. But I wanted it . . . I waited one more
month, with the sensation of being pregnant, I wanted it, I’ve been crazy about
children all my life.’
Another type of case seems to exclude the possibility of a parental project
from the outset. This is a situation – a rare one in our interviews, moreover
– in which a pregnancy occurs while the woman is involved in concurrent
sexual relations with several men, so that she is uncertain about the identity of the progenitor. Although such situations seem to arise not so much
during adolescence as later in the course of emotional and sexual life, most
often in periods of transition between two emotional projects, they have in
common with the ones I have already evoked the fact that they do not bring
together beings between whom a project might take shape. In fact, contrary
to certain libertarian utopias oriented towards critiquing the ‘traditional
family’ that have marked the transition between the understanding involving a kinship group and the understanding involving a project, it seems that
the parental project can only be recognized as valid, according to its own
logic, if it remains linked to reproduction in the biological sense and thus
involves only two persons. In cases in which two progenitors can make rival
claims, the project of having a child can thus take shape only if one of the
two backs out so as to allow the other to assume his ‘biological paternity’
(even if the latter is not the one who will actually take responsibility for
bringing up the child to be born). A clear case of this sort is the one in
which sterility on the man’s part leads a couple to use a sperm donor whose
identity will not be revealed and who, once the donation has been made,
will renounce all claims on the child to be born.
It was because Florence didn’t know who would have been the father of her
child, if the child had come into the world, that she had a second abortion, a
few years after the episode related above. Some time after her first abortion,
she met a slightly older man, a photographer, married but separated from
his wife, who lived only part of the time in Paris; with him she experienced
‘a really intense episode’. He said he wanted to have a child with her. Then
their relationship deteriorated; he left Paris, and she remained alone. She then
met, in the restaurant where she worked the evening shift, ‘someone who
was married and was expecting the birth of his child a week later; he hadn’t
touched his partner for seven months, and my boyfriend hadn’t touched me
for seven months’. After first refusing to make love with him, she consented,
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and saw him twice in two weeks. At that point, her boyfriend came back.
‘We fell in love again. We made love together once without a condom, twice,
we spent two days together, and the third day we had a fight, but a bad one,
really serious, horrible, I still feel horrible, and in fact it had a strange side.
Gilles was arguing with me all the time, and the other fellow, the one who was
married, called me, I don’t know if he felt something or if he just called me out
of the blue, but it was right after Gilles had hurt me, and I had him come over
and we made love, it was three days later, with a condom that broke. The next
day I took a morning-after pill.’ ‘But’, Florence added, ‘he did touch me, so
I’m in this situation now: is this child my married lover’s or is it my boyfriend
Gilles’? So I still have this doubt. That’s why it’s horrible, because I don’t
know who it is.’ The ‘morning-after pill’ turned out not to work. Florence
hesitated, but finally had an abortion, because she didn’t know ‘whose it was’.
She went back to being single again.
Joelle, now 40, a nurse, found herself in a similar situation when she was
20. She immediately decided to have an abortion: ‘I didn’t raise the question of
keeping it, because already . . . because of the conditions I was in at that time. I
had had relations with two boys, I didn’t know which one it was. Neither one
was serious. There’d been just one time with each one, so, I mean, it wasn’t
as if I were in the middle of a relationship with somebody. So I didn’t have to
ask the question: would the person want this or not? There’s one I never saw
again, and another that I did see again, but it was an accident, and I might
even have to say I asked for it, the guy had had a lot to drink, he didn’t seem
to know what he was doing . . . With both of them, it was a one-time thing,
and since they were just a few days apart I had no way of knowing and so,
you can’t imagine having a child by someone when you don’t even know who
the father is . . . And here, in this case, it would have been without a father
because I didn’t have a plan with either one, neither would have been fit to be
the father and besides, it’s just not possible to say to one’s child: “I don’t know
who . . . ”.’
Abortion as the instrument of a deferred project
A second type of case concerns adolescent couples who are already in a
long-term relationship and think they will ‘stay together’ (and with several
of the women in our interviews this actually happened). The pregnancy
that occurs is also treated as ‘accidental’. The ‘decision’ to have an abortion
seems to impose itself unproblematically and by ‘common consent’. In this
case, the pregnancy may be the opportunity for making a plan, setting up
the ‘project of having a child’, but the project does not take a conflictual
form. It is constituted as compatible with the abortion, because it is deferred
to a future date. What is developing in the woman’s body, then, is treated
as replaceable. The being to be aborted this time will be ‘replaced’ later on
by a real child, who for its part will be brought into the world. (As we shall
see in chapter 7, the replacement rationale does not rule out the possibility
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that the one eliminated by abortion may leave a lasting and sometimes troubling, or, as it were, phantom-like, trace in reproductive memory.) When
this possibility is realized, the woman telling the story sometimes speaks of
the child who was actually conceived some years later in terms that suggest
a quasi-reincarnation, as if the being she had aborted had come into existence later, in the child she kept. In cases of this sort, the couple holds up
under the ordeal of abortion. The woman speaks of her pregnancy to no
one but her ‘boyfriend’, so that no one else will be in a position to remind
her of the ephemeral existence of the being she aborted. It is necessary to
minimize the presence of that being so it can find itself reincorporated in the
one that will replace it.
Violaine was 42. She was a tradeswoman who worked in street markets.
She had two children aged 15 and 16, and lived (‘in concubinage’, as she put
it) with the man who was the father of her children; they had met when they
were both adolescents. This man, several years older than she, was already her
partner when, at 17, she found herself pregnant (‘I started to take the pill at
16, but I must have screwed up’) and she finally decided to have an abortion.
Her partner was doing his military service and left her ‘free to choose’. As
Violaine told her story, she stressed the need, in a situation like the one she
had been through, to ‘think it over’ and to act in a ‘reasonable’ and ‘responsible’ way: ‘Still, I had to think it through fast and be really sure of what I was
doing, because it can have psychological repercussions afterward. I really had
to accept my decision, either way, and what’s more I had only two choices. I
had thought about it, I was 17 years old. I told myself: ‘Girl . . . 17 years old,
with a little one in your arms, you’re not sure you’ll be staying with the man
you’re with right now, so you may find yourself all alone with the child, it’ll
be all over with your studies, too, I mean with my life . . . For me, it was too
early; in my head, it was too early, it wasn’t the right time. Especially because
it’s a responsibility, even at that age I knew that it’s for life, isn’t it, the responsibility for a child. Having a child isn’t all there is to it; afterward you have to
bring it up, for how many years . . . I was thinking ahead. Anyway I had to
think. Finally, my choice was made, I asked myself . . . “How are you going
to react?”, and so I took the positive approach, I said: “It’s not possible, so
that’s that.”’ The beginning of the pregnancy and the abortion itself seemingly
passed without leaving many memory traces: ‘It’s like a haemorrhage, that’s
all. I was a little tired, but I got over it quickly, because I had agreed to do
it, too. It was my choice, and it’s true that when you’re ready . . . Afterward,
I forced myself to tell myself, in my mind: “I made the right choice, I made
the right choice, and that’s that.”’ Violaine went on to talk about the birth of
her children: ‘I wasn’t ready. And in fact, anyway, I had my first child when I
was 26. After the abortion, I waited . . . That time too, it was the same thing,
I thought it over also. It didn’t just happen. I said to myself: “OK, I’m 26,
I know that after 30 it’s harder to have children, for a woman, physically,
already I’m thin, small, so it’s not easy.” I thought some more: “You want
children, you don’t want children?” I didn’t have children just like that, I
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mean all of a sudden you just let it happen, you tell yourself: you’ll have a
child when there’s a child coming. It’s a responsibility after all, a child. You
have to take care of it, it doesn’t bring itself up on its own, so it takes a lot of
time, which means that you don’t have much time for yourself because you
put the child first, in principle, finally, in principle . . . I put it first, especially
the earliest moments of life, all that, they need it, even now, still. And so I
had my first one, my daughter, and then since it went very well, a very good
delivery, no problems, no contractions, no water breaking, that happened
on the table, nothing . . . I had my second one soon, they’re a year apart, the
second, the same thing, it went very well. If it hadn’t been for work – because,
OK, I had a hard job, I worked six days out of seven, I put in lots of hours in
my work, and besides it’s physical work, I worked the markets, so it was very
hard physically, but if I hadn’t had to work I would have had three, four, one
after another. Just to have a family, for them too, to be a big family, yes . . .
But it’s true that I’ve sometimes thought about the abortion I had when I was
17, I tell myself now that he would have been 25 years old.’ Violaine spoke of
that abortion only to her ‘boyfriend’ and to a girlfriend. She didn’t talk about
it with her mother. She didn’t want anybody to be able to talk to her about it
later: ‘Because afterward that can bring frustrations. If I told my mother, she
could say: “But why didn’t you talk to me about it?” This can’t do me any
good. It’s over. You can’t go back on it, to try to feel bad about it. No, no, I’ve
really dealt with it. No, no, very well.’
The project thwarted
The cases of abortion that came up most frequently in our interviews arose
not at the beginning of the woman’s love life or sex life but after these had
been well established, roughly from ages 20–5 to 35–40. A woman who has
an abortion at that stage has presumably known several more or less lasting
unions (from which she may have kept one or more children). At the time
she finds herself pregnant, she has been committed, often for quite a while,
to a new ‘relationship’, that is, a new emotional project whose duration is
left in suspense, even if it is accompanied (and this is far from always the
case) by cohabitation, so that whether the relationship will continue or be
broken off is a question treated as if it were wholly dependent not on a
contractual agreement but on the more or less satisfactory character of daily
interactions.
Abortion decisions in situations like these are radically distinct from
those that were undoubtedly the most frequent in the context of what I have
called the understanding with the kinship group. In that understanding, in
which the opposition between legitimacy and illegitimacy played a central
role, and in which contraception, not very reliable, relied essentially on the
good will (and the sexual competence) of the men, abortions punctuated the
lives of ‘stable’ couples, typically married with children. In this context, all
pregnancies were (officially) attributed to the husband. Abortion decisions
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were either made by common agreement between the man and the woman,
or – probably more often – left up to the wives by husbands accustomed to
‘closing their eyes’ and keeping their distance from the feminine dimensions
of life; the women were essentially put on notice that they were to ‘take care
of it’. Now, in the data we gathered both from counselling interviews and
in hospital settings, not only were officially ‘married’ couples fairly rare,
but so were couples presenting themselves as solidly established for the long
term, with one or more children. It was as if, in the latter case, contraception in effect played a preventive role with respect to abortion, as the earlier
advocates of legalized abortions, for whom this practice was supposed to
be gradually marginalized by the spread of methods and habits of ‘family
planning’, had anticipated and hoped. In contrast to the situation of couples
settled in together for the long term and in tacit agreement about what
could be called ‘sexual routines’, for couples in the early stage of a relationship contemplating the possibility of a shared future, the period following
the initial encounter may be favourable to a relaxation of contraceptive
controls. It seems, in fact, that in many cases pregnancy occurs neither
following a ‘failure of contraception’ properly speaking, nor because the
woman has opted, explicitly or not, with or without the consent of her
partner, to start a family, nor even because she finds herself carried away,
as it were, ‘without wanting to’, by the ‘desire for a child’, but because the
tonality taken on by the love relation, the trust, the ‘complicity’ between
the partners, their well-being, incites them to relax the controls that had
up to then permitted them to avoid pregnancy (this conforms to the model
established earlier by Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, according to which
‘fertility’ would be the result of a double negation, that is, not – a first
negation – doing everything necessary in order not – second negation – to
have a child [Bourdieu and Darbel 1966]).
This pattern is clearly apparent in Paulette’s story. At age 28, Paulette was
a student preparing her thesis, making money at ‘little jobs’ and sharing an
apartment with a friend after the failure of a marriage (she was going through
a divorce), when she met Georges. Three months later, she was pregnant: ‘We
were really attached to each other, we were together all the time. I’d never
had to worry about getting pregnant before, I’d always been very, very careful
to take my pill, to take my contraceptive correctly . . . And afterward, with
Georges, I brought condoms from the start, but as we went along he didn’t
want them, he wasn’t adjusting well to them, and I didn’t want to take the pill
because I’d taken it for a long time and for quite a while I’d stopped wanting to
take it . . . We ended up sometimes making love without a condom; we talked
about this a lot, because he really wasn’t adapting to the condom well at all.
So we also tried to work a little with the fertile periods, but at first we didn’t
calculate very well. And twice, he withdrew before.’ Paulette, who ‘felt that
this wasn’t the time’, and didn’t want to ‘get pregnant’, found that her period
was late: ‘I didn’t sleep all night, and at the same time it was crazy, because
something in me . . . because Georges and I were getting along extremely well.
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And it’s funny because a month before he’d said, one day, “I want to have
a baby with you”, and that touched me enormously . . . so, perhaps, unconsciously, I let things happen, I was less strict about contraception . . . When
you’re led by feelings, you say: “Yes, it doesn’t matter, you’ll use the condom
only for the dangerous days, and afterward you withdraw a little ahead of
time, and that’ll work.” But I didn’t want to have babies.’ Realizing that she
was pregnant, they spent ‘whole nights’ talking it over, not knowing whether
they were going to keep it or abort. Paulette thought that ‘the ideal would be
to have an abortion’, but she ‘didn’t have the courage’. Georges let her decide.
(They finally decided to keep the child, but Paulette miscarried.)
Still, this does not mean that couples engaged in the new types of temporally open-ended emotional and sexual projects are less capable of planning
ahead, as if this type of relation were particularly attractive to persons who
turn out at the same time to be least capable of forming stable relationships
and of ‘planning’ births, for reasons having to do with their personality
structure, or because they are not endowed, for example, with a ‘rational’
ethos in Max Weber’s sense. To be sure, pregnancy arrives without having
been ‘wanted’, in the sense that it has not been the object of a ‘decision’
made ‘in common’ by the two partners. Nevertheless, it happens, as if its
avoidance had not been sought with great determination, and what happens
next takes the form of an ordeal or test to which the couple is subjected and
that most often determines the outcome.
In the interviews we carried out, which registered only women’s
viewpoints on their abortion(s), the defaulting of the male progenitor in
situations like these, as we have already seen, was most often invoked as
the reason for the abortion. The father’s defection constituted the principal
justification for the decision. Several different types of cases arose.
In one typical situation, the person telling the story finds herself pregnant
while she is involved in a relationship that she describes, at least after the
fact, as not being destined to last. Her ‘boyfriend’ at the time is evoked in
rather uncharitable terms. Either owing to his character (‘immature’, ‘indecisive’ and so on) or owing to circumstances (for example, he is involved in
another relationship, or he is older, married and has not really broken with
his wife34), he is not apt to commit himself to the project of having a child.
Though the causal link is not made explicit in these accounts, the listener
has the feeling that the pregnancy is what has led the narrator to realize
that the relationship to which she had been committed had no future and
allowed her to bring it to an end.35 A woman who finds herself pregnant
under these circumstances either does not inform her ‘boyfriend’ or else she
tells him she is pregnant but without suggesting that she has any illusions
about his willingness to assume paternity or that she would want him to
do so, and she informs him at the same time that she will ‘not keep’ what
has implanted itself in her flesh. The relief that the ‘boyfriend’ manifests
when he finds out that the pregnancy will be terminated as soon as possible
is described as confirming the woman’s expectations, but at the same time
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there is some bitterness on her part, as if things might have gone differently; this suggests that at one point or another something like the project
of having a child with that man had indeed been envisaged by the woman
telling the story.
Leila spoke about the boy she was with when she found herself pregnant
again after a first abortion three months earlier: ‘I saw his behaviour change
as soon as he learned I was pregnant. He was really frightened. He completely
panicked. I saw how scared he was. He isn’t a really stable person, not very
brave, or motivated . . . He described a dream he had when I told him, where
he saw me pregnant up to my neck with a black dress and a white shirt over it.
It was ridiculous, because I never wear clothes like that. And what was really
funny, actually, was that when I found out, I called him up and I was crying, I
was crying on the phone, and I said: “I’m pregnant, can you come over so we
can talk about it?” Afterward, he told me that as he was on his way he was
completely panicked, thinking that I might tell him I wanted to keep the child,
when I wouldn’t have been crying if it hadn’t been a problem for me. And I
found it completely weird that he didn’t even understand what I was telling
him. I was not in a good place. I was cursing myself up and down and besides,
we’d talked about this before, I mean before I had the test I told him: “I have a
feeling I’m pregnant, it’s shitty, I’ve already had an abortion, I don’t want it”,
etc., so it had already been said before, but in spite of everything he continued
to imagine . . . But I think he was already having so much trouble taking care
of himself that, this thing, thinking that he was going to have to take care of
a baby, teach it things, sooner or later, he doesn’t even really know what he’s
doing with himself . . . There really are things in common between these two
guys [the two boys she’d been with on the occasion of her two abortions], in
their way of life, their way of completely avoiding responsibilities.’
Abortion seems much more problematic when the duration and intensity
of the relationship have allowed the couple to sketch out a project, if only
on an imaginary basis in the mode of amorous play. When the woman and
her ‘boyfriend’ have ‘lived together’ for quite a while and have grown closer
through their involvement in other projects (work, political activism and
so on), a more complex process unfolds, spread out over a longer period
of time, during which their intentional goals seem to come together, but on
an imaginary level, before they split apart in the face of ‘realities’. In such
cases, the decision to proceed with abortion – which, in our interviews, was
almost always presented as originating with the man (even if the woman
who was talking to us took responsibility for it herself) – was described as
particularly difficult, painful, impossible to ‘erase’.
Abortion under these circumstances often marked a step on the couple’s
downward path towards a break-up.36 In most of the interviews, the breakup was presented as happening after it had become impossible to pursue
sexual relations with the person who was the source of the pregnancy, after
the abortion or once the decision to abort had been made, an impossibility
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often attributed to ‘physical’ problems (‘frigidity’, ‘disgust’, pain during
intercourse).
Jeanine had been ‘going out with a guy for about six months’, someone with
whom she ‘was absolutely not in love’ but whom she ‘liked a lot’, when she
‘found herself pregnant’ and decided to have an abortion: ‘As soon as I learned
I was pregnant, it was pretty much the end between us; knowing that I was
pregnant by him turned me a little against him, I could even say I really didn’t
want to be with him any more. At first he was really nice, he wanted to come
with me to the family planning clinic but I didn’t want him to, so that was a
kind of rejection, I really sent him packing . . . In terms of my own sexuality,
where he was concerned, I had a blockage. The day I learned I was pregnant,
it wasn’t really over, but within two or three days I was telling him: we’re
done. It was ridiculous, we’d been together six months, we weren’t at all in
love. It was shitty at the end. We’d had a good time for six months, we weren’t
going to go on like that for ten years, it was kind of ridiculous. I thought we
were getting a little pathetic together. I was expecting to leave him, but I said
to myself: we’ll see, we’ll see. And so when I learned I was pregnant, we had
made love the night before, and the next day, he was there, so I took the little
test, I found out I was pregnant, I really felt blocked, but then I’d never had
that, with any guy. But really, sex . . . well . . . I went off it, I have to say. I
didn’t want him to even touch me. See, even if he just touched my shoulder
a little and said: “Are you OK?” I took his hand away and said, “Fine, but
don’t touch me, that really bothers me.” I think I wasn’t very nice. He called
me every day, even so, for three weeks, at least twice a day. “Are you OK?”
and things like that, and every time I brushed him off.’
Liliane, age 24, an employee in a film distribution business, had the same
sort of problems after her second abortion, when she was 22: ‘Afterward,
you’re sort of disgusted with the guy, so you don’t want to see him, I don’t
know why, but . . . in my case, with the one I was with at the time, and he was
serious, I was fed up with him, sexually I mean, with him, I couldn’t do it any
more. It was purely sexual. I mean that having sex was painful; it really hurt, it
was really so uninteresting that I don’t even understand how girls my age who
are at that point and think about nothing but sex . . . it’s so worthless, really
there’s no point, because for me, it hurt, it really was bad, but OK, fine, if it
doesn’t hurt them, I have the one friend who went through the same thing and
had the same reaction as me, but not the other one, she kept on liking it. For
me, it’s awful, it hurts, it’s not even fun at all. But the problem is that the guys
ask you for it. Me, it turns me off, it’s really a chore, but he keeps asking for
it. If he doesn’t get it he’s in a bad mood . . . Well, I can do this to him for a
month, but at the end of the month he’ll say to me: “Come on, we’d better do
something about this”, because every night I’m looking for an excuse, because
it turns me off, I don’t want it.’
It is as if the abortion had in a sense exhausted the love relation by
making its outcome calculable, that is, by abruptly reducing the amount
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of uncertainty about the future that the relationship had included up to
then, and that was necessary to nourish and keep it going. Pregnancy and
especially, perhaps, the announcement made to the male progenitor, the
awareness of his fear in the face of this news, his evasiveness, constitute the
test through which the woman’s concern about the validity of the couple
becomes a certainty: the certainty that the man with whom she is living, or
sleeping, does not measure up. In terms of the relation to time, there is actually a big difference between projects in a sexual relationship and projects
in a professional context. In the latter case, awareness that the project has
to be terminated on a specific date is not expected to diminish or exhaust
the enthusiasm of the participants. In contrast, in a sexual relationship,
a precise anticipation of the end, the predetermination of the end, make
pursuit of the project impossible. The proportion of uncertainty in a sexual
relationship that remains present as long as the project has not actually
ended, even if one knows ‘in one’s heart of hearts’ that it will come to an
end ‘one day’, is probably precisely what gives it its character of ‘authenticity’ as compared to ordinary professional projects. The project of having
a child, because it is a very long-term project, even when it is posited in
the imaginary mode, thus makes it possible to reinitiate in perpetuity the
uncertainty the sexual project needs to survive. For the same reasons, the
appearance of a pregnancy and the observation, made concrete by an abortion, that this pregnancy cannot be associated with the project of having a
child most often bring the sexual project to an abrupt end.
Christine, age 24, a student who had had an abortion a year before our
interview, spoke of her break-up (she had been living with a student two
years younger than she for nine months): ‘He didn’t feel ready either, and
we weren’t sure of ourselves, and we were right not to be sure of ourselves,
and that messed up our relationship; we broke up a month later. There were
repercussions, though: I had the abortion in February, last year, and by April
it was all over between us. It showed the limits of our relationship, I think,
it raised the question of afterward, a question that we’d never brought up,
and at that point we became aware that we were starting to think about our
values, whether we had the same ones, over a longer term, because . . . And
that’s what happened, it gave us a different perspective, and he’s the one who
left, and basically I agreed with him. We figured out that we didn’t have the
same outlook, that we didn’t see things the same way.’
In a certain number of cases, we had the feeling that the pregnancy had
come about as if to administer this test, to get it over with and put to rest a
growing uneasiness about the future of the sexual relationship that neither
of the partners dared terminate by making a deliberate and, as it were, coldblooded decision.
It is worth pausing to consider this moment at which the imaginary goal
of a child is confronted with ‘reality’. For example, a woman whose period
is late takes a test and realizes that she is pregnant. She is happy. She talks to
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her ‘boyfriend’ about it. He too is happy. They give their love material shape
by imagining its unfolding in the world in the form of a child. They imagine
this child (what it will be like, what features it will get from one partner
and the other, and so on). But these realizations are imaginary, in the sense
that their desire bears only on the projection of a present situation into the
future (the two of them, the bedroom, nightfall, lamplight, sensuality, the
concrete realization of their love, and so on), associated with a particular
world, that of affectivity, detached from other situations associated with
different worlds and equally apt to be projected into the future. The shift
to ‘realism’ consists in introducing elements of these various worlds into
the projection in such a way as to test their compatibility by means of
trials, which also have an imaginary character, in order to be in a position
to rank preferences. But this operation, entirely imaginary though it may
be, is nevertheless ‘realistic’ in the sense that it takes into account the fact
that, if nothing is done to prevent it, the arrival in the world of a child is an
ineluctable process (unless there is a miscarriage, but this possibility is too
uncertain to be introduced into a calculation) and that, once this process
has begun, its unfolding is determined by biology: it obeys a blind, autonomous logic that does not take into account any of the other projects under
way. Realism then consists in imagining the immersion of the child already
born, with its concrete attributes and accoutrements (tears, feedings, sleepless nights, childhood illnesses, appointments with the paediatrician, and so
on), in situations where there is no space for it (business meetings, evenings
with friends, trips and so on), and whose progress it threatens to hamper.37
It is understandable, then, that these failures to engender and the abortions that sanction them do not intervene at just any random moment in
the affective and sexual itineraries of the persons we have seen. Only a
minority of the women we met and talked to in hospital settings had been
involved for a long time in relatively stable relationships. In these situations,
in fact, the existence of a gap between the imagined expectations of the
man and the woman, and between these expectations and what happens
once they are tested by a ‘reality’ that has itself been anticipated in imagination, while it still remains possible, is nevertheless relatively unlikely,
because a high level of reciprocal knowledge, interactions, and involvement
in the same contexts (especially socio-economic and professional) tends
to facilitate the coordination of expectations, sometimes through power
plays, moreover. Contraception then constitutes (in the absence of medical
counter-indications) an effective means for anticipating these failures and
palliating them. In contrast, the possibility that failures of engendering may
arise seems much more prevalent both at the very beginning of a woman’s
sexual and sentimental life and during the uncertain periods between the
end of an emotional project that has been stable for a certain span of time
and involvement – if this comes about, which is certainly not always the
case – in a new project endowed in its turn with a certain stability. It is in
fact in these transitory states, where the woman’s situation and that of her
partner can be quite asymmetrical (for example, if one member of the couple
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is ‘still’ married while the other is divorced or ‘separated’, or if one has
responsibility for children and the other does not, and so on), that the gap
can be maximal between the expectations of the two partners, and between
the representations that each one makes of the other’s expectations. And
this is all the more the case to the extent that the ‘purely affective’ character
of these relationships, weakly instrumented and relatively disconnected
from the other contexts of the partners’ lives, tends to diminish the imaginary weight of ‘reality’, a weight that few things intervene to recall in the
situations in which the partners find themselves. Abortions are sad stories
because they are the occasion for recalling failures and break-ups, and also,
sometimes (as we shall see in chapter 7), for reactivating old suffering in a
way that can refer not only to the history of the person involved but also to
that of his or her antecedents, especially in the female line – the woman’s
mother, her grandmother – by stirring up troubling questions about the
conditions of one’s own conception and birth, the reasons for one’s advent
in the world. At the hospital, the women who are there to ‘interrupt their
pregnancy’ often find themselves in tears during the counselling interview.
The desire to unburden themselves of these old stories also seems to be
one of the reasons that motivated the persons who agreed to speak of
their abortion(s) with a sociologist (who was often mistaken, it would
seem, for a ‘psychologist’, that is, addressed as a practitioner to whom one
could confide one’s ‘story’ in the hope that the story would be less burdensome – an expectation often misplaced, as it happened). In contrast, other
persons, better informed about sociology and its limitations, justified their
willingness to tell their stories on the grounds that their ‘experience’ might
be useful to others.
The gap between a woman’s expectations and those of the man responsible for her pregnancy takes on a particularly dramatic form when the
‘parental project’ has been previously envisaged not in the form of an
imaginary evocation but in a way that inscribes it ‘realistically’ in the
world, that is, by associating it with changes in the material environment
(housing, job situations and so on) and also by speaking about it with relatives and friends, before the companion, initially in agreement, changes his
mind. Two cases of this type come to mind. In the first, the woman ended
up agreeing to have an abortion but had a hard time dealing with her grief
over the child she did not have. In the second, after making the necessary
arrangements for an abortion, the woman finally decided to keep her
child. In each case, the woman, in despair, brought other persons into the
dispute (the mother of the woman’s partner among others in the first case,
the woman’s own mother in the second), and took them as allies in order
to give more weight to her own position. In both cases, too, dreams and
nightmares were mentioned.
Véronique, age 26, was finishing her studies. She had stopped taking the pill
two years earlier, some time after meeting the man with whom she was still
living; at the time, he wanted a child. She got pregnant quickly, and they were
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both ‘very happy’. But two months later she had a fairly dramatic miscarriage
(a major haemorrhage in the middle of the night). A few months later, she
got pregnant again. But in the meantime, a new project had fallen into place:
spending a year abroad. Her companion then asked her quite insistently to
have an abortion (‘we’re going to have an abortion’, he said), which she
‘absolutely did not want to do’. The argument went on for a month, ‘a month
of endless discussions’. But Véronique did not want to ‘do violence’ to her
companion, in whom she sensed ‘real terror’: ‘The more arguments he made,
intellectual ones, I’ll call them, well-reasoned, the more I became an animal,
actually. I turned into a little animal ready to bite and scratch. And I spent
weeks in bed without moving, curled up under the covers and ready to . . . I
imagined a whole bunch of scenarios, people coming up to me to tear out my
guts, to . . . And I was ready to kill, but really, I felt it was . . . it was something
that was growing and so I think that that really an animal sensation was actually responding to arguments that no longer had any meaning for me and . . .
it was terrible, because I would get up . . . he would be crying in a corner. He
would say: “I’m ashamed of what I’m asking you to do.” And at that point I
understood that he was facing something impossible for him, just like having
an abortion was impossible for me. So we were in a hopeless bind, I mean,
it was killing me. I actually thought about suicide, because it was really not
possible, nobody could . . . really, nobody could do this to me, so I’d rather
die, and anyway if I had an abortion I’d be half-dead . . . It was terrible and
terrifying, and as time went along I reached the point where I could feel his
pain, his panic, almost physically, but at the same time I didn’t understand it. I
didn’t know where it was coming from.’ Véronique asked to have a sonogram
and insisted that he look at it too, hoping it would make him change his mind.
But he remained ‘inflexible’. She got in touch with her companion’s mother,
who encouraged her to ‘stand firm’. Finally, she made the necessary arrangements for an abortion and went ahead with it. But she didn’t manage to get
over it, and she associated the two episodes, the miscarriage and the abortion:
‘It’s pretty hard to represent yourself as someone who’s not able to bring life.
Besides, it’s very odd, because since these episodes I have huge nightmares
every night, and every night I dream that I’m dropping children, that I don’t
know how to hold them, I dream that I’m here on this balcony and I’m picking
up little kids and they’re getting away from me, I’m letting them fall from
the seventh floor. Every night I drop kids, I kill them, I run them over. I’m
incapable of . . . not just of bringing life, but of holding onto it.’
Sofia, age 38, was an employee in a non-profit association. She had an
abortion when she was 19. Then she had three children. She was 29 when she
met Jean. Two months later she was pregnant. Her companion insisted that
she have an abortion. She made the necessary arrangements and set a date.
She didn’t feel well and was having nightmares: ‘I would go into a butcher
shop, one with a display case, etc., and the meat was all foetuses, and there
was blood everywhere. And then the butcher took me by the hand, and then I
tried to pull away, to leave, and I couldn’t manage it, and I woke up like that
in the middle of the night, it was really horrible, but I went through that for
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two days.’ Sofia spoke about it with her mother, who encouraged her to keep
the child. Finally, she didn’t keep her appointment at the hospital, but let her
companion, who had promised to accompany her, go alone. Then she phoned
him and told him she was leaving him. They eventually got back together, had
two more children, and broke up seven years later.
With the help of various theoretical constructions and especially psychoanalysis, one can prolong the analysis of the ‘misfire’, where pregnancy is
concerned, by attributing to the partners in the sexual relationship ‘unconscious desires’ (often having to do with their family histories inasmuch as
they themselves had also been children in a lineage) capable of entering into
opposition with their ‘conscious’ will.38 One can then follow the failure of
the parental project even in situations where it seemed never to have been
formulated, as in cases of pregnancies that ensued from episodic sexual relations during which contraception was handled carelessly, and interpret it as
the expression of a desire for a child that takes the form of a pregnancy. I
shall not take this path, not because I reject it but because it would imply
treating our interviews as so many singular clinical cases, which I am unable
to do. The challenge of articulating the framework I am attempting to set up
here with psychoanalytic theory is one that I cannot take on in this work.39
Nevertheless, in the chapter devoted to the experience of abortion, I shall
propose a conceptual approach that allows me to start from phenomenology (more specifically, with the work of Michel Henry) and extend the
analysis of the ambivalent relations that surround pregnancy by seeking
to show that they have a character of necessity that becomes clear if it is
associated with the two constraints presented in chapter 2.
In a large number of the stories we collected, the recourse to abortion is
explained by the impossibility of linking the being to be born with a project
(more often owing to the defection of the male progenitor, it seems, than
owing to a rejection by the person who was telling us her story, describing
her status as a pregnant woman) that would have exempted the child from
contingency and endowed it with full humanity. In this sense, as I have
already had occasion to note, abortion is justified as a measure carried out
to the benefit of the being that would have come into the world (‘the child
to be born’) if intrauterine life had not been interrupted, the child in whose
name one considers that it would not have had a life worth living given
the circumstances of its conception. In this sense, abortion was much more
often described, by those women who resorted to it, as the result of an
inexorable process, virtually independent of the will of the woman whose
acquiescence (required by law) had nevertheless been given, than as the
result of a ‘decision’ in the strong sense.
Ourdia, an employee of Nubian origin, spoke of the abortion she had had
when she was 25 (she was now 28); she had wanted to have a child, but she
resolved to have an abortion because she had discovered that the ‘father’ had
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been ‘totally deceiving’ her: ‘I did it for my own good and especially for the
good of the child, because I could not have . . . It wasn’t the fact of assuming
it physically. But it was going to remind me too much of . . . The other part,
which wasn’t from me, was a part I didn’t want any longer in my life at all,
and moreover he’s the only person I’ve had a relationship with that I’m not
going to see again because . . . And I wouldn’t have been able to . . . I know
that maybe sooner or later I would have reproduced unconscious things,
finally, it was more that sort of fear, of reproducing things, of holding things
against the child, indirectly, or that he would remind me of his father, and I
know perfectly well that I couldn’t go out with the father in the future, and
that’s not very good for the child, either . . . Or else I would have it and it
would have been too prefabricated and not at all sincere.’
In this respect, it is remarkable that two other possibilities are much more
rarely expressed in the context of this understanding. The first consists in
claiming that abortion is a ‘personal choice’, ‘fully assumed’ and justified
with reference to a requirement of ‘autonomy’. The second, the symmetrical
inverse of the first, consists in considering as perfectly legitimate, or at least
as ‘normal’, the prospect of bringing into the world a child whose advent
has not been preconfirmed with reference to a parental project, that is – as
the saying goes – a ‘fatherless’ child or one whose father would be treated
as a simple biological agent necessary in order to inscribe in the flesh a being
whose confirmation could be ensured by the mother, on her own. It is as if
these two attitudes towards engendering, which appeared as militant and
legitimized positions with respect to a political ideal of liberation – in the
1960s and 1970s, when the principal objective was to put an end to a situation in which a compromise among the three understandings we examined
above (with the Creator, with the kinship group and with the state) was
dominant – had faded away with the establishment of a new understanding
oriented towards projects.
In this new framework, which allows for the possibility of abortion even
while granting it only a marginal place, it is the relatively frequent recourse
to this practice that makes it possible to absorb, unofficially – and also to
conceal – the failures of engendering that the new understanding, in its official version, cannot recognize any more than those that preceded it. Persons
involved in this act, which is performed with the greatest assurance of
discretion, speak no more freely about it today than people did in the recent
past, when it had to be performed in a clandestine manner; indeed, they
may speak about it even less, in that legalization has in effect done away
with the need to seek help, advice or support that had led women to confide
their anguish to other women, friends, relatives, colleagues and others. As
for the manifestations of disclosure that accompanied the period of militant
demands in the 1970s (manifestations that bore on the question of abortion
in general, moreover, rather than on individual cases), they disappeared as
institutional responsibility for this practice was established. Women who
have abortions may never have been so alone.
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Constructing Foetal Categories
The ontological manipulation of the foetus
In the understanding that involves a project, abortion has an unofficial
function that goes far beyond its officially recognized role, in that it absorbs
and conceals the failures peculiar to this type of understanding. Although it
may be practised with discretion, abortion cannot be entirely passed over in
silence. The strategic position it occupies in the project-based understanding imperils the validity of this understanding by threatening to bring into
broad daylight the tension between the two constraints (distinction and
non-discrimination) identified in chapter 2, a tension that the various types
of understandings we have examined are meant to blur.
One solution offered to this problem in the context of the project-based
understanding consists in an ontological manipulation of the foetus, a
manoeuvre of the constructionist type designed to distribute the beings
that have been implanted in the flesh between categories that are as remote
as possible from one another, depending on whether the beings in question are destined to be destroyed or instead to be confirmed by speech.
This fiction – I use the term in a sense close to the one it has in legal
language – makes it possible, to a certain extent, to reduce the tension that
is manifested when two characteristics in the project-based understanding
are associated: on the one hand, an extremely high valorization of a child
when it is integrated into a project and, as a corollary, an almost equal
valorization of a foetus whose development is destined to be pursued until
birth; on the other hand, an extremely low valorization of a foetus that
cannot be integrated into a ‘parental project’. Now, the least one can say is
that these two beings have the same support structure, so that the question
of establishing a basis for selection between those that will be adopted and
those that will be eliminated has to be addressed outside the field in which
the action is unfolding.
To designate these two foetuses, I shall speak of an authentic foetus in the
first case and of a tumoral foetus in the second. I am producing labels here
that do not figure as such in the discourse of the actors themselves, much
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as, during the coding operations that accompany statistical analysis and
especially the factorial analysis of correspondence, researchers create terms
to designate and summarize in a standard form items whose associations
are brought to light by the analysis. Although they are clearly identifiable,
as we shall see, both in the actors’ discourse and in that of the experts,
and even in legal texts, these two modalities of the foetal condition are not
actually designated by specific terms in ordinary language, not only because
of the avoidance that generally surrounds the topic, but especially because
any enterprise of designation that would involve the attribution of different
predicates to the same subject would risk arousing associations that would
immediately increase the tension that the use of two weakly linked lexical
fields, in different contexts, can lessen. These modalities fit within the
typical implicit or covert categories1 described in anthropological studies
of the taxonomies used in traditional societies (ethnoscience), categories
whose action and discourse outline a place without explicitly naming it,2 in
a process that often betrays the presence of some tension or contradiction in
the taxonomy. In this sense, the operation of an external analyst who designates explicitly what ordinary usage avoids naming directly – even while
evoking it by playing on connotations – can unquestionably be compared
with unveiling.
The same thing can be said about the other foetal figures that will be
deployed in this chapter: on the one hand, reactive figures, which conform
to the norms of the project-based understanding in envisaging the foetal
modalities associated with prior arrangements deemed ‘outdated’ (I shall
call these types of actants, which appear only in the critical literature, the
conservative foetus, the barbarian foetus and the totalitarian foetus); on the
other hand, the actant targeted by the abundant literature that has arisen
in the wake of developments in biotechnology, especially those associated with medically assisted reproduction (I shall call this type of actant a
techno-foetus). Later in the chapter I shall examine the cognitive constraints
that weigh on the qualification of this last actant as it relates on the one
hand to the authentic foetus – relations often marked by ‘metaphysical’
interrogations about the ‘future of humanity’ – and on the other hand to
the tumoral foetus, from which it must be sufficiently distant to avoid any
association, even accidental.
The authentic foetus is the one in which the child to be born via projectbased engendering is embodied. It is authentic in the sense that, as we
have seen, the parental project constitutes one of the longest and most
robust of the many projects presented in a world in which the project
polity has become very extensive. It is precisely the fact that it is difficult
to disengage from this project (although difficult to very different degrees
for men and for women) that confers on it, in contrast with short and
fluctuating projects, the property that is tacitly attributed to it of bringing
forth something authentic. In engendering, each actor is expected to reveal
his or her most ‘profound’ (and thus most ‘authentic’) aspects, because,
once formed, the project of having a child imposes itself on the will of
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those who have entered into its contract and acts as a test on which ‘one
can’t cheat’.
The authentic foetus is characterized by the anticipation directed towards
it. Scarcely formed, it is already a ‘baby’. The prominent qualities that
modern popular psychology attributes to babies (‘persons’)3 consequently
spill over onto foetuses. A foetus is no longer a completely unknown being,
as it was in the past: no longer a nobody, to put it bluntly. We know that
foetuses react to their environment, both internal (the mother’s emotions)
and external (noises, the father’s deeper voice). Both mother and father
become acquainted with the foetus through the senses, listening to its
heartbeat (through a stethoscope), ‘making contact with it’ by touching the
mother’s belly, and especially ‘seeing’ it, or rather, recognizing its shape on
the hard-to-decipher sonogram, an image that may well end up in the family
photo album. At the same time, the material environment in which the being
will take its place is being prepared. Clothes are purchased to welcome it,
along with objects that have become increasingly numerous and sophisticated owing to the development of the children’s market. Administrative
steps are taken to arrange for maternity leave, to reserve space in a hospital
or clinic, to sign up for day care, and so on; these steps all help embody the
foetus. Finally, the ‘child to be born’ is spoken of more and more openly
and to more and more people – relatives, friends, colleagues and so on – as
the moment of its birth approaches.
The tumoral foetus is the object of a very different construction, as one
would imagine. Far from being swept up by the future, as it were, as the
authentic foetus is, the tumoral foetus is drawn back towards the void
from which it has just barely emerged. It is supposed to leave the fewest
possible traces in the world, even in memory, if not in the memory of the
woman involved, then at least in that of others. Thus a number of women
interviewed said that they had not spoken to other people, not even people
they were close to, about their abortion, for fear that later on they might be
reminded of the possibility that this being that had not existed might have
been part of the world (‘if he had lived, he would have been ten years old
. . . ’ and so on).
All precautions are taken so that the smallest number of representations
are invested in it, except perhaps that of a tumour growing according to
its own blind logic that has to be removed before it reaches a size that
would make the operation no longer feasible. For it is indeed in the register
of operations, in the surgical sense, that abortion is reported today. The
foetus that was aborted, often fairly late, during the era of clandestinity
manifested itself in a disquieting way with something like a body (picked
up, taken in hand to be thrown away, it had a certain weight, as Annie
Ernaux recalls with lucidity in the work she devoted to her abortion4); this
made a place for it, however ephemeral, in the objective world, whereas
with medical abortion today it disappears, almost as if it had never existed.
The entire arrangement, moreover – the hospital admission procedures, the
anaesthesia, the recovery, the discharge formalities, the follow-up visit, the
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steps to follow for insurance reimbursement, and so on – is set up in such a
way that this intervention can easily be characterized as an operation with
a therapeutic purpose.
The French term interruption volontaire de grossesse (IVG, ‘voluntary
interruption of pregnancy’) was forged at the time abortion became legal
and is thus contemporaneous with the access of the tumoral foetus to full
social identity; it helped establish the existence of that being as null, to the
extent that it provided a periphrasis making it possible to target a process
(pregnancy) and to designate an action (interruption) as well as an agent
(not characterized, moreover, and without attributes) who performs that
(voluntary) action while eclipsing any reference to the being that is to be
expelled and destroyed in the action. This keeps at a remove the representations that the term ‘abortion’ could always reactivate, at least through the
connotations associated with it, most notably those of a foetus implanted
in flesh, and it raises insistently the question of how to get rid of the foetus
and how to eradicate the traces of its passage.
Jeanine, age 26, had an abortion at age 22 when she was a student, without
having had ‘any problems’ except perhaps ‘physically’ (three weeks passed
between her decision to abort and the operation itself, and she ‘had a very hard
time’ with her pregnancy, experiencing a number of physical symptoms that
bothered her). She expressed the difference between the two foetuses I have
called ‘tumoral’ and ‘authentic’ as follows: ‘There are people who absolutely
want to have children, there are people for whom an abortion just isn’t possible, because already from the moment the sperm and the egg meet, it’s a living
being. For me, it’s not a living being. For me, it remains at the chemical stage,
it’s two molecules that came together, that are going to produce a living being,
but it’s not a living being, full stop.’ Later during the same interview she added:
‘I am very much in love with the person I’m with now, and I think he too will
want to have children and everything, so, yes, I think that when I get to the
point of wanting to have a child, I’ll have a child, and the fact of having had an
abortion, the fact that I had the start of a somewhat complicated pregnancy,
doesn’t mean that it will bother me when I get pregnant, not at all. I even
think that if I get pregnant now, a wanted pregnancy, I won’t spend a second
thinking about the other one. Because I didn’t have the impression of being
pregnant. For me, being pregnant means that you’re going to have a child, it’s
nine months, you want it . . . But for me, it was just something . . . it was 100
per cent, there wasn’t even a tenth of a percentage of wanting to have that child,
I didn’t even think of myself as pregnant, I had the impression that I needed to
have an operation, there was something that had got into my body. It was my
fault, I mean, it wasn’t an extraterrestrial, I didn’t see the Virgin Mary, I messed
up. But now, if I wanted a child for example with Philippe, well, yes, I’d get
pregnant and I’d be super-happy from the start. Maybe I wouldn’t even have
morning sickness, or maybe not so much, but I think that even if I did I’d still be
a little bit happy, anyway I’d tell myself: “Oh, it’s not serious, I’m vomiting, but
I’m building something with my boyfriend, I’m super-happy and everything.”’
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The two foetuses on a sonogram
Sonograms, in widespread use in France since the 1990s, offer a particularly
pertinent opportunity to see how the distinction between the authentic
foetus and the tumoral foetus is constructed. Although the medical act is
the same, the arrangement in which it is inserted and the medical discourse
that accompanies its implementation differ profoundly depending on
whether the foetus is intended to be preserved or destroyed. I borrow the
descriptions of sonograms made during pregnancies intended to go to term
from Bénédicte Champenois-Rousseau’s dissertation on ‘prenatal diagnosis’
(2003); this study was based on the observation of 300 consultations in two
obstetric clinics in the Paris region. I shall compare these situations with
those including sonograms that we were able to observe in abortion clinics.
In the obstetric clinics where Champenois-Rousseau made her observations, the typical arrangement was the following. The pregnant woman lay
on an examination bed, facing a screen that she could see without difficulty.
To the left of the bed, there was a chair, turned towards the same screen,
intended for the person who accompanied the woman (usually the male
progenitor of the child to be born). To the right of the bed, there was a
desk with a second sonogram screen controlled by the doctor. Here is an
excerpt from a dialogue between the doctor, a pregnant woman and the
woman’s husband, reproduced by Champenois-Rousseau at the beginning
of her study; she chose a perfectly ordinary example in order to show how
a situation of this type unfolds (this was a routine sonogram at twenty-two
weeks): ‘The doctor (putting the probe on the woman’s belly and looking
at the screen across from him): “So the baby is crosswise, here’s the head,
the back is crosswise.” / The patient: “Oh, yes, you can really see it!” (the
screen shows a small thing that moves, dilates and contracts very fast) . . .
/ The doctor: “That’s blood going through the heart.” / The patient (to her
husband, sitting by her side): “Look at the mouth, did you see it?” . . . The
doctor: “Do you want to know the baby’s sex?” / The patient: “Yes.” / The
doctor (moving the probe); “It’s a girl.” / The patient: “Oh!” / The doctor:
“Good, fine, everything is going well, just fine.”’
As this brief excerpt suggests – and as Champenois-Rousseau’s analyses,
based on an extensive corpus, show very convincingly – in a situation of
accepted pregnancy, the arrangement of the sonogram and the way it is
handled by the doctor lead the mother and often both parents to recognize
their child in the technologically produced representation that is hard for
a lay person to decipher. The being implanted in the flesh is designated as
‘your baby’, its developing organs, particularly its heart and its sex, are
pointed out and identified. This moment thus constitutes an important stage
in the work of adoption by the mother of the being she is carrying.
The organization of the situation and the way the doctor handled it were
very different in the cases we were able to observe in which the sonogram
preceded an abortion. Here, the arrangement included a single screen
located beside the bed on which the woman lay, and she could see it only
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by turning her head (the doctor might invite her to look ‘if she wanted
to’). The woman was alone with the sonogram operator and no seat was
provided for a companion. Finally, in their commentary, the doctors chose
language that allowed them to name what they saw without using terms
that could give too much body to the being in the flesh and pull it in the
direction of the unborn child, the ‘baby’. Thus doctors spoke of ‘visualizing
what is going to come out’ and very often used a demonstrative pronoun:
‘That’s what’s going to go.’ The doctor might also speak of the ‘products of
the expulsion’ or, when pressed by anxious questions from the patient and
obliged to provide fuller explanations, he might speak of ‘a big grey lump
to be expelled’, ‘a little spot from which the pregnancy would develop’ or ‘a
projected pregnancy’. Speaking of the intervention to come, he would warn
that it might ‘hurt a little’ because ‘the uterus tightens up around a void’.
When a medical (drug-induced) abortion was anticipated,5 the doctor presented it as ‘a natural miscarriage’ and said that ‘everything’ was ‘coming
out’. If the patient wanted to know more, asked more insistent questions,
the doctor might speak of an ‘embryo’, but only to deny its presence: ‘there
isn’t an embryo inside, just a blastocoele’; ‘there’s just a cavity with the
placenta around it’; ‘there’s no visible embryo’. The expressions used by
doctor thus combined to imply not that they saw nothing but that what
they saw was nothing.6 The term ‘baby’ was never used (except in one case,
but in a negative form, when the doctor asked: ‘What was your method for
not starting a baby?’). These denegations could have unanticipated effects.
One patient asked: ‘But am I really pregnant?’, suggesting that if there was
nothing there, then intervening was pointless. Another doctor addressed the
patient with the question: ‘Do you want to see what I see?’
‘Baby’, ‘foetus’, ‘embryo’, ‘pre-embryo’, ‘gametes’ . . .
As we have just seen, while administering sonograms, doctors use the term
‘baby’ if the being in the flesh is destined to be kept; in the contrary case,
when they cannot do otherwise they resort to the mode of denegation (‘this
is not an embryo’). The multiplication of terms for what is in the womb,
associated with a categorization that strives to be precise and ‘scientific’,
was part of the foetus-effacing work that accompanied the legalization of
abortion and the use of abortion to palliate failures of the project-oriented
understanding. The distinction between an embryo and a baby refers to different stages of development of the unborn child. But it is far from purely
technical, and it would probably not have taken hold as forcefully if it had
not been associated with moral debates (which we shall examine later on)
over the legitimacy of the treatment to which the foetus was subjected; the
goal of establishing stable borders between different types of foetuses was
to inscribe them in legal or quasi-legal categories so as to solidify them
and make the lines difficult to cross. This effort to categorize is still at
work, as attested, for example, by the recently popularized use of the term
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‘pre-embryo’, associated with the intent to use beings that are still in the
early stages of development as legitimate objects of scientific research.
We can see at work here, on the terrain of engendering, the struggles to
classify that have been described in the case of social groups.7 In the case of
abortion, these struggles have been especially intense, because the moral and
legal debates over foetuses and what can be done with them have most often
relied on a definition of the ‘stages’ in the development of those beings and
on the determination of the continuous or discontinuous character of their
evolution. In this sense, every ‘border’, no matter how solidly established it
may appear, has, like positions taken up in trench warfare, been established
many times over, then lost and re-established by the adversaries engaged
in these interpretative conflicts. Both sides have relied on the legitimacy of
positive medical knowledge and on philosophemes derived from classical
metaphysics, such as distinctions between ‘act’ and ‘power’ (redescribed
and blurred in the language of ‘potentiality’), between ‘substance’, ‘matter’
and ‘form’, or the question of ‘finality’ in its relations with ‘evolution’.
With respect to the constitution of ordinary categories of action rather
than to debates between specialists, categories such as ‘foetus’ or ‘embryo’
have served as attractors, or, in Eleanor Rosch’s conceptualization (especially Rosch 1973), as ‘good examples’ or ‘focal points’, in the process of
stabilizing the distinction between the authentic foetus and the tumoral
foetus, constituting them as radically different beings and making it as
difficult as possible for them to appear simultaneously in the space of
representation, in order to remove the tensions that their contiguity might
arouse. It is thus not out of the question to relate the ongoing work of
multiplying foetal categories to the process of attenuation and concealment of an irreconcilable contradiction that is accomplished by myths,
according to Claude Lévi-Strauss: middle terms are interspersed one step
at a time between two radically opposed terms, using a series of embedded
analogies so as to substitute increasingly weak oppositions for the originally
irreconcilable poles (Lévi-Strauss 1963, 206–31).
The critical requalification of the foetus in the other types
of understandings
The work of categorization that is carried out in the framework of the
project-based arrangement has an affirmative character; it aims to establish
distinctions corresponding to reality, even if these distinctions cannot be
fully expressed. This work goes hand in hand with the reactive requalification of foetuses in the other types of understandings, as they are revealed by
critical examination.8 This enterprise of requalification is reactive not only
because it seeks to establish the validity of the project-based understanding by contrasting it with earlier understandings that are taken to be both
condemnable and superseded, but also, in another respect, because it contains traces of the critiques addressed to the project-based understanding,
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and to the categories set up in this framework, on the basis of positions
that can be connected, more or less, to the other types of understandings.
In an understanding with the Creator, the foetus is thus requalified as an
essentialist foetus; in an understanding with a kinship group, it becomes
a barbarian foetus, and in an understanding with the state it is recast as a
totalitarian foetus. In all three cases, the constraining character of the preexisting understandings is emphasized; the project-based understanding, in
contrast, is the only one that guarantees women’s autonomy (although this
implies ignoring the fact that the project itself also constitutes an instance
of preconfirmation external to persons).
In relation to the project-based understanding, the foetus whose identification is constructed with reference to the Creator may be qualified negatively
as essentialist, precisely because it is posited from a standpoint that does not
recognize any distinction between an authentic foetus and a tumoral foetus.
This means that the foetus is not so much considered from the standpoint
of tradition as positioned through still-lively disputes over the legitimacy of
abortion (and over the uses to which ‘superfluous embryos’ can legitimately
be put in the age of medically assisted reproduction, as we shall see later
on). The foetus is considered essentialist in the sense that its goal would
be to install in the social world a timeless foetus, independent not only of
history but also of the various contexts of interpretations and practices (or,
in another terminology, different networks) into which it may be inserted.
In this critical line of thought, the (metaphysical) use of essentialism points
towards the (political) accusation of conservatism. Indeed, to believe that
there are atemporal entities independent of history that do not draw their
being from the interpretation given them by human beings in society and
from the practices to which they are subjected is in effect to accredit a static,
atemporal world not susceptible to change and therefore not open to ‘progress’: a world, then, at the heart of which the forces of domination would
never risk running into any obstacle and could maintain themselves forever.
Now the idea of liberation through revolutionary action, as it took shape at
the turning point between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, submits
the possibility that human beings may achieve full humanity to a work of
emancipation with respect to external constraints that had been accepted as
self-evident and imperishable.
In other contexts, the foetus in the understanding with the Creator can
also be qualified negatively as naturalist, to reveal the bond it maintains
with the belief in a natural order and in a natural law emanating from
that order; this would be the case even if no relationship were officially
established between the immutable and legitimate character of that order
and the fact of basing its origin on a Creation. In this case, arguments that
rely on the authority of science and emphasize the singularity – the natural
singularity, as it were – of the being conceived through the encounter
between a sperm and an egg can be challenged to the extent that the being
benefits from a genetic donation that has a unique character.9 In other
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situations (which I shall examine later on), the foetus is posited as a natural
being, in the sense that it is objective; here the argument is based on the
technologies that confer photographic reality on the being. But whether
one speaks of essentialism or of naturalism, the critique in question remains
fundamentally the same, to the extent that the notion of natural order, or
even simply of nature, is devalued inasmuch as it refers to an externality on
which history, interpretation and social practices would have no effect and
which, consequently, would offer resistance to the unlimited progress of the
human species.
Let us add, finally, that the essentialist foetus cannot be confused with
the authentic foetus because this latter owes a large part of its identity precisely to the fact that it is constructed in opposition to the tumoral foetus,
whereas this distinction is rejected in the case of the essentialist foetus. If
they have in common the fact that they are both objects of love, they are
sharply distinguished by their temporal orientation. While the authentic
foetus is oriented towards the baby, as we have seen, the essentialist foetus
is oriented towards the origin. In the first case, one seeks to unveil all the
knowable properties of the foetus (its sex, its biological determinations and
so on), so as to prefigure the baby it will become. In the second case, conversely, inasmuch as the foetus is the object of a donation, it must remain a
mystery until its arrival in the world, so as to confirm at its birth the status
of absolute boundary, which the development of medical technologies,
integrated into the project-based understanding, tends on the contrary to
remove.
What I have called the barbarian foetus is the critical qualification of the
foetus that fits the understanding with a kinship group. On the basis of
a progressivist vision of the world, the foetus is thus shunted off into the
past. The foetus in question may be contemporary, but it is then associated
with groups, classes, countries or societies considered ‘backward’ and thus
deemed to remain at a stage anterior to the one reached by current Western
societies in the evolution of the ‘civilizing process’.
This foetus is barbarian in the sense that, since the possibility of a parental agency of preconfirmation of the child to be born is not recognized, its
arrival is associated either with a form of animal life, characterized precisely
by ignorance of the first constraint I identified in chapter 2 (beings through
flesh must be distinguished from beings through speech), or with the exercise of a masculine violence that, whatever the conditions under which it is
manifested, and even if the woman is presumed to be in agreement (owing
to the fact, for example, that she is married to the person who exercises the
constraint), is viewed as tantamount to rape.10
In the first case, the foetus’s arrival independently of any project is
emphasized, as if it were animated by a will that would be, in a sense, that
of the species, not that of individuals apt to control their own destinies; its
capacity to proliferate uncontrollably – to ‘swarm’ – is also stressed, along
with its propensity to cling insistently to the flesh in which it has come to
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be implanted. When it reaches full term, it is dropped, like the offspring of
animals. The latent image of the litter (as in ‘a litter of puppies’) surrounds
the disapproving or even disgusted gaze (often that of a member of the
Western world in a third-world country) with which an onlooker views
a woman surrounded by young children ‘clinging to her skirts’ who ‘all
look alike’, as if, given the way they were fabricated, such beings could not
accede to singularity.
In the second case (but the two instances of indignation can go hand in
hand), the barbarity that has produced the foetus is associated with the
sex act as the manifestation of domination, the dominion that men in the
patriarchal order exercise over women. The barbarian foetus then makes
common cause with suffering and death. It eats away from the inside, as
it were, and destroys the woman who is bearing it, affecting not only her
physical capacities and her health but also her psychological wellsprings
and even her will to live. Once it has arrived in the world, it reproduces
the violence at its origin, if it is a boy, and reimposes the domination from
which it has resulted, if it is a girl.
Finally, with the totalitarian foetus, the constraint that is denounced is
that of a collective, an institution, and more precisely an institution that
invokes a national interest, or rather a nationalist passion. This denunciation may be deployed whether the foetus goes to term or is aborted. For
what matters here is the primacy of a collective will over an act of individual
acquiescence. The ‘reproductive capacities’ of human beings are treated as
if it were a matter of ‘machines’ whose ‘productivity’ can be enhanced or
diminished. The woman’s ‘womb’ no longer belongs to her. It is treated as
if it were a nationalized good belonging to the public domain, managed by
a state medical apparatus, with the aim either of increasing the quantity or
the quality of the population, or, on the contrary, of limiting population
size by practising an authoritarian form of birth control.
This type of critique often occurs in denunciations of the population
policies practised in ‘Communist’ or ‘Fascist’ countries; it targets practices
‘contrary to human rights’ that are implemented by ‘totalitarian’ regimes.11
Also potentially subject to critique are prohibitions on abortion (for
the purpose of increasing the population12) and, conversely, constraints
intended to limit the number of children through administrative means,
such as the establishment of a quota of births per couple beyond which
financial (or legal) sanctions can be imposed, or else the use of bonuses as
incentives for abortion or sterilization, or, finally, manoeuvres intended to
increase population quality (Anagnost 1995). The same type of critiques
can be addressed to population policies carried out in association with the
Population Division of the United Nations (founded in 1946) in certain
southern or third-world countries. Population policies have come under
criticism for their authoritarianism, although most often in a discreet way;
the ‘necessity’ of slowing population growth in poor countries was largely
accepted, in keeping with the demographic dogma that prevailed from
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the 1940s to the 1960s in the context of the major American foundations
(especially the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations), linking the possibility
of economic development to demographic control.13 (Such critiques relied
more on the understanding with the Creator than with the project-based
understanding.) In the latter case, denunciations have targeted policies
that provide incentives, with the argument that so-called incentives in fact
have the same effect as obligations imposed in an authoritarian fashion; for
example, they may include awarding sums of money or gifts to very poor
populations, as rewards for surgical procedures such as abortions or sterilizations that are designed to lower the fertility rate.
But positions challenging the totalitarian foetus may also come to light in
the Western context, in debates over biotechnologies and medically assisted
reproduction, where ‘eugenics’ is at issue. To be sure, in contemporary
Western states eugenics is no longer officially practised; indeed, it is generally
prohibited. But the appearance of new technologies in the realm of reproductive medicine – especially prenatal diagnoses, which make it possible to
detect illnesses or conditions (Down syndrome among others) of which the
foetus may be a carrier and thus make it possible to avoid the birth of handicapped children by means of therapeutic abortions – has reignited the debate
over eugenics and whether its practice is compatible with the project-based
understanding. Those who argue that it is indeed compatible stress that, in
this case too, the decision to abort belongs solely to the parents (informed
by doctors); parents have the right of access to all the arrangements available for carrying out their project of having a child, and also, correlatively,
the right to seek to improve the quality of their progeniture, to seek to spare
their children the suffering of a handicapped life and to spare themselves
the suffering of life with a handicapped being.14 Others, in contrast, consider that administrative measures tending towards systematic mass testing
(measures likely to be developed, in their view) would be implicitly aimed
at eradicating certain handicaps: they argue that such measures would leave
parents with no more than a strictly formal freedom of choice. Apparently
liberal but in fact authoritarian, these measures would have the effect of
bringing back eugenics.15 Thus we would see the reappearance of selection
carried out, if not by the state, at least with its consent.
The work of categorization threatened
As the foregoing remarks suggest, the work of categorization that aims to
establish as great a distance as possible between the authentic foetus and
the tumoral foetus does not take place in an argumentative and practical
vacuum. It runs into obstacles that have to do either with the recollection of
other arguments or with technological innovations that come to disturb the
classifications being developed, in particular by multiplying unclassifiable
or litigious cases, or by unexpectedly associating priceless foetuses with
worthless ones.
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But these disturbances do not depend, at least not entirely, on chance
encounters between independent causal sequences: on the one hand, the
sequence that has led to the legalization of abortion and, on the other, the
sequence that has led to unprecedented developments in the technologies of
procreation. These two sequences are in fact both inherent to the projectbased understanding. It is in the framework of this understanding that the
greatest possible gap is established between the worthless foetus – the one
that is aborted – and the priceless foetus – the one destined to come to
term, the one prefiguring the baby that will concretize the project of having
a child. Now it is precisely the extreme importance attached to the child
resulting from a project (known as a ‘wanted child’), and to the foetus
in which it finds itself embodied during gestation, that has stimulated the
search for technologies destined either to bring the foetus to term, to control
its development so that it will achieve this result under the best possible
conditions, or to keep it alive when it is born prematurely.
The development of technologies of procreation has brought into existence new beings (especially the ones I call ‘techno-foetuses’) and by the
same token it has posed unprecedented legal problems bearing on the question, inherent to the law, of what status should be attributed to these beings
and, consequently, what treatments they might receive. But at the same time
other, often vexed questions have arisen concerning the boundaries between
the techno-foetus and the authentic foetus on the one hand and the tumoral
foetus on the other. For, rather like the cascading logic of union classifications (where an advantage obtained by one category is immediately claimed
by others), the fact of granting a status to a techno-foetus has not failed to
evoke the possibility of reopening the question of why the tumoral foetus
for its part would not ultimately be granted the same advantage.
Let me add that one important consequence of these categorial, moral
and legal disputes, largely carried on in the public sphere, has been to bring
the foetus into the social realm, to make it a fully social being, something
that does not seem to have been the case in Western history up to now, and
may not have been the case in any known society.
The danger represented by unclassifiable or litigious cases
As in the case of the classifications studied by ethnoscience, the categories
of foetal life have fuzzy borders that are hard to conceptualize without reactivating the questions and tensions that the establishment of a taxonomic
order was supposed to have set aside. Now the technological means and
the legal arrangements oriented towards the protection of the child resulting from a project sometimes tend to give body to beings that are difficult
to define either as authentic or as tumoral, and that threaten to contest the
validity of this opposition through the questions that their qualification
raises. Escape hatches must then be found in an effort to avoid a challenge
to the taxonomic order. I shall give four brief examples.
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The first concerns the medical interruption of pregnancy, legally acceptable in some contexts until the end of gestation; it consists in treating a
being that has already been adopted and constituted as a ‘baby’ by the
woman who is carrying it as if that being were an ‘embryo’ (that is, as practically ‘nothing’).16 A new terminology, new practices and new demands
tend to emerge in such borderline cases, in such a way as to distinguish this
unqualifiable being both from the tumoral foetus and from the authentic
foetus. The terms ‘abortion’ and ‘voluntary interruption of pregnancy’ (and
we have seen that the latter emphasizes not the expulsion of a being but the
termination of a process) tend to be replaced more and more often by the
term ‘foetal euthanasia’ (Milliez 1999).17 In fact, in the case of therapeutic
abortion, it is no longer possible to pass over the being that is destroyed
in silence; its bodily presence is undeniable (the mother has felt it move in
her, the parents may have ‘seen’ it in a sonogram, family and friends are
aware of a pregnancy that ‘shows’, and so on), and it may have reached a
stage in the evolution of foetal life where, if it were to be born prematurely
but in good health, serious efforts would be made to keep it alive. The very
way abortion is practised associates it with birth (the foetus is killed in
utero, so as to protect doctors against the accusation of infanticide, then
‘delivered’ through recourse to products that stimulate contractions).18 In
this case, the fiction of an incommensurable distance between the worthless
(tumoral) foetus and the priceless (authentic) foetus is hard to maintain;
the arguments and representations deployed thus need to be displaced,
reoriented towards a ‘gentle death free of suffering’ provided for the good
of the one who receives it. Certain parents who undergo this ordeal relate
it, moreover, to the situation they would have been in had their child been
‘stillborn’ or had it died shortly after birth. They give a name to the being
that is destroyed and even send their family and friends cards announcing
its simultaneous birth and death; they may ask that their ‘baby’ be buried
(instead of being incinerated like ‘products of abortion’) and that it appear
in their family records.19
Another problematic example in which categories that ought to remain
far apart are brought together is created by the development of technologies for the benefit of ‘preemies’, and at an increasingly early stage of their
development. Especially in countries such as Great Britain where abortion
is legal up to twenty-four weeks after the last menstrual period, the use
of these technologies tends to introduce into the same mental space two
beings that do not belong together: on the one hand, the worthless being
in whose case abortion is unproblematic and, on the other hand, a being
so precious that ‘everything must be done to save it’. The constraint of
non-discrimination identified in chapter 2 (the second constraint) can then
find itself reactivated: why go to so much trouble to save the life of this
one, whereas the life of that one can be deemed of no value? The tension
between the different treatments received by the abortable foetus and the
premature infant for whom every possible life-saving effort is made appears
with particular clarity when the problems posed by the decision to continue
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or halt efforts to revive the newborn are raised in their ‘ethical’ dimension.
While in the case of abortion the arrangements are such as to shunt aside
the question of justification, it is not the same for the decision to stop the
resuscitation effort, for the requirement of having to justify that decision,
if only in their own eyes, often weighs painfully on the doctors responsible
(Grassin 2001).20
Similar problems come up for the taxonomic order, this time in its legal
dimension, when a demand for compensation is presented to the courts by
a woman whose foetus has been destroyed accidentally, for example in an
automobile accident where the responsible party has been clearly identified.
Such a demand could be judged valid provided that the foetus be assimilated either to a part of the mother’s body (which she lost as she might have
lost an arm or a leg in the accident) or to a being over which she has property rights or for which she has legal responsibility. Nevertheless, the courts
have until now either refused to recognize harm caused accidentally to the
foetus or declared themselves incompetent to rule (as was the case recently
in the European Court of Human Rights21). In fact, such recognition would
present a risk for the taxonomic order, in that it would associate the case
of the (authentic) foetus destroyed accidentally with that of the (tumoral)
foetus aborted voluntarily.22 If the first has a price such that its loss must
be the object of compensation, why would the same thing not hold true for
the second?23
One more example, at the frontier between technology and law: during
the 1980s, in the United States, the concept of ‘foetal rights’ came to the
fore when obstetricians went to court to demand compensation from
mothers for in utero harm done to the foetus, for example owing to drug
addiction, excessive alcohol consumption, or refusal to undergo certain
prenatal medical procedures. These cases clearly involved authentic foetuses
for which the doctors overseeing the pregnancy considered themselves
medically responsible. Their charges thus aimed to shift blame for harm
done to the foetus onto the mother so as to disengage their own responsibility. But, as in the situations of accidental destruction evoked above, lawsuits
of this sort can blur the distinction between authentic foetuses and tumoral
foetuses, or even call it back into question.
In the United States, in recent years, the proliferation of legal cases against
pregnant women for mistreatment of foetuses they were carrying seems to
have been stimulated by concern on the part of the doctors involved to exempt
themselves from responsibility. The notion of prenatal injury is thus on its
way to being firmly established in American jurisprudence. Cases of this type
are quite varied. Women have been accused of refusing prenatal technologies
such as foetal diagnostic tests or in utero surgery, or charged with drug or
alcohol use deemed harmful to the foetus. This jurisprudence, which seeks to
establish ‘foetal rights’, has been the object of lively polemics, since it tends to
limit the rights of women as constitutional persons and also since it inevitably
interferes to some extent with the right to abortion. Introducing a collection
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of essays on this question, which includes several critical contributions by
academic specialists in women’s studies, Robert H. Blank thus writes: ‘Many
observers who study patterns in tort law have concluded that continued
expansion of tort recovery for prenatal injury is leading to the recognition of
the fetus as a person …. The trend towards abrogating the parental immunity
rule and efforts to surmount the practical difficulties of a parent–child suit
clearly presage the day when a cause of action by a child against its mother for
prenatal injury might be upheld. Furthermore, criminal law has increasingly
been used to constrain the choices of pregnant women . . . or to punish them
for their actions which harm the fetuses they are carrying …. Although these
trends are incompatible with a woman’s constitutional right to abortion and
threaten to contradict her procreative autonomy and bodily integrity, they
demonstrate a growing legal concern for the welfare of the unborn and for a
right of all children to be born with a sound mind and body.’
Foetal surgery, which has been developing especially rapidly in recent
decades, presents similar problems. One question that arises is who can
decide whether, for the surgeon, the foetus is a ‘patient’ or not. The surgeon’s operations on the bodies of a mother and her foetus cannot be
separated. Now, in cases where the prognosis suggests the possibility of
foetal surgery, the mother can legally either give her consent or opt for
abortion. A surgeon who specializes in foetal operations thus declared to
Monica Casper, the author of the standard work on the history and sociology of this practice (1998): ‘Biologically we’re treating the fetus as a patient,
as part of mom, and it’s a patient because mom says it’s a patient. If she
says it’s not a patient, it’s not a patient. The legal framework is that it could
still be aborted.’ Casper asked this doctor what would happen if a mother
decided finally to resort to abortion after a surgical operation on the foetus.
He replied: ‘Who decides to abort? It’s her decision.’ But he acknowledged
that he would be upset, ‘because we’d have invested time, energy, and effort
in the fetus’s well-being’ (ibid., 178–9). Through the mother’s decision, the
being constituted as a patient, for whom on these grounds the maximum
must be done, would shift back again into non-existence.
A new foetal category: the techno-foetus
Technological developments in the field of medically assisted reproduction
have been stimulated by the demand, expressed over time within the projectbased understanding, to concretize in one’s flesh, sometimes without regard
to cost, a child already conceived but only as a project. A secondary effect
of these developments has been the appearance of new beings that cannot
be qualified as either authentic or tumoral; their presence, both in the world
of bodies and in the space of debates, is problematic in relation to the tacitly
accepted taxonomies and threatens to destabilize them at any moment. It is
essentially in this regard that these technologies, which certainly raise a host
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of other problems, interest me here. To designate these new beings, I use the
term techno-foetuses.
What are commonly called ‘frozen embryos’ are good examples of
the kinds of beings at the heart of this tacit category (to borrow Eleanor
Rosch’s terminology). Obtained by in vitro fertilization, these beings are
destined to be reimplanted in the womb. But because the technique of
reimplantation has a high failure rate, several are produced each time and
left to wait after freezing, so that renewed attempts can be made until a
pregnancy is achieved and brought to term. (This practice, following a ‘preimplantation dialogue’, makes it possible to select the beings that have the
greatest chance of resulting in a qualitatively satisfactory child, for example
by eliminating the ones that carry ‘recessive genes’.) One unintended result
of the technique is a proliferation of these ‘frozen embryos’ (in France
alone, there are probably tens of thousands); their taxonomic identity is
thus a problem leading to questions about their fate and who has the right
to decide it.
Frozen embryos cannot be assimilated to tumoral foetuses and deemed
to be ‘nothing at all’, inasmuch as they have been created with the intent to
‘give life’. Their production has been associated with a ‘parental project’ in
a particularly manifest form since, in cases of recourse to medically assisted
reproduction, the women involved, and to a certain extent their partners as
well, consent to significant sacrifices, often over a long period of time and
without allowing themselves to become discouraged by repeated failures,
so that what had been conceived as a project can finally be realized in the
flesh. But from another standpoint, frozen embryos that have not been
reimplanted cannot avail themselves of the preconfirmation offered by the
project. This is clearly expressed by the canonical formula used to describe
them: ‘superfluous embryos without a parental project’.
Let us note in passing that this proximity to the authentic foetus raises a
delicate boundary problem, since the techno-foetus must not be confused
with the state foetus, which has been widely discredited today. The need to
maintain this distinction relates particularly to the question of determining
who can legitimately make decisions about the future of the ‘excess’ beings
created by medical protocols. In France, at least, the potential parents
(and, legally, the woman in whom the being produced in vitro will be
reimplanted) have the power to decide to start the process that is to lead
to a pregnancy. In fact, any decision about beings created with the help of
sophisticated technologies, if it is made by an agency that depends more or
less on a centralized institution, would tend to identify those beings with
state foetuses, and this, in the framework of the project-based understanding, would call into question the validity of the decision. This constraint
weighs heavily on the action of doctors, for in reality they are the ones who
face the question of what to do with the excess beings that they have been
led to create in order to satisfy a mother’s desire to bear a unique foetus in
her womb. Saying that these beings no longer correspond henceforth to a
‘parental project’ signifies in fact that the potential parents have abandoned
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the authority that they had over them, thereby leaving the decision to
doctors.
A debate has thus arisen about the beings created in vitro (though the
arguments can be extended to other examples of techno-foetuses), a debate
that has led, in France, to the awarding of legal status to those beings (via
the 1994 bioethics laws), so as to codify the treatments to which they may
or may not be subjected (destruction, sale, use in medical research or for
industrial purposes, and so on). In this debate, the proponents of different
types of solutions are distributed, in sum, between a reductionist position,
which identifies these beings with the cells of which they consist and thus
denies them any selfhood, and a humanist position, which emphasizes, in
contrast, the fact that these beings result from the fertilization of human
gametes and thereby have the character of ‘potential human beings’, hence
their ‘dignity’ must be respected. While, for holders of the first position, it
would be pointless to define a specific status, since these beings fall only
under the law of property rights (a body of law that needs to be clarified
in their case, however), for holders of the second position it is essential to
award a judicial status to the beings, so that their ‘dignity’ will be protected
by law.
The two options raise difficult boundary problems. The first concerns the
authentic foetus: how can one justify such a big difference in identity and
treatment among several embryos conceived by the same procedure but of
which only one will fulfil the parental project? The second problem (which
tends to predominate in France) concerns the tumoral foetus. In fact, if
the techno-foetus inherently possesses ‘dignity’ such that its destiny must
be protected by a statute – in particular to forestall the risk of its being
‘reified’ – why would the same reasoning not apply to the tumoral foetus,
since these two beings possess substantially similar properties? But this
association suggests another even more delicate question. What sense does
it make to confer on a being a legal status, that is, rights, on the basis of its
relation to the ‘human’, without conferring on it at the same time the ‘right
to life’ that constitutes the first of all ‘human rights’?24 Now, if such a right
were awarded to the techno-foetus (which would presuppose its conservation in frozen form for an indefinite period of time and would raise difficult
technical problems at the very least, and would require a risky search for
volunteer surrogate mothers willing to welcome them), why would it not
also be awarded to the tumoral foetus, which would lead to nothing less
than eliminating the difference between the latter and the authentic foetus,
and consequently challenging the legal validity of abortion?
We find an echo of this dilemma in the often awkward discourse of
those who militate in favour of legal status for the techno-foetus but who
seek to separate this question from that of abortion, viewing the two as
unrelated. As evidence, let us consider a recent radio debate featuring the
biologist Jacques Testart, an ardent defender of a ‘status for the embryo’,
and the legal scholar Marcela Iacub. Iacub countered Testart’s humanist
arguments according to which the ‘embryo’ as a ‘potential human being’
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possessed intrinsic ‘dignity’, so that it should be protected against any
measure tending towards its ‘instrumentation’, by arguing that such ‘instrumentation’ had already been ratified with the legalization of abortion, so
that, to be internally consistent, the argumentative line defended by Testart
should be extended to challenge the legality of abortion (this argument was
obviously intended to disqualify Testart’s position by revealing that it was
in reality simply begging the question, disguising a pro-life position). The
position underlying Iacub’s objection, which she spelled out in a book she
co-edited with Pierre Jouannet (2001), takes the implicit presuppositions of
the project-based arrangement to the extreme limit. This position consists
in effect in considering as relevant only the distinction between beings that
have been engendered in the context of a parental project and those created
in some other way, either in the flesh or in vitro, and which, eminently
replaceable, are treated as lacking intrinsic worth.
Here are some excerpts from the debate between Marcela Iacub and Jacques
Testart that took place on 17 January 2002 during a radio programme on
France Culture (‘La suite dans les idées’, hosted by Sylvain Bourmeaux)
devoted to the use of embryos in pharmaceutical research:
M. Iacub: ‘It’s the debate over the Veil law [the 1975 French law legalizing abortion under certain conditions] that keeps us from agreeing today
about what an embryo is. French society has made a choice. In other words,
we ultimately privilege the life of persons already born over the embryo. We
don’t ask a woman to give reasons for choosing abortion; this is to say that
lots of embryos are killed, I don’t know how many, 200,000 a year, finally,
and yet we’re still asking ourselves whether embryos have to be sacred when
it involves, maybe in a little more mediate way, using them to cure certain
diseases. . . . I have the impression that we still have to suffer this space of
misunderstanding, perhaps wilful misunderstanding, which has surrounded
the debate over the Veil law and isn’t going away . . . This is a law, it has
to be said perhaps with the brutality that the story deserves, a law that has,
somewhere, reified the embryo, has subjected it to the interests of persons who
have already been born. So the embryo can be considered as in the process
of becoming a person, a potential person, to the extent that it is going to be
caused to be born. It is simply to this extent that the embryo has to be considered as a potential person. But an embryo that is not called upon to become,
let us say, the body or the biological life of a human being to be born is something that has been reified, where someone has decided that it was ready to be
sacrificed for the happiness of people who have already been born. I think that
this is the crux, the choice that has been made and that we are not facing. In
fact, we’re not managing to face it.’
…
J. Testart: ‘On this question, I wouldn’t want the people who wonder about
the nature of a human embryo and tell themselves that it’s not the same as a
cow embryo or a mouse embryo to be confused with other people who are
actually opposed to abortion in the name of a religion, a certain concept of
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humanity or of God. . . . We fought for the right to abortion. This doesn’t
prevent us from considering that the human embryo is not just any object . . .
I have to recognize that it is very risky, very dangerous to institute a human
sub-species that would be at the service of the other . . . Thus it is a sort of
materialization where the needs of some would have every possibility of being
expressed and of exploiting another human category. And to me, this seems
serious. Let me recall just one thing, we all started as embryos.’
…
M. Iacub: ‘Mr Testart, I think you are talking about something that is
already here. We’ve already decided that women, because they don’t want to
make a child now, because they have a headache, because . . . we don’t ask any
woman for a reason to kill the embryo she is carrying, finally. If this is a subcategorization of humanity, we mustn’t be afraid to say so. There are people
who have not yet been born. Human beings, as you like to put it, who are not
yet born are considered as something like things.’
One way of developing a debate over the techno-foetus while sidestepping the questions that would be raised by associating it with the tumoral
foetus anchored in the flesh of a singular person consists in stressing the
technological arrangement, managed by a collective, that constitutes the
techno-foetus’s environment. In the United States, in debates that preceded
a presidential decision to allow federal financing to support ‘research using
human embryos’, members of the ‘moral majority’, strongly opposed to
abortion, argued in favour of using ‘human embryos for therapeutic purposes’, considering that ‘an embryo conceived in vitro has no possibility of
developing into a human being’ on its own; consequently, they made a clear
distinction between ‘human life begun in the womb’ and ‘embryos’ found
‘in a test tube or a refrigerator’ (Nau 2001).
But it is also because the techno-foetus has been dissociated from the
project that led to its creation, because it has been disembodied, in a way,
dissociated from all flesh and detached from the singular persons who
presided over its formation, that it can be available for legal and moral
investments of a different order that cause this barely outlined being to take
on a higher level of generality, and make it the focus of debates concerning
not cases associated with particular situations but rather the question of
‘the human’ in the broadest sense of the term, the question of the origins,
contours and future of ‘humanity’.25 Such debates (which reached a peak
over the question of cloning, although so far this technology has not been
applied to human beings) doubtless owe part of their fascination to the fact
that they have implications for the problematics of ‘human rights’. These
latter can be conceived, according to an individualist logic, as subjective
rights (and in this case nothing stands in the way of a decision to resort to
medically assisted reproduction, even if the decision results in the creation
of ‘excess’ embryos; moreover, technological developments permitting,
nothing in this logic precludes deciding to clone a deceased child); alternatively, ‘human rights’ can be conceived according to a holistic logic, as
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rights of the human species, and in this case decisions taken by individuals
on their own personal responsibility can be considered as engaging ‘humanity’ in general and for that reason as necessarily subject to collective rulings
(Barret-Kriegel 1995).
In these debates, the reference to the concept of dignity, which is in
the process of being elaborated in the field of law, plays a central role.
Developed, on the one hand, with respect to ‘crimes against humanity’ and,
on the other hand, in the context of bioethics legislation (Ambroselli and
Wormser 1999), this concept has been consecrated by the French Conseil
constitutionnel [Constitutional Council], which introduced it into the ‘constitutional bloc’26 considered as following the ruling of the Conseil d’État
[Council of State] concerning ‘midget tossing’: in 1996, having to decide
whether a mayor had the right to prohibit this type of carnival attraction,
the Conseil d’État sided with the mayor, deciding that ‘respect for the
dignity of the human person is a component of public order’ (Edelman 1999,
505–14). This ruling and the introduction of a reference to ‘dignity’ in the
constitutional bloc gave rise to a heated debate among legal scholars that is
not without relevance to our topic. Legal experts (such as Mireille DelmasMarty [2002] or Bernard Edelman [1999]) concerned with constructing and
solidifying this notion in order to consolidate and implement the notion of
humanity have been opposed by those who see the legal consecration of that
notion as a ‘legal coup d’État’ (as Olivier Cayla put it [1998]), opening the
way to a ‘return of the moral order’ in the sense that it would allow juridical
agencies – thus agencies of the state – to come between persons and the uses
they mean to make of their bodies. Hadn’t the dwarf in question – those
who defend this position ask – signed a work contract, and wasn’t he free to
use his own body as he liked – in the case in point, to earn his living?
The question raised clearly concerns the limits that can be imposed on
personal freedom in the framework of liberal individualism. While the
opponents of this notion saw it as a scandalous limitation on the freedom of
the legal subject ‘in the relation he maintained with himself’, and as a return
to limitations on ‘subjective claims’ in the name of an ‘imperative and transcendent order’ (Cayla and Thomas 2002, 13), its defenders considered on
the contrary that certain actions of individuals could be the object of legal
prohibitions even if the one who performed them had freely consented to
them, to the extent that he was engaging not only his own will, but also his
‘very quality as a human being’, a quality that no human being has the right
to renounce without imperilling all of humanity, to which he or she belongs
(Edelman 1999, 512). (This can be related to the classic liberal axiom
according to which human beings do not have the right to sell themselves
as slaves.) The notion of ‘dignity’ can thus be considered by Edelman as
the fundamental concept underlying the philosophy of human rights (as the
rights of humanity; ibid., 509), and, by Cayla, as an ‘antiliberal’ instrument
for subverting human rights (as individual rights; Cayla 1998, 130).
The same debate was revived in late 2000 in connection with the celebrated Perruche ruling (which gave rise to a significant body of literature in
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just a few months) in favour of the plaintiff. (A request for reparations for
wrongful life had been filed on behalf of a severely handicapped young man
whose mother had contracted rubella during her pregnancy; the mother
argued that she would have aborted and thus would not have given birth to
the plaintiff if the laboratory that had performed the prenatal examination
had not given her incorrect information.) Opponents of the Perruche ruling
argued that it was contrary to ‘human dignity’ to ‘complain of being born
disabled rather than not being born’ and that ‘human life’ could not be considered ‘wrongful’ without calling its ‘dignity’ into question (Labrusse-Riou
and Mathieu, 2000). Those who defended the validity of the ruling judged
on the contrary that, behind the invocation of ‘dignity’, the opponents’ real
goal was to ‘cancel out the speech of the mother through which she expressed
her will not to bring a handicapped child into the world’ and thereby to call
the right to abortion itself back into question: ‘and this, by virtue of a profoundly pro-life political and ideological choice which, in the name of the
contemporary concept of “dignity of the human person”, only revives the
traditional war that the anti-Moderns have been waging constantly, since
the eighteenth century, against the subjective rights of the individual, that is,
against the freedom to dispose of oneself that the Moderns have envisaged
as being at the heart of “the natural rights of man”’ (Cayla 2002, 35). This
interpretation was confirmed by Marcela Iacub in an article published in a
major morning newspaper, where she declared that, ‘above all, the Perruche
ruling gives a new legitimacy to abortion. The actions of children against
doctors in effect break with the idea that abortion implies a tension between
the child’s right to life and the mother’s right to abortion, as well as with
the feeling that, when a woman decides to have an abortion, she is committing at the least a wrong against the child who could have been born. The
ruling says on the contrary that it is precisely for the good of the child to be
born that for an unhealthy embryo one can substitute another, through the
intermediary of abortion’ (Iacub 2002a).
After the Second World War, the thematics of ‘human rights’ came up again
for debate, chiefly in an effort to settle once and for all the question brought
up by the Nazi regime as to who among those who claimed to belong to
humanity could be considered truly human: the goal, in other words, was
to rule out the possibility of playing with the definition of humanity by
affirming the existence of a common humanity that would be absolutely
incontestable. Paradoxically, this effort had the effect of relaunching the
debate about the borders of humanity.
In fact, if ‘human rights’ are considered to be subjective rights, they
cannot be effective if they are not specified. This is why, with respect to
our topic, they have been spelled out as ‘rights of women’, ‘reproductive
rights’, ‘rights of the child’ and so on. Yet in many debates ‘human rights’
are invoked by those who defend opposing positions. On the question of
abortion, ‘reproductive rights’ and the ‘rights of women’ can be opposed by
an attempt to extend the ‘rights of the child’ to the foetus: this argument
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points to the increasingly uncertain character of the boundary between
the two types of beings, a boundary that the development of reproductive
technologies tends to blur.27 There is no way to settle such disputes without
seeking to define more precisely in legal terms the beings that can be deemed
to hold subjective rights; this would necessarily amount to specifying which
of the postulants to humanity can be viewed as truly belonging to it. But
the situation is not very different if ‘human rights’ are envisaged as rights
of the human species, since certain tendencies in political and moral philosophy confidently invoke biology and zoology in order to call the notion
of ‘species’ into question. For these thinkers, there is nothing immutable
about the definition of ‘species’ or the notion of a border between species.28
(We shall see this in more detail in the next chapter, when we examine the
major theories in moral philosophy that aim to legitimize abortion.) Thus
the current debates that rely on the thematics of ‘human rights’ tend to
reintroduce the notion of humanity’s frontiers, a notion that the revival of
this thematics was precisely intended to eliminate forever.29
The question of representation and the visible
In the examples examined above, the risks of destabilizing the categorial
separation between authentic foetuses and tumoral foetuses were linked
above all to the appearance of beings that occupied an ambiguous position with respect to that distinction, and especially to the fact that efforts
to specify and stabilize the representation of these beings threatened to call
back into question the opposition between a priceless foetus and a worthless
one. But the space of representation in which the interplay of associations
and differences operated was, in these various cases, essentially legal. Now,
no less awkward associations can be suggested, and much more frequently,
when the foetus is grasped not by putting categorial constructions to work
but rather by being presented to view in its bodily aspects. In fact, from the
standpoint of onlookers who dismiss what they may know about the differences, these two beings, the authentic and the tumoral, so dissimilar on the
cognitive level, have the same body. This is why the moment when the foetus
becomes visible is always a delicate moment whose traversal requires particularly difficult work, not only in terms of argumentation but also in terms of
managing emotions. Let me offer two examples. The first deals with the brief
moment after an abortion when what has been expelled is visible, without
mediation, to the eyes of the doctor, the nurse and sometimes the patient,
before it is destroyed. The second concerns some intense debates that have
arisen over photographic representations of foetuses and their public use.
In citing certain comments made by doctors to patients during pre-abortion
sonograms, I noted that these doctors asked their patients if they wanted to
see the screen, an offer that was sometimes declined; I did not mention the
remarks that the doctors made after the fact about that experience, which
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for them was sometimes repeated several times a day. Now the doctor’s
relation to the image that appears on the control screen is not always as
simple as the comments he or she addresses to the patient might suggest.
While doctors make an effort to say that what they are seeing is ‘nothing’,
their work nevertheless consists in seeing and interpreting as objectively as
possible the representation of what they are going to extract, and this task
is all the more painful for them the more the foetus is advanced in age and
consequently configured in a way that evokes the morphology of human
beings. This epiphany of the foetus is no doubt – as a medical team from
the department of obstetrics and gynaecology at the hospital centre in Arras
responsible for abortions30 pointed out in an ‘open forum’ published by
the newspaper Libération – one of the chief reasons for the resistance that
a certain number of doctors manifested towards the Aubry law of 4 July
2001, which extended the legal limit on performing abortions to fourteen
weeks after the last menstrual period.
A situation of the same type, but which gives rise to a discomfort even
more difficult to alleviate, can occur during the operation itself. In relation
to what interests us here, a characteristic feature of the aspiration technology used in abortions is that it ordinarily eliminates the shape of what is
extracted. The foetal remains are crushed and sent by the machine into a
detachable pouch (the ‘sock’). But after the extension of the time period
allowed for abortions, it sometimes happens that the ‘sock’, too small to
hold the remains of a more voluminous foetus, bursts open, dispersing
debris in which ‘human’ forms are recognizable to the naked eye: a decidedly troubling situation for the doctor and the nurse assisting him.31
A nurse anaesthesiologist spoke during a meeting of the department responsible for abortions (in a provincial hospital): ‘This time, for a thirteen-week
pregnancy, the socks weren’t big enough, and it went straight into the bowl; I
assure you that it wasn’t funny . . . when you have to empty the products and
there’s a mess all over. . . . Yes, when it gets stuck in the aspirator at thirteen
or fourteen weeks and you hold the tube in the air so it’ll go through – it’s
different from an early pregnancy.’ After the meeting, one of the doctors
present (doctor 3, provincial hospital) gave some explanations about the
nurse’s intervention: ‘I know what happened that Saturday, it was doctor X,
an obstetrician, so, that famous Saturday, it was the day before she was going
on vacation, she had had some urgent requests for late abortions; she had
asked two midwives to assist her and they had both refused, so she called on
this nurse anaesthesiologist. OK, fine, but it’s rare that it happens this way,
it’s true that with a late pregnancy the sock can explode under pressure, too,
and it’s not funny.’ . . . ‘What’s this about a sock?’ ‘It’s a bag in the bowl that
collects the products of the expulsion.’
Problems of visibility also come up with medical abortions, even though
they have the advantage of being performed at an earlier stage of foetal
development, up to seven weeks after the last menstrual period. When the
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doctor verbally presents medical abortion to the patient, he compares this
act to a ‘miscarriage’ or to a ‘pregnancy period’ (‘it’s like a natural miscarriage, but induced’; ‘you’ll see, with the medical method, it’s like having a
heavy period with pills; the uterus contracts’). In certain hospital centres,
the patient has the choice between expulsion into a toilet or a basin; in the
latter case, this allows for assurance that the uterine cavity has been fully
emptied (‘we watch and we tell you when it’s done’).
‘So today we’re going to give you a pill that stops your pregnancy, and
then Friday [that is, two days later] you’ll come back here and take two more
pills that will make your uterus contract and trigger the expulsion; it’s like a
miscarriage, but induced. It hurts a little, that’s normal, it’s the uterus that’s
working. In 5 per cent of cases, it works after the first pill, and in eight cases
out of ten, it works here when you come back. Then, after the expulsion, we
check the bowl to see what’s been produced, and we have definite proof that
everything is out and we don’t need to check with a sonogram.32 We’re practically the only centre where you can find out right away if everything is out,
then we use an incinerator to burn the products of the expulsion. You can see
them if you want to’ (doctor 1, provincial hospital).
The doctor to a patient who wants to have the expulsion at home:33 ‘OK,
it’s been five weeks and four days since your last menstrual period; you’re
going to take three pills to terminate the pregnancy and two cytotec fortyeight hours later to get rid of it; but when you do this at home and you don’t
expel anything after taking the cytotec, which happens – it depends on the
woman, we don’t know why some hold back, it’s mysterious – we don’t give
you the other two pills in advance, you have to come here seven days later to
do it again and if you have bleeding, you have to rush to the hospital’ (doctor
2, Paris hospital).
The doctor gives the patient a verbal description of what is going to be
expelled (‘it’s a grey sac less than an inch long, covered in blood’). In this
case, too, the nurse or nurse’s aide who is helping with the expulsion may
ask the patient if she wants to ‘see’ what came out, an offer that is not
always welcomed with enthusiasm (‘I didn’t linger over it, I have to say’
[a student, age 23]). In fact, it seems that, unlike what happens in the preabortion sonogram situation described earlier (in which the doctor does
not put the patient in a position to look), the nurses make this proposal
seeking to delegate control to the patient, so that they will simply have to
‘confirm’ what she sees by glancing as furtively and as rapidly as possible
at the content of the basin. In rare cases, unlike the situation where aspiration is used, with medical abortions the being expelled may still be alive.
The nurses know this, and some of them say that they have been able to
‘see heartbeats’. According to the doctors questioned, many nurses hate to
‘look in the basin’ (‘they can’t stomach any more looking’) and try to get
out of it by passing it off to a colleague. (Certain abortion services have set
up ‘support groups’ to help nurses face this problem.) The refusal to look is
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also manifest among the social workers and psychologists who are in charge
of the (optional) interviews with patients: ‘As for me, I’ve never wanted to
see it. I prefer not to look, otherwise it’s not going to help me listen to the
women’ (abortion counsellor, hospital in the Paris region).
Chloé, a 22-year-old student who had retained few memories of her first
abortion at age 15 (by aspiration, under general anaesthetic), described her
second abortion, a medical procedure, which she had when she was 20, as
‘super shocking’, and she was particularly troubled by having had to void
into the toilet: ‘Yes, it was much harder, because I did it with a procedure, it
was medications, I was told that it was much more reliable. Actually, it was
really horrible, because you weren’t put to sleep and you weren’t warned at
all about what was going to happen over the next few days, so this time, it
was much more humiliating. In fact, you arrive in the morning, you have to
take the medications, you’re in a room with other women who’ve also had
the medications. They put protective covers on the chairs, you don’t know
why, but you suspect it’s because you’re going to bleed. All the women went
to the bathroom all the time; with me, I was OK, I wasn’t hurting – it wasn’t
working, that’s all. And it was really at the last minute when I said, “You’re
getting out of here, you’re not going to stay until ten at night”, it was really at
the last minute that I went to the bathroom and it fell out, just like that, and it
was super, super shocking. Because they don’t warn you about how it’s going
to happen. . . . When I saw the thing in the toilet, it really shocked me, it didn’t
look like anything, it was a ball of blood, it didn’t look anything like a baby,
but it was still . . . I never said to myself “OK, I’m going to flush, it’s a baby
that’s going to disappear.” I said, “OK, this is how it is”, I tried not to think
too much about it because . . . it’s horrible to do that to someone.’
Liliane, age 24, an employee in a film distribution company, spoke in
roughly the same terms about her second abortion, performed when she was
22: ‘And so this time, it was more horrible than the first time because this time
I was older, so I was more aware of what it was to be a mother, and besides,
the method was really . . . really hard, because it was a medication. There were
thirty of us in a room smaller than this one, in a square, waiting like laying
hens, waiting to lay our eggs, and it’s super painful because you have contractions, it’s really, really painful, so there you are in a room, all the girls hurting
and rolling on the floor and all waiting to push out the egg, and the nurse who
comes in and says: “OK, well, now go for it, you’re losing blood, put it in the
pot.” And afterward, she looks in the pot and everything, and then, well, then
it was really hard, because I actually saw it, and I felt it come down and I saw
it, you know, unlike the first time, when I didn’t see anything.’
A second example that can illustrate the way in which the distinction between authentic and tumoral foetuses is threatened when a foetus
becomes visible is supplied by the very important role played by photographs of foetuses in the polemics around abortion.
In 1965, when the cover of the American weekly magazine Life pictured
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an eighteen-week-old foetus inside the amniotic sac in the womb, the photograph by the Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson was a milestone, and
not only as a technological exploit. It marked access to the order of graphic
representation of a being that, until then, had largely escaped such representation, and it prefigured – as we shall see later on – the gradual entry of that
being, some years later, into the social order which had more or less ignored
it previously. From this point on, photographs of foetuses proliferated, so
that today one can put together a large collection of images simply by going
through newspapers and magazines intended for a broad public.
In the conflicts surrounding abortion over the last several decades, opponents of legalization made considerable use of photos of foetuses in order to
support the assertion that to abort was to ‘kill a child not yet born’. Some
used Nilsson’s photos or similar ones to celebrate the foetus as a representative, in the womb, of human life in gestation; others showed post-abortion
photos of dead foetuses, often brandishing them in anti-abortion demonstrations to dramatize their protest. The morphological similarity between
the foetus and the infant that would have come into the world had the
foetus lived was used to prove that the foetus was indeed a human person
and to demand that the life of that person be protected by the state, often in
the name of human rights.
To counter these arguments and reduce the emotional effects that such
photos could arouse, academics, especially in the United States, who
were close to movements that defended abortion rights (sociologists, philosophers, legal scholars, historians of science, members of women’s studies
departments, and so on) undertook to ‘decode’ the rhetoric of abortion
opponents and to ‘deconstruct’ the images the latter used; this also led
them to try to deprive the foetus of the presence and stature that it had
recently acquired, in part precisely because of the debates over its status.
The academics involved in this enterprise relied in particular on conceptual
instruments borrowed from the practice of deconstruction in the fields of literature, philosophy and sociology. By adopting an epistemological position
of the constructionist type, they essentially challenged the realism claimed
by those who used the images in question. They sought to demonstrate that,
far from being ‘real’, these images were artefacts and thus instruments of
ideological propaganda, either because they decontextualized the foetus by
isolating it from the womb (that is, from the mother, whose presence was
excluded from such images34), or because the photos had been produced
by technological encoding (via electronic microscopes and digital imaging
techniques), or, finally, because using artificial techniques to show what is
normally hidden was tantamount to producing an artefact. One metaphor
in particular stood out at the heart of this critique and achieved the status
of a commonplace: echoing Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001, A Space Odyssey,
the photographic image of a foetus enclosed in the womb was associated
metaphorically with that of a cosmonaut enclosed in a spacesuit, the first
floating in amniotic fluid the way the second floated in space, both cut off
from their moorings in a world.35
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The entry of the foetus into the social world via deconstruction
The last several decades have been marked by the entry of the foetus into
society. This movement, which is still being carried out before our eyes
today and which is no doubt far from over, has constituted a radical
innovation. By speaking of the foetus’s entry into the social world, I am
referring to a more specific process than the one customarily discussed by
sociologists when they say that such-and-such a phenomenon is ‘social’ or
when they assert, as if repeating a watchword, that ‘everything is social’.36 I
prefer to say that a being is social (in the sense in which Bruno Latour uses
the term, for example37) or is part of society when the human members of a
collective (which, for Latour, includes more than human beings), or at least
some of them, deem that the relation maintained with that being concerns
and engages the collective as a whole. The access of a being to society thus
presupposes the intervention of spokespersons, the task of qualifying and
representing that being in some of the agencies that govern the collective,
and an investigation of the bonds it maintains with other beings, its compatibilities and incompatibilities. These bonds may be determined according to
relations of causality (for example, a given being, by its presence, may put
another being at risk), according to associative and taxonomic relations
(unless all the categories are to be changed, admitting a given being into
the collective would be to introduce a hapax, or even a monster), or as a
function of the logical relation between the rules of behaviour applicable
in the case of a given being and other rules, more or less general, that are
recognized as valid in the case of other beings. (For example, if one may
eat a chicken, which is an animal, but not a cow, which is an animal, it is
necessary to specify what makes it possible to distribute these two members
of the class of animals between two different categories, the edible and the
inedible.) Not all beings are social beings in this sense, even if there are no
beings that cannot be linked to others by associative chains. But I shall call
a being a social being only when these associative chains are activated, that
is, when the relation that the beings maintain with others is apt to cause a
problem for the persons that are in relationships with them. In this sense,
we can see an index of the fact that a being accedes to social life when it uses
speech, either on its own or through the intermediary of a spokesperson,
when a discussion, a debate or perhaps a dispute is begun about that being,
or when a given being appears at the centre of what I have called elsewhere
an ‘affair’ (Boltanski 2012, especially pp. 169–77). Such a definition tends
to associate the social with the political, provided that one understands by
‘political’ – as Latour does – any intervention or discussion that takes as its
object precisely the collective, the beings that make it up and the bonds of
interdependence that these beings maintain among themselves.
The entrance of the foetus into society probably could not have taken
place without the intermediary of the technologies that have made foetuses
accessible to the senses and transformed them from completely unknown
beings (even, to a large extent, for the mothers carrying them) into beings
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that can be ‘seen’, whose photographic image can be produced, whose
heartbeats can be heard and recorded, whose sex and, in certain cases,
whose maladies and handicaps can be known – beings that can receive
medical care in utero, that can be touched, interactively, through the
abdominal wall (haptonomy), and so on. (Smell is the only sense for which
the foetus has remained completely unknown.) But the foetus has also
acquired a social presence owing to the conflicts surrounding it as it was in
the process of affirming its physical presence. Indeed, these conflicts have
ultimately multiplied the opportunities to refer to that being, even though
it has been qualified in different and sometimes contradictory ways by the
various parties involved, so that the density of the (unqualifiable) object of
the conflict has tended to grow in keeping with the disputes devoted to it.
As we have seen, these conflicts have fastened in particular on problems
that might well not have arisen with such force had the foetus not been
subject to representation, not only in the field of the visible but also in
the legal realm. The institution of legal controls has been used as a way to
settle these conflicts by giving priority to one particular qualification over
competing ones. But the result has been more or less the opposite. The mode
of legal inscription has the effect of setting forth both the winning and the
losing qualifications and thereby, as it were, ‘objectifying’ behaviours and
ontological constitutions of objects in the world that can remain relatively
unaware of one another when they are immersed in the flow of practical
actions (though the lack of recognition can always be denounced as ‘bad
faith’). Because they are accomplished in different times and places, associated with distinct affects and acts, their indexical character tends to win out
over the requirement of cognitive coherence. This latter is fully manifested
only when actions, behaviours and practices that are of problematic consistency when they are transported to the level of justification are dissociated
from their practical contexts and brought together in a way that can be
qualified summarily as ‘abstract’, in the sense that they are effectively
presented according to a modality that dispenses with the circumstances in
which they have been carried out.
Constructionism as a social technology
To calm the tensions aroused by the concomitance between the rise in
power of the foetus and its access to the social world on the one hand,
and the legalization of abortion, the need to be able to make the foetus
disappear, on the other, the solutions explored have alternated between
deconstructionism and constructionism. Deconstructionism, as we saw
with the example of photography, has been called upon to challenge the
belief (criticized as ‘essentialist’) in the existence of a foetus that would be
endowed in itself with a permanence independent of the qualifications that
may be applied to it, substituting for this belief the idea that the foetus is a
purely ‘historical’38 or social being that depends entirely on the intentions,
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projections and definitions that may have been applied to it, these being
associated with interests and with forms of domination. The deconstruction
of the foetus has sought to show, as Ian Hacking did in analysing many
other examples of deconstruction, that norms presented as atemporal and
immutable could be subject to radical changes (Hacking 1999). But this
movement of deconstruction leading to a form of relativism, powerful in the
critical register but not very effective as a guide to action in concrete situations, has alternated with a constructionist movement headed towards the
establishment of various practical categories of foetuses separated from one
another so as to prevent them, in so far as possible, from overlapping, or to
keep their association from reviving disputes about right and wrong ways
to qualify these beings. The conventions underlying the beings that I have
identified by distinguishing between the authentic foetus, the tumoral foetus
and the techno-foetus – conventions that are at once indispensable for supporting prevailing practices and constantly threatened – were produced in
this way.39
The construction of foetal categories (although other examples could
have been just as persuasive) suggests that in recent decades sociology was
right to attribute great importance to the question of constructionism, even
though it was generally mistaken about the nature of the problem raised.
In fact, the debates over constructionism have most often taken place in a
register that associates the problem of the ontology of social objects with
epistemological questions. Now, as we see with particular clarity in the case
of law, constructionism is first of all a procedure used by societies when they
face contradictions that they cannot resolve except by seeking to distribute
among different categories beings that, because they are subject in different
contexts to treatments whose justification would appeal to contradictory
principles, have to be wholly accounted for by the qualifications that are
applied to them. Predicates are thus privileged over subjects of predication. A single entity is split apart into as many beings as there are socially
pertinent predicates to qualify it in different incompatible contexts. But
this also means that constructionism, understood in this sense, constitutes
a way of toying with realism. For, if in the moment of deconstruction the
qualifications are treated as purely ‘historical’ in the sense of ‘arbitrary’ or
‘intentional’, in such a way as to challenge the illusory realism of the positions subjected to critique, in the constructionist moment, on the contrary,
the various qualifications are grasped in order to establish the existence of
essentially different entities deposited in reality independently of the dispositions of the mind. The constructionist moment is thereby associated with
a movement of return towards the most trivial essentialism.
Let me add one last remark on this point. We may wonder why constructionist operations of delimitation, which can always give rise to polemics
and critiques, are particularly problematic in the case that concerns us here.
Are we not dealing, moreover, with operations entirely comparable to those
which, in a perspective of justice, set up various spheres of legitimacy associated with various states of persons, as Laurent Thévenot and I analysed
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them in an earlier work (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006)? The difference is
easy to grasp. In the model of the sense of justice based on the concept of the
polity, a single being can traverse different situations in which, if a dispute
arises, he or she will turn out to be qualified according to different specifications that are relevant with reference to the various possible worlds. In
contrast, in the case that concerns us here, if the foetus is qualified in the
tumoral mode, it will be destroyed, so that its possibilities of access to
other states will be eliminated. The central issue here is thus reversibility.
To remain in harmony with the principle of common humanity that is the
basis for the metaphysics of justice that subtends our most ordinary judgements, qualification according to different states must be compatible with
a total reversibility of states. This is, for example, the reason why common
sense considers that the tests on which judgement rests must be able to be
repeated, or that a treatment that grasps persons in a certain state and then
exhausts them to such an extent that they cannot shift into another state
has something inhuman about it. Now the treatment applied to the foetus
when it is qualified as tumoral radically contradicts this requirement of
reversibility. The fate of this foetus is irreversible, at least if one takes it as
a being destined to be the object of a rise in singularity. In a different terminology, it is condemned to remain in a primordial state of humanity, that of
replaceable beings. Perhaps another foetus will develop in the same womb.
Perhaps it will reach the end of its trajectory and come into the world. It
will not be the same one.
Constructionism and ontology
Unlike the essentially critical moment of deconstruction, which opens up
a field of relatively indeterminate possibilities and thereby exercises effects
of liberation, the moment of constructionism is accompanied by a closing
off of possibilities. Certain categorial associations that are possible a priori
are rejected or abandoned, while other associations are privileged and
stabilized. This selection is not ‘arbitrary’ in the sense that the divisions
established would be somehow selected at random among the array of all
possible ‘choices’, or even in the sense that they would be entirely determined by the interests of their proponents. On the contrary, the categorial
divisions follow lineaments already inscribed in language40 or in the most
general metaphysical constructions that subtend the ontology of most of the
world’s objects within a specific complex cultural situation. It follows that
not all constructions or divisions are equally probable, because they are not
equally acceptable to common sense. It is thus very difficult in our society
(although not in some others) to cross boundaries such as those separating
‘things’ from ‘human persons’ (for example to say of a floor lamp that it
is my ‘cousin’), in particular because such boundaries not only separate
inanimate from animate beings (animals are animate) but also beings apt to
be property from beings apt to be property owners. It is in this sense that
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Roman law could, through a ‘legal fiction’, include slaves in the class of
things, even though the Roman citizens who profited from this fiction were
not unaware that their slaves were human beings like themselves in every
respect.
The distinction between the three categories of foetuses, whose construction seems to me to be under way, constitutes a good illustration of
the dependency of categorial thought with respect to the ontologies most
strongly engaged in the structures of the ordinary world – which are also
those whose salience in the Western philosophical tradition is best attested.
The tumoral foetus can be associated with the category of accidents, as we
find it used in Aristotle, that is, as an attribute whose relation to the subject
is not a necessary one.41 It is grasped only as a chance event happening to
the female body, in which it manifests an unexpected change of state that,
detached from all intentionality and therefore devoid of signification, has to
be able to be rendered reversible by virtue of a voluntary action inscribed in
the logic of a project. It is referred thereby to the order of pure contingency
– that of the ‘accident properly speaking’ as opposed to the ‘accident in
itself’ – according to the Aristotelian distinction between ‘properly accidental accidents’, such as the fact, in the example of Socrates, of ‘being
seated or standing’, and those ‘which, without belonging to the essence of
Socrates, which is his humanity, are no less characteristic of what can be
called “socraity”’, such as the fact that Socrates was wise, happy and so
on, and that by this token tend to define the quiddity of a being (Aubenque
1997, 464–5). In fact, the tumoral foetus contributes in no way to defining
the quiddity of that of which it is the attribute and consequently has no
status other than that of a ‘quasi-non-being’, according to the Aristotelian
formula, which keeps it from being envisaged in its selfhood. In this sense,
it cannot be the object of a predication, for this would immediately raise the
question of the composition of this being to which a given quality is attributed. Any reference to anything that would point towards its establishment
in permanence is by that very token set aside (since the very possibility
that it can be maintained over time is excluded), so that one avoids not
only giving it a name of its own, obviously, but even designating it by a
classificatory term. It is precisely this necessary operation of ontological
annihilation that is sometimes called into question by women who choose
to take advantage of the pre-abortion interview when, speaking to the psychologist who receives them, they designate what is developing inside them
by means of a term with an essentialist resonance and speak of their ‘baby’
or their ‘child’, attesting in this way to an anxiety that the counsellors often
seek to calm by questioning the validity of these terms and refocusing the
conversation on the state in which the women currently find themselves: ‘a
pregnancy project’.
To interpret the separation between an authentic foetus and a technofoetus, I shall rely on a distinction based on Aristotelian categories used
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by Paolo Virno to clarify a way of conceptualizing beings in terms of two
contrasting states: the one they are in when they manifest themselves in
presence, in acts, and its opposite (Virno 1999). In this context, Virno
distinguishes potentiality from power. The distinction can be illustrated
by means of an example that he borrows – inspired by Saussure – from the
linguistic realm. To speech, which is in the position of an act, he opposes,
on the one hand, language, which belongs to potentiality, and, on the other
hand, the faculty of speaking, which is of the order of power (ibid., 82–3).
While the act ‘coincides with presence, that is, with now’ (ibid., 81), so that
it always ‘falls within time’ (ibid., 66), potentiality designates a state of the
act that, far from exempting it from temporality, constitutes it as not-yetnow, that is, as Virno puts it, as ‘almost-now’ (ibid., 81). By the same token,
the relation of the act to potentiality can be described as that of the now to
the not-now (‘the actual being precedes the potential being in the flow of
time’ [ibid., 74]), so that the ‘relation of cause to effect’ can be defined as
a ‘relation between different successive nows’ (ibid.). Power ‘does not have
a determined place in time’ so that it is ‘constantly “not-now”’ (ibid., 78).
Power presents itself as ‘indeterminate, generic, formless and thus radically
different from a potential act because it is a whole without parts’ (ibid.,
84). It is thereby ‘unactualizable’, so that ‘acts do not exhaust power, quite
simply because they do not enter into it’ (ibid., 86).
Relying on this analysis, I shall posit that the authentic foetus is inscribed
in the category of virtuality. Thrust forward, in an imaginary mode, in
the logic of the project, the authentic foetus is inscribed in time and finds
itself linked to the present by a chain of causalities. It thus presents itself as
belonging to the order of the almost-now.
Unlike the authentic foetus, the techno-foetus belongs to the category of
power, from my perspective. We have seen that the discourse in which the
techno-foetus is presented in public usually does not concern the fate of a
particular foetal individual, but that of humanity in general. It is the power
of humanity, the very faculty of being human, without which no person
could realize his or her humanity, that is in question here. Now this power
does not fall within time, and, as Virno says, it endures inasmuch as it is,
precisely, ‘unactualizable’ (1999, 87).
How can one specify the type of power – the faculty of being properly
human – that underlies the debates centred on the techno-foetus? Following
Virno once again, I shall sketch out a description while relying on the
analytic tools that Johann Gottfried Herder constructed in his ‘Essay on
the origin of language’ (1969), to make explicit the basis for distinguishing between human beings and animals. While each animal is inscribed in
a determined ‘circle’, a ‘sphere to which it belongs by birth, into which it
instantly enters, in which it continues all through life, and in which it dies’,
‘man has no such uniform and narrow sphere in which only one operation
is to be performed . . . His senses and his organization are not adapted to
one single thing’ (ibid., 127–8). Thus as Virno’s commentary stresses (1999,
87), the faculty of being human indeed refers to the ‘indefinite nature’ of
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the human being, to its ‘constant disorientation’ linked to the ‘absence of a
predetermined milieu in which the individual can be definitively and completely integrated’. The power that is properly human can thus be defined
as a power of uncertainty.
One can see in this ontology of determination by way of indetermination
the reason why most critiques directed at the techno-foetus bear precisely
on everything that, in a technological approach, tends to inscribe the human
foetus in a field of forces acting in a determinist fashion, everything that
tends to enclose it in a network of imperative specifications and to subject
its production to the instruction of a sort of ‘process planning office’, as
is the case when several embryos are produced, and doctors will select for
reimplantation the one that seems to them most likely to develop in a way
that will allow the mother to bring into the world a child apt to give satisfaction. This is, more generally, the reason why a number of persons feel
troubled today by the technological innovations that have shifted the foetus
from the status it had in a traditional regime – that of a complete unknown
– to that of a being partly knowable by anticipation, that is, before it has
seen the light of day and been able to reveal itself through its acts. Such
troubling concerns may lead people, for example, to show reticence when
faced with a prenatal diagnosis and even to refuse to learn the sex of the
being that will be their child.
Given that the categories of potentiality and power are determined with reference to that of the act, one question remains: what can be said about the
foetus in acts? I suggest that this category remains empty in the framework
of the project-based understanding, because to fill it would presuppose
that the opposition between the foetus as parental project and the foetus as
nothing has been surmounted. To be sure, to speak of the foetus in acts is
problematic because the foetus, as we have already noted, is characterized
precisely by the fact that, since it is not in the world, no action can truly
be imputed to it. But there remains a possibility that is not thematized in
the framework of the project-based understanding, although it is incorporated into the experience that pregnant women have of their pregnancies.
To identify this possibility, however, we have to bracket the distinction
between ‘beings as things’ and ‘beings as persons’ which, as we shall see in
the next chapter, organizes most of the constructions that aim to legitimize
abortion, in order to start from an analysis (in chapter 7) of the experience of the flesh which, in pregnancy, is indissociably that of the pregnant
woman and of the foetus developing within her.
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Decriminalization, legalization, legitimization
In this chapter, I shall examine the efforts to legalize and legitimize abortion
that have accompanied and followed its decriminalization. Without losing
sight of the French example, which is at the centre of my work, I shall
draw heavily on Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy, especially the American
variety, for, owing both to a virulent opposition and to a feminist movement favourable to abortion (a movement particularly active in American
universities), the search for arguments designed to legitimize abortion has
been carried farthest in the United States.
I shall make a clear distinction between three phases in these efforts: the
establishment of laws that led to the decriminalization of abortion in the
first place, the legalization of abortion as an attempt to make the practice of
abortion a right, and, finally, the quest for moral legitimization that could
ground the right to abortion on universally valid principles. Each of these
phases has provided impetus to the next, owing to the critiques each has
provoked. The effect of critiques is essential here: they are a driving force
in the dynamics leading to a rise in generality of argumentative protocols.
Indeed, it was the critique addressed to the decriminalization of abortion
that stimulated efforts to give the practice a more solid grounding by
making it a right, first of all by aligning it solidly with an existing body of
law. But, as is the case whenever the law is either extended to objects that
it had not previously envisaged or – as happened with abortion – when it is
changed radically in its orientation, it becomes necessary to develop moral
arguments capable of forging an interface between legal practices and the
principles underlying ordinary morality.1 These principles, which remain
tacit in peaceful everyday situations, tend to be unveiled when the dynamic
succession of justifications and critiques during a dispute forces a rise in
generality.
The idea that the legal sphere is essentially autonomous seems to impose
itself as self-evident, as it were, when the law is apprehended from within
as a corpus faced with requirements of internal consistency (which explains
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why this idea is often defended by legal experts). Countering this viewpoint,
I shall emphasize the dependency of law on ordinary morality.2 In fact,
inasmuch as law has no reason to exist except to the extent that it is applied
to objects external to itself, a legal system is not merely an arrangement
capable of bringing disputes to a close by formulating a judgement whose
only requirement is that it be associated with other judgements formulated
previously or in different domains. The legitimacy of a legal judgement
does not depend solely on what could be called legal traceability. Such
rulings are themselves constantly judged by ordinary persons, who do not
refrain from declaring a particular judgement ‘unfair’ or ‘scandalous’ in the
name of their own values.3 It follows that a body of law cannot completely
ignore its relation to moral judgements formulated in extra-legal language
without running the risk of weakening its own strength. That strength does
not reside solely in legality; far from it – especially when a judgement is
confronted with critiques. Legalization does not merely confirm a customary state. The historicist conception according to which such confirmation
is indeed the role of legalization can lead to exalting the legal norm by
placing it at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of social norms. (If this conception
were correct, at any given moment in time, the more faithfully a body of
law reflected practices in their statistical reality, the more solidly grounded
it would be.) But the historicist conception can also end up reducing the
legal norm to a pure outcome of power relations, thus giving it the status
of a mere artifice used by those in positions of dominance to consolidate
their power. Legalization thus constitutes a test that subjects practices to
a double requirement: a requirement of consistency with the current legal
edifice, to be sure, but also a requirement of justification with respect to
the general principles that underlie judgements in ordinary situations of life
as these principles are revealed during disputes. This double requirement
is nowhere so visible as in the work of qualification, a legal exercise par
excellence that is also at work whenever persons involved in a dispute find
themselves obliged to specify how they grasp the entities – persons, things
or events – that are at the heart of the quarrel.
By reviewing the efforts made to justify abortion – to render that practice
licit under certain conditions, to legalize it and make it a right, to legitimize
it on the moral level – I shall be able to clarify what I said in the previous
chapter about the forms used to categorize foetuses. For it was essentially
during the process of legalization and legitimization that a debate over the
‘status of the foetus’ arose, that is, a debate over the way it was appropriate to qualify the foetus in the various situations in which it found itself
immersed. Prior to this process, the foetus was so absent from social and
political space that such a debate could hardly have got off the ground, all
the more so in that the criminalization of abortion (instituted, as we have
seen, for reasons that had little to do with the qualities of that being) made
it possible to extend the exclusion to which the foetus had been subjected
up to that point.
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The protest in favour of legalizing abortion
With respect to our topic, and without going into the details of a history
that has been presented elsewhere,4 I suggest that the historical moment
during which abortion was decriminalized, between 1965 and 1975, raises
essentially two questions. The first is why such an updating did not happen
earlier. To account for this, we cannot point to a rapid and dramatic change
in practices that rendered the previous regime ineffective and maladapted,
such as we might have seen had the regime been completely overwhelmed
by a prodigious increase in the number of abortions and had faced a ‘health
catastrophe’ that the political authorities were helpless to address. For, while
such a situation – often characterized even in the 1960s in epidemiological
terms – does seem to have existed in France during the years that preceded
decriminalization, it had persisted for almost a century without having had
any notable legal effects, except perhaps a reduction, starting in the mid1950s, in the number of cases subjected to criminal penalties (moreover, as
we have seen, that number had never been proportionate to the number of
abortions practised). In other words, the absolutely inoperative character
of the law had not previously sufficed to bring about its abolition. Thus we
can legitimately ask whether the role tacitly imputed to the law was really to
put an end to abortions, or at least to limit their number, or whether it was
not rather to prevent the moral dilemmas associated with abortion from
entering into the public sphere.
Abortion may well have been considered a ‘social scourge’, but that
viewpoint did not necessarily modify in any way the public stances of the
moralists, politicians, doctors, demographers and experts of all sorts who
had the authority to speak publicly about the ‘problem’. These recognized
authorities could simultaneously express indignation about abortion and
tolerate it or even support it discreetly in situations treated as individual
cases (for reasons as diverse as eugenicism or Malthusianism directed
against the ‘poor’, defence of the ‘family’ threatened by illegitimate births,
and compassion towards ‘fallen women’); they could demand reinforcement of official measures aimed at prohibiting it, even though they knew
that those measures would be of no use. Meanwhile, the contradiction
between the various attitudes, a contradiction protected by the barrier
separating the official realm from the unofficial, the collective sphere from
the individual, remained hidden from view; had it surfaced, it would have
become unsustainable. Each of these ‘authorities’ – most often men, of
course – behaved as if it had been tacitly agreed that laying out these incompatible stances would have threatened an understanding that was certainly
imperfect but to which there was no alternative; we may suppose that this
tolerance of inconsistency, especially apparent where abortion was concerned, helped considerably to accredit the theme of ‘bourgeois hypocrisy’
whose denunciation undergirded critiques of the ‘dominant social order’ for
more than a century.
The second question, which may be somewhat shocking to the militants
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who played an active role in the protest movements that led to decriminalization in the mid-1970s, and which takes a decidedly different tack from
most of the accounts of the action produced by the militants themselves, is
how a political reversal could have been so easily achieved.5 The fortress
that had blocked access to abortion fell in a few short years, in France as
in most of the Western world, and this happened without much opposition
from the nation-states in question. Thus, for example, practically none of
the doctors who declared openly that they were performing abortions were
penalized in a lasting and consequential way. It was as if it had sufficed for
a significant number of persons – ‘irreproachable’ doctors and well-known
women – to endorse abortion for the structure intended to confine that
practice to illegality and to banish the questions it raised to be definitively
overturned.6
The nature of the social operation that these public statements carried
out is worth contemplating. Its thrust was not of the ‘informative’ order.
This operation did not consist in informing ‘the greatest number’ of persons
about previously hidden phenomena, facts that they had not known and
whose disclosure would have caused a scandal. In fact, no one was unaware
that abortion was practised on a very large scale, and its consequences
for women were no secret. The operation drew all its force precisely from
its public character, that is, from the fact that it brought into the public
space, with the intention of submitting it to public debate, something that
everyone knew privately; it thereby transgressed the separation between the
official and unofficial dimensions of the understandings that had presided
over the engendering of human beings. By the same token, the procreative
order as a whole was called into question. And it was no doubt the fear of
seeing this order disturbed – an order that, in the absence of alternatives,
had appeared to have all the characteristics of necessity – that accounts for
the comprehension from which the order had benefited up to that point,
even among the women who were directly subjected to its constraints and
who, if only to the extent that their abortions were carried out in solitude
and secrecy, helped to maintain that order ‘over their dead bodies’.
The feminist movement had been stimulated during the 1960s by the
considerable growth in the number of women enrolled in higher education
programmes that opened the door to professions previously monopolized
by men – most importantly, where our topic is concerned, the medical
professions, whose members saw abortion and its health consequences
as a professional (and thus a collective) problem. It was undoubtedly this
movement that made it possible to challenge the pre-existing understanding. In the case of the understandings that governed engendering, breaking
down the separation between their official and unofficial dimensions could
probably have come about only as a result of ‘feminism’, understood as
a movement with at least two objectives. It sought first of all to improve
the ‘feminine condition’ and to make it more just by struggling against the
inequalities between the sexes in the realms of citizenship (the right to vote),
political participation (parity in the electoral process), education (access to
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post-secondary institutions), work (‘equal pay for equal work’) and so on,
just as the labour movement had been oriented towards a search for greater
social justice. But the feminist movement also sought specifically to bring
the feminine dimension, which had previously been excluded as such, into
the public sphere, and thereby to modify radically the boundaries of the
political realm. The sudden emergence of abortion not only as a problem
but especially as an achievement in the public sphere and, with the demands
for its legalization, in the juridical sphere (where it had been constituted as
a criminal offence a century earlier and as such had been pushed farther
than ever away from the public domain), thus succeeded in constituting the
most manifest expression of change in the political regime of the feminine.
This change corresponded to – without being the sole reason for – a
challenge to the understandings to which engendering had been subject up
to that point. This was particularly the case with respect to the understanding with kinship and the understanding with the state, at least in the case
of France, where the understanding with the Creator had lost its political
and social force. This had come about not only because of a recent but significant weakening of the influence of Catholicism (to which the Church’s
disregard for feminist issues had no doubt contributed significantly), but
also because the intense conflicts that had opposed the Church to the
Republic for several decades had ended with ‘peace on the religious question’ (to borrow the expression Olivier Christin devised with reference to
a different historical context [Christin 1997]) based on a strict division
between the political and religious domains that none of the authorities
involved wanted to challenge.7
One of the questions raised by the legalization of abortion was whether
abortion infringed on the ‘public morality’ that law is supposed to ‘express’,
or whether its condemnation was instead a matter of ‘personal convictions’, so
that adopting the law would not necessarily imply ‘approval of what it allows’
(Jean Foyer, during the debate in the National Assembly on 26 November
1974).8 Foyer, staunchly opposed to legalization, thought that the practice
of abortion infringed on public morality and therefore could not be legalized.
Conversely, deputies in favour of legalizing abortion argued that the practice
did not infringe on public morality, even though it was rejected by some in
the name of certain beliefs; accepting or rejecting it was thus a purely private
matter. Jacques-Antoine Gau thus declared: ‘Who are we, ladies and gentlemen, to decide whether the undeniable fact that a biological process begins at
the moment two sex cells meet suffices to establish the existence of a human
life? Or to prefer the thesis according to which there is no human life that
is not conscious, that is, no human life that is not inscribed in a system of
relations with others, and in any case endowed with a minimal autonomy?
No doubt the partisans of the first thesis invoke certain traditional rules of
our law, borrowed from Roman law, affirming that from conception on the
child has to be considered as if already born. But even on this level there are
many hesitations, since, in the terms of article 56 of the Civil Code, a stillborn
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child has to be declared on the official state registry only as of the 180th day
of pregnancy. No, too many uncertainties weigh on this debate for us to be
able to see the arguments put forward by the most determined opponents of
any change in our legislation as anything but a belief or an ethical choice, one
that is, I repeat, worthy of respect, but one that does not impose itself, nor
can it be imposed, on the conscience of all. Agreeing to base the law on such a
belief would amount, moreover, to violating a principle that goes back to the
origin of our Republic and that is the sole guarantee of the pluralism without
which our society would cease to be free: I am referring to the secular nature
of our State. The role of the secular State is not to be the citizens’ director of
conscience; it is to organize and guarantee their freedoms. Where abortion is
concerned, the role of the law is thus not to transcribe a philosophical or religious doctrine, whatever it may be, but to leave the decision to the conscience
of every person.’9
The weakening, not to say the quasi-disappearance, of the understanding with kinship constituted the epicentre of a change that was much more
general in scope: nothing less than the disappearance of the domestic polity
from the principal situations in which it had been located up to that point.
By domestic polity – in the sense this notion was given in On Justification
– I mean, in sum, a political order that depends on forms of subordination associated with the kinship model and is capable of extending to a
large number of social situations requirements of justice in terms of which
people’s worth depends essentially on their hierarchical position in a chain
of personal dependencies. In formulas of this type – best exemplified by the
Old Regime in France, but maintained in a number of situations long after
the Old Regime ended – the political bond between beings was conceived
as a generalization of the generational bond conjugating tradition and
proximity. A formula like this is at work, for example, when a ‘master’ recommends one of his ‘disciples’ in whom he has ‘confidence’ for a particular
job, or in business arrangements critiqued from a position of civic equality
as ‘paternalistic’.
In a domestic order, one of whose central characteristics is that it does
not recognize the public–private separation as outlined by liberal individualism, women occupy a defined place in society as well as in the family, but
this place is most often hierarchically subordinate to that of men. Women’s
status is thus marked by personal dependency with respect to men; the latter
represent them on all the occasions where a social unit, whatever its size
or function, becomes visible to an external observer and thus, especially,
in political situations. It follows that, in an order of this sort, women are
assigned to the unofficial sector. Their contribution to the reproduction of
society is, rather like that of domestic servants, at once indispensable and
invisible: relegated to what Erving Goffman calls ‘backstage’, devoted particularly to the task of maintaining masculine worth in representation and
to taking charge, ‘discreetly’ and with ‘devotion’, of the non-presentable
beings hidden in the folds of institutions and families – alcoholics, the
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mentally ill, handicapped children, suicidal adolescents, the senile elderly,
‘depraved’ and ‘unmarriageable’ young women, ‘incompetent’ and ‘abnormal’ people of all sorts.
At the end of the 1960s and especially in the 1970s, most of the tests that
relied on the domestic polity found themselves challenged, as we see from
critiques of a large number of situations marked by personal dependency (in
universities and in businesses but also, especially with the anti-psychiatry
movement, in families), or critiques of the advantages that stem from age,
membership in a circle of prominent local individuals, family transmission
of goods or privileges, and so on. These critiques of the domestic world,
which express and extend the movement of revolt against the political
power of kinship and, more generally, against all forms of personal dependency that had begun in the eighteenth century (in France, particularly with
Rousseau), support the unveiling of male domination, and this unveiling in
turn provides fodder for more general attacks, in which male domination is
represented as the pinnacle of hierarchical power in the ‘patriarchal’ forms
that characterize an outdated social order.
One might have expected that this sort of challenge to the understanding with kinship – and, in areas unrelated to the question of engendering,
this sort of challenge to the domestic polity as a whole – would give new
strength to the understanding with the state, which, as we know, had relied
on the critique of kinship in the nineteenth century and had found its own
implementation hampered precisely by opposition from the ‘traditionalists’,
who remained attached to parental forms of selection of the beings destined
to come and take their places in the world. Yet nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, the demands to legalize abortion, while they were
indeed addressed to the state, challenged the state’s claim that it had the
right to exercise its power in the area of engendering and to control, as it
had done a century earlier (especially by criminalizing abortion), the quality
and quantity of the national population. The same could be said to hold
true for the critique of the domestic world in general, moreover: relying
primarily on civic instruments of protest, this critique had seemed to be
aimed at reinforcing state control over the principal tests of social selection,
yet it rapidly turned into a critique of all hierarchical, bureaucratic or even
institutional power, ending up as a defence of autonomy and self-realization
in a free competition that in turn opened the way to the project polity.
Abortion and the state
The offensive in favour of liberating abortion drew the bulk of its strength,
on the one hand, from the public unveiling of the massive reality of the
practice despite its legal prohibition, and, on the other hand, from representations of the suffering caused by that prohibition, according to the
thematics of a politics of pity, as Hannah Arendt put it, a politics whose role
in political rhetoric has continued to grow since its emergence in the late
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eighteenth century (Arendt 1963, 53–110). The political response to that
offensive becomes understandable if we associate it with the question of
the state and its action in the realm of biopolitics. This response manifested
dual concerns. The first involved a pulling back on the part of the state,
which would give up its efforts to intervene for the purpose of controlling
population quantity and quality (this was a project that had been pursued
not only by the right but also, and even especially, by the left during the
interwar period).10 Several factors – some of which, for want of specific
legitimization, did not come into play explicitly in the debate – seem to have
favoured this renunciation, which did not proceed without pain. I propose
to look at three of these.
The first had to do with the disqualification, in the Western democracies,
of the statist biopolitics that had been put into practice in authoritarian
regimes, Fascist or Communist, especially in the wake of the monstrous
consequences of the eugenicist and racist scientism on which Nazi ideology
had relied. The second was a weakening of populationist preoccupations, a
tendency that can be associated with innovations that were emerging during
the same period in the context of the labour force (robotization, outsourcing of some mass production to peripheral countries, and so on) and in the
military (weapons technology, the substitution of ‘iron’ for ‘flesh’ in the
army, as military writers put it). During the French parliamentary debate
of 26–8 November 1974, the question of population size was evoked both
by adversaries of the proposed Veil law, who warned of its dangers, and
by the law’s defenders, who sought to cast doubt on the existence of a
causal relation between abortion and ‘demographic decline’; however, the
general tone of the discussions suggests that this preoccupation, central in
the debates that touched on population politics between the last third of
the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, now played only
a marginal role. The third factor, finally, concerned the increasing anguish
over population growth in the southern hemisphere, during the very period
when abortion was being legalized in a number of Western countries.11 We
know that the belief linking economic development to the struggle against
population growth12 took the form of a veritable dogma after the Second
World War and gave rise, starting in the 1960s, to concrete measures supported by the United Nations Population Division. The end of the 1960s
was marked by the appearance of a large number of works denouncing
overpopulation, often in an apocalyptic tone,13 and this widespread fear
played an important role in the birth of political ecology.14 To face up to
these fears, the major Western countries had rallied to the policy of international aid and development agencies that tied aid to third-world countries
to their good will in the area of demography, no matter what methods were
used (incentivized or forced sterilizations, distribution of contraceptive pills
and devices, abortions and so on). It thus became very difficult for these
Western countries to manifest strong opposition at home, in the name of
their demographic ambitions, or of ‘morality’, to measures that they were
advocating for poor countries.15
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But once it had been accepted that the state would no longer try to control
the engendering of the human beings that made up the ‘national population’ (a renunciation that ratified the weakening of what I have called the
understanding with the state), a second concern influencing the vote on the
1975 law came into play: the concern for preserving the state and maintaining certain essential privileges while redrawing their contours. On the one
hand, while state power was apparently not subject to challenge as long as
the law – by now devoid of all effectiveness and seldom applied – was not
attacked in its very principle, violations of the law, publicly carried out and
publicly acknowledged without triggering any sanctions,16 revealed that the
law could be ‘flouted’ and the ‘authority of the state called into question’,
producing a ‘situation of disorder and anarchy that [could] not go on any
longer’.17 On the other hand, by adopting a law that would make abortion
possible at will during the early stage of pregnancy, even though the law
was presented as fairly constraining (abortion was decriminalized only to
the extent that it was medicalized; it could take place only during the first
ten weeks of pregnancy and had to be performed by a doctor in a hospital
context; it had to be preceded by a counselling interview and carried out
only after a seven-day period for reflection, and so on), the appearance of
control could be salvaged by maintaining state oversight over a practice
whose most radical defenders demanded complete freedom to operate in
both the public and private sectors.18 It was essential for maintaining state
authority that some state control, however minimal, be retained.19 Most
of those who expressed themselves on the subject, even those who turned
out to be strongly in favour of legalizing abortion, hesitated to speak out
decisively on the question of whether abortion did or did not destroy a
‘human being’ (a ‘person’, a ‘potential person’, a ‘virtual human being’ and
so on); they generally declared this question ‘insoluble’ and thus a matter
for ‘individual consciences’.20 Nevertheless, the fact that abortion was an
act of violence committed on a being that had some relation to ‘humanness’, however difficult it might be to qualify, could not be completely set
aside with a sweep of the hand, even if countered by the violence – patently
obvious in this case – done to women when abortion was practised under
clandestine conditions. It was consequently hard for the state to leave the
practice of abortion entirely free (that is, lacking a regulatory framework,
a prescribed time period and conditions for performing the operation),
without abandoning what has been understood since Max Weber to constitute one of its principal king-like privileges: that of holding the monopoly
on legitimate violence.
The law decriminalizing abortion
Properly speaking, the 1975 Veil law does not purport to legalize abortion,
still less to legitimize it. The 1920 and 1923 laws were not abrogated, and
article 217 of the penal code, which condemned abortion, was suspended
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– a quite exceptional measure – only for a probationary period of five
years. In fact, abortion remained a criminal offence except for certain cases
explicitly identified in the new law, and ‘maintenance of the prohibition
[remained] the fundamental principle’ (Ferrand and Jaspard 1987, 32).21
The first article of the law is formulated rather paradoxically, it must be
said, with the following assertion: ‘The law guarantees respect for every
human being from the beginning of life’,22 so that ‘this principle shall not
be infringed except in cases of necessity and according to the conditions
defined by the present law’. But ‘a pregnant woman whose condition places
her in a situation of distress’ may ask a doctor to interrupt her pregnancy.
This way of opening up the possibility of legal access to abortion was
ambiguous in several respects. Beyond the ambiguities, which I have already
had occasion to emphasize, concerning the role the state was to play in the
realm of engendering – between rules governing the act of abortion itself
and the definition of a procedural framework – we can identify at least two
other points on which the law was particularly equivocal.
The first and probably the most important point concerns the reference
to the foetus. On the one hand, with the adoption of the Veil law, foetuses
were endowed for the first time with quasi-legal recognition (since the state
was inscribing ‘respect for the human being from conception forward’ into
the law). In a way, then, this law marks the entrance of the foetus into law
through a ‘side door’, opening up the possibility of future developments of a
legal order (as we shall see more than twenty years later, for example, during
discussions of the ‘status of the embryo’ in connection with the adoption
of the bioethics laws). In this sense, we can say that the debate over the
legalization of abortion and the law itself made an important contribution
to the emergence of the foetus, which had been virtually unrecognized until
then, in the social and political world. From another standpoint, though,
the risk of seeing the law itself in danger by giving body to the being whose
destruction it authorized seems not to have escaped the notice of the fictive
collective individual whom French legal texts call ‘the legislator’. Attesting
to this, as we have already seen, beyond the substitution of a euphemism
(‘voluntary interruption of pregnancy’) for the term ‘abortion’ (which was
nevertheless the only term used during the parliamentary debate), there is
also the fact that the time period during which a pregnant woman could
make the decision to abort – shorter in France (ten weeks) than in most
other Western countries – was justified solely by the risks abortion posed to
the woman, risks understood to be lower in the early stages of pregnancy,
and not by consideration for the state of foetal development, which comes
closer and closer to that of a newborn, especially a premature newborn,
as gestation progresses over time. An argument based on foetal evolution
would have brought explicitly into law a being that could neither be completely ignored without rendering the law incoherent and without depriving
it of an object, in a sense, nor be explicitly recognized without getting
caught up in an effort of legitimization that would have led legislators to
propose an ontology of the foetus and submit it for discussion.
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A second source of ambiguity concerns the reference to ‘necessity’, which
was nevertheless indispensable to hold together, on the one hand, the fact
that the prohibition on abortion remained the fundamental principle, and,
on the other hand, the possibility of suspending this principle in certain
cases of force majeure. As Isambert has shown, the solution adopted consists in extending to cases of ‘psychological distress’ the medical standard
that had prevailed when abortion was prohibited, namely, that doctors
could interrupt a pregnancy and consequently sacrifice the foetus in cases
where continuing the pregnancy would have endangered the mother’s life
(1982, 366).23 It was thus a matter of expanding physical risk to include
psychological risk, with a tacit reference to the idea of legitimate defence; it
should be noted that, in the entire history of law, at least since the Middle
Ages, this concept has been virtually the only one recognized as a valid
justification for violence. Even though the act was medicalized, the decision
to intervene did not fall to the doctor but solely to the woman seeking an
abortion; she was thus to be the only judge of the distress her pregnancy
was causing her, and, consequently, of the ‘necessity’ of interrupting it, a
necessity on which the whole structure of the Veil law was based. The ‘invocation of a situation of distress’ thus made it possible to ‘take into account
all the reasons for refusing birth’ without legitimizing or even specifying any
of the reasons (Ferrand and Jaspard 1987, 33–4).
The 1975 law appears, then, in a particularly obvious way, as a law of
the lesser evil.24 It in no way makes abortion a good thing; by the same
token, it does not ensure its legitimization. It simply recognizes that, in
certain circumstances, abortion, which is a bad thing, may be practised if,
and only if, this bad thing prevents something even worse from happening.
A politics of the lesser evil can be distinguished from a politics of good
as well as from a politics of the worst.25 It is distinguished from a politics
of the worst by its refusal to make the provocative gesture of resorting
to extremes of evil in order to make its intolerable character inescapably
apparent to all, in an effort to incite radical change, most often by violence.
The politics of the worst is the worst temptation to which the illusion of
‘total revolution’ leads. But it is also distinguished from a politics of the
good through its adherence to the idea that ‘every good has its own bad
side’, or, in contemporary terms, through its consequentialist character,
that is, through the intent to give primacy to consequences over principles
and thus through its inability to place itself in a dependent relation to
a ‘discriminating’ ‘first or last’ principle that would be the object of an
explicit and univocal utterance and that would be capable of discriminating among actions and categorizing them as good or bad (even if this were
a ‘principle of lesser evil’). In the framework of the politics of the lesser
evil, when principles are invoked in spite of everything, this step is most
often taken in an ambiguous and contradictory way. The laws associated with a politics of this type thereby maintain an uneasy relation with
the requirement of legitimization with reference to a general principle of
justice.
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In comparison to the 1975 Veil law, the 2001 Aubry law, without fundamentally changing the structure of the earlier law (it maintains the notion
of ‘situation of distress’), is clearly oriented towards legalization, or at least
normalization. Besides the extension of the time period during which abortion
is authorized (from before the end of the tenth week of pregnancy to before
the end of the twelfth week), it eliminates the requirement of a pre-abortion
interview (except for minors) and, without relinquishing the principle of
parental authority in the case of minors, it anticipates abrogating this principle
in certain cases. In addition, it eliminates the reference to quotas on abortions
performed in private clinics, and it removes penalties for advertising and
‘propaganda’. While article 223–12 of the penal code, which penalizes anyone
who ‘provides a woman with the means to practise abortion on herself’, is
maintained, the new law specifies, on the one hand, that ‘in no case can the
woman be considered an accomplice to this act’ and, on the other hand, that
‘the prescription or delivery of authorized medications for the purpose of
provoking an abortion cannot be assimilated to the offence mentioned above’;
this provision is meant to guarantee the conditions under which a medical
abortion can be carried out at home with medications prescribed by a general
practitioner. Finally, the offence of hindering the practice of abortions is
defined more broadly: the Aubry law extends the notion of ‘disturbance’ by
adding to ‘threats and acts of intimidation’ a reference to ‘moral and psychological pressures’ (making it theoretically possible to press charges against
anti-abortion movements for carrying out non-violent actions) and it increases
the penalties prescribed.
The inherent constraint in this policy of the ‘possible’, which stresses
‘necessity’ in ‘certain circumstances that cannot be determined in advance’,26
is that it always has to take the ‘occasion’ or the ‘circumstances’ into
account, for it is solely when the circumstances are deployed, even if only
hypothetically, that the consequences, positioned as dependent on the circumstances, can be taken into account. This policy thus presupposes that,
in order to be implemented, it must pass through the intermediary of a
singular judgement capable of appreciating the consequences of an action in
the context of circumstances that are in some ways unique. While laws that
declare a good or prohibit an evil (for example, laws that forbid theft or
homicide) purport to be valid in full generality and to legitimize what they
authorize (or delegitimize what they penalize), the reference to the lesser evil
confines the practice of the law to the order of the singular. It presupposes a
being, individual (a judge) or collective (a ‘commission’), with the authority
to pass judgement on a case-by-case basis in such a way as to establish a
hierarchy among different evils in particular situations. In fact, an evil, even
considered in a particular situation as a ‘lesser evil’, still remains an evil and
thus cannot be legitimized in full generality. This modality of the reference
to law thus presupposes, in addition to case-by-case application, an exercise
that remains singular – specific persons charged with responsibility – and,
if not secret, at least discreet. For a judgement that recognizes in a given
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situation that an evil must be accepted inasmuch as it prevents a greater
evil still does not make the first evil a good, and consequently does not
ensure it complete and general legitimacy. In this sort of legal framework,
the authorization to act is subordinated to the judgement of the persons
who deliver it and it is in no way guaranteed to last, if confronted either by
a change in the persons authorized to judge or by a change in the sense of
prudence with which these persons are endowed.
The clauses in the Veil law that subordinate access to abortion not only
to fixed rules (it is to take place in a specialized centre that is required to
report the procedure so as to allow the collection of statistics, it must be
carried out during the first ten weeks of pregnancy, and so on) but also to
a medical consultation and a preliminary counselling interview are in this
sense entirely characteristic of the way the law works in a perspective of
the lesser evil. But there is one difference, which happens to be essential:
the final decision belongs neither to the doctor nor to the counsellor nor to
a collegial commission but only to the woman who wants an abortion and
who, to fulfil her wish, must request the procedure even though it cannot
be denied her.
This paradoxical structure is marked by the association between the
withdrawal of the state, which abandons its claims to control over
engendering, and the requirement, nevertheless, of state supervision over
the practice of abortion (which, with legalization, becomes statistically
quantifiable, for example), even while allowing open access in terms of
individual choice. This structure constitutes one indicator among others of
the way in which, during the 1970s in France, under the combined effect
of a libertarian critique from the left and the impetus of liberal individualism from the right, a state chiefly built in large part around a compromise
between civic requirements (inherited from a Rousseauist tradition) and
industrial requirements (inherited from a Saint-Simonian tradition) – but
a compromise that also left ample room for the old arrangements of a
domestic nature, at least in practice – was replaced by a state based on the
search for a different compromise, this time between the maintenance of
state-level organizing and management on the one hand and, on the other
hand, the requirements of individual autonomy that had until then found
political expression chiefly in the forms of liberal individualism developed
in the Anglo-Saxon countries, especially the United States.
The political singularity of the 1975 law lies in the fact that it was proposed by a right-wing administration and adopted with almost unanimous
support from the left-wing members of the National Assembly. It fell to
then-president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to be the first, through his action,
to turn around a period of crisis marked by an intense movement of critique
of capitalism in business and in the student world and by challenges to
most of the tests on which social order relied. Now the guiding thread of
Giscard’s action of restoration through change consisted in going against
the line that had been adopted by post-1968 administrations and especially
by the left-wing Gaullist-inspired administration of Jacques Chaban-Delmas
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and Jacques Delors, labelled the ‘new society’. Giscard abandoned measures
aimed at satisfying demands attached to what I have called elsewhere the
social critique – measures that prolonged the social-democratic welfare
state established in the post-war period – and attended to demands that
the Gaullists, at once statists and traditionalists, rejected with horror,
demands inspired rather by the tendencies that I have characterized with
the term artistic critique (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, 419–82). It was in
fact primarily under the influence of tendencies close to Giscard d’Estaing
that the pursuit of national agreements with the unions in the area of social
benefits was ended (this pursuit had been the chief means used by previous
administrations to calm a crisis situation without changing the structures of
authority, whether in the business world or in the family) and that reform
efforts shifted onto new grounds. Demands associated with requirements
of autonomy and liberation were being forcefully expressed, either in the
realm of work, where they reintroduced the demand for certain aspects
of self-governance (quality circles, improved working conditions, selforganization and so on) or in the realm of ‘morality’, particularly in matters
of sexuality, engendering and relations between the sexes. In both of these
realms the state’s role was redefined. It was no longer to specify rules of
behaviour required of individuals, either legally or administratively; it was
to concentrate on the organization of procedures that had to be adopted
collectively so that individual persons could achieve autonomy, and it was
to rule in legal disputes or to calm the tensions that might be aroused when
incompatible behaviours met in a common space.
Here I need to say a few words about the way in which access to abortion
was legalized in the United States, both in order to bring out the contrast
with French law and because to a certain extent the principal arguments
destined to legitimize abortion – arguments that we shall examine shortly –
were forged in that country.
Two major differences between French and American abortion laws need
to be emphasized. The first – signalled by Isambert in the article cited above
(1982, 370) – is procedural. Isambert begins by comparing two events that
played important roles in the process that led to the decriminalization of
abortion: in the United States, the Abramowicz vs. Lefkowitz trial in New
York State in 1970,27 and in France the Bobigny trial in 1972.28 These trials
have common features. Each took place within a series of events in which
the harsh and unjust character of criminalization measures was manifested
in a particularly repugnant way29 and, as a result, each trial crystallized a
mobilization around indignation in a particular case in which a victim was
unjustly accused (a structure characteristic of the logic of ‘affairs’30). And
both trials drew in ‘personalities’, public figures deemed particularly worthy
of ‘esteem’ and particularly ‘impartial’,31 who took a stand, beyond the case
in question, against criminalization of abortion in general. But the actions
carried out during these trials by the opponents of criminalization differed
because they occurred within the context of different political institutions.
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The American opponents brought suit in a federal court against the abortion laws of New York State, drawing on the constitutional right of every
American citizen to go before a judicial agency and challenge laws he or she
is supposed to obey.32 A legal basis of this sort for judging the law is lacking
in France, where the legislative branch alone – a political agency, according
to Isambert – has the legitimacy needed to challenge existing legislation
and, depending on circumstances, to modify it. By the same token, the
power needed to challenge the law, in the absence of any legal basis, must
be acquired solely through mobilizations that rely on moral indignation: in
other words, through the intermediary of the ‘affair form’.33
Two years after New York reformed its abortion laws in July 1970, thus
interrupting trials that were under way, a pair of similar appeals to the US
Supreme Court34 led to a nationwide change in legislation. In the 1973 Roe
vs. Wade decision, the Supreme Court invalidated the Texas legislation that
had made abortion a criminal offence, declaring it unconstitutional, which
amounted to legalization. This decision led all the other states to reform
their legislation in order to introduce this new constitutional right. At first
glance, at least, American law thus appears less restrictive than French law:
while dialogue with a medical authority is required in both systems, abortion may take place during the first trimester of pregnancy in the United
States (as opposed to the first ten weeks in France) on the basis of a simple
agreement between the doctor and the pregnant woman and, most significantly, abortion has been legalized as a constitutional right and not merely
decriminalized.
If, however, we subject the arguments used by the Supreme Court
to close analysis (as Yves Sintomer has done [2001, 206–39]), we may
conclude that, although they legalized abortion (instead of simply decriminalizing it as the Veil law did), they did not lead to its legitimization as
such. In fact, the Court’s decision did not rely, as one might have expected
in a country where the free-market tradition is particularly vibrant, on the
Lockean notion of individual self-ownership, a notion revived in the 1970s
by libertarians and developed in particular by Robert Nozick (1974); the
Court preferred to invoke the notion of privacy.
It seems that constitutional recognition of the principle of self-ownership,
in the case of abortion, presented two major disadvantages. The first was
that it would have opened up the possibility of providing a legal basis for
particularly controversial practices that had been previously prohibited – as
with contraception, sterilization and suicide – and whose legalization would
have led to legal disputes over issues such as euthanasia, organ trafficking
or drug consumption, and also that it would have reinforced the legitimacy
of other practices (smoking, alcohol abuse, failure to wear a seat belt)
that could be otherwise discouraged, if not forbidden, because of their
potentially high costs to society at large. A reference to the requirement of
autonomy underlies the principle of self-ownership and freedom to dispose
of one’s own body; however, this requirement has limits even in free-market
liberal orthodoxy, which rejects total self-alienation: for example, one may
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not sell oneself as a slave. The requirement of autonomy is also subject to
constraints that weigh unequally on persons (in relation to the freedoms
granted in principle to all citizens under the law – freedoms that had been
at the centre of debates over ‘freedom of labour’ in the nineteenth century –
‘formal’ and ‘actual’ equality are not the same thing35). But the reference to
autonomy also raises difficult problems concerning the aggregation of individual liberties. If, following a liberal individualist logic, the state can justify
its neutrality in the face of individual choices, in particular in the sexual
realm, choices that involve only individuals in isolation (masturbation, for
example, or the private possession of pornographic material), or individuals who are autonomous (essentially meaning adults) and thereby capable
of free consent (for example, practising homosexuals) – in other words, if
the state can renounce the right to intrude between individuals and the uses
they make of themselves and in particular of their own bodies – it cannot
disengage as readily when these choices have repercussions on other persons
who have not given their consent, whether these are direct repercussions, as
in the case of drunk driving, or indirect ones, via private or public insurance
arrangements, as with practices like smoking or drug use, which endanger
the health of persons covered by insurance.
But to base abortion legislation on self-ownership would have presented
an even greater risk: it would have provided grounds for an argument
(one being advanced by certain ‘moderate’ feminist groups among others)
based on the fact that abortion does not involve the mother’s body alone;
another body, embedded within hers, is also affected and must be taken
into account. This approach would have led inexorably to a debate centred
on the question of the foetus, when every effort had been made to set
that question aside. By stressing the notion of privacy, the Supreme Court
shifted the debate from the issue of property to that of freedom, conceived
on the model of ‘religious freedom of conscience’: the ‘right to abortion’
could also be associated with ‘a series of fundamental freedoms involving
marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing,
and education. . . . These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, central to personal dignity
and autonomy, are central to the freedom protected by the Fourteenth
Amendment. At the heart of freedom is the right to define one’s own concepts of existence, meaning, the universe, and the mystery of human life’
(Sintomer 2001, 234).36
It is remarkable that this legal decision made it possible to constitute
abortion as a right and thus to institutionalize it in a way, using arguments
based primarily on the assertion of state neutrality in the matter and on
recognition of the strictly private character of the practice, even though the
practice was still framed by the legal system, which amounted to associating
– as French law does, but along very different lines – the withdrawal of
the state and a requirement of state oversight. As in the case of the Veil
law, this requirement was justified by the need to protect the health of the
woman seeking an abortion. Given the fact that American law, too, turns a
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blind eye on the foetus, it was indeed solely with reference to the woman’s
health that the state’s interest in the question could be reintroduced, for the
state, whose least contestable role in a tradition of liberal individualism is
to ensure the safety of the governed, has an interest in the ‘full and complete
protection of the patient’ inasmuch as the patient is a citizen.37 The same
reasons were invoked, as they were in France, to justify a time period after
which abortion was to fall back under state control. The state could exert
control, if it so desired, as of the second trimester, but still without reference to the foetus: the further advanced the gestation, the more abortion
jeopardizes the health of the woman whom the state has the duty to protect
and even, under some circumstances, to defend against herself.
The legitimization of abortion
The laws that established the possibility of free access to abortion left
those who had struggled for their passage with the sense that their victory
was fragile, for good reasons. A law of the lesser evil and of exceptions,
the French law went into effect for a five-year period. It did not legalize
abortion and did not abolish its criminalization in principle; it settled for
referring to conditions authorizing the suspension of criminal penalties,
without specifying what those conditions might be. In the United States,
the Supreme Court ruling made abortion a right, but it did so by ratifying
the state’s decision to refrain from intervening in the matter in the name of
respect for private life. In both cases, the foetus, the principal object of the
dispute between supporters and opponents of legalized abortion, went
unmentioned or was treated ambiguously. It is understandable, then, that
the goal of consolidating the law led not only to the formation of militant
movements of vigilance and protest against anything that might threaten to
weaken what had been achieved, but also to a search for arguments capable
of giving this achievement a legitimate grounding. The enterprise of legitimization did not seek to make abortion a good, but rather to establish its
neutrality with respect to the opposition between good and evil.
Those working to legitimize abortion turned to moral philosophy for
support, especially in American universities, where this discipline was
better anchored than in Europe; both feminist movements and movements
opposed to legalized abortion were much more highly developed in the
United States, and that country had been drawn into a veritable ‘war’ over
the issue.38 In the face of the virulent and sometimes violent critiques39
targeting legalized abortion, the privacy argument seemed insufficient,
all the more so in that it was problematic in relation to efforts to extend
and consolidate ‘women’s rights’. In fact, the privacy argument relied on
a boundary that had been solidly established in the free-market liberal
tradition since Locke, the boundary between public space, where decisions
concern the state, and private space, where the state is not to intervene;
respect for this boundary is usually viewed as one of the basic criteria for
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making judgements regarding the fundamental freedoms. But, in such a
division, which in a contractualist spirit stressed the capacity of human
beings to give autonomous consent, and which was constituted against the
theories of patriarchal power that claimed to found the sovereign’s absolute
rule over the nation by conflating it with the father’s authority in the domestic unit (as John Locke argued, against Robert Filmer), a certain number
of human beings found themselves more or less distanced from the public
arena and confined to the private sphere on the grounds that, not having
achieved autonomy, they could not form the rational judgements expected
of citizens. This obviously applies – we shall come back to this point – to
children, who in this type of political construction can ‘count’ only as
potential citizens, but it also applies to domestic servants and, to a certain
extent, to women. In addition, following the same logic, where women
are concerned only actions carried out in the public sphere can be deemed
politically relevant; ‘personal’ and ‘private’ actions performed in the intimacy of the home cannot. Yet the introduction of the feminine as such into
the political order implied that this opposition between public and private
had been surmounted. In fact, as Susan Okin (1989) argues, critiquing
Rawls, for women the home constitutes the principal site of domination
and of inequality, specifically inequality between the sexes; thus the theory
of justice cannot be satisfied with determinations targeting the polity but
must penetrate into the home and especially into the bedroom, because the
oppression to which women are subjected is first of all of the sexual – that
is, the ‘intimate’ – order. This is the type of position that has been advanced
to forge laws against sexual harassment, for instance in the form of verbal
exchanges taking place ‘in private’ but in the workplace, or, outside of
the workplace, between persons sharing the same professional context, so
that ‘sex remains outside of work’, for employers have the right to forbid
even ‘desired relations’, which can also ‘constitute a mode of exploitation’.
From the standpoint of free-market liberalism, this law could be considered
contrary to freedom of speech and to the defence of privacy, all the more
so in that, in cases where accusations are made in court, both the plaintiff
and the accused have to reveal significant portions of their private lives
(Cohen 2000). But the extension of the law and of judicial power beyond
the frontiers of intimacy threatens most notably to undermine the basis on
which the law legalizing abortion rests, for that law relies, on the contrary,
on a reaffirmation of the importance of the boundary between the public
and the private spheres, between what happens in the political arena and
what happens at home, between decisions that involve the general interest
and those that concern private life (Phillips 2000).
But what made the law fragile was probably in particular the way it
avoided the question of the foetus and how it was to be qualified. Under
the assaults of opponents who did not hesitate to recall the existence of this
being – demanding, for example, in the United States, the adoption of a new
amendment protecting ‘human life from its beginnings’40 – the foetus kept
coming back up in the debate, and this created pressure to forge arguments
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that could justify abortion without leading to a deadlock on the nature of
the being at whose expense abortions took place.
Efforts to consolidate the law authorizing abortion thus shifted from the
terrain of demography (‘liberalizing abortion does not cause depopulation’)
and social hygiene (the need to combat the ‘health scourge’ of clandestine
abortion) to that of the qualification of the foetus in a moral and legal
context centred on the question of rights. In fact, the liberal individualist
framework into which the debate was quickly inserted had led to stressing
the rights of the pregnant woman – in her status as a private person and,
with respect to the state, as a citizen – to terminate her pregnancy. Once
the foetus was reintroduced into the discussion, the chief problem became
how to know whether that being, too, had rights that could be opposed to
those of the woman in whose womb its gestation was occurring. But, for the
reasons I mentioned earlier (chiefly related to the role played by the boundary between public, political space and the space of private or intimate
relations), the liberal individualist framework was ill prepared to accommodate that question, as we can see from the debate over the rights of children
and particularly of infants (although this is a much less problematic issue).41
Since access to rights was tied to the possession of autonomy in the use of
reason, children, and a fortiori infants, could be politically qualified in that
framework only as ‘citizens in waiting’; the state’s only duty towards them
was to take into account their potential for becoming citizens (Arneil 2002).
From a strictly legal standpoint, it was easy to show that, in the existing
framework, foetuses did not possess rights of their own (or were not ‘constitutional persons’42), so that the discussion could shift to the question of
whether a foetus is ‘a creature of moral consequence’ (Dworkin 1993, 57).43
The debate over the possibility of opposing the potential rights of a
foetus to the rights of a pregnant woman focused on the question of personhood. The main issue became, as we know, how to determine whether the
foetus was a ‘person’ or not. But this term, used by the partisans of free
access to abortion as well as by its adversaries, could take on rather different meanings according to the theoretical framework in which it was used.
It is thus rather astonishing to see it turn up at the centre of the arguments
developed by Christians against abortion, whereas the notion of person,
absent from Patristic references to foetuses (the Church Fathers spoke of
‘living beings’, ‘human beings’ or ‘creatures’; Larchet 1998), is associated
in particular with reflection on the persons of the Trinity (hypostases), and
this turns it in a different direction from the one it takes in liberal theory,
where it is oriented not towards the idea of autonomy, as in the previous
case, but on the contrary (especially in St Augustine) towards that of relation, or else of subsistence in a single individual substance (or, in St Thomas
Aquinas, of subsistent relations; Ladrière 1991). But in the debates over the
foetus (or, to use the standard terminology, over the ‘status of the embryo’),
the liberal meaning of the word ‘person’, explicitly adopted in formulations
that played on the ambiguity of its moral significance and legal meaning
by those who meant to use it to prove that the foetus was not a person,
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seems to have won out so completely that it imposed itself on all those who
joined the debate, among them those who sought to demonstrate that the
foetus was indeed a ‘person’ by relying on Christian doctrine. The more or
less explicit association of predicates such as autonomy or reflexivity with
the notion of person allowed for constant shifting between the question
of whether the foetus was a ‘person’ or not and whether it had rights or
not – rights themselves being defined with reference to the capacity to be an
autonomous agent – and particularly the right to life.44
We shall now examine in greater detail the chief arguments that were
developed, principally in the framework of Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy,
to legitimize abortion without coming to a deadlock over the foetus but
while qualifying it in such a way that the question about that being’s ‘right
to life’ could be answered in the negative. A demonstration of this type
requires engaging in an ontology of the foetus. In a fairly classical fashion,
these philosophical constructs can be distinguished according to whether
they emphasize the foetus in its substance or try to define it in the language
of relations, in particular with reference to its relation with the mother.
The all-or-nothing dilemma
Approached from the viewpoint of substance, the question of what the
being of a foetus is comes up first, in debates over abortion, in all-or-nothing
terms. The principal argument of those who contested the legitimacy of
legalized abortion started with the complete human being who possessed
rights (‘human rights’), and through reverse induction maintained that,
if complete human beings had these rights, so did children and newborn
infants; thus foetuses had them as well. The being hidden in its mother’s
womb, the one that is born, the one that once born appears as a baby destined to grow up, and the adult that this being becomes are the same being,
from a moral standpoint, so that what is owed to one – first and foremost
the right to life – is also owed to the others. This attention to the persistence
of a being throughout the transformations it undergoes in the course of its
development was often qualified as essentialist by the adversaries of this
position. Under appearances that are modified over time, a single essence is
maintained and unveiled; the predicates that can be conferred on it multiply
as it increasingly affirms its presence in the world.
A radically inverse position consists in denying the foetus any substance
of its own by diluting it in the substance of the mother. The foetus is then
considered inasmuch as it is of one body with the mother and, by virtue of
its belonging to that body, simply as one of the mother’s organs.
This sort of argument leads its proponents to grant crucial importance to
the moment when the foetus separates from the mother’s body, that is, the
moment of birth, considered as an event that produces a fundamental ontological change. In this view, the passage through the vagina transforms a
maternal organ into a complete human being that has rights. We must note,
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however, that this demonstration has been weakened by the changes, both
technological and social, that have affected our knowledge of the foetus
and the conditions of its birth (changes evoked in the previous chapter) –
that is, essentially for empirical reasons. The ability of doctors to follow a
pregnancy, especially by means of medical imaging, the now quite common
possibility of medically inducing birth at the moment deemed most propitious, the shortening of the period after which a foetus can reasonably be
deemed viable and brought into the world ‘prematurely’, so that its gestation, as it were, continues not in the mother’s womb but in a technological
environment, and so on – all these factors have had the effect of weakening
the value of birth as an ontological marker.
To escape from the all-or-nothing dilemma, other constructions seeking
to legitimize abortion have relied on a search for substantive criteria allowing a distinction to be made between beings, foetuses in particular, to whom
a right to life could not be attributed and beings apt to hold that right.
One of the most demanding constructions of this type is found in the work
of Michael Tooley, which we shall now examine; it has had considerable
influence in the abortion debates.
‘Human being’ versus ‘person’
One way to get out of the ‘all-or-nothing’ dilemma that comes immediately
to mind is to focus on the foetus as a developing being and to maintain that
it does not acquire the right to life until it reaches a certain developmental
stage. However, this mode of reasoning – which is often used spontaneously
by doctors (‘it isn’t anything yet’), but which was carefully sidestepped by
the laws authorizing abortion, as we have seen – also runs up against theoretical difficulties. The problem in this case is how to establish the moment
in its development at which a foetus can successfully pass the examination
that will allow it to move into the higher class. In different terms, one might
say that it is a matter of determining the tests on which a change in the
qualification of the foetus can be based. The difficulty originates, at least
in large part, in the very dynamics of the debates over abortion. It has to
do chiefly with the fact that the relevance of the principal moments that
punctuate the development of pregnancy has been subject to such intense
challenges during these debates – both from opponents of liberalization
(concerned with showing that before reaching any given stage the foetus
was already a ‘person’) and from supporters (eager to win ground by
increasing the gap between the moment one can speak of ‘personhood’
and the original moment of the encounter between gametes) – that neither
argument45 retained the power of conviction necessary to play the role of
salient point with respect to which an agreement could have been reached,
explicitly or at least tacitly, over a change of state in the foetus.
Michael Tooley confirms this analysis of the situation when he acknowledges that none of the frequently invoked salient points has ‘moral value’,
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and therefore none can serve to support the establishment of a clear
boundary between the two periods of foetal life, whether this might be the
moment of conformation (when the foetus takes on human shape), that of
quickening (when its intrauterine movements become perceptible), that of
viability (the moment as of which the foetus can survive outside the womb),
or finally, that of birth, on which Tooley focuses a critique using some of
the arguments I have already evoked (Tooley 1972; Tooley 1983).
Tooley’s strategy consists in proposing a different basis for establishing
the distinction between beings that have a right to life and those that do
not. Rejecting the arguments that make the foetus an organ belonging to
the mother, Tooley recognizes that a specific being is expelled by abortion,
that that being is, before its expulsion, a living being, and that it is undeniably a human being. Up to this point, his reasoning is close to that of the
opponents of abortion. But he reproaches the latter, whom he qualifies as
‘absolutists’, for presupposing that every being holds a right to life merely
by belonging to the human species.46 He seeks on the contrary to base his
demonstration on the opposition between ‘human beings’, whose right to
life is not guaranteed, and ‘persons’ (not necessarily belonging to the human
species), who have a legitimate claim to the right to life. To establish this
opposition, he undertakes to define the properties that a being must possess
to be eligible for qualification as a ‘person’, or, putting it differently, he
seeks to determine the type of tests to which a being that is a candidate for
the status of ‘person’ must be subjected. Having rejected morphological
properties (the greater or lesser morphological proximity between the body
of a foetus and that of a baby), Tooley stresses cognitive tests, which he
deems relevant with reference to the philosophy of mind.
Most important, in his view, are two types of tests, ranked hierarchically. Tests of the first type have to do with sentience, or the capacity to
feel pleasure or suffering.47 Tests of the second type, ranked higher, have
to do with a capacity known as ‘self-awareness’, that is, in Tooley’s sense,
the capacity to maintain a reference to the self as a being persisting in time,
as manifested notably in the capacity to make plans, or to be the subject of
continuing interests as revealed through desires (the reference to interests is
critical, in liberal theory, for the determination of rights).48 Relying on data
from physiology and experimental psychology, the author maintains that
before the age of two months the foetus has none of these capacities, but
that it acquires sensation during the third month. Nevertheless, while it is
appropriate to take this property into account (by choosing the least painful
abortion technique), the ability to experience sensations does not suffice to
guarantee the right to life. That right must be granted, on the contrary, if
the being subjected to testing satisfies the criterion of a persistent self. In
the latter case, the being can be said to be a ‘person’. This status may be
attributed in the first place to human beings who possess adequate cognitive
capacities, but the author suggests that it might also be applicable to certain
animals, and even, in an indefinite future time, to certain computers.49 In
contrast, neither foetuses nor infants (during the first ten or twelve weeks
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of life)50 are capable of passing tests demonstrating that they maintain a
persistent sense of self over time, so that neither abortion nor infanticide
during the first two or three months of life poses a moral problem.51
At this point in his argument, Tooley is obliged to go back to the question of the development of human beings and its moral relevance. He thus
undertakes a critique of what he calls the ‘potentiality principle’, that is, the
belief according to which, in addressing a being capable of evolving over
time following an intrinsic process, one must take into account the properties it will have when its evolution is complete. The difficulty is inherent
in the notion of evolution,52 which at once stresses change and presupposes the permanence of a being subject to ordered changes (as opposed
to random events that would affect an indeterminate set of independent
beings); this notion thus leads to questions about the nature of a given being
in terms of the orientation of the changes that affect it. Without denying
that the foetus is a ‘human being’ subject to an evolution oriented towards
its transformation into a ‘person’, Tooley seeks to demonstrate that this
fact is not morally pertinent and thus that it must not affect the decision
to preserve or to suppress the being, nor may it be used to justify the fairly
widespread belief that abortion is more problematic when it is performed
not at the beginning of pregnancy but at a later stage, when the foetus has
reached an advanced level of development.53 To this end he uses two arguments, which might be qualified respectively as subjective and objective.
The subjective argument returns to the theme of interests (inasmuch as
they support rights) and raises the question whether a foetus can be said to
have an interest in continuing to exist. Tooley’s response is that the desire
to exist, which underlies the interest in existing exhibited by adult persons,
cannot be transposed to foetuses, for the latter are not subjects of conscious
states. The objective argument combines the ‘symmetry principle’ (it is
morally equivalent to do something evil or to do nothing to keep something
evil from happening – a principle that has itself been the object of considerable debate) with a ‘thought experiment’: the story of the kitten and the
miracle drug. A scientist has discovered a drug that, if injected in a kitten,
allows the creature to develop mental capacities that give it access to the
status of person. Asking whether this scientist has the right to refrain from
administering this drug to the kitten, and to kill it instead, Tooley responds
in the affirmative, and transposes his conclusions to the case of the foetus: if
it is not evil not to act in such a way that a kitten will not become a person
(by withholding the miracle drug), then it is not evil to destroy a foetus that
would become a person if it were allowed to live.
In the conclusion to his book, Tooley explores some practical considerations. He says in effect that his goal was to offer a solid set of arguments
to demonstrate the moral character of abortion and infanticide, so as to
support those who have to confront such dilemmas (should one abort?
should one kill a newborn, for example if it is handicapped?54), which he
views as of great practical importance. He takes credit for bringing the
examination of these questions to a level that is not usually approached
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in public debates, and he expresses hope that a consensus about abortion
can be achieved when people become able to reflect on these questions in a
philosophically informed way. The question of the legitimacy of infanticide
is fundamental in Tooley’s eyes, for he believes that this question must be
resolved before a public consensus in favour of abortion can be reached.
The worth of the foetus in an ecological totality
Arguments of the type I have just presented using Michael Tooley’s work as
an example have a dual lineage that connects them with logical positivism
and with utilitarianism. From logical positivism, Tooley and his colleagues
retain in particular – along with rhetorical features such as recourse to
anecdotes used to support ‘thought experiments’ – concern for eliminating
references to what they consider ‘metaphysical beings’, entities that, in their
view, cannot be objects of experimental testing here and now. And this
category encompasses not only supernatural beings (deities, angels and the
like) and collective beings (such as peoples or social classes) but also beings
that take on a ‘metaphysical’ character, according to these authors, when
one seeks to qualify them in terms of what persists in them throughout the
changes of state or property that they undergo (and to which the change
in predicates applied to them attests), because one then tends to associate
them with something indeterminate that would be maintained in them as
an ‘essence’.
As for the utilitarian lineage, it is evident in the refusal to confer a
particular status on human life as such, the refusal to view it as ‘sacred’ in
itself (a position utilitarians call ‘absolutist’) and, consequently, the refusal
to consider that everything possible must be done to preserve the life of
any human being whatsoever. Utilitarians maintain that such a position
derives from a metaphysical prejudice (the notion of humanity being itself
metaphysical in nature) that cannot be verified empirically and that lacks a
solid foundation in the framework of a positive morality. They seek, then,
to define more precisely the various moral obligations we have towards the
assorted beings that populate the empirical world by linking these obligations to a calculation as to the relative worth of the beings. This calculation
can be made by adopting a viewpoint that is either holistic (the worth of
a being is associated with a requirement of maximizing global happiness
and thus with respect to a collective interest) or individualist55 (criteria for
judging whether the life of a being ‘is really worth living’ are established
by associating that life with a ‘life quality scale’, thus with respect to an
individual interest [Leplège 1999]); a third approach entails a series of
back-and-forth moves between these two viewpoints, so as to balance the
requirements that are established with reference to a being’s capacity for
suffering (sentience) and those established with reference to its social utility.
One of the objectives of the utilitarian approach is to give such calculations a rigorous foundation by establishing general principles that make it
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possible to establish equivalence among all beings given empirically, so as
to be able to compare and rank them in terms of the moral obligations we
have towards them (and especially in terms of the obligation we have, or do
not have, to respect their lives).
In this spirit, the interest of Mary Anne Warren’s work (1997) lies in
her effort to define such criteria in precise terms, by relying on principles of
general validity, and also in her desire not to limit herself to an evaluation
that takes social utility alone into account; instead, she proposes instruments for calculation capable of establishing the ‘moral status’ of any being
that belongs to an ecological totality. As she sees it, this approach ought
to make it possible to orient practical decisions about questions involving
euthanasia, abortion, the right to use other animals as food, and biomedical
research. Warren considers that the concept of ‘moral status’ can be developed from the starting point of common sense (thus, she says, in ordinary
circumstances we do not usually deem that we are doing something wrong
if we destroy a stone). Still, there are a great many unclear or controversial
cases that the utilitarian calculation can help make more obvious and, consequently, less conflictual. The ‘postmodern era [is] characterized’, Warren
observes, by ‘the intensity, and often acrimony, with which we debate the
moral status of both human and non-human entities’ (ibid., 15); the abortion controversy and the animal rights movement are her examples. Thus
she argues that now more than ever we need a clear concept of ‘moral
status’ grounded in ‘shared standards and principles . . . based upon arguments that most people can understand and accept’ (ibid., 10), especially
given the growth in human population in relation to that of other animals,
and given the increasingly powerful technological means available to the
human population that are putting the global ecosystem at risk.
If all beings are capable of having a moral status, deemed higher or lower
in particular in terms of their capacity to suffer, Warren (along with most
contemporary utilitarians) posits the existence of beings at the pinnacle of
the moral hierarchy, beings that possess what she calls ‘full moral status’:
namely, persons. She also defines persons as ‘equal’ with respect to their
moral status. The full moral status of persons consists in the fact that the
moral obligation not to make them suffer (or to minimize suffering) is supplemented by the obligation to respect their lives. But what are persons?
The rejection of a metaphysical position means that they cannot be simply
identified with human beings. Persons thus come to be defined as a sub-class
of beings that experience suffering; they are characterized by ‘sophisticated
mental capacities’ such as ‘rationality’ and ‘self-awareness’ (Warren 1997,
18). As Warren notes, the capacities that a being must possess in order to
have the moral status corresponding to the rank of person are currently
under debate (they range from the capacity to have beliefs and desires to
the more complex capacities needed to pass moral judgement). The author
thus seeks to construct more precise criteria making it possible to rank
various beings (oysters, worms, infants, handicapped beings, foetuses, the
great apes, embryos and so on) in order to define their moral status with
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precision and, consequently, to define the degree to which we are obliged
to respect their lives. In order to succeed in this endeavour, the author
develops what she calls a ‘multi-criterial approach’ (ibid., 19) so as to be
better able to handle complex moral problems. She identifies seven criteria
that can be taken into account in order to identify the moral status of any
being whatsoever. These criteria combine intrinsic and relational properties
(the fifth, for example, the ‘ecological principle’, indicates that a being may
have a higher moral status than the one its intrinsic properties might justify
because it plays an important role in its own ecosystem). To give an idea of
the diversity of beings that can be ranked according to their moral status
by means of these criteria, the author borrows the following list from Mary
Midgley (1994):
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
The dead
Posterity
Children
The senile
The temporarily insane
The permanently insane
Defectives, ranging down to human ‘vegetables’
Embryos, human and otherwise
Sentient animals
Nonsentient animals
Plants of all kinds
Artefacts, including works of art
Inanimate but structured objects – crystals, rivers, rocks, etc.
Unchosen groups of all kinds, including families or species
Ecosystems, landscapes, warrens, cities, etc.
Countries
The biosphere. (Midgley 1994, 381–2, in Warren 1997, 173–4)
Applied to the question of abortion, Warren’s multi-criterial calculus
allows her to critique Tooley’s positions as overly simplistic, because they
take into account only the inherent cognitive properties of the foetus and
not its relational properties (such as the fact that it is situated in an ecosystem which is its mother’s womb) and also because they do not bring into
play the moral status of the woman in whom the foetus is contained. But
Warren, shifting from a calculus of individual utility to one of global utility,
also criticizes Tooley (and his single criterion of ‘personhood’) because he
neglects the question of the population level that must be maintained in
order to avoid exhausting the resources that future generations may need in
order to lead a life worth living.56
What can we say about a foetus if we use the means for calculating that
Warren puts at our disposal (ibid., 202–8)? (a) That we are not dealing with
a moral agent and that it therefore cannot benefit from full moral status.
(b) That if one destroys it early enough, it cannot be considered a sentient
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being, so that abortion does not contravene the anti-cruelty principle (principle 2). (c) That foetuses are alive and thus have a right to respect for life
(principle 1: a life is not to be destroyed without good reason), but that
transitivity of respect (principle 7) is limited in their case by the moral rights
from which women, unlike foetuses, benefit by virtue of the agents’ rights
principle according to which ‘[m]oral agents have full and equal basic moral
rights, including the rights to life and liberty’ (principle 3). It follows that
‘the intrinsic properties of presentient foetuses do not entail that they must
be accorded a strong moral status’ (ibid., 208).
The foetus as intruder: is hospitality a moral obligation?
We shall now examine some other arguments that have been the object of
abundant commentary and debate. Crafted to legitimize abortion, these
arguments place less emphasis on the substantial properties of the foetus
than on the relation between that being and the woman in whose womb it
is developing. For an initial example of arguments of this type, let us take
the pioneering work of Judith Jarvis Thomson (1971).
Thomson’s research aims to demonstrate that abortion is legitimate even
if one views the foetus as a ‘person’ (a belief that the author clearly does
not share, but she seeks to show her adversaries that even this argument,
which constitutes their main support, is insufficient to challenge the legality
of abortion). Thus she starts from the following premises: (a) the foetus is
a person, and on this basis it has the same fundamental rights as an adult,
notably the right to life; (b) nevertheless, recognizing that a being has the
right to life does not imply recognizing that that being has a right to benefit
from everything needed to keep it alive.57
As is often the case in Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy (Michael Tooley’s
story about the kitten and the miracle drug is a typical example), Thomson
uses an anecdote to build a ‘thought experiment’ designed to confer on
widely shared moral intuitions the form of a model: the story (which has
become famous in the literature on abortion) of a ‘famous violinist’. A
celebrated violinist is suffering from a fatal illness. However, he could be
saved if he were to receive a blood transfusion, for a certain period of time,
from one particular woman. Music lovers kidnap this woman, put her to
sleep and take her to a clinic where she is hooked up to the violinist’s body.
When she wakes up, the director of the clinic comes to see her and says
that she is free to go, but that, if they unplug her, the violinist will die. ‘But
never mind,’ the director adds, ‘it’s only for nine months. By then he will
have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you’
(Thomson 1971, 49). The question Thomson raises is whether, according
to our moral intuitions, the woman in question has a moral obligation to
remain connected to the violinist’s body. After examining the question, she
answers in the negative.58
Thomson’s argument associates the mother’s body with a house
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(protected by the right to private life or, in Lockean language, the right
to self-ownership) into which an intruder has broken, demanding to be
welcomed, sheltered and fed despite the many disagreeable aspects of
his presence (Thomson enumerates the difficulties caused by pregnancy:
nausea, constipation, discomfort during sexual intercourse, and so on).
The question is thus whether hospitality towards this stranger is a moral
obligation or an option that one is free to accept or refuse, even if refusal
will result in the death of the one asking for help.59 For the author, the latter
position is the only one compatible with a requirement of freedom.60
To answer the objections raised to Thomson’s work (objections that I
shall examine later on), a number of authors have tried to make the argument more robust, in particular by using the legal problematics of ‘transfer
of rights’; the question then becomes what conditions have to be met for us
to be able to consider that the mother has transferred to the foetus a right
to make use of her body (Smith 1984, especially p. 234).
Recognition as a condition of the right to life
A certain number of authors have stressed the theme of recognition by
others (and in particular by the mother) as an operation that establishes the
difference between beings that have a right to life – because this right is recognized in them – and beings that do not. In this context, Robert Solomon’s
work is of interest in that it seeks to establish a synthesis between this position and utilitarianist postulates (Solomon 1984). Solomon rejects both the
approach that begins with an opposition between persons and non-persons
(Michael Tooley) and the approach that posits an ‘intrinsic value of life’
(Ronald Dworkin); neither, in his view, is amenable to a rational foundation. Starting from the Hegelian dynamics of modes of recognition (from
the primary group to society in the broad sense; from individuals inasmuch
as they have concrete needs to subjects recognized in their individual particularity; from the family to the state by way of civil society; and so on),61
he relativizes the ‘rights of persons’ as constituting merely an arrangement
used to protect the lives of individuals in very large societies where anonymity is the rule. He concludes that the ‘intrinsic value of human life’ is itself
a ‘social convention’ whose goal is to serve society as a whole (Solomon
1984, 220). On the basis of this utilitarian position, he can deny that the
notion of the intrinsic value of human life has any validity as an abstract
principle (in the wake of the utilitarian critique of human rights, especially
that of Jeremy Bentham62); for Solomon, one can only say of a being that it
has a ‘worth’ with reference to the recognition afforded it by someone (or
by society) which grants it worth. Applied to abortion, this principle allows
him to declare that ‘the worth of a fetus is the worth it has according to
the people involved with it, and who will be involved with it after birth’
(220), which leads him to undertake to legitimize a distinction of the type I
have posited between an authentic foetus and a tumoral foetus, by relying
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on observation of practical operations. Thus, for a woman who wants to
have a child, the foetus is a ‘person’ as soon as the doctor tells her she is
pregnant, while for a woman who does not want a child the pregnancy is
an invasion and the foetus comparable to an intruder that must be ousted
as quickly as possible. By the same token, the woman who wants to have a
child will confer on it a full right to life; the woman who does not want a
child will not do so. Solomon thus considers that the question whether or
not the foetus has any ‘rights’ is a false question, because it treats ‘rights’
as something that one possesses, whereas they are of the order of attributes
that one can claim or that can be granted by someone else. Now, because
foetuses cannot claim any right unless they are invested with the right to life
by someone else, he says, no right can be recognized in them. Recognition is
thus what determines whether there is an ‘other’ in the womb or not.
After considering the value of the foetus in relation to recognition by
the mother, Solomon embarks on a discussion of the worth that the foetus
may represent for society at large. This depends, he says, on economic and
biological considerations. A ‘society that is dangerously underpopulated’
will see the foetus as ‘a full person with all rights, especially the right to life’
(Solomon 1984, 221). Conversely, a ‘dangerously overpopulated culture’
will be able to consider the foetus as a ‘virtual parasite, to be considered
as much the same as the carrier of a disease, without rights, like a rat
during the plague years’ (ibid., 221). The author remarks nevertheless that
such extreme positions are not found in our modern societies, where ‘the
question of worth of the fetus tends to turn on a large variety of more individual factors’ that have nothing to do with the ‘unsupported metaphysical
postulation of the intrinsic worth of the individual fetuses themselves’,
adding that ‘not only do fetuses as such lack such intrinsic worth; we do
too’ (ibid., 222); here he is referring implicitly to authors of articles on the
value of foetuses. Finally, although he subordinates the right to life to the
fact of having been recognized by others, so that the opportunity to survive
depends on the community into which fate has tossed us, Solomon defends
himself against the charge of ‘moral relativism’. It is not more ‘relativist’, he
maintains, to define moral good by the desire of a community than by an
abstract rule. In the end, he advocates a completely laissez-faire approach
to abortion; in his view, that practice should not be regulated by laws but
solely by ‘internalized moral constraints’ that are ‘not universal’ and may be
‘at odds with each other’ (ibid., 224).
Let us note that Solomon’s arguments present analogies with certain arguments that accompanied the debate over abortion in France in the 1970s
but that relied, in the French context, less on a thematics of recognition
than on a problematics of desire associated with Freudianism. The stress
did not fall on ‘rights’ (a theme that for constitutional reasons does not
have the same importance in France as it does in the United States), but
rather on the conditions of access to full humanity. An argument often
developed by authors of Catholic origin or inspiration, one that can be
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qualified as ‘humanist’ or even ‘spiritualist’, begins with a critique of the
purely ‘materialist’ representations of human beings considered, from a
Darwinian perspective, as members of one animal species among others,
and consequently, positions that reduce the development of an embryo to
a strictly physiological process. These authors maintain, on the contrary,
that reference to the symbolic function is necessary to qualify human beings
as such. It follows that they integrate into the process of humanization not
only the biological evolution that turns an embryo into a newborn but also
the processes on which access to symbolization depends. They hold that,
among the processes that give access to the symbolic function, one element
plays a central role, namely, the ‘desire for a child’, especially that of the
mother. The mother’s desire, inasmuch as it is the vector through which the
relation of the desired being to the symbolic order comes about, is thus a
condition of humanization. It follows that the child born without having
been desired will not accede, or will risk not acceding, to full humanity.
Thus the abortion of an embryo or a foetus that is not desired cannot be
assimilated to the destruction of a human being, since this undesired being
is not and will never be the object of the desire that it become fully human.63
The deconstructionist critique
This brief summary of the arguments that have been proposed in favour
of abortion cannot be completed without evoking the deconstructionist
positions. These came up in the preceding chapter in connection with the
debate over visual representations of the foetus, although in that case it was
less a matter of legitimizing abortion in a positive way than of developing
a radical critique of the oppositions it has provoked. The deconstructionist
enterprise presents itself as a critique of the ideologies on which masculine
domination and patriarchy are based. It turns for support to the social sciences and, more particularly, to data borrowed from ethnology and history
in order to challenge what is called ‘naturalism’ in texts written from this
standpoint. Naturalism, conceived in this way, consists in viewing beliefs
and practices that actually relate to social arrangements that vary over
time and according to culture as if they stemmed from ‘nature’ (or, more
precisely, from ‘human nature’). ‘Naturalism’ thus consists in ‘naturalizing’
these beliefs and practices, treating them as absolutes. To deconstruct
them, it suffices to show that they are in fact not absolute but arbitrary, in
the sense that they are ‘social constructs’ and, as such, subject to change;
nothing keeps these beliefs and practices from being radically transformed
and replaced by others. But the deconstructionist analysis does not stop
here. Indeed, the fact that beliefs and practices are ‘arbitrary’ is not a sufficiently powerful motive to bring about change, if the only goal of this
change is to replace them by other equally ‘arbitrary’ beliefs and practices.
A further step is needed: these beliefs and practices must be shown to serve
the interests of certain parties (in the case that concerns us, men) to the
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detriment of other parties (women). Thus the deconstructionist critique
(which in this respect often converges with the Marxist critique of ideologies) has to rely on positive theses, either a theory of exploitation (certain
beliefs increase the general level of exploitation while others reduce it), or a
theory of reason (certain beliefs are more rational than others), or a theory
of progress (the beliefs to come are preferable to those of the past), or else,
as is often the case, a combination of these three theories. This is why the
polemical uses of deconstruction and the invocation of the theme of ‘social
construct’ often represent just one phase in a trajectory that leads, once the
critique has been made, back towards realist arguments that draw their
force from the hard sciences and more specifically from the natural sciences.
Choosing from an abundant literature on this matter, I propose to look
at an important book by Mary Boyle (1997). Invoking Jacques Derrida and
Michel Foucault, Boyle defends the idea that abortion is a problem only
because it is judged negatively in relation to childbirth, which is judged
positively. Thus she endeavours to destroy the prejudice in favour of childbirth, which she views as a reflection of masculine ideology, and to restore
a symmetrical relation between abortion and childbirth. Childbirth is thus
presented as one alternative (among others) to abortion. Boyle’s demonstration is built on data from psychology and medicine showing that childbirth
presents a health risk greater than that of abortion, and that depression is
more frequent after childbirth than after an abortion, so that childbirth is
valued and abortion devalued only under the influence of a belief that is a
‘social construct’ (ibid., 27–45). Boyle also uses the notion of ‘social construct’ to deconstruct the idea that human life has a sacred character: not, as
Michael Tooley does, by making cognitivist arguments (which she criticizes
as ‘naturalist’), but by pointing out that the category of ‘personhood’, far
from being universal, is on the contrary inscribed in the history of the West.
Denouncing ‘childbirth’ (as opposed to abortion) as a ‘social construct’ necessary to the maintenance of masculine domination opens up the possibility
of a radical change in modes of reproduction, a change itself associated
with a radical revolution. In effect, the deconstruction of naturalism makes
it possible to consider that the way of reproducing human populations to
which we are accustomed (direct sexual intercourse between a man and a
woman and gestation of a foetus in a woman’s body) is viewed as ‘natural’
only owing to beliefs that naturalize just one among various possible modes
of human reproduction. Such a mode of human reproduction can thus be
described in turn as part of a ‘reproductive order’ based on exploitation.
This sexual order could be construed as necessary as long as there were
no other conceivable means to ensure human reproduction. Today, the
development of techniques of medically assisted reproduction allows us
to envisage seriously the spread of other reproductive arrangements that
would allow the burden of gestation – which now falls solely on women
– to be more evenly distributed between the sexes.64 The authors who set
out to sketch this new reproductive order are interested in the question of
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abortion only in so far as they perceive the defence of this already-acquired
freedom to be the condition for achieving new freedoms, which they see
as even more important for the future. Once the new reproductive order
is established, the question of abortion will fade away, they believe, on its
own. In this sense, for these authors, the cause of abortion is at once central
and outdated.
Endeavours to legitimize abortion and critiques of these endeavours
Endeavours to legitimize abortion, whose principal argumentative schemas
(dating mainly from the first half of the 1970s) I have just outlined, have
been developed over several decades according to a dynamics of critique
and justification. Not all critiques have been produced by women writers
hostile to the liberalization of abortion; many have come from philosophers
defending an alternative line of argument. The responses these critiques
have generated have provoked numerous commentaries in turn. Without
going into the virtually infinite details of the polemics, I shall try to summarize some of the problems raised by the various efforts at legitimization.
Let us look first at the theses that rely on a sharp distinction between
persons (who have a right to life) and non-persons (who do not have such
a right); Michael Tooley’s work probably offers the best example. In addition to technical problems, theses of this sort raise questions concerning
their scope and their relation to other moral intuitions that are frequently
involved in ordinary judgements. One technical question has to do with the
difficulty of establishing robust criteria that are hard to challenge and that
remain stable over the long term. In fact, the criteria presented by authors
such as Tooley are derived from the experimental sciences, especially physiology and psychology. Now, these criteria have to be open to modification
as the disciplines change, and this requirement threatens to undermine the
usefulness of efforts to establish the difference between ‘persons’ and ‘nonpersons’ on a firm footing. The relation between Tooley’s arguments and
a great number of the moral intuitions that are at work in other areas of
daily life is even more problematic. Tooley is the first to acknowledge that
the way he is attempting to demonstrate the legitimacy of abortion leads
to a revision of other moral beliefs. In fact, the distinction he establishes
between human beings and persons leads him, on the one hand, to include
seriously handicapped persons (hemiplegics, brain-injured patients, persons
with Alzheimer’s disease, and so on) along with infants in the class of
non-persons, and, on the other hand, to include beings that are not human
(higher-order animals, computers with sufficient capabilities, and so on)
in the class of persons. Such a distribution requires us to recognize, in the
wake of the legitimization of abortion, both the validity of practices such
as euthanasia and also the extension of human rights to certain higherorder animals.65 This step, which many individuals who tend to favour the
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liberalization of abortion are not inclined to take, disqualifies the notion
of common humanity and replaces it with another principle of communalization based on success in cognitive tests. If Tooley’s distinction were
accepted, it would lead in effect to a major (although not unthinkable)
change in our moral habits and political practices, for example by including
the recognition of fundamental inequalities among human beings (genetic
but not racial inequalities) in our conception of the democratic ideal.66 In
contrast, it is hard to see how the challenge to the ‘potentiality principle’
that plays such an important role in Tooley’s demonstration can be compatible with a great number of routine practices in society, and especially with
the social obligations having to do with child-rearing and schooling. These
obligations entail investing resources now in a being – a child – who will be
in a position to put them to work (in a useful way) only later; consequently,
they lead us to confer moral value, in advance, on the direction towards
which that being has the potential to evolve.
The argument that emphasizes the differences in the way motherhood,
foetuses, infants, ‘persons’ and so on are represented in different societies or historical periods, thereby highlighting their ‘socially constructed’
character, has been subjected to the same critiques as the constructionist
approach in general.67 In relation to our topic, a troublesome difficulty
that I have already evoked entails the need to shift, at a certain moment in
the demonstration, from a strictly deconstructionist and radically critical
position to an affirmative position. For if, as Ian Hacking has remarked,
the deconstructionist posture is truly convincing only when it is oriented
towards change, and especially when the reader has the sense that the
transformations announced by the deconstructive enterprise are already
under way,68 then at one point or another it becomes necessary to abandon
the strategy of disqualifying the conventions that are still in force by bringing out their ‘relative’ character, and undertake instead to depict the goal
towards which the change is leading and to say in what respects the change
is desirable. Now this implies abandoning the sceptical posture that was
appropriate for unveiling the ‘arbitrary’ character of unduly naturalized
requirements so as to establish the desired change as worthwhile, and it
is easy to see that the means required to achieve this end are not readily
compatible with relativism.
With respect to the thematics of recognition, when it is used as a moral argument to legitimize abortion, we can transpose the reservations expressed by
Bernard Edelman on the use made of reference to the ‘parental project’ in
the French bioethics laws passed in 1994. For Edelman, making a being’s
right to life depend on recognition by others, even if those others are its
parents, amounts to ‘not envisaging the freedom of the child to be born’,
to considering it as ‘a “project of freedom” for the parents alone or [as]
the object of their freedom, as it were’. Now, Edelman adds, ‘the strange
concept that holds that only a human being can be the object of freedom
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for other human beings’ has to be ‘compared with slavery’ (1993, 453–73).
In this case too, the principle invoked – recognition by others, considered
as empirical individuals capable of granting it or not granting it – is questionable if one seeks (as Robert Solomon does) to give it a more general
validity, setting aside the problems raised by the ‘status’ of the foetus. Could
the idea that the situation accorded to persons, or the ‘status’ of each one,
would therefore depend on the recognition granted to each person by other
persons, and thus would depend on circumstances, be inscribed in political
structures? It is hard to imagine unanimous acceptance of such a project,
especially inasmuch as the logic of recognition, as Solomon uses it, at least
implicitly presupposes an unequal distribution of positions, so that certain
beings would be in the position of having to recognize, others of having to
be recognized. It is moreover in opposition to the idea of circumstantial
recognition, appealing to the opinion of others in a given situation, that
citizenship is defined: as recognition given by the state to every human being
born on a certain ‘national’ territory (and/or to parents having a certain
‘nationality’) and who has been the object of an official ‘declaration’ that
owes its emancipatory value with respect to relations of personal dependence69 precisely to the fact that the protection it grants does not depend on
evaluations by empirical individuals free to modify their assessments and
practices wholly according to the situation or even according to personal
whims.70
Among the various solutions proposed to the problem of legitimizing abortion, the schema presented by Judith Jarvis Thomson has probably received
the greatest number of commentaries, critiques and efforts at reformulation
to palliate these critiques. One of the principal objections has been the following. While, under certain circumstances, and particularly in a case of
rape, the foetus can indeed be considered as an intruder, in most cases, the
mother has a particular responsibility towards the foetus she is carrying
because its presence in her womb is the result of sexual intercourse to
which she consented. Now, she could not have failed to know that sexual
intercourse could result in making her pregnant. It follows, according to
this objection, that even if it was not specifically desired, the foetus cannot
be considered as an intruder or a foreigner whom one is morally free not
to welcome (according to the principle of responsibility). Even a reference to
rape does not suffice to end the dispute, because it raises difficult problems
of interpretation. Thus when the always (or almost always) asymmetrical
character of intercourse between the sexes is emphasized, a great number
of sexual acts that are carried out in the context of daily routines and that
do not give rise to complaints can be categorized as acts of violence. We
have seen that a more sophisticated way of presenting Thomson’s argument consists in reformulating it in the legal language of transfer of rights.
The question then becomes how to know whether the fact of (voluntarily)
having sexual intercourse can be assimilated to an act leading to such a
transfer. Thomson’s answer is that one cannot transfer a right to a being
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that does not yet exist.71 Another argument is that the transfer of rights
must be explicitly willed, which is not the case for a woman who has sexual
intercourse without clearly aiming at procreation.72
In a sometimes surprising way, Thomson’s argument has been the object
of numerous critiques by feminist authors. She is criticized for comparing
the relation between mother and foetus to the relation between two strangers involved in a trial. At the heart of that critique, we find the accusation
according to which, with respect to this problem, Thomson and other moral
philosophers who use the same type of argumentation implicitly adopt
positions and a rhetoric of impartial detachment that are typically those
of men; this renders them incapable of grasping and expressing the specific
experience of women.73 Yet, according to these critics, one must start from
that experience to claim the right to abortion, or, rather, the right to have
free access to the means to abortion that are most reliable from a health
standpoint and least painful psychologically. According to these authors,
what is neglected, in particular, by moral philosophers, even though it
occupies a central place in women’s experience, is nothing other than suffering: the experience of abortion is always, for women, a painful experience.
Following this line of argument, abortion is presented both as an act subject
to a decision that stems only from the women concerned, and in which their
freedom is thus engaged, and as an act that is never accomplished except
under the constraint of imperious necessity, which gives it the character of
a ‘grim choice’. Here we return to the search for legalization without legitimization that characterizes the legal approaches to this problem, which was
presented earlier in terms of the lesser evil.
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Exiting from the liberal framework
The feminist political philosophers who defend the possibility of open
access to abortion even though they are often quite critical towards most
of the arguments proposed to legitimize this practice seem to be torn
between liberalization and liberal individualism. And it is probably this
awkward position that sometimes makes their discourse hard to follow
and apt to provoke harsh reactions of rejection from adversaries intent on
defending a more radical line. Even as they firmly maintain the requirement of liberalization, these feminist philosophers in effect oppose two
sets of arguments: both those that consider only the woman and her rights
and tend to reduce the foetus to a nonentity (to nothing, except perhaps
an element of the mother’s body), and also those that take into account
the existence of the foetus and seek to show that it cannot be treated as
a ‘person’, still less endowed with a right to remain where it is and to
develop. They accuse arguments of the latter type of relying on the axiom
that posits two beings, the mother and the foetus, each of which can be
examined separately and between which a quasi-contractual relation can
be established comparable to the relation between an employer and an
employee or a property owner and a tenant, for example.1 They seek, on
the contrary, to stress the suffering experienced by a woman facing an
abortion, who is caught between two types of violence: the violence of
the presence in her womb of a being that is imposing itself whether she
wants it or not, and the violence that she imposes not only on the foetus
but on herself by having an abortion. The philosophers in question insist
on indicating what is specific about the situation of pregnancy, that is, the
fact of involving two different beings, the one embedded within the other
in such a way that nothing can be done to the one without being done to
the other as well.
Now a concern of this type is hard to compare with the more frequent
approach to legitimizing the liberalization of abortion, which consists
in adopting the form of liberal individualism, a political framework that
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constitutes practically the only resource available when it is a matter of
designing a new understanding (in the sense given this term in chapter 3) apt
to replace understandings with the Creator, kinship groups or the state. For
it is indeed in opposition to the omnipotence of these assorted agencies that
the liberal individualist conception of an autonomous subject has developed. Such subjects are capable of endowing themselves with a moral law
without waiting for a revelation to provide one;2 they are capable of being
envisaged as individuals endowed with their own worth, even after they
are detached from kinship bonds;3 and they are worthy of being protected
against abuses of power by a state, even one founded on free consent. In
such a framework, the question of the legality and legitimacy of abortion –
when it is faced straightforwardly in an effort to go beyond legal expedients
– can only be envisaged by interpreting the situation of pregnancy in terms
of a conflict in which the respective rights of mother and foetus are put in
the balance, either to oppose them, to rank them or to establish some arbitration between them. The possibility of considering the foetus as ‘both me
and not me’, to borrow an expression from Catharine MacKinnon (cited in
Dworkin 1993, 55), is ultimately excluded.
It is nevertheless this path that I would like to explore now, because
it seems the one best able to account for the experience of the women I
encountered, at least in so far as the experience can be grasped through
their narratives. I shall try to reconstitute the personal self-knowledge that
these women gained in the situations in which they confronted abortion
and I shall also try – the two endeavours are inseparable – to put in place
a conceptual language that will allow me to transcribe this experience in
the analytic framework I am proposing here. Finally, I shall examine the
way the reference to the two constraints on engendering (chapter 2) can be
understood in the language of intimacy.
From moral categories to the language of personal knowledge
To put it briefly, the categories that organize the political or moral discourse
on abortion – whether that discourse is intended to legitimize the practice
or, on the contrary, to condemn it – turn out to be of little use for interpreting women’s accounts of this trying experience and, more generally, it
would seem, for understanding what they mean when they talk about their
pregnancies.
A first dividing line often seems absent from the way these women tell
their stories: there is often no separation between themselves as autonomous
subjects and those other beings, heteronomous and distinct, that are identifiable within their bodies, in a precise anatomical space called the uterus
– rather in the way in which the position of an object is defined by spatial
coordinates. When the women in our interviews speak of their pregnancies, both they themselves and that other being are inseparably in question,
without any break in continuity; they stress particular states characterized
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precisely by the fact that through them something is manifested that would
be in the order of a test or trial of otherness within identity.
A second dividing line that finds itself largely invalidated in the narratives
is the one that opposes ‘happy’ pregnancies – because they are ‘wanted’ – to
the pregnancies that manifest themselves immediately and uniquely by a
feeling of ‘distress’ because they are ‘accidental’ and ‘unwanted’. As we
shall see later in this chapter, pregnancies, especially in the early stage, can
give rise to a state that does resemble happiness – or more precisely, as we
shall soon see, to a state of plenitude – and can lead to an abortion or, on
the contrary, can be accompanied by great disquietude and nevertheless go
to full term; or, in a third case which is probably the most common one,
it can be marked by alternations between these two types of stages, for
varying lengths of time.
A third dividing line that the data gathered led me at the very least to
relativize concerns the stances, usually handled in a ‘moral’ register, that
the women involved adopted towards abortion. It is hard to read these
narratives and assign them to two clearly distinct categories, one in which
the stories express ‘guilt’ at the memory of an abortion and another in
which the stories present abortion in a quasi-anodyne fashion, as if it were
a practice that might be unpleasant or painful, to be sure, but that posed no
specific problems. The type of emotion betrayed in our interviews was most
often situated either beneath or beyond ‘guilt’, in the sense of a moral sentiment oriented with reference to an explicit prohibition; to reconstitute the
emotions expressed, we need instead to call upon the registers of ‘mourning’, ‘loss’, ‘emptiness’ and ‘discomfort’ or even denial.
Finally, even the categorial distinction whose importance we saw in the
understanding centred on the parental project, especially in official or public
expressions, the distinction between the authentic foetus oriented towards
a ‘baby’ and the tumoral foetus reduced to ‘nothing’, is challenged by these
interviews, if not in all cases at least in certain episodes of the narratives,
and especially in those concerning the weeks that precede the decision to
abort or even the operation itself (the ‘decision’ can in fact be made and
then questioned several times in a row); this is particularly obvious when
the move to abortion is made, after long hesitation, at the last moment
when this act is still legally possible.
Let us take for example the case of Fabienne, age 36, a secretary. Fabienne
had had two abortions, one in adolescence (when she was 16 and her ‘boyfriend’ 19), the other early in her marriage (she was 26). Shortly afterward, she
became pregnant again and decided to keep the child, first with her husband’s
agreement and then against his will, after he asked her to have another abortion. She was now bringing up her daughter alone. Fabienne said little about
her first abortion, except to say that ‘it was a choice’ and that she had had
‘no other option’: ‘Someone my age couldn’t be ready, couldn’t be prepared
to be a mother, to take care of a child, without even being grown up herself.
I couldn’t take that on.’ But she spoke at length about the second abortion,
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which took place at the beginning of her marriage: it was ‘completely different’, ‘harder’, because there ‘was another option and things could have been
different’. She said that her husband had told her that ‘he didn’t want to have
a child’ with her. She waited a while before ‘talking a little about the subject,
to see whether things might change’, and ended up deciding to have an abortion when she was almost two months pregnant. She described the beginnings
of this second pregnancy that was to end in an abortion: ‘At day three I told
myself: “I’m pregnant”, and I knew it, I was actually pregnant. My body was
different, there was something going on, something happening differently . . .
I felt it, every time, but then you tell yourself “No, don’t rush”, you have to
wait at least a week. They say it’s all in your head, and all that. And every
time it was true. If you let the feelings come, your body shows it, where it
is, and it reflects all your sufferings a little, every minute of your life. So it’s
inevitable, you feel something very subtle, little differences compared to how
things normally work inside, how you usually feel things . . . I felt it, I think
it’s very important, especially in a phase of pregnancy, because everything
really is happening in your body. Your body is there, it’s alive, it’s telling you
things, it feels it and the feeling inside exists. It’s not the same sensation as
being six months pregnant, but it’s there. It’s a slight sensation, like a current
changing direction, it’s like a river that always flows in the same way at the
same rhythm, and then at some point the rhythm changes. Because it’s not
something you can put your finger on, it’s not something intellectual, it’s
physical, and your body goes . . . I don’t know if I can find the right words, it
has another . . . It has a different movement, let’s say, it does things differently.
So there’s a sensation, you feel it, if you have any feelings at all, if you want to
feel.’ Fabienne then spoke about the feelings she had after her abortion: ‘After
the abortion there’s an emptiness: an emptiness you feel not just intellectually
and psychologically but an emptiness in your body, too, a void: yes, the feeling
of a void, of loss. A sad emptiness, you don’t really feel like smiling, you feel
kind of bleak. It kind of evolves. First it’s a feeling that lasts all the time, all
day, you wake up with it, and then it gradually fades away, there are times
when you see something else, when something reminds you that life goes on,
there’s a little happiness somewhere and then it gets better, it changes slowly.’
Paulette had studied German for two years; she did not have a career at
the time of the interview. Age 32, four months pregnant, she had had two
abortions, when she was 23 and 29. Her second abortion took place under
the following circumstances. For four years she had been in a relationship
with a man with whom she wanted to have a child. But for several months the
relationship had been deteriorating and they had stopped making love. She
then had an ‘amorous escapade’, ‘just one time’ to have some ‘purely sexual
pleasure’ with a ‘friend’. Following this one-night stand, she found herself
pregnant. She then announced, she said, to ‘the man [she] loved, finally, the
man with whom [she] wanted to spend her life, who also wanted a child’,
that she ‘was pregnant and didn’t know who was the father’. He insisted that
she have an abortion. For Paulette, the decision was a hard one because she
‘wanted a child’ and she was ‘already 30 years old’. She hesitated, ended up
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opting for abortion, but had to wait a month before the operation, which took
place at the very end of the legal period: ‘I couldn’t stand being pregnant. I
didn’t want to get used to it. I was afraid of liking what was happening to me
too much because, finally, it’s what I wanted. I mustn’t feel the baby. I was
afraid of feeling the baby, of feeling some connection . . . And even my physical state, my breasts were swollen, I couldn’t stand the changes in my body . . .
Around the same time, I had had the “luck”, in quotation marks, to have to
change jobs. I threw myself into my work . . . I went out, I saw a lot of people,
and I smoked pot, I smoked a lot of pot, in fact, to keep myself from thinking,
from having dark thoughts. Because I was working so much, I’d come home
late, I was pretty tired, but the pot allowed me to stop thinking, especially to
stop thinking about that.’ Six months after that abortion, Paulette ‘got back
together’ with her friend, whose child she was now expecting.
Cécile, age 27, was a teacher. She had had two abortions, the first when
she was 20, the second when she was 22. The second time, especially, she felt
‘guilty’ for her ‘negligence’ (she hadn’t been taking the pill and her partner
used condoms), a bit ‘stupid’. Long after the abortion, she said she regretted
not the child she didn’t have but ‘inflicting that’ on her ‘own body’, something
‘useless’, ‘painful’, ‘unnecessary’. She still had a ‘very painful’ memory of her
abortions and she especially stressed, in the second case, her doctor’s ‘really
inappropriate’ insistence on ‘making [her] look at the sonogram’. She was
now ‘super anxious’ that ‘that could happen a third time’ and she dreaded
her ‘visits to the gynaecologist’. During her first pregnancy, she ‘wasn’t aware
of anything’; it was her housemate who saw that she ‘wasn’t well’, realized
that she was pregnant and told her so (an ‘announcement’ confirmed by test
results). The second time, she ‘understood sooner’. She couldn’t bear what
was happening to her; she ‘had a very bad experience’ with ‘the symptoms
of pregnancy’ (‘nausea’, ‘pain’, ‘waves of anxiety’, ‘vaginal discharges’): ‘My
body was telling me that I was really pregnant. It wasn’t a wanted child. It
must already be hard when you’re pregnant and you have painful symptoms
and it’s something that you’ve wanted, but this . . . ’ She still wasn’t taking the
pill (‘for health reasons’), but she lived in fear of a third pregnancy. She didn’t
want either another abortion – she said she ‘couldn’t take it on’ – or a child,
at least not for several years.
Danièle, almost the same age, in a similar professional situation and from
a similar social background (middle class, technical sector), had also had two
abortions. She spoke differently about her experiences: ‘The second time, I
thought it wouldn’t happen to me again, and then I got pregnant, and that
time, I knew it. Then there was the big question: do I keep it or don’t I? And
that time, that baby was alive in me, I dreamed about it, I loved it. I felt that I
loved it, that little baby, really, I saw it in a sonogram . . . But when I decided
I couldn’t keep it, I went to the hospital, something snapped, and I woke up,
and I went on, that’s all. I really snapped. I don’t know any more what I was
feeling right before. I just know that there was a before and an after . . . I don’t
know how I managed, but I have the impression that it didn’t change anything
in my life. I tell myself: “Danièle, basically, you’re getting through this, you’re
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handling it really well.”’ But Danièle, who broke up with her ‘friend’ shortly
after the abortion, had recurrent dreams: ‘Sometimes I dream that I’m giving
birth or that I feel my baby, or I feel the love I have for it. So there’s something
there after all, but it’s always in my dreams.’
To interpret the stories we were told, it is necessary to explore the oppositions between what is voluntary and involuntary, desired and imposed,
between identity and otherness, happiness and distress, and so on, in a
broader framework, so as to understand the moments when these oppositions can be questioned, and also, by the same token, to specify the contexts
in which they coincide with experience.
A topos for describing the experience of self in engendering
and abortion
I shall now establish the outlines of an analytic framework capable of associating with a single form the descriptions the women we met offered of
their experiences of engendering and abortion, even though these descriptions correspond to very diverse trajectories, as varied as the twists and
turns that form the weave of every life when it is recounted, or, in Paul
Ricoeur’s now widely accepted expression, ‘emplotted’.
To develop this model, I shall borrow the Freudian terms topography or
topos and agency. To be sure, the reference to a logic of ‘spaces’ is doubly
metaphorical here. I am not only distancing myself, as psychoanalysis does,
from the idea that the psyche can be distributed among different physical
substrata, which already confers on the analytic notion of ‘psychic space’
a metaphorical character (Laplanche and Pontalis 1974, 449–53), but also
distancing myself from the project that is present in analytic theory of
describing the psychic apparatus as an array of systems each with a different
function. I am doing this, in the first place, because the subject matter I am
dealing with – life stories in their relation to engendering – cannot be contained in what is customarily called the realm of the ‘psyche’. But I am also
doing this because I lack a theoretical support structure that would allow
me to form the project of gaining access to what persons do not tell me,
to something like the relation between a ‘conscious’ and an ‘unconscious’.
This does not mean that the object of my research is entirely of the order of
manifest self-evidence and is awash in transparency, as it were. But the type
of opacity that holds my attention is precisely the type faced by the persons
involved. Indeed, they often referred to it explicitly, when they went back
over past events and tried to express – and thereby to ‘understand’ – the
tenor of the ‘feelings’ they had had and the modalities of their actions at the
time, in an attempt to discover their own ‘motivations’ and sometimes to
‘justify’ them or to ‘give them a meaning’, as they often put it. Now the way
they went about recovering the dimension of worry, confusion and anxiety
that often marked the period(s) of their lives when they were confronted
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with abortion consisted precisely in stressing the tension between the differing desires they experienced. They placed special emphasis on moments of
reversal, occasions when, while they were in the grip of desire for one thing,
desire for something else got the upper hand.
I shall call these desires the will of the flesh, the will to control and the
will to legitimize.
To construct the distinction between the will of the flesh and the will to
control, I shall rely on the concepts of flesh and auto-affectivity of the flesh
as developed in Michel Henry’s phenomenology.4 The search for a language
that makes it possible to explore what lies beneath the subject–object separation is central in Henry’s philosophy of flesh. To the intentional aim by which
consciousness is constructed in the donation of the objects in the world, and
thereby of the world itself, Henry opposes auto-affectivity of the flesh which,
radically immanent, does without any projection into externality, and which
constitutes the movement through which ‘life engenders itself in the process
of its eternal auto-affectivity, a process through which it comes into itself, is
crushed against itself, experiences itself, and takes ultimate pleasure in itself’
(Henry 1994, 304).5 For Henry, this process is not only perfectly immanent
but also absolutely passive.6 But its immanence and passivity are no less
constitutive of the ‘self’ as singularity, as selfsame.7 However, in Henry’s
construction the ‘self’ engendered in the auto-affectivity of the flesh cannot
support the entire weight of presence to the world, even if, without the clarification of what is engendered in auto-affectivity, access to this presence would
remain unintelligible. In the wake of the elucidation of the ‘self’, Henry introduces another component that unfolds when one lingers over the way what ‘is
engendered like a self in the auto-affectivity of the flesh’ escapes from passivity
and finds itself realized in such a way that the ‘self’ can ‘enter into possession
of itself’ and of the ‘powers that traverse it’. This ‘capacity of the self to be in
possession of itself’, to ‘deploy all the powers of its body’ and to ‘take hold
of itself’ is what, according to Henry, institutes an ‘I’. This ‘I’, Henry says, is
written as ‘I Can’ (ibid., 305–6).8 The ‘I’ is the ‘power’ to be ‘in possession
of all one’s powers.’ But, unlike the ‘self’ in which it is rooted, the ‘I’ escapes
from the passivity of auto-affectivity; thus its deployment makes possible a
‘structure of representation’ with respect to which ‘everything is arranged’
– in Henry’s phenomenological language, an ecstasy – oriented towards the
outside, towards the world, towards what is ‘before’ (in the spatial sense),
towards a ‘that [thing] is’, towards a ‘there is [something]’ (Henry 2000, 60),
apt by that token to give itself objects in their relation to a subject and to
arrange them in the externality of a project.
Before going more into detail, I should say that the difference – developed in
the pages that follow – between the will of the flesh and the will to control
corresponds to the distinction, in Michel Henry, between the ‘self’ and the
‘I’. I will not be betraying Henry (who was not at home in the vocabulary
of psychoanalysis9) if I speak of the agency of the ‘self’ and the agency of
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the ‘I’. But I shall try to deploy the agency of the ‘self’ formed by the autoaffectivity of the flesh in what is specific about it when the flesh is affected in
the situation of pregnancy, where flesh is experienced at once as being of the
self (in the sense of the experience of one’s own body) and as if – inasmuch
as a foetus is developing in it and it finds itself engaged in the formation
of another being – it were exempting itself from the intentional grasp and
manifesting a sort of inherent will of its own.
To speak of the way in which the foetus and the woman who is carrying
it find themselves thus mutually implicated, I shall use the Platonic topos
of cho–ra, borrowing it, among the numerous interpretations that it has
received, from a use to which the social sciences have already become
accustomed, the use Augustin Berque (2000) made of it to construct the
geographic concept of oecumene, referring to the inhabited areas of the
world. To describe the dynamics of the environment, Berque needed a
notion that would allow him to break with a conception of space as topos
(which the incorporation into general culture of Aristotelian notions and
especially, in this case, of a Cartesian concept of space has made familiar
and almost ‘natural’ to us). From this Berque derived two different representations of the relation between a thing and its place. If one conceives
of a place as a topos, it is then ‘separable from the thing, which is mobile,
whereas it [the place] is not’. In contrast, Berque adds, ‘the cho–ra is a place
that participates in what is found there; and it is a dynamic place, starting
from which something different comes about, not a place that encloses the
thing in the identity of its being’ (ibid., 20–5).10 The notion of cho–ra can
thus serve as a conceptual tool that will allow me to name what is found
beneath the division between subject and object, at the moment when
beings, although different, are in a situation such that each of them is what
it is only in its relation to the other.
Introduced into the Timaeus to give body to the mediation without which
the relation between the intelligible and the perceptible would remain enigmatic,11 the cho–ra, which is first of all a place in which the phenomena subject
to generation and corruption appear (Brisson 1974, 212), is useful for my
research in that it is one of the rare philosophemes that rest at least in large
part on the metaphor of engendering in the womb (the other metaphor invoked
is that of the artisan who works soft materials like wax or gold in fusion). But
this place is not a space, in the modern sense of the term, defined abstractly by
a system of coordinates; it is rather a contrée [region, land, clime].12 Cho–ra is
thus distinguished from topos in the sense in which, in Aristotle, it prefigures
Cartesian space.13 What specifies the cho–ra as contrée, as opposed to topos
as space, is the impossibility, in the case of cho–ra, of dissociating an object
from the place it occupies.14 In the case of space as topos, the object remains
identical to itself no matter what position it occupies in space, as defined by
its coordinates, since its displacements do not affect space as such, whereas, in
the case of cho–ra, neither the space nor what occupies it can be grasped independently of each other.15 It is thus not enough to say that cho–ra is ‘relation’,
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which would already presuppose an identification of the terms that enter into
relationship. The cho–ra is, indissociably, the occupied and the occupier. It thus
follows that the cho–ra escapes the logic of subject–object or subject–predicate
relations.16 The predicate is incorporated into the object, indissociably. For a
cho–ra is at once ‘that in which’ (as place), ‘that of which’ (as matrix or uterus;
Mattéi 1996, 209) and that on which (as mark). In fact, the spatial metaphor
is supplemented by a constitutive metaphor associated with artisanal work. A
cho–ra ‘moulds’ what is held within it as ‘a pregnant mother’ may ‘mould her
infant, when she has borne it, like so much wax while it is still plastic’ (Plato
1934, 171). The place forms what occupies it just as the artisan shapes a figure
in a soft material or puts a mark in a piece of wax. But the unfolding of the
metaphor refers again to the womb, for what is moulded also leaves its mark
on what is moulding it.
I shall leave aside the metaphysical implications of the notion of cho–ra
in order to put the metaphor to use in two directions. The first, especially
if we recall the use Augustin Berque made of the topic, has immediate
political consequences. The conception of space as topos belongs to the
problematics of liberal individualism. In fact, the dissociation of being and
place is necessary if the liberal subject is to be constituted in its autonomy,
that is, as independent of the context in which it is plunged, momentarily
or lastingly, and inasmuch as it holds rights that are specifically attached to
it, whatever its environment may be: these are subjective rights. In contrast,
defined in its dependence with respect to a contrée, it loses the autonomy
that constitutes it, inasmuch as it is itself, and not another, as a subject
by right.17 This is moreover the reason why the political philosophies that
sought to break with a conception of space as topos and tried to base the
social bond instead on codependence between things and places, container
and content, have gradually moved away from liberal individualism and
have even succumbed, in certain cases, to the temptation of fascistic
organicism.
The second direction in which we can take the notion of cho–ra for our
purposes is obviously to bring it back towards one of its metaphoric origins:
the one involving a pregnant woman. But I shall take care not to conflate
cho–ra with uterus in the anatomical sense; on the contrary, I shall substitute
cho–ra for uterus so that I can shift away from biologizing objectivization,
a field appropriate for gynaecologists but of no use in my own enterprise.
I shall thus turn in the other direction, towards the experience of the body
itself in the experience of pregnancy; in this context, I can say that cho–ra is
a certain state of flesh that is realized in pregnancy.
In the attempt to understand pregnancy, in its singular characteristics
– or to deploy it in a description – one is readily referred (as is often the
case in literature dealing with this theme, especially literature from the area
of moral philosophy) to the experience of a subject that becomes aware
of the existence, within the space of its own body (as topos), of an object
(the foetus) of which it can form a representation, one that the subject can
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consequently project outward, and with respect to which the subject can
form a project, for example that of keeping the object in its inner space or,
on the contrary, that of expelling the object outside of its body, which is
constituted as an object in its own right. I do not mean to say that such a
description corresponds to no reality. We shall see later on how this reality
can be brought to the fore. But it derives from an analysis of the agency of
the ‘I’ whose specificities are revealed only through contrast with the experience of the flesh.
The reference to cho–ra thus allows us to escape from two pitfalls that
consist either in talking about flesh in general, something to which the situation of pregnancy would not bring any relevant specifications, or in giving
up the schema of auto-affectivity in favour of an orientation directed at
the outset towards an analysis of the body, considered as a space inscribed
within physical coordinates, a space that may contain an object (the foetus)
of which the person becoming conscious of her body and what it contains
may make an immediate representation. I shall say, then, that cho–ra is the
name of flesh as it affects itself in the test of pregnancy.
As for the will to control, an expression used here to refer to the powers
of the ‘I’ when, during the course of the action, it grasps itself as such and
realizes itself as self-possession (‘I can’, ‘I want’), I shall associate it with
the moment of engagement in a project.18 While, for the agency of ‘self’,
pregnancy is manifested in the feeling – which may be marked positively or
negatively, as we shall see – of flesh that experiences itself in what is affecting it, at the level (as it were) of the agency of the ‘I’, that with which the
person is pregnant can, through the power of the imagination, be detached
from the flesh that surrounds it: it can be represented and, in the language
of phenomenology, thrust forward, that is, at once engaged in advance in
the externality of the world and projected into the future, inscribed in a
certain type of project, with various qualifications that are apt, speaking
schematically, to guide its identification by relying on one or the other of the
preconstituted schemas that are already present in the social world: namely,
in the case we are considering, by assimilating it either to the tumoral foetus
(nothing) or to the authentic foetus (my baby).
Finally, speaking of the will to legitimize, I shall refer to the agency of
justification. To be activated, this agency requires the presence of a third
entity, whether real or imagined, to which explanations are provided as if
they were owed. This third agency may be a ‘generalized other’ (as George
Herbert Mead put it [Mead and Morris 1934]19), embodied or not in a
flesh-and-blood interlocutor; it may also be the person involved, when, in
dialogue with herself, she explains herself before an ‘ideal spectator’, to
use the terminology of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, which
she has internalized, as it were; or else, in a case that seems to recur very
frequently and to which we shall return in greater detail, it may be the very
agency that would have come into existence if the child to be born had in
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fact been born, a child to whom reasons having the value of excuses are
presented.20
I should add that these three agencies, and the wills that are manifested
in them, have different temporal orientations. The agency of the ‘self’ is
essentially inscribed in the present: the will of the flesh is experienced precisely with the force of what is there, a present reality, and, consequently,
in the manner of a state that immobilizes us in passivity, ‘invades’ us and
from which we have great difficulty removing ourselves even if we know –
as we say, ‘in the abstract’ – that it will go away ‘one day’, to the point of
becoming ‘incomprehensible’ (comparable in this to the state of suffering
that accompanies disappointment in love). Conversely, the agency of the ‘I’
is oriented towards the future: the will to control manifests itself with the
greatest intensity when the urgency of something to be done imposes itself,
something whose tenor will turn out to be determined in one direction or
another. Finally, the agency of justification, inasmuch as it is applied to
operations that have certain properties of judgement, is above all retrospective: the will to legitimize has to be turned towards the past, looking there
for acts, feelings, facts that it will agree to submit to the test of critique.
Even so, excuses present a somewhat more complex temporal structure to
the extent that they often consist in imagining what the future of the child
to be born would have been like if the abortion had not taken place, so as
to make it clear to that virtual being that the preferable outcome had ultimately been that it not come into existence.
I shall now explore this topic further by deploying each of the agencies I
have just outlined, paying particular attention to the different wills associated with them.
The experience of pregnancy between plenitude and disquietude
I suggest that, in pregnancy, the experience of the flesh can be qualified by
using two terms: first, plenitude (though I do not mean to burden this term
with an overdetermining moral value), and then disquietude. The feeling of
plenitude appears to be profoundly unstable, so that it constantly threatens
to be transmuted or tipped over into what I am calling disquietude in the
face of strangeness. And this, as we shall see, comes from the new relations
that are instituted between the agency of the ‘self’ and that of the ‘I’.21
In fact, in pregnancy, the flesh which, for the pregnant woman, does not
stop being ‘my flesh’, actualizes its capacity for germination, for proliferation. It tests itself, too, in its faculty for deploying itself in an outside-the-self,
but an outside-the-self that is in itself, that is itself, so that it is as if a will
proper to it, ‘its’ will, until then transparent and conflated with the ‘self’,
is taking hold on its own to manifest itself in its own implacability, its
strangeness, its foreignness and its self-centredness.
This suddenly revealed autonomy of the flesh affects the relation that
the ‘self’, as agency, maintains with the ‘I’. While, in the customary forms
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of auto-affectivity of life, the passive test of the flesh realizes the ‘self’ and
in the same movement realizes the ‘I’ – as ‘capacity of the self to be in
possession of the self’, in a transparent relation of ‘I’ to ‘self’ – in the test
of pregnancy, the auto-affectivity of the flesh, while it is indeed also constitutive of the ‘self’, nevertheless cannot be reappropriated as such by the
agency of the ‘I’ and merge with it. Flesh affected by the test of pregnancy is
indeed ‘of itself’, and yet it manifests itself as unaccustomed flesh, flesh that
has lost its habits and, consequently, in a way, as other or as of another.
Starting from the agency of the ‘I’, the ‘self’ invested by cho–ra can then
manifest itself as strangeness or foreignness in the form of a disquietude that
asks to be appeased.
A somewhat similar experience of unquiet flesh can no doubt manifest
itself in the test of illness, but this analogy is to a certain extent misleading.
For, in illness, the new state is defined precisely in opposition to health,
and this provides a way to distance oneself from it and in a way to deny
it, by grasping it in the ontological mode of the accident. An accident,
inasmuch as it is fortuitous, non-essential and external, can be added to the
‘self’ without altering its nature (although the rejected foetus, the one I call
‘tumoral’, can also be represented in this mode – indeed, that is precisely
why I use this term). Now, in the experience that interests us here, the very
boundaries between what is normal and what is pathological tend to disappear. This strange flesh whose own will seems to have free rein remains no
less firmly affixed to the ‘self’. Its will, which manifests itself as if it were
autonomous, remains no less inherent to the ‘self’ with which it maintains
the greatest possible intimacy. And this is so because the experience of
pregnancy entails, indissociably, both disquietude and plenitude, both selfalienation and self-realization.
Let me offer a few clarifications regarding these feelings of plenitude and
disquietude as they interfere with engagement in abortion. A large proportion of the women I met, especially in the many cases in which they
explained the decision to abort by a failing on the father’s part (whether
he strongly rejected paternity, was deemed ‘immature’ or could not be
identified among several possible men, and so on), incorporated into their
narratives sequences that shed light on the tension between what I have
called the agency of the flesh affected by pregnancy (the ‘self’) and the
agency of the ‘I’ in which projects are formed, an agency oriented towards
the outside in an endeavour to be realistic.
The fact of having finally opted for abortion did not necessarily wipe out
the memory of the feeling of ‘plenitude’ – often evoked in the register of
happiness or pleasure – that accompanied the discovery of the pregnancy
and the experience of the bodily changes it brought. When it was associated with the memory of pregnancies brought to term, this experience
could be transmitted without difficulty and even no doubt idealized, while
memories of the unpleasant aspects of the pregnancy were more or less
blanked out; however, in situations that led to abortion the experience
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came up most often in our interviewees’ narratives in the form of a painful
antinomy.
The woman’s relation to this experience seemed to depend largely on
the time periods between the different stages of the process that led to
abortion (or, in certain cases, did not lead there, when the plan to abort
was made but then abandoned ‘at the last minute’): the moment when the
pregnancy was suspected because of certain ‘signs’, described sometimes
as physical, sometimes as coming from an inner feeling; the moment when
the pregnancy was duly attested (the result of an initial pharmacist’s test
having been confirmed by a doctor); the moment when the project of aborting came up as a conceivable possibility; the moment when that project
imposed itself and the ‘decision’ was made; the moment when the person
concerned committed to carrying out the decision by contacting a gynaecological service that practised abortion; the moment, finally, when the act
was performed by a doctor.
Sofia spoke about her abortion at age 19: ‘My problem was that I kept on
having my periods but I was nauseated, my breasts hurt, I couldn’t figure out
why. In fact, what I thought was my period turned out to be bleeding . . . But
where I felt it wasn’t really in my belly; right away, it was a picture in my
head. It came up all at once; I saw it right away. All at once. I was seeing it get
bigger, but inside. . . . And I went to Planned Parenthood. I talked with those
people. I started to explain what I was feeling. What I was experiencing in that
decision that was going . . . that had to be made’ (age 38, one abortion, three
children, separated, employee of an association in Paris).
All along the way, many representative situations can arise. Thus, in
our interviews, when a fairly lengthy period separated the moment when
the pregnancy was suspected and then attested and the moment when the
decision to abort imposed itself as ‘the only possibility’ or ‘the only reasonable thing to do’ – that is, most often, when the father’s attitude was
ambiguous and when the future of the love relation between the father
and the pregnant woman was not yet entirely determined – the plenitude
of pregnancy had room to unfold. Remembering, women spoke about the
pleasure they experienced as they felt their breasts grow larger; about how
they would touch their bellies or look at themselves in a mirror; about
the way the experience of being a woman became clear to them, in those
moments, with particular force; sometimes, too, about the sensation of
‘blossoming’, feeling more beautiful, with ‘lovely hair’, a ‘real body’, ‘fine
skin’; and also, in other cases, of renewed ‘energy’, of the experience of
feeling their own ‘power’, of ‘feeling great’, and so on. In a large number
of cases, the abortion narrative thus blended together in a very intricate
way statements that explained why the decision to abort had ‘imposed
itself’ and formulations that referred to ‘wanting a child’, as the women
involved put it, a desire all the more powerful because it did not find a
path to realization.
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The plenitude of being pregnant, according to Isadora (one abortion, then
three children): ‘I loved being pregnant, it was sublime, fantastic, because
you’re stuffed with hormones of I don’t know what, it means you’re physically
in great shape. Besides, I had [the children] fairly young, I wasn’t tired, I was
in good health, they were all born three weeks early, so I didn’t even have time
to go stir crazy.’ But, by the same token, the experience of abortion was difficult: ‘There’s the whole physical phenomenon that gets set up in your body
when you’re pregnant, it sets off hormonal stuff, it’s all under way and then
all of a sudden it’s stopped artificially, then you’re really wiped out physically
and psychologically.’ She suffered especially from a disquieting manifestation:
‘Around nine months after the conception of that child, so let’s say seven and
a half months after the abortion, my milk came in. The whole physiological
mechanism had gotten started and then the day when the baby should have
been born, for three days I had milk coming out, I had big round spots like this
on my clothes; I have to say it was a shock. So I hid out, because I was afraid
that my parents, especially, would understand what that meant. And it was
really, really hard: I had milk.’
Violaine, who worked outdoors (in open markets) and had had an abortion
and then two children, associated her pregnancies with ‘warmth’: ‘I felt good,
pregnant. It’s true that you feel good because you’re warm. That’s something
I really liked, that I was warm; it felt really good. Because usually I’m chilly,
and besides, since I work outdoors, I was always out in the cold. Ah! Those
two times, those nine months, twice, I was always warm, I felt good, it’s
true, it feels really good. There are just the last three months, it’s true that it’s
hard because there’s so much weight on your legs, even when you lie down
you don’t know where to put yourself.’ Violaine added: ‘I was made to have
children. I’m Cancer, I have a very maternal sign.’
Véronique, who was 24 and finishing her studies, talked about her first
pregnancy, which ended in a miscarriage, before she got pregnant again and
decided to have an abortion: ‘I was completely happy, fine, I felt . . . I had a
very special feeling: starting from the moment I got pregnant, I felt that my
past could never catch up with me. It was a kind of revelation for me, I felt
capable of doing . . . well, almost anything. It was unbelievable! My past was
kind of tugging at me, it’s kind of heavy to drag around, lots of things like lots
of people have, and now, for me, it was all over with, it was really . . . I was
turning for good towards what was going to . . . towards what was coming
and I felt invulnerable, totally invulnerable. I felt good, physically, and yet, I
wasn’t, I wasn’t huge, I was just . . . but you just have to feel that to feel that
you’re . . . it was indestructible. I had the impression that I was capable, but
even physically, I had the impression that it was redoubling my strength, that I
could do a whole lot of things, I had the impression that I was going to . . . But
I even had the impression that problems, little psychological stumbling blocks
. . . I had the impression that all those stumbling blocks weren’t problems for
me at all. Everything looked smooth, I had the strength to do it, I felt I was
carried along by incredible energy.’
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These surges of plenitude, despite or because of the happiness they bring,
may also have the effect of making the period that separates the decision
to abort from the act itself particularly hard to endure, especially when the
act is delayed for reasons independent of the will of the person concerned:
overburdened health services, for example. The pregnant woman then
finds herself in a contradictory situation, because she is experiencing the
unfolding of her pregnancy (and she often cannot help continuing to take
pleasure in it) even knowing that she must not dwell on it – that she must
not know what she is feeling, as it were – since the pregnancy is destined to
be terminated.
Juliette, age 27, a teacher, had had an abortion about a month before the
interview. She became pregnant after making love just once, with a fellow she
‘had known before’ but whom she ‘hadn’t seen for a long time’. She decided
right away to have an abortion because the man wasn’t ‘the right person; just
a passing acquaintance’. But it so happened that she wanted very much to
have a child just then (she was on vacation with a friend who had just had a
child and ‘we never stopped talking about children’). The period between the
moment she realized she was pregnant and the moment she had the abortion
was thus especially painful: ‘Finally, the time I found the hardest was between
the moment I became aware of it and the moment when I really took care of it
concretely, when I had the abortion. Because I felt that I was pregnant and at the
same time I had decided just like that that I was going to have an abortion no
matter what and so I didn’t want to be too aware that I was pregnant. But I felt
it anyway. And then I was really tired and all that, so it was a kind of in-between
state, I was really depressed.’ After the abortion, she experienced ‘a feeling of
liberation’. But she didn’t want to have sexual relations. And she had just met a
fellow, someone ‘very insistent’, with whom ‘things went badly’ for that reason.
When we met Florence, age 26, she was pregnant for the second time (she
had had a first abortion three years earlier) and was scheduled to have an
abortion two days later. She described both the desire she felt to have a child
and the impossibility of having, as a child, the one that had implanted itself
in her flesh, the involuntary pleasure of that presence and also the very strong
disquietude it provoked in her: ‘I’ve always adored children. I cry like a fool,
all the time. I see a little kid, I can’t stop crying. Everybody tells me: “You’re
crazy.” . . . The suffering, it’s because I want . . . I want to keep this child, but
in my situation I just can’t . . . I don’t have the strength to fight and say: “This
is it, I want this child no matter what.” . . . I was starting to feel good. I was
ready to have a child. I wanted . . . I feel something that’s eating up my life.
Something that is eating away at me from the inside. It’s something like that.
It’s not bad, it’s not harmful. But now, it’s really something . . . I feel nauseated. I don’t feel well. I eat, it’s not good. I sleep, I get up, it’s not good. I have
the impression that there’s something eating away my life from the inside.’
In other cases, when the decision to abort and the first steps towards
the abortion itself came soon after the moment when the pregnancy was
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discovered, the women involved remembered the psychic processes they
had called on to escape from their conflicted awareness of their flesh; for
example Joelle, who said she was ‘cut off from her emotions’ and ‘did
what she could to keep from being invaded’, or Sidonie, who remembered
having ‘repressed her experience’ and compared the state she had been in
to that of an object, a ‘factory item’, ‘something that let itself be handled’,
‘manipulated’, ‘boxed up’, sent around on a ‘conveyor belt’ where ‘things
were made’.
That language expresses an anxious determination not to deviate from
the decision to have an abortion, an effort to remain ensconced in the
agency of the ‘I’, and there alone, so as to silence the language coming from
the flesh. We shall see that this way of sticking with one’s own commitment
to the project of having an abortion most often requires a deployment of
‘rational’ motifs and justifications aiming at legitimacy, with which the
woman aligns herself – to borrow the well-known image invoked by Jon
Elster – the way Ulysses had himself bound to the mast of his ship to make
sure he would not yield to the sirens’ song.22
‘Ambivalence’ as a conflict of wills
But this is not the only possibility. ‘Ambivalence’ is often noted by psychoanalysts in this sort of situation, but also elsewhere, in many cases,
when the mother asserts that she ‘wants to keep’ the child she is carrying;23
this sometimes leads analysts to question the notion, even though it has
become common-sensical today, of ‘wanting a child’, stressing its ‘ambiguous’ character. In our framework, ambivalence can be interpreted as an
unstable shifting between the will to control and the will of the flesh. The
‘ambivalential conflict’ (Revault d’Allones 1976b) is thus situated at the
crossroads between the agency of the ‘I’, where a project is unfolding, and
the agency of the flesh affected by cho–ra, which, beneath the constitution
of the foetus as an external object located inside, lacks the capacity to differentiate between the replaceable products of sexuality and the singular
– that is, irreplaceable – beings destined to come into the world and occupy
a defined place in it.
Certain remarks that may appear contradictory when taken at face value
have to be associated with the concern, anchored in experience, for taking
into account the reality of the two wills we have identified, should they be
in conflict. Such remarks are made by many spokespersons for abortion
who proclaim their affiliation with the feminist tradition, when, on the one
hand, they speak out against any intervention that would have the aim or
effect of making women who have abortions ‘feel guilty’, and, on the other
hand, they recall insistently that it would be contrary to reality and insulting
for the women who have had abortions to treat the act ‘lightly’, to ‘trivialize’ it. It would be in effect to forget that it always includes an element of
‘violence’ directed not, or not only, towards a being whose reality, weakly
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objectivized, can always be called into question, but towards the woman
herself, in the sense that it is indeed in her own flesh that she finds herself
pregnant.
The experience of pregnant flesh can also impose itself from the outset in
the mode of disquietude rather than plenitude, or it can shift in more or less
rapid sequence between the two feelings. Pregnancy is then experienced in
the way an illness would be, not only because of the discomfort that often
accompanies it, especially in the early stages (nausea, fatigue, digestive
problems and so on) but also owing to the very nature of its strange particularity, a kind of proliferation of foreign flesh in the texture of the flesh itself.
The feeling that something, as if under the effect of an inherent will, independent of the person experiencing it, is growing in the fleshy tissue, and
more or less inexorably, can take the form of unbearable anguish, aroused
– in the words of a woman we encountered in the hospital at a moment of
great distress – by ‘this thing that doesn’t want to let me go’. Abortion is
then anticipated as a deliverance. It is not presented here, as it was in the
cases evoked earlier, as the result of a ‘decision’ that takes ‘reality’ and especially the ‘future’ into account but that is as apt to enter into tension with
the feelings aroused in the present by the state of pregnancy. What is experienced as unbearable is this state itself – or, more precisely, the presence of
the ‘thing’ lodged inside.
Sophie, age 25, a student, had had two abortions, when she was 18 and 22.
She talked about the way she experienced her pregnancies, especially the one
that led to the second abortion, which had been an especially difficult moment
for her. ‘Before getting pregnant, if you’ve never been pregnant, you think
about having a baby, it’s a terrific fantasy. The day you’re pregnant for real,
all at once, in your body, you know there’s a thing growing in there. You’re
out of the fantasy and into reality. You feel it. You know that there, there’s a
. . . Even if you don’t feel everything that’s going on inside, you know there’s
something that is . . . And that you can’t prevent it. Even if you try hard to
keep from thinking about it. Trying to have a mental abortion.’ After these
experiences, she was frightened by the idea of what was penetrating her body
and her sex life was changed by this: ‘I was going crazy thinking about giving
myself physically to a man. I spent time rebuilding the pleasure, the love, the
sex. I couldn’t stand the impression of direct ejaculation inside me. All that
stuff that gets mixed up inside you, and then you’re stuck. You can receive it
but you don’t want to.’
Karine got pregnant when she was 25 and was still living in university
housing. She contacted the health services: ‘I wanted to get rid of my problem
right away.’ The beginning of the pregnancy went very badly: ‘The faster I
could have got rid of my problem the better it would have been. It was all the
harder for me because I was physically sick, really sick, I think I’ve never been
so sick in my life over such a long period because . . . especially . . . finally,
the week before my first appointment then the whole week between the two
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appointments and the day of the abortion I was sick as a dog, I was vomiting,
I couldn’t stand up straight, I lost I don’t know how much weight, because I
hadn’t eaten for two weeks. I couldn’t swallow anything. . . . I even vomited
in front of the health service entrance because . . . and even the nurse said:
“But this can’t be – what’s the matter with you? It isn’t normal to be sick like
that!” And that sickness went away five or ten minutes after the abortion.’
During her interview with the counsellor, she explained what was happening
inside her in this way: ‘I told her a little about the way I saw things, I told her
I believed I was sick and I was asking for someone to take care of me and I
wasn’t asking anyone to question whether I was sure or not. And she just told
me that I wasn’t sick, that pregnancy wasn’t a sickness. She was probably right
to point that out, because maybe it was kind of short-sighted to say that I was
sick, but for me that’s what it was. It was the same as if I’d had an appendicitis attack, I would have gone to have my appendix out.’ Later, during the
same interview: ‘Finally, for myself, I have to say that there was something
foreign developing in my body, it was pretty unbearable . . . I had no control,
something was happening in my body that I couldn’t control and that’s what
I couldn’t stand. Something was happening that wasn’t perceptible yet but it
put me in a situation where I was going to completely lose all control.’
The trace, in oneself, of another
Understanding why these feelings of plenitude or disquietude are manifested, how intense they are and how they displace one another or overlap
is doubtless not a goal that can be reached with the ordinary means of
sociology. But one can make two conjectures on the subject. The first is
that the amplitude taken on by one of these feelings or the other very
probably plays an important role in the final decision to have an abortion
or to keep the child. This is particularly clear in the not infrequent cases
where, against all expectations (and, people close to the woman involved
often say, against all reason), the child is kept even when the context is
unfavourable in terms of social norms (for example, today, when the conditions of engendering do not allow the formation of a ‘parental project’).
But we see it, too, in the inverse cases, which are also common, in which
abortion imposes itself as an imperative whereas the social conditions
for birth seem to have come together. The second conjecture is that these
feelings, inscribed in flesh, must be associated with the image of the man
to whom the woman attributes her pregnancy. The man may be depicted
as a beloved person (even if his rejection of paternity has played a central
role in the decision to abort, or even if all relations with him have ended);
as a relatively indifferent person (this is often the case when the pregnancy
has resulted from a ‘one-night stand’ or from a very brief liaison); or as a
repugnant person (which does not mean that the pregnant woman may not
have had a more or less extended relationship with him; he may even be
her partner or husband).
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Marie, 53, a professor, had had two abortions and, hospitalized for the
third, finally decided, the night before the operation, to keep the child. The
first abortion – when she was 33, a divorced mother of a 7-year-old girl – took
place at the end of a relationship with ‘a friend’ with whom she had not had
‘a very steady relationship, or even a very loving relationship’. Of that first
abortion, which, for her, was beyond question, she said simply: ‘I didn’t want
to keep it because I knew it wasn’t the man with whom I wanted to have a
child.’ The second abortion took place right after she met the person who was
to become her second husband (a man who had just separated from his wife,
the father of two very young children). ‘It wasn’t stable, but with him, I was
really very much in love and I knew that I probably wanted to have a child
with him in the future, but not right then.’ Marie said of this second abortion
that she had ‘cut it out of her memory’. At age 30, she was pregnant again by
the same man. She first thought that she wouldn’t keep the child; the ‘timing
was bad’. Her husband was in favour of abortion but let her make the decision. But her relation to her pregnancy took a very conflictual form. The signs
of pregnancy ‘bothered [her] a lot’, because, she said, she knew she would
not keep it: ‘I hated it a little, I was uncomfortable, I remember that I looked
at myself, I was afraid of my own body . . . I didn’t want my body to change
because I knew I had made the decision to have an abortion.’ The date of the
abortion was put off for lack of space in the hospital. She had a pre-abortion
sonogram (‘I was thinking to myself, I don’t want to see, I don’t want to look
at it . . . I didn’t want to realize that I was pregnant’). ‘It was terrible because
it’s too much, being pregnant for nine weeks and then having an abortion,
that’s what I didn’t want. I didn’t want it because there was a conflict in me:
to have a person, a being inside, you watch it develop, and afterward I was
going to cut it off, so this really shocked me because the other time, when I
had the abortion it was a decision made right way, I found out I was pregnant
and I had the abortion the same week.’ She went into the hospital to have the
procedure. During the night she had a nightmare. She realized that she wanted
‘to have the experience of motherhood again’. At seven in the morning, she
called the nurse: “You have to excuse me, but I want to keep the pregnancy.”’
Her second daughter is now 13 years old.
In fact, flesh in a state of pregnancy is unusual or ‘other’ not only because
it turns out to be animated with its own inherent will but also because it
incorporates a trace deposited by another. This trace or imprint is different from the memory, good or bad, left by the sexual relations that the
woman may have had with one man or another – a memory that may be
often recalled or, on the contrary, suppressed – because it is inscribed in a
lasting way in the texture of the flesh itself. It makes flesh with oneself. And,
blended with oneself, the trace of a repugnant being arouses disgust and,
more precisely, a sort of disgust that is also disgust with oneself. What I
have called disquietude can in this sense be associated with the disgust that
grips someone who has eaten a repugnant food (for example a forbidden
meat such as pork for Jews and Muslims, or, for many Indians, any meat at
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all24) whose flesh is henceforth incorporated into that person’s own flesh and
is united with it (this constitutes one index among others of the proximity
often noted by anthropologists between eating and sexuality). Thus, in pregnancy, especially in its early stages, the woman’s flesh becomes foreign to
itself, as it were, as if the durable mark left by another imprinted something
of that foreign being, of its very substance25 and along with it something of
its situation in the world, its place in the structure of groups and no doubt
especially in kinship groups; in short, something of all that made it what it
was, all that it had incorporated into itself during its previous life.
Especially during the observations we undertook in a hospital setting during
the period that immediately preceded an abortion, several persons manifested
their disgust for what had come to lodge and grow within them. One woman,
age 30, a saleswoman who was bringing up a child alone and who had already
had one abortion, said: ‘I have the impression of having an intruder inside me,
whereas with my son and his father, it wasn’t anything like that.’ Then she
spoke of her current friend, the one responsible for her pregnancy: ‘He’s already
been violent. He’s very possessive. Since I’ve known him, I’ve been wiped out.’
Manifesting an even more intense rejection, another saleswoman, age 24, who
had had one previous abortion, declared: ‘I don’t know who it was by, this
thing. I have the impression that I have a monster inside. When you asked me
if it was the same person, in fact, I haven’t been able to really separate from the
first one, and I’m ashamed, and I have the impression that it was his, anyway
that’s how I felt it’ (during the counselling interview, in a provincial hospital).
These remarks also help to clarify what I have called plenitude. Moments
of plenitude are those in which the flesh dominates the foreign contribution
imprinted within it, adopting it and experiencing its own dilation as an
appropriation of the flesh not only of another person but, one might say, via
that flesh, of the world in its most external aspects, of difference in its most
radical form: a difference that, no longer threatening, becomes harmonized
with the self, as it were. Disquietude and plenitude can alternate, and this is
often what happens, it seems, early in pregnancy. Then one of these feelings
tends to settle in more tenaciously and get the upper hand. This movement
accompanies the reappropriation of the flesh at the level of ‘I Can’ and the
inscription of the foetus in a project. But the bodily feelings themselves also
leave traces. Thus it may be that the rejected foetus, eliminated by abortion, delays in effacing its presence and maintains itself in the register of the
void, of lack, of loss. This presence can be episodic and manifest itself when
an event (for example, running into an old friend whose pregnancy had
coincided with her own) happens to remind a woman that, if the abortion
had not taken place, she too would have had ‘a child of that age’ or, on the
contrary, it may manifest itself more insistently and continuously. In several
cases, the women we met told us that they occasionally dreamed about the
‘child’ they had aborted or that they ‘talked’ (and in one case ‘wrote’) to it.
One woman (Sofia) who, after a first abortion, gave birth to three children
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in difficult situations (while the two successive male progenitors insisted on
abortion) said she thought that if she had the misfortune of finding herself
pregnant again, she would still keep this inconvenient intruder – as if, she
said, ‘I will always be missing one.’
I should add that the converse situation, in which children said to be
‘wanted’ and intended to go to term never cease, throughout the entire
pregnancy, to be objects of disquietude and rejection, also exists, unmistakably. But this situation was inaccessible to me in the context of my research,
not only because I had chosen to approach the question of engendering by
way of abortion, and because these beings could be the object of stubborn
rejection without being aborted for all that, but also because, while in an
interview situation it is still possible for a woman to express the repugnance
she feels at being pregnant, and also, after the fact, the nostalgia she feels
for the lost child, there may be nothing more difficult than to admit one’s
disgust for a so-called wanted child (in the sense that its conception was the
result of a decision) whose birth is expected by a whole familial community,
not to mention feelings of rejection that can be directed towards a child
already born.
From the will of the flesh to engagement in the project
The reappropriation of what is happening in the flesh affected by pregnancy
(at the level of what I have called the agency of the ‘self’), if it is to constitute a project and integrate that project into the flesh (at the level of what
I have called the agency of the ‘I’), implies a radical transformation. In this
case, the ‘I’ cannot construct itself tacitly in the wake of the ‘self’, because
the pregnant flesh manifests itself to the ‘I’ as if it were endowed with an
autonomous will. What ‘I’ wants may not be what the pregnant flesh wants;
what the flesh wants, ‘I’ may not be able to accept; ‘I’ does not have full
power over the flesh as cho–ra, which in turn does not have full power over
‘I’, and so on. In order to be inserted into the register of the project, the
one in which the will to control can have free rein, the will of the flesh has
to be detached from the logic of place as cho–ra in order to be associated
with a logic of place as topos. The immanent experience of the flesh is then
replaced by that of the body, as a place that belongs to the subject, which
is the subject’s property, implying that it is distinct from the subject; the
subject–object relation is reinstituted at the same time. In the ‘belly’, in the
‘womb’, that is, somewhere in the space of the body, is found – located
there, by a strange wilful illusion, as if it might just as well be located
elsewhere – a being, the foetus, in a position of externality, targeted by
the ‘I’ just the way an object placed before its eyes would be. This radical
change also affects the experience of pregnancy in its temporal structure.
At the same time that the foetus finds itself disconnected from the place
in which it is enclosed – henceforth a space and no longer a contrée – it is
grasped by a movement that projects it into the future and, indissociably,
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into the imaginary. For, just as it is not out in front, just as it is not visible
the way an external object would be, just as it remains rooted in the flesh
and not present in the world, in the same way it exists only in the strange
ontological state that is currently its own and not in the forms necessarily
conferred on it by its insertion in a project: neither in the form of a fully
realized ‘child’ (my baby) nor in the form of a virtuality (nothing).
But this strange ‘thought experiment’ has to have been carried out if the
will to control, which does not have power over the flesh as cho–ra, is to be
manifested. The extraordinary imaginative capacity of the ‘I’ (a capacity
unknown to the ‘self’, which is always immersed in reality) allows it then to
constitute that object, through the gaze it directs towards it, as it would do
with any object thrust in front of it. On that ‘other’ that is invisible but instituted by the imaginary gaze directed at it, one can confer a status, or rather
statuses, that differ according to the projects into which it is integrated and
that always concern it inasmuch as it is an external being, present in the
world; and this is so whether the being is constituted as an entity to be born
(in the modality of the authentic foetus) or as ‘nothing’ to be eradicated (in
the modality of the tumoral foetus). In relation to the ‘I’, the being inside is
instantly torn away from the flesh, as it were, to be wholly associated with
the status with which a project has invested it.
And yet that reappropriation at the level of the ‘I’ always remains precarious. The feelings aroused by the affected flesh are suppressed but not
completely eliminated. The will to control does not succeed in completely
taking over the will of the flesh. One of the reasons for this is the possibility, never completely dismissed (although it is less and less probable as the
pregnancy advances), that a so-called ‘spontaneous’ abortion may occur.
Even reappropriated in the mode of the object and integrated into a project,
the foetus may thus withdraw itself from the imaginary status that has
been conferred on it. While technological progress has reduced to a bare
minimum, if not to zero, the number of cases in which ‘induced’ abortions
fail (such situations were still quite common in a fairly recent past; they
resulted in the birth of foetuses that had been destined for expulsion before
full term, and sometimes ended in infanticide), cases of ‘spontaneous’ abortions of foetuses constituted as authentic still remain common enough so
that the will of the flesh cannot be totally forgotten.
But even aside from these cases of declared rebellion, pregnancy cannot
easily be ‘lived’ without an alternation between states in which passive
affection predominates and states in which the pre-eminence of the ‘I’
makes the foetus the object of a project. Without the gnawing disquietude
that arises from the cho–ra, the project of provoking an abortion would have
difficulty finding a basis. And without the plenitude emanating from the
cho–ra, would life during the lengthy course of a pregnancy carried to term
even be ‘worth living’?
The tension between what I have called the will of the flesh and the will to
control (that of the ‘I’) was experienced in an especially disturbing way by the
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women we met, either in hospital settings or in counselling interviews, who
had had, at two moments in their lives, two experiences that they could not
help associating: first that of the suffering caused by failing to become pregnant when they wanted to (with, finally, in the various cases observed, medical
intervention followed by a birth, or not); then, later in life, that of the disquietude of finding themselves pregnant when they (or their partners) no longer
wanted a child (with abortion as the outcome). Sidonie, age 38, married with
two children, compared these two experiences. Speaking of her abortion, she
said: ‘Sometimes I tell myself that I have not let go of what is still in my head,
that is, the possibility of having a third one, perhaps.’ Then she recalled the
period when she was trying unsuccessfully to become a mother for the second
time, and said: ‘I have had more traumatic experiences in my life. There are
harder things. Not being able to have a child when you want a child, that’s
really hard, it’s total failure. I used to cry, after I went to the clinic for the
shots and it didn’t happen. It’s very hard for a woman. It’s really a frustration
because it’s a situation where you simply have no choice. You have to accept
what happens and it’s sometimes really hard not to be able to do anything, just
keep on dreaming and thinking that you can always find a solution. It wasn’t
happening. So I stopped. And it happened all by itself eight years later.’
And similarly, the fact of getting pregnant under conditions that make it
difficult to carry the pregnancy to term when various contraceptive means are
accessible can be interpreted as the expression of an autonomous will, independent of that of the ‘I’, sometimes attributed, with the diffusion of elements
from psychoanalysis in the press or on television, to the ‘unconscious’. Thus
Paulette said: ‘I asked myself, “How could that have happened to you?” when
I was a grownup, after all, I knew where babies came from. I understood,
after my second abortion, that unconsciously you can’t fight against the wish
to have a child.’ And she added, by way of explanation: ‘I’ve always been surrounded by children. For me, it’s not something mysterious. I’ve completely
integrated that into my life as a woman, for a long time. I come from a large
family, I have nephews and nieces, so the desire to have a child has been there
for a long time.’
‘Flesh of my flesh’
Not all foetuses are aborted. The number of those who remain, until the
day of their birth, in the flesh in which they have implanted themselves, is
larger (especially, no doubt, since the spread of effective means of contraception) than the number of those that are driven out. Let us ask how, in
this case, the relation between the will of the flesh and the will to control is
established, a relation that, as we have seen, often took on conflictual forms
in situations in which pregnancy led to abortion.
The first possibility that comes to mind is passivity. In the absence of an
intervention intended to interrupt it, and if it is not prevented from continuing by a miscarriage, pregnancy runs its course, indifferent – at least viewed
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in its biological dimensions – to the conditions under which the sexual act
from which it resulted took place (rape, submission, desire, exchange and so
on), indifferent to the mother’s situation, and to consideration of the place,
or the absence of a place, awaiting the child to be born. In passivity, the ‘I’
withdraws, as if it had no need to intervene, or as if it could not (and did not
want to) have any effect on what was happening. The rejection of such passivity, often denounced as the most obvious product of male domination,
has constituted one of the principal arguments for ‘birth control’, either
through contraception or through abortion. Let us note nevertheless that
the type of passivity at issue here is not the type that affects ‘the flesh’. That
type of passivity is situated not at the level of the ‘self’ but at that of the ‘I’.
It marks a renunciation of the project mode, that is, a refusal or, no doubt,
to be more precise, an inability to reappropriate, at the level of the will to
control, what the will of the flesh (whether through a feeling of plenitude or
a feeling of disquietude) makes manifest. It is as if the person involved were
entirely absorbed in the flesh, in a way, without being able either to confirm
propositions of engagement or to resist them. Now, envisaged from the
outside, this sort of resignation on the part of the ‘I’ confronting the ‘self’ is
felt to be scandalous, even inhumane. And this is so not only because giving
in in this way is perceived as an abdication of the rights that the person
involved has over herself (or, as militant discourse has it, ‘over her own
body’), but also, no doubt, although this is less often expressed explicitly,
because this passive resistance to constituting a project with respect to the
flesh is seen as the sign of a transgression of the first constraint on engendering that I identified in chapter 2. Failure to constitute a project would then
make it obvious that the process of confirmation through speech of what
has come to implant itself in the flesh has not been carried to term, that the
being to be born has not been adopted by the person who is carrying it, so
that the conditions of its access to singularity, that is, to full humanity, have
not been completely guaranteed.
This is quite precisely what one of the people we met felt towards her
youngest son. Finding herself pregnant (and in a state of health such that
her gynaecologist advised her to have an abortion), she said that she would
probably have ended the pregnancy if her oldest son had not come down
with leukemia. One of the reasons she finally decided to keep this third child
and bring it into the world was the hope that it could provide material for
a transplant if it turned out that a transplant would be necessary to ensure
the survival of the oldest child in case of a relapse. Thus she did not ‘adopt’
this new child for itself, but maintained it in herself, as it were, for another.
This inhibition of the process of adoption was manifested very concretely by
her behaviour during her pregnancy: for example, whereas she spoke to her
foetus during each of her first two pregnancies (‘I talked to him when he was
in my tummy; big discussions; I carried on like a crazy woman’), she had
never talked to the third one ‘in the same way’. She attributed the behavioural
difficulties of this third child to the failure to adopt; the boy ‘had lots of
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problems’ during the first few years of his life and ‘really put me through some
hard times’. She was now trying to make up for her passivity with particularly
intense manifestations of attention and love to this last-born 4-year-old son:
‘He lacked affection when he was in my tummy. I understood that later. I
think that Michel . . . I didn’t want him, and it was really hard, the day I
figured this out. It was immensely painful for me. It’s what has brought me
closest to him, today. I made a huge effort, afterward. I never stopped telling
him I loved him, I hugged him. Even today, he’s the only one who still climbs
into bed with me’ (age 38, separated, one abortion, three children, works for
an association).
But the reference to passivity does not suffice to account for all pregnancies carried to term. Certain pregnancies are accepted, or, as the saying
goes, ‘wanted’. The question that arises in these cases is what type of relation is instituted between the will of the flesh and the will to control. For
acceptance, unlike passivity, presupposes starting anew at the level of the ‘I’
and enrolling in a project. This transfer goes hand in hand with the constitution of an object relation. The foetus ‘thrust out in front’ is the object of an
intentional aim. One can make plans for its future (by preparing a ‘nursery’,
signing up in advance for a place in a child care centre, and so on). Thus in
this case too there is a sort of repression of the agency of the flesh (even if
this agency never stops manifesting itself as such in an alternation between
disquietude and plenitude), and yet the repression is not conflictual. It is as
if the tension between the two agencies were appeased, as if the feelings that
intervened at the level of the first were taken up again and redescribed at
the level of the second.
Nadia, a professor who had been living with the same man for twelve years,
was expecting her first child at age 37. She was only eight weeks pregnant,
but this ‘wanted child’ was already constituted in the imaginary mode. Nadia
informed her husband that the pregnancy test was positive: ‘The fourth day, I
went to the pharmacist’s, I picked up a pregnancy test, I went to the supermarket with Marc, I hid it, I didn’t show him that I’d bought it. So I went home,
I rushed to the bathroom, I peed and when I saw the mark, wow, it was . . .
OK, then I called Marc and I showed him the stick with the mark, I was sure
that he didn’t know what it was all about, I was laughing, and he said: “But
what is it?” And I said, “Look at the mark, there”, and he said, “But what
does it mean?” Then I said, “There it is, it’s what you wanted.” He couldn’t
believe it, he was really thrilled. He took me in his arms, he was laughing, he
was super-happy.’ Nadia imagined her baby: ‘I imagine how he’ll be, what his
hair will be like, his skin, his smell, what he’s going to want, how he’s going
to be, his personality, I’m already thinking about his sign, if he’s really born
after nine months. I really want to touch his skin, baby skin is so fantastic.
So this little being, who’s going to be fed by me, I think a lot about him. And
then I also think about his name, the name I’m going to give him. I’m a little
afraid of projecting my own desires onto the child, to say what I want him to
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be or how I want him to be. I would like him or her to be brave, I’m thinking
for example of calling it Valentine if it’s a girl or Jérôme if it’s a boy. I dream
that he’s become a strong person with a sensitive heart. . . . Mornings and evenings, I touch him, I know he’s there, even if I don’t yet have any sensations.’
Nadia spoke about the first sonogram: ‘I already knew that it was a really
moving moment and I tried to control myself, to hold back . . . the sound of
the heartbeats was really impressive. I wanted to make an audio recording, but
on the cassette there was only the picture. Marc came too, he stayed on the
chair beside me, he was already complaining, he said to the woman: “I’ve seen
what the father’s role is, it’s to stay on the sidelines; when I came in the doctor
told me to take the little chair on the side.”’
What is the nature of the transference that takes place between the will
of the flesh and the will to control? I posit that it is of the order of love in
the sense in which I used this term in an earlier work to describe regimes of
action and interaction whose importance has been neglected or underestimated by sociology (Boltanski 2012, 89–165). With respect to the problem
we are dealing with here, love, as a regime of action and interaction, is of
interest in that certain of its properties place it at the intersection between
the auto-affectivity of the flesh and ways of entering into action that rely
on an intentional aim. I shall present a brief overview of the associations between auto-affectivity and the regime of love, following a text by
Sébastien Laoureux in which he envisages the possibility of what he calls a
‘regime of passion’.26
A first association between auto-affectivity on the one hand – grasped
from the starting point of the ‘limit states’ of suffering or jouissance, or, in
the perspective I have adopted, of plenitude or disquietude – and a regime
of love on the other hand is the impossibility in each case of gaining access
to resources that make it possible to establish equivalence. What affects
the flesh is ‘incommensurable’. In fact, in order to find a common measure
between the manifestation of these sentiments, at different moments in
time or in different persons, one would have to be able to rise in generality
and, relying on a convention, set up a metrology, a system of measurement
that would make it possible to exit from the field of immediate experience.
Similarly, a regime of love is defined first and foremost by the rejection of
equivalence, and this opposes it to a regime of justice. While, in the case of
justice, evaluations take merit and proportions into account, love presents
itself as ‘unfounded’ and ‘infinite’ (in that it is exempt from calculation).27
It does not depend at all on the merits of the object on which it bears, or
on the benefits provided, and in any case, in the absence of instruments of
equivalence making it possible to sustain associations, love would have a
very hard time evaluating merits or benefits. It is precisely inasmuch as love
is unfounded that it can be said to be infinite.
A second association has to do with the question of language and the
possibility of describing a state (personal or relational) in a report. In the
case of auto-affectivity, this auto-affectivity itself is the equivalent of a
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spoken word. But it cannot be articulated without triggering the start of an
exit out of the pure test of self (this is moreover the reason why one often
says about suffering that ‘it helps to talk about it’, as if the shift to discourse
made it possible to leave the ‘regime of passion’ behind). The difficulty of
translating what is happening in a report is also a characteristic feature of
the regime of love. Self-reference, which activates equivalences, pulls people
out of the regime of love, as we see clearly in the case of an utterance such
as: ‘You see, I give you things and I don’t keep track’ – the mere reference
to the action of keeping track, and thus to the instruments of equivalence
without which any accounting is impossible, brings up a calculating will
that has no place in love.
The last point in common, finally, is the preference for the present to
the detriment of the retrospective relation that prevails, for example, in a
regime of justice. Auto-affectivity is experienced in the present, without the
gap allowed by ‘emplotment’ (which is already a dialogic relation between
the current self and the self that experienced in a more or less distant past
what is now being redescribed), and thus without taking any ‘reflexive or
critical distance’. Similarly, persons in a regime of love maintain themselves
in a relation that can be qualified, for want of a better term, as carefree;
they do not seek to construct series that would allow them to evaluate the
actions of others over the long term.
In other respects, however, what I have described as a regime of love has
many features that distinguish it sharply from the description of a ‘regime
of passion’ that I have borrowed from Sébastien Laoureux. Thus persons
in a regime of love, far from being confined to passion, are on the contrary
oriented towards relations with others, and this involves them vigorously in
action to such an extent that they are sometimes said to ‘forget themselves’.
Now, these actions are not simply involuntary and spontaneous by nature.
On the contrary, they are sustained by intentional aims that orient them
towards another person. Love is thus indeed anchored in the ‘I’. Persons
in the regime of love are hardly passive or affected only by their own flesh;
they reach out actively towards others. Such a person is not in a primitive
state of indivision; he or she can target another person as an object of
love precisely because the other is different, because the other is physically
present in the situation or else evoked in an imaginary mode. Nothing
prevents a person in the regime of love from making plans for the beloved
being and committing to a project involving that being.
These contrasting properties confer on the regime of love the possibility of playing the role of shifter between the auto-affectivity of pregnant
flesh and the agency of the ‘I’. A mother’s love is indeed turned towards an
object, the object she bears in herself, in the space of her body, and that she
projects, in her imagination, out in front of her, as if the child were already
there. But she does not detach herself for all that from the flesh that, in the
same movement, finds itself tested as her own flesh – uneasy, full – and as
‘flesh of my flesh’. But why do we say of love as a shifter that it is infinite?
Conferring this quality on it does not amount to saying that it would be ‘the
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greatest’ and singing a hymn to mother love. Infiniteness here is not a matter
of size. I mean two things by it. The first is that it corresponds to a commitment over such a long term that it can in effect be treated as if it were
to have no end. The second, more fundamental, is not only that this love
expects no return on the part of the one to whom it is addressed, at least no
return that would take the form of a proportional reciprocity, but also that
this love is not founded first and foremost on an evaluation of the merits of
the one towards whom it is directed. In the case of the love that a mother
bears towards the foetus implanted in her body, how could it be otherwise,
since the addressee of this love is largely unknown to her? This is why one
can also say of such love that it is gratuitous.
This rapid analysis of the way in which the logic of the project shifts onto
the experience of pregnant flesh when the foetus is kept, and onto the
‘wanted’ child, offers, in contrast, a better grasp of what may make the
experience of abortion troubling. In both cases – whether the foetus is
considered as having to be kept or having to be destroyed – the shift to a
project is accompanied by a movement that constitutes the foetus as a representation, and consequently as an object. But when the project is settled in
favour of abortion, it can neither shift to a logic of gratuitous love – for one
does not ordinarily destroy what one loves – nor rely on a test (in the sense
of a metaphysics of justice) that would reveal that the foetus lacks the qualities it needs to continue its trajectory towards life. One cannot recognize
merits in a foetus or impute faults to it, because it does not act in the world.
Thanks to modern investigative technologies, one can certainly find sufficiently important defects in a foetus to motivate its destruction, but these
defects are never presented as if they withdrew from the foetus the right to
life (which would point in the direction of justice). It is not the case today
(as it could be the case in the context of the understanding with the state)
that a handicapped foetus is eliminated because it would be a bad human
being or a useless and costly human being. It is most often by invoking the
sufferings that would belong to the human being in whom the foetus would
be realized if it were allowed to live with such a handicap, a human being
whose life ‘would not be worth living’, that this action is accomplished, that
is, with reference to a logic of pity which is neither that of gratuitous love
nor that of justice.
It follows that the positions a pregnant woman can adopt towards the
child she wants to keep and towards the foetus of which she would like to
be relieved are not symmetrical. Indeed, in cases where a foetus is reappropriated in a project of having a child, it is then the object of an act of
adoption which, in itself, cannot be any more motivated than would be
the act of eliminating the foetus. But the act of adoption does not need
to be motivated, precisely because the formula of gratuitous love, in that
it is not based on an evaluation of qualities proper to the loved being, is
substituted for the imperative of justification, and this points, for its part,
towards a logic of justice. One does not excuse oneself for expecting a
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child, or, in any case, one does not apologize to the child to be born, even if
reasonable outside observers might consider the child’s advent in the world
inopportune, for example owing to a political context in which the father
is being hunted down by an occupying police force, the mother ill and in a
precarious economic situation, and so on. On the contrary, in the case of a
foetus destined to be aborted, and which cannot as such be constituted as
an object of love (or, it might be better to say, must not be, for when that
happens in spite of everything – we encountered cases of this sort in our
interviews – the psychic tensions become unbearable), the requirement that
reasons be offered to account for its elimination returns to the foreground.
This requirement can never be completely ignored. It is clearly in this phase
that the second of the two constraints identified in chapter 2 – the constraint
of non-discrimination – is unveiled in the most awkward fashion. Why this
one rather than another? Why him or her?
Ourdia, who had had an abortion at age 25 and had married and had a
child since then, said about her second pregnancy: ‘All things considered, I had
a very good pregnancy. Everything was easy. I didn’t have any problems. So I
was quickly reassured; I didn’t have any anguish on the medical or technical
level. But at the same time, there was a kind of guilt when I said to myself:
“Well, perhaps I didn’t give a chance to the other one, whereas now I’m taking
every possible step, doing everything I can so that this one will arrive in the
world.”And it’s true that there was, I admit it, a little twinge in my heart,
because you think about it, you find yourself in the same situation, and now
you’re in it up to your neck . . . It’s the same doctor who tells you you’re pregnant, it’s the same one who . . . And now it’s for something else, something
entirely different. With the first one, you did everything to make it go away, to
get rid of it, and with the second one, you’re there, you do everything to keep
it, to make sure it’s in good health, so you can’t help thinking about it because
at bottom the feelings are the same. And afterward, I admit that I’ve thought
about it, but it wasn’t guilt any more, it was just a thought.’
One solution is obvious, as we saw in chapter 5: to convince oneself,
at the beginning of pregnancy when the decision to abort has been made,
that there is nothing there. Several of the women we met in abortion clinics
arrived with the hope that there would be something like a ‘pill’ that would
have the effect of terminating their state of pregnancy without anything
being evacuated outside of their body.28 Moreover, the doctors and the
people who do the pre-abortion counselling interviews often oppose powerful resistance to the expression of this belief, considering that it is an
obstacle to the start of the ‘mourning’ process, for according to them, the
abortion should be ‘assumed’ so that the woman can ‘free herself from it’
(which can incite practitioners, for example when the denegation strikes
them as too obvious, to make the woman who is going to abort look at her
sonogram and to comment on it rather than keeping it at a discreet distance,
as they usually do).
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These are the explanations that I shall examine briefly now, placing particular stress, among the set of motives invoked, on those that seem to be
directed not towards an external interlocutor, a representative embodying
common sense, but towards the foetus itself, to whom one must explain
why it was not exonerated.
Accounting for an abortion: justifications, motives, excuses
This is where the last of our three agencies comes in, the one I associate with
the manifestation of a will to legitimize. It is activated when the woman
concerned undertakes to account for the circumstances in which she had
an abortion, doing so according to three modalities that I shall associate
with the terms justifications, motives and excuses. As I have just suggested,
accounting for an abortion falls under pragmatic conditions that are entirely
different from the ones involved in accounting for a pregnancy intended to
go to term or from the conditions surrounding a birth. While in this second
type of situation the statement of what happened, of the event (‘the happy
event’), is in some sense self-sufficient, not requiring a more ample explanation or justification (except perhaps in cases where the pregnancy does
not satisfy new moral norms that are being instituted – such as pregnancy
at an age deemed too advanced, or pregnancy when the mother is ill), the
account of an abortion or even the simple announcement to others of an
anticipated abortion remain highly problematic. Thus most of the women
I met said that they had spoken about their intention to have an abortion
only to a very small number of persons, sometimes to their mothers (much
less often, it seems, to their fathers), more frequently to a sister or to an
‘intimate’ friend (who in many cases accompanied them to the hospital);
this discretion was often motivated by a fear that they would be reminded
‘later’ of the existence of that unrealized child and that painful memories
would thus be reawakened.
It is particularly significant, in this regard, that the legalization of abortion has not made it easier to talk about the act, not only in public spaces
but even in private situations, except among intimates. If an opinion about
the possibility of abortion, considered in full generality, can perfectly well
unfold in public, accounts dealing with concrete acts most often remain
confined to the world of intimacy. To produce an account of an abortion almost always comes down to an accounting. The act presents itself
immediately, when it is a matter of talking about it, as needing to be
‘explained’.
I shall reserve the term ‘justification’ to designate commentaries on abortion that are oriented towards a moral horizon and that typically seek to
legitimize this practice in a way that will be valid in full generality. The
justifications of abortion (or, conversely, the justifications of its rejection)
aim to establish the position of abortion with respect to a logic of moral
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good and evil. Thus the various attempts originating in moral philosophy,
which I examined at the end of the previous chapter, seek to consolidate
the legalization of abortion by ensuring its legitimization; these attempts
fit very well into the project of establishing a repertory of justifications apt
to be taken up by ‘ordinary persons’ and associated with concrete cases. It
is indeed towards such justifications that people point when they speak of
abortion in general, and especially when they remind us that women who
have abortions must not be ‘made to feel guilty’ or even when, concerning
their personal situations, they reproach a given person (a friend, a doctor,
a counsellor or social worker) for having tried to ‘make them feel guilty’.29
The terms ‘guilt’ and ‘making [someone] feel guilty’ are used with regard to
the context of judgement here; their use presupposes a reference to a third
party who is not directly involved in the situation but who takes on himself
or herself, from a position of externality, the moral authority to blame the
actions of others. The effort to avoid ‘making [the woman] feel guilty’ then
signifies that abortion is one of those actions that is impossible to judge
from the outside, when one is not caught up in it oneself. The fact remains
that, in our interviews, which gathered life histories rather than ‘opinions’,
this register of justification was not very prominent.
Rather than speaking of ‘guilt’ to describe the terms in which many of
the people we met spoke of their abortions, it would be better to refer to
endless ‘mourning’, in the sense that Monique Bydlowski gave this term in her
analysis of the traumas that follow ‘neonatal deaths of children never seen’.
Unlike ‘what follows the loss of a beloved being’, mourning of this sort affects
persons as would ‘the loss of a part of themselves’. There is ‘no trace’ on
which mourning can focus: ‘no familiar object, no piece of clothing recalls the
being that disappeared’. There is neither ‘inscription in the civil register nor
tomb . . . no sensorial trace to touch or to see so as to shore up memory, so a
proper mourning process cannot take place’ (Bydlowski and Gauthier 1997,
21–2).
Fabienne spoke of her ongoing mourning for the child she would have had
if she had not undergone a second abortion (the first one had left few traces in
her memory, it seemed): ‘There is suffering, yes, fairly heavy suffering that you
experience for a while, then it gradually fades and becomes something that
belongs to the past. But there is suffering that you carry, which won’t be there
for your whole life, it’s not that, it fades gradually and you take your distance,
but there is loss. It’s not a loss like a child you’ve had and who exists, but it’s
also a loss, and I felt it, that loss. The body feels it, you lose a child who isn’t
there yet, whom you haven’t been able to touch, you haven’t . . . but still, you
lose it. It’s not a concrete loss of a being you’ve loved, that you’ve shared, but
it is a loss, it’s a loss at another level, so it’s a loss for which you don’t have
any reference points, nothing to remember it by. No way to get attached to
something in that suffering. So it’s an emptiness, a void that isn’t connected
with a memory that you might have of something you’d experienced, of a
moment, so it’s really a void.’
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The principal justification we picked up in this context stressed, in a
fairly classical way, the difference between early abortions, performed when
‘it isn’t anything yet’ or ‘almost nothing’, and late abortions, when the
foetus already has a human shape. Nevertheless, such a register of justification seems rather disconnected from practice. A given woman may say she
is favourable to abortion without having undergone one herself and another
woman who has had the experience – but in a situation in which ‘there
wasn’t any other solution’ – may oppose the practice.
In contrast, in our interviews we found detailed narratives of the motives
that led to abortion in circumstances that were always presented as particular; some of these motives were evoked in chapter 4. ‘Explanations’ like
these do not justify abortion as if it involved a property or a morally neutral
action. Indeed, they are not directly situated with respect to a ‘moral’ register. They seem to consist above all of excuses addressed primarily to the
one who was not born.
Laure, who had had an abortion because ‘she couldn’t do otherwise’, for
‘economic reasons’, had spent several months writing letters that she kept
without rereading them: letters addressed, she said, ‘to the child who hadn’t
been born’. These explanations thus have an ‘altruistic’ character, to borrow
an expression Durkheim used to qualify certain types of suicides. It is a matter
of explaining to the one who has not been born not only why this had been the
case, but also why it was ultimately preferable for that being not to be born, or
at least how taking that being’s interests into consideration, the life it would
have had if it had come into the world, had been preponderant in the decision
not to give it life. Thus Paulette said, to explain her abortion, ‘I was thinking
of the child, too. For me, a baby has to be wanted in order to be more or less
happy. Because the history of my own family has something to do with this.
My mother, at the time, there wasn’t any contraception, so she was pregnant
for four years straight. When I came I wasn’t expected, and unconsciously, I
knew it. So a child who is born like this, for a youthful mistake, I wouldn’t
want to bear that burden.’
In these explanations, the enumeration of facts, events, determinations
and conditions that concern the mother herself, and especially, as we have
seen, her relation to the absent or failing father, is obviously predominant.
In addition to the father’s rejection of his paternity, these women tend to
invoke other motives that are easy to imagine: immaturity, lack of money
or work, the absence of autonomy with respect to their parents or, for
older women, the burden of having young children at home whom she
often has to bring up on her own, exhaustion, the situation of women in
the workforce where no account is taken of the circumstances that weigh
upon them, and so on. But what these explanations also say is that, under
such circumstances, in the absence of a ‘real father’ and also, in a certain
way, in the absence of a ‘real mother’ who could have truly adopted what
has come to lodge in her, the one who would have come into the world if it
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had been allowed to be born could not be realized, could not fully develop
its humanity.
The dimension of time, however, often gives these excuses an uneasy,
ill-assured character. For the women who present them are accounting, retrospectively, for one or several past events – their abortions – by relying on
the (prospective) anticipation of what the child’s destiny would have been
had it lived. Yet no one can be sure that there would not have been a different outcome, that the children whom these women decided not to have
would not have developed in the same way as the earlier or later one(s) who
had been brought into the world, loved and raised often against all odds,
those ‘priceless’ children for whom the women have done and would still
do ‘practically anything’.
Giving meaning to what happened
To put it succinctly, the people whom we met during our interviews sought
to give meaning to what had happened. In so doing, in most cases they
were simply continuing out loud a work of reflection that they had already
undertaken on their own. The means available for giving meaning to an
action – that is, for removing it from pure contingency by associating it with
orders of phenomena capable of being the source of different manifestations
in other circumstances – are not unlimited in number. Let us look at three
of these. A first register refers to will: a given action has meaning because
someone wanted it to happen. A second consists in invoking necessity, by
pointing towards independent causes of the will to act that thereby function
as external forces. A third, finally, unfolds as the actor discovers correspondences between seemingly unrelated facts and events.
In the case that concerns us, the register of will, which is perfectly
adjusted to the logic of the project (and thus to the expression of what
I have called the will to control), is the one that seems to come up most
self-evidently. Is it not precisely to this register that the advocates of family
planning appealed in the past (‘a child if I want one, when I want one’),
just as the ‘pro-choice’ movements defending abortion rights do today?
The persons we met made this argument their own when they insisted on
specifying, as many did, that they themselves and they alone ultimately
made the decision to abort. Abortion thus seemed to be inscribed within a
plan of rational action that was defined in relation to a linear conception of
time (‘it wasn’t the right moment’) and that took into account a hierarchy
of preferences. We saw this approach when the motive invoked was the
choice to pursue studies that might have been interrupted by the arrival of
a child, and pregnancy and childbirth were consequently deferred to a later
date. It is obviously possible to hold to this type of explanation, and some
of our interviewees did. Still (and this might not have been the case had we
interviewed men), the logic of rational choice is very often submerged by
the register of necessity.
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The register of necessity presents a structure that is radically opposed to
that of will. The agent in this case is no longer a person who makes choices
after having carefully weighed her interests. The agent is constituted by a set
of forces weighing inescapably on the person subjected to their action, and,
consequently, by a set of causes that one can attempt to establish. These
forces and causes can be associated with particular circumstances; they can
be personalized (as is the case when the need to abort is attributed to the
failings of the child’s father or to pressure from the woman’s mother) or,
on the contrary, they can be generalized in an impersonal form, that, for
example, of economic or social determinisms that weigh on the pregnant
woman. The reasoning followed then consists in showing that abortion
was chosen, but because there was no other choice, according to a modality that evokes Sartrean ‘bad faith’. The frequent shift from the register
of will to the register of necessity is hardly surprising. It corresponds, on
the one hand, to the requirement of leaning on an external authority in
order to take responsibility for having an abortion (but also and equally
for engendering, as we have seen); on the other hand, it corresponds to the
conflictual relation that is instituted between the will of the flesh and the
will to control, since the reference to an order of necessary causes constitutes a way to render this conflict less intense by partially discharging the ‘I’
from the weight of the decision; finally, it corresponds to the compulsion to
present explanations that have the value of excuses to the being that one has
prevented from being born. Now, it is generally within the logic of excuses
that one evokes ‘circumstances’ in which ‘external causes’ independent of
the person’s will intervened.
Chloé, age 22, a student in communications, ‘got pregnant’ when she was
20 (after a first abortion at age 15): she had used up her pills and made love
without protection with the boy with whom she had been living for a year.
She explained: ‘He didn’t want it, because he felt he wasn’t ready; as for me,
because of my studies, it wasn’t possible, that’s all. And materially, it wasn’t
possible either. That was that: neither one of us wanted it.’ But she added,
referring to her first abortion: ‘The second time, it was harder, when you’re
older, when you’ve been together for a long time. You tell yourself that you
could do it. That it’s just a problem of money. Or the lack of time.’
Sidonie, too, invoked the register of necessity to explain the decision to
abort (she said that the decision was made by her husband, but to protect her),
when, working as a nurse with two children in the family already, she found
herself pregnant once again at 37: ‘It meant too many sacrifices, I left . . . I
lived in the suburbs, I’d leave every morning for the 16th arrondissement [an
affluent residential district in Paris], I’d come back in a rush to pick him up at
day care, I’d go home, I’d do the shopping, I’d cook for the family. I couldn’t
do that any more, it was exhausting. . . . Doing everything: I’d come home, do
the errands every day because my husband didn’t have time, I had to do the
shopping every day, I was far away from supermarkets, I didn’t know how to
drive, so I had to come back by bus and all that, running around by public
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transport, in the end it was starting to get really hard and I said that at school,
at 4:30 when they got out of school, it just wasn’t going to be possible to get
home by 4:30.’
Liliane, age 24, a salaried worker who had had two abortions, evoked
necessity, like many of the people we met. But her case was special in that
she seemed to doubt the strength of her own argument, which she finally
attributed to her mother: ‘The first time, I didn’t want the kid, but the second
time, I don’t know why, I told myself, “I’m keeping it.” I didn’t want another
abortion, I’d rather die, I’d rather work like a dog all my life. In my head,
I was really in a euphoric phase. It’s all good, I’m a mother, I’m keeping it,
that’s it, but he [her partner] didn’t see things the same way at all: “You’re
crazy, you’re losing your mind.” And so I told my mother that and she said:
“Wait, you’re going to the hospital”; she took me there, and there I was, I
had to do it. She made the appointment; I wouldn’t have been able to do it. It
was because he didn’t have a job, because he didn’t have papers, he’s French
but he’s been waiting for his papers for two years, so in the end, that was it,
so many things piled up that made it impossible. If he’d had a job, if he were
earning plenty of money, if the National Employment Agency had sent him
his papers, if . . . maybe . . . Because in fact when you say “we’re keeping it”
or “we’re not keeping it”, what was a problem for us was that our parents
didn’t approve, we’re not from the same culture, you’re Arab and I’m French,
and so on. Those obstacles weren’t really obstacles; for us, the obstacle was
money, that is, an apartment. If we’d had money, a job, an apartment, the
question wouldn’t even have come up, even if my dad hadn’t agreed and had
said, “No, no, I’m formally opposed.” Anyway, he was opposed, but that was
absolutely not an obstacle. I mean, for me, the guy, how does he come in, he’s
going to have some stability and allow the child to grow up in an environment
that will be after all pretty satisfying materially and pretty balanced, especially
materially, I mean that’s the first thing that runs through my head. It was like,
“Oh! But no, you have to have money!” And afterward, you find that unfair,
you say to yourself, “But damn it, you have to be rich in life to have children.”
But no, in fact not at all, because when you realize that in fact you can’t
have it because you’re too young and you don’t have money to bring it up,
you say it’s unfair, but there are people earning the minimum wage and they
manage to bring up their children. That means, it’s not . . . it’s not necessarily
incompatible.’
Alongside the registers of will and necessity, a third path was often taken
in the life stories we collected, to give meaning to what happened. This
approach consisted in discovering (sometimes because they were actively
being sought) correspondences between the heterogeneous biographical elements and establishing ‘links’ among them, by ‘thinking them over again’,
often ‘years later’, but also establishing links between episodes that were
deemed to have played a memorable role in the women’s own lives and
incidents that had marked the lives of their forebears, especially, in a female
line, the lives of their mothers and grandmothers. Unlike the reference
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to necessity, which points towards impersonal forces (such as economic
constraints) that act in the mode of linear causality, the evocation of correspondences explores a singular constellation, by following the life course
of a particular person and those from whom she descended or to whom she
was close. The register of correspondences thus occupies an intermediary
position between the register of will and that of necessity. It comes close to
that of will in the sense that what happened happened to a singular person
and not, for example, to a social actor defined by a condition and common
properties. But, as in the cases where necessity was evoked, the will at work
was not that of a ‘subject’ whose ‘decisions’ were transparent in character,
but that of a person whose actions were partly influenced by forces that,
even as they surpassed her, were within her – were her – and that she could
try to grasp, after the fact, by deciphering their manifestations in the way
one interprets signs.
These correspondences were often associated with dates30 (as in the case
of Joelle, who was married and wanted to have a child but ‘miscarried’ ‘on
the 14th of July’, that is, ‘precisely’ one year after she had had an abortion).
They might also bear on places, as in the story of Isadora (presented more
fully further on), who found herself pregnant at age 18, while she was
vacationing on a Greek island with the young man she was going to marry;
she had an abortion, and ten years later found herself on the same island,
again on vacation and again ‘with a baby in her tummy’, ‘liberated’ from
the memory of her abortion, as if she had ‘come full circle’. They could also
have to do with ‘troubling’ ‘coincidences’ (as in the case of Juliette, who
found herself pregnant and had an abortion just when her ‘best friend’ had
had a child and had asked her to be the godmother). Other correspondences
associated what was happening to the woman in question with something
that had happened to her mother (thus Laure lingered over the fact that
she had an abortion at age 22, ‘precisely’ her mother’s age when Laure was
born), or her grandmother (Joelle, whose experience will also be presented
more fully below, thought that her ‘story was no accident’ and that there
was a relationship between her abortion, an abortion her grandmother had
had, and her own birth).31
These associations are often presented as belonging to the realm of
chance, but, to borrow André Breton’s expression, an objective chance
that, through the intermediary of seemingly fortuitous ‘coincidences’,
points towards an underlying but hidden order, so that, even if one finds
it impossible to assign a precise meaning to what has happened, one nevertheless suspects that somewhere – according to the expression drawn
from psychoanalysis but now used in everyday parlance – there must be a
context in which all the events that seem contingent, that might not have
happened, that one has experienced and sometimes regrets, would turn out
to be ordered with respect to one another and, as it were, would begin to
‘speak’. It is quite likely that the spread, particularly through the press, of
terms, notions and perspectives more or less derived from psychoanalysis
has provided instruments for establishing such associations and also for
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making it legitimate, or at least acceptable, to communicate them. But it
is no less likely that in this regard psychoanalysis has merely relayed one
of the most widespread and most traditional ways of giving meaning to
the world by unveiling and interpreting correspondences between beings,
events and forces that stem from different orders but are secretly articulated
with one another.
Joelle, age 46, a nurse, associated the abortion she had had when she was 20
and the miscarriage she suffered at age 33 when she was married and wanted
a child (she had a daughter the following year, and then separated from her
husband): ‘Afterward, when you can imagine having a child, you can’t help
thinking about your abortion, and that’s when you understand, after the fact.
Years later. I don’t know if it was a coincidence or not, but I made the connection. It’s because before I had Manon, well, I had a miscarriage, just a few
weeks after I found out I was pregnant. And it was weird, I had my miscarriage on the 14th of July, and so right away I connected that with . . . the first
time. . . . With the father, I’d done everything to have it. It was painful, I cried
and cried, I couldn’t stop. The 14th of July, like when I was 20, it was Bastille
Day that I’d been in the hospital. I think there was . . . given the date . . . it
might not have been an accident, that it happened just then, the same dates.
. . . That time I was aware of wanting a child, so I remembered the time when
I hadn’t wanted one, because as much as, when you have an abortion, you can
want not to have a child, afterward, when you do want one, you feel just as
much that you really do want one. It was obvious, the first time; the second
time, it was just as obvious that I wanted one. The evidence was right there,
right on that day, the 14th of July.’
Joelle also worked at establishing a correspondence between what had happened to her when she was 20 and the conditions of her own birth (regarding
her mother): ‘And then, my story, too, it wasn’t an accident, since my mother
had me when she was 16.’ Then, during the interview, I learned that her paternal grandmother died from an abortion, something that Joelle had learned
quite late (in her family they spoke of ‘chills and fever’). Joelle interpreted her
own birth this way: if her mother had had her at age 16 instead of having an
abortion, it’s because her father (who was 18 at the time) hadn’t wanted her
mother to have an abortion because his own mother had died of one: ‘I have
my father’s mother who died that way, I mean my paternal grandmother. I’d
guessed that that’s how she died, because often in the family they didn’t speak
openly about it . . . They said she died of chills and fever, and every time I said
she died of chills and fever, it didn’t sound right . . . Here’s the story they told:
she was riding a bicycle, she had a raincoat on, she got very hot, and then she
had chills and fever and that killed her. One day, with my mother, I don’t
know, I must have been 22 or 23, I said, “Listen, Mum, when I say that Dad’s
mother died of chills and fever, it doesn’t sound right, and I don’t know why.”
And my mother told me that she had died from an abortion, a haemorrhage.
So I’m sure that that’s why my mother didn’t have an abortion, my dad must
have said “I don’t want this”; his mother had died a few years earlier. My dad
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was 12 when he lost his mother and 18 when he had me. At age 16, my mother
didn’t want to have me at all, but it’s certain that, even if the idea of an abortion had come to mind, my dad must have said no because he knew his mother
had died from that, and he certainly couldn’t have stood it if my mother had
died from the same thing. Otherwise, I’m sure my mother could have been one
of those women who took the risk, because you can say, can’t you, that it was
a risk back then! . . . That’s how things were. My grandmother, my mother
and I, we lived through things . . . ’
Isadora (age 48, three children, homemaker, a practising Catholic but in
favour of free choice concerning abortion) saw a correspondence between the
abortion she had had at age 18, after a vacation in Greece with the person she
married, and a birth ten years later. ‘It haunted me for years, because I had
the feeling I’d assassinated someone. I didn’t feel guilty at the time, because I
felt I was more a victim in the story than anything else, a victim of society, a
victim of the state of mind in my social and family environment, a victim of
my image, more a victim than an executioner. But even so, I found that . . .
It’s something that haunted me for years. And then I was liberated from it.
In fact, that baby had been conceived in Greece, during a vacation in Greece.
And I was liberated from it when I went back to Greece ten years later, more
or less, when I was pregnant with Gérard. I went back to Greece, I had a baby
in my tummy that I was going to bring into the world, and so it freed me, I
had the impression that I’d come full circle. Because I had left Greece pregnant
with a child that I couldn’t . . . that I didn’t bring into the world, since I ended
the pregnancy, and I came back to the same place with a child in my womb
that I was expecting and cherishing and that I loved and that I was going to
bring into the world. And I told myself that, finally, I said to myself without
saying it, that maybe it was the same soul that had come back, knowing that
now I could welcome it.’ Isadora established another correspondence between
the being she aborted, which she thought would have been a girl, and her
nephew’s girlfriend who came to live with her for a while, a girl ‘who was
exactly the same age as that child would have been’: ‘I told myself: I am being
entrusted with her, too, to close the circle, so I can be completely liberated
from all that, because you can’t live your life in the past, either.’
From a grammatical approach to the interpretation
of an experience
What links can be established between the grammatical approach that I
started with (chapter 2) and the analytic framework that I have just outlined
in order to account for the experience of the people involved as it can be
determined from their stories?32 Let us go back to the distinction between
the agency of the ‘self’ and the agency of the ‘I’, between the will of the
flesh and the will to control. The first constraint that I identified (marking
the difference between beings engendered through flesh and those who are
also engendered through speech) can easily be retranslated into the terms
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used to analyse experience. This constraint corresponds to the requirement
not to maintain onself constantly in the passivity of auto-affected flesh
through what grows in it, beneath the subject–object distinction, or else not
only to fluctuate between plenitude and disquietude, but to grasp anew at
the level of the ‘I’ what is growing in the flesh, to assume possession of it
in the way one does an object (whatever its construction may be – authentic or tumoral) and to situate it in the future in the mode of the project.
The disquietude that is never completely absent, as we have seen, even in
pregnancies that appear ‘happiest’ or most ‘fulfilling’, requires on its own
behalf, as it were, an exit from passivity and a new approach at the level
of the ‘I’. One cannot calm it, in fact, except by constituting what comes in
the flesh either as something to be thrown out as quickly as possible or as a
baby who is already there, whom one can ‘touch’, to whom one can ‘speak’,
and so on. To escape passivity, that is, to reappropriate what is happening
in the logic of the project, and, in the same movement, to make or remake
an ‘I’, the will to control has to put to the test its capacity to counter the
will of the flesh. Now in this case there is no test at hand but the one that
consists in getting a grip, if only in the imaginary mode, on the possibility
of silencing the will of the flesh by interrupting its germination, that is,
the possibility of abortion. It is thus indeed in passing from passive autoaffectivity to the constitution of the foetus as an object, projected ahead of
oneself and already placed, in a way, on the outside, in the world, and by
placing oneself in the position of subject in the face of this object, that the
requirement of singularization brought in by the grammatical approach –
that is, the properly human need to substitute for the replaceable products
of sexual intercourse beings destined to occupy a determined place in the
world – can be satisfied.
What becomes of the second constraint (the constraint of nondetermination), which has to be taken into account in particular, as we
have seen, to interpret the deficit of representations of which abortion is the
object? This second constraint would have no reason to exist if everything
took place at the level of the ‘I’. It would suffice then to limit oneself to
the intentional aim that has constituted the object – the foetus – either as a
worthless product of sexual intercourse or, already, as a child ready to be
inscribed in a world where a singular place awaits it, for an unbridgeable
gulf to open up between these two types of beings. It is indeed in a way
this point of view that is adopted by constructions aiming to legitimize
abortion that stress the inalienable autonomy of the mother’s project in
the face of the radical heteronomy of the foetus. For these constructions,
the foetus’s access to humanity depends on the act of recognition freely
accomplished by the mother when she inserts it into a project, for ‘recognition’ and ‘a project’ make it possible to distinguish between beings that are
of human flesh, to be sure, but whose humanity is condemned to remain
unaccomplished, and those who are called, in this tradition, ‘persons’.
Still, as I see it, such a position has a partly fictional character, because it
places its bets on an incomplete reality. It does not take into account the fact
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that the new approach at the level of the ‘I’ does not suppress in any way
the auto-affectivity of pregnant flesh (of the flesh upon which, in accordance
with the determinations of the term cho–ra, a mark is imprinted), that at most
this auto-affectivity is only retranslated when the subject–object relation is
applied to an experience that is located beneath that distinction. Now, for
the will of the affected flesh, and, by the same token, in its manifestations
on the level of experience, nothing allows us to see the slightest difference
based on whether what is growing in the flesh is constituted, once it is taken
up at the level of the project, as an authentic foetus or as a tumoral foetus.
By the same token, too, this distinction can always appear, relying on the
experience of the flesh, as an arbitrary construction, and the destruction of
the tumoral foetus can be perceived as unjustifiable and abusive because
nothing distinguishes it – from the standpoint of the flesh, if one can put
it this way – from that other being eagerly anticipated and already loved,
which it also could just as well have been. This is why the will to control
appears so difficult to fulfil, especially when the foetus is destined to be
destroyed. On the one hand, the will to control must manifest itself with
enough force to do the work – which will be more or less difficult and more
or less successfully accomplished depending on the case – of repressing the
will of the flesh, and, on the other hand, it must weaken itself in order to
comply with the demands of the will to legitimize that blurs the moment
of ‘decision’ in order to stress the intervention or the failings of those other
forces (whether these are determined with reference to a ‘Creator’, to
‘kinship’, to ‘Society’, or to a ‘parental project’) without which it does not
seem possible either to make or to unmake children. In short, it is as if the
act of making children with the beings that have come to be inscribed in the
flesh, or of unmaking them by refusing them access to constitution through
speech, were never completely under the empire of the ‘I’ and of the will to
control in which it is manifested, but tends on the contrary if not to escape
the ‘I, at least to exceed its grasp in all directions.
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Bringing closure to disputes about abortion
Neither the legalization of abortion nor philosophical constructs designed
to support legalization by legitimizing abortion, nor even constructionist
arrangements aimed at establishing a radical separation between a worthless (tumoral) foetus and a priceless (authentic) foetus that prefigures the
child to be born, have managed to bring an end to the debates and conflicts
over abortion. The movement to legalize abortion had followed a path that
allowed it to circumvent the question of the foetus, but with the development of biotechnologies it has had to confront new problems in the legal
realm, owing to pressure to assign a ‘status’ to the embryo. Where efforts
to legitimize abortion stem from moral philosophy, the often ingenious
constructs proposed have run into problems of scope and problems of
compatibility with the solutions offered to other moral questions bearing
on different realms of daily life, so much so that many of the philosophers
bent on solving this difficult problem have gradually come to espouse the
idea that ordinary morality, with its Judaeo-Christian legacy in particular
(although similar obstacles would doubtless have arisen if comparable
efforts had been made in the context of other traditional moral frameworks), had to be abandoned altogether, once and for all. But reforming the
moral sense as a whole, within formations as vast and as ancient as those
of Western civilizations, is no small task; at all events, it is not the kind of
thing that can be done by decree, as it were, from philosophy departments
in American universities. As for the constructionist tinkering, so useful for
confronting the contradictory requirements of daily life, it ran into trouble
with the emergence of litigious cases (often related to the dilemmas raised
by the proliferation of techno-foetuses) that straddled categories that
were absolutely not meant to communicate. Thus, in a recent work, two
American scholars begin by saluting the efforts made over the previous
thirty years to base the validity of abortion on a ‘social construction of the
foetus’, but then observe that the strength and credibility of this enterprise
has unfortunately been weakened by technological developments and
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especially by visualization technologies; these have had the effect of reinforcing the common-sense belief according to which foetuses that can be
seen, thanks to photographs or sonograms, exist ‘for real’, no matter what
fate may await them. In the face of such obscurantism, these scholars conclude that the defence of abortion has to follow a different path, one that
requires granting women, as autonomous beings endowed with reason, ‘the
right to kill those things whose invasion of one’s life threatens its integrity’;
up to now, as they see it, this right has been a masculine prerogative justified
by requirements associated with the quest for ‘the good life’, as when men
deem it necessary to kill ‘foxes, mice, dandelions, bacteria, and sometimes
each other’ (Michaels 1991, 131).1
It is hardly astonishing that abortion should be an object of conflict. This
is the case by construction, in a sense, because it reveals a tension that is
inherent in human engendering. This conflict, which has gone on for more
than half a century now, is perhaps one of those destined never to die out,
but rather to undergo periods of calm and periods of renewal, depending on
the prevailing societal circumstances. Taken in its broadest sense, it can thus
be characterized as structural, rooted in tensions inherent in the dominant
Western ontologies and moral grammars. Barring a radical change in this
framework, the conflict over abortion can only be attenuated by measures
that reduce its social presence (such as medical abortions accomplished at
home) and in this way tend to return it to the shadows from which it has
been emerging, in Western societies, since the nineteenth century.
To understand these measures, we need to return to the tensions presented
in chapter 1 and, more generally, to the way axiological contradictions are
manipulated in social settings in order to reduce the stresses of daily life.
Two ways of minimizing contradiction
One of the theoretical interests of the investigation I have undertaken into
engendering and abortion lies precisely in the engagement with an object
that brings the question of contradiction and the role that contradiction
plays in social arrangements to the fore with particular force and in a way
that could not be addressed with the tools and models that I established
earlier to analyse the sense of justice. A sociology that means to give full
scope to the normative dimensions of human activity (a moral sociology,
in Durkheim’s sense: that is, not a sociology impregnated with moralism
but a sociology that takes ‘moral phenomena’ seriously) may have to place
contradiction – whether in its most obvious forms, such as the realm that is
the focus of this study, or in the form of passing tensions, easier to absorb
in the play of action – at the centre of its preoccupations. For, in a society
that does not give itself normative expectations, or what might be called
ideals, people would certainly be confronted with choices, but these choices
would have a purely strategic character, as is often the case in models
constructed by neoclassical economics. The neoclassical paradigm, in its
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orthodox versions, deals with axiological dilemmas by developing models
of rational action oriented towards the maximization of interests. In this
narrow and often, it must be said, unrealistic framework, persons do not
have to face contradictions. Moreover, the very fact of giving full scope to
the normative dimension of human behaviours or, on the contrary, the fact
of claiming to absorb this dimension in arrangements of a different type is
what constitutes the chief dividing line among the various tendencies of the
social sciences. And this dividing line, far from corresponding to an institutional separation between disciplines – between sociology and economics,
for example – runs on the contrary through the heart of each of these fields
(L. Boltanski 2002b).
As Freud recognized, in order to see contradictions arise, actors must be
endowed with an imperious sense not only of reality – of what is – but also
of what ought to be and what ought not to be, that is, a sense of what is good
and what is evil. Now, as the work of Erving Goffman (especially Goffman
1959) in sociology and that of Lévi-Strauss2 in anthropology showed in the
wake of the work done in American social psychology between 1930 and
1950 (especially that of Leon Festinger3), contradiction presents an intolerable character for human beings in society (no doubt because it inhibits
action and, by impeding any possibility of coordination, leads to violence).
As a result, a great number of social arrangements – generally associated
with ideologies – take on particular prominence when one grasps the role
they play in reducing specific contradictions; in the absence of means to
resolve a contradiction, these arrangements may at least attenuate or dissimulate it. However, taking my own overall object of study, the sense of
justice and the moral sense in complex societies, as a starting point, I shall
posit a distinction between arrangements that take the question of what is
good into consideration and those that tend rather to take into account the
various expressions of evil.
The model of polities (and worlds) that Laurent Thévenot and I presented
in On Justification in our effort to account for the sense of justice provides a
good example of an arrangement aimed at addressing the problems posed by
reference to what is good. This model is wholly designed to make possible a
world capable of enduring despite the multiplicity of disputes, in which the
divergent claims of persons are not resolved (solely) by violence, even as it
takes into account the contradiction that is always possible – thematized by
Max Weber when he talked about the ‘war of the gods’ – between different forms of goods. Given that, in a complex society (and perhaps in every
society), different forms of goods (or ideals) that cannot be achieved at the
same time and in the same situations without raising insoluble dilemmas
are nevertheless recognized as legitimate, one solution consists in attaching
these goods not to different types of individuals (as in the tripartite model
proposed by Georges Dumézil and implemented by Georges Duby [1980]),
with at its extreme limit a society of castes that imperils the recognition of a
common humanity, but to different types of situations organized so as to be
as homogeneous as possible with respect to a specific type of world. In each
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of these situations it is possible to celebrate the form of good (or, to return
to the vocabulary of On Justification, the form of worth) that is revealed in
it by the accomplishments of persons when they illustrate it through their
actions; celebration of one expression of good goes hand in hand with a
distancing of other expressions that can be illustrated in different situations.
Disputes over the question of fairness may also arise. But they will be
dealt with through reference to a determined principle of worth and by
means of specific tests; this will forestall the use of violence, which might be
thought to impose itself inevitably if all forms of good are presented at the
same time. One model of this type presupposes that persons, stabilized as
such by rigid identities (otherwise one could not follow them as they shift
between different ‘polities’), can pass from one world to another, from one
situation to another, recognizing the form of good required in each.
In this framework there is also another possibility, which is that of
critique: in its radical forms, a critique challenges the validity of the good
recognized in a given situation by opposing to it other forms of possible
goods with which it then enters into contradiction. The solution to these
conflicts may consist in purifying the situation by removing from it anything
that might point towards an external good or, on the contrary, in forging
practical compromises between different goods. Without resolving the
contradictions between different types of goods (there is no higher good
in which a principle of equivalence would be couched, making it possible
to array the various goods in rank order), compromise makes it possible
to attenuate them or to close one’s eyes to them. Let us add that this type
of arrangement, which puts the stress on goods, seems particularly well
adapted to dealing with public problems and more generally to situations
that may have an official character in which a requirement of generality and
legitimacy is imposed.
In the realm to which this study has been devoted, however, we are in the
presence of an entirely different case. The contradiction that I have identified between the two constraints on engendering cannot be absorbed by
distributing the constraints between different situations within which one
or the other would be presented as a good. I shall not go back over the
various reasons why the question of abortion eludes the empire of justice,
but I shall recall one of the main reasons, which is the simple fact that
certain applicants for entrance into humanity are destroyed, so that, owing
to this primordial violence, the solution that would consist in having a
single being, already identified in what is particular to it, transit between
different worlds cannot be applied. When cases of this type arise, efforts
aimed at attenuating the contradiction will take a different path. They will
leave aside the question of good(s) and concentrate instead on the question
of evil(s). For in cases like these there is no way to resolve the contradiction
that can be publicly identified with a solidly established good.
The path that consists in forging a compromise cannot be followed,
either, for a very simple reason. A compromise requires that the various
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competing goods be associated in such a way as to limit one another, as
it were, without any one gaining the upper hand over the others. But this
requirement is not purely argumentative or abstract in character. It presupposes, if it is to be deployed in a realistic way, that the various beings
– persons, things, artefacts, animals and so on – involved in the compromise can remain associated within the compromise framework, that is, at
a minimum, that they can be protected from destruction. Now, in the case
of abortion, there is at least one being, the foetus, about which a decision
is required. It must either be maintained alive or destroyed; there is no
intermediate solution.
With cases of this type, the exploration of a way to attenuate or blur the
contradiction will set aside the question of good(s) and turn towards that of
evil(s). The operation will then consist in ordering different expressions of
evil so as to orient the action with reference to a logic of the lesser evil. But
an evil, even if is considered lesser than another, remains nevertheless an
evil, so that it is difficult to take credit for it publicly, as one would do with
a good. Whereas an action oriented towards the greater good finds itself
confronted with a demand for justification, an action guided by the logic of
the lesser evil can provide only excuses. Now excuses, unlike justifications,
do not lay claim to legitimacy but instead emphasize that the (extenuating)
circumstances were such that fitting into the mould of legitimate action was
not permissible.
This is precisely what I mean when I say that abortion is not legitimizable, because it cannot be treated as a good, nor can it be justified in full
generality with reference to a legitimate requirement, even though it cannot
be penalized. Such a justification would presuppose not only the possibility of presenting the practice of abortion as if it were in conformity with a
norm that had the value of an imperative – and this, as we have seen, has
never appeared to be the case – but also, presumably, the possibility of
deeming it condemnable under any and all circumstances, that is, considering it as always constituting the manifestation of an evil to which no greater
evil can be opposed.
It follows that the occasions on which reference to the lesser evil prevails
will tend to avoid exposure in the public sphere in so far as possible. They
can certainly be mentioned, but rather in private, unofficial relationships, or
in situations protected by institutional secrecy, to persons apt to understand
the excuses invoked, and to accept them, as if they had confronted the same
dilemmas and knew that in the face of such problems there is no solution
that could attenuate the contradiction in which one finds oneself other than
opting for the lesser evil.
But to say that the motives behind actions carried out in a logic of the
lesser evil are difficult to make public does not mean that they are unknown
to the person who has acted, or that thay are of the ‘unconscious’ order.
It is pointless to appeal to the heavy machinery of illusion to distinguish
situations in which public justification prevails and which are presented
as transparent from situations destined for greater obscurity in which the
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logic of the lesser evil is at work. The elements of reality that are thus tacitly
tolerated, with their negative character, are not radically repressed or thrust
into the abysses of the unconscious, even if one tends to shunt them aside
as best one can, or, in Goffman’s vocabulary, to minimize them by treating
them as if they were random occurrences.4 Since an evil, even ranked in
relation to another evil, remains an evil, persons will tend to avoid lingering
over it for too long and will instead be inclined to close their eyes to it. And
they will have a good excuse for this: that they can do nothing about it.
They cannot do anything to prevent this greater evil except close their eyes
to the inevitable portion of evil that must consequently be tolerated. Why?
Usually so that the social world can continue to be what it is and because
one cannot imagine that it might be otherwise. Or else out of fear of violence, or fear that a greater violence might be unleashed if the contradiction
were thrust into broad daylight.
This being the case, closing one’s eyes to entire expanses of social reality
tends to make these realities in effect less and less visible. The thing one
prefers not to see is not equipped with instruments for being seen. The social
world is not such that it would reveal itself in its transparency through the
intermediary of immediate experience without requiring the deployment
of instruments for grasping at a distance, particularly instruments for
constructing events and beings in their most general character – Laurent
Thévenot calls these ‘investments in forms’ (1984); thus we need tools for
establishing equivalence that allow us to associate, in a determined relation,
achievements or entities that always owe something to the particular circumstances in which they are embedded. Now, with respect to that which
one prefers not to see, equivalences between cases are not established. Series
of events or statistical series cannot be constituted. No totalization is possible, and each of the expressions of evil that presents itself to the gaze has the
form of an exception: it is a special case, an incident, something that should
not have happened and yet did in fact happen. It is moreover because judgements that invoke a lesser evil are essentially of the circumstantial order that
they can dispense with reference to goods of a general nature, a reference
that one might have thought necessary to establish and support an ordered
sequence of different expressions of evil.
If eyes are to be opened, certain of the persons whom the (lesser) evil has
harmed have to make themselves heard with sufficient force to intervene in
the ‘competition of victims’ (Chaumont 1997) and demand to modify the
generally recognized hierarchy between different types of evils. I shall not
examine here the reasons – they doubtless derive from specific conjunctures, or might be called essentially historical – that are capable of making
a critical movement of this sort possible or not in any particular case. But
when such a movement takes place, the contradiction that the logic of the
lesser evil only managed to dissimulate, without being in a position really
to resolve it, tends to resurface. An alternative then arises: one can either
repress it anew or try to modify the entire normative framework that had
been officially recognized up to that point in such a way as to grasp the
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(lesser) evil and reconnect it with a good capable of achieving legitimacy.
Such a transformation is more or less acceptable and thereby more or less
difficult to accomplish according to the repercussions that it may have on
the various domains of legitimacy. It is possible that, in certain cases, and I
think that abortion is one such case, the contradiction that the logic of the
lesser evil tended to attenuate or, in any case, to render less visible has an
anthropological anchoring such that the attempt to render legitimate what
was previously held to be an evil makes it surge forth anew in its intolerable
aspects, triggering a movement of flight or even fear, oriented towards the
search for ways to forget it once again.
Towards the effacement of abortion?
It is indeed, it seems to me, towards a horizon that would be marked by the
disappearance of abortion that the critiques directed towards this practice
over the past several decades tend, critiques whose dynamics have moreover
played an important role in the irruption of the foetus itself into the field
of social representation, with the effect of rendering the contradiction more
striking than ever. Regarding something currently presented as an awkward
problem and actively or potentially conflictual, everyone would prefer to
see it vanish and be forgotten. But the wish to see abortion vanish obviously takes on very different meanings depending on the orientation of the
critiques directed towards the present situation.
Those who have opposed, and continue to oppose, the legalization of
abortion not only want abortions to stop occurring, but also associate the
disappearance of abortion with its prohibition and recriminalization.5 They
behave implicitly as if the existence of abortion today were the result of its
legalization, or at least as if the legalization of this practice had considerably
increased its frequency by bringing it into the order of the permissible and
thereby ‘trivializing’ it. But to demand the recriminalization of abortion is
to forget the high level of frequency of this practice before it was legalized,
and to attribute little importance to the considerable suffering brought
about by its clandestine exercise. Nothing indicates, moreover, that there is
a major causal link between the practice of abortion and its legal status, so
that those who demand measures of prohibition may be making an error
comparable to that of the mid-nineteenth-century advocates for family
planning who thought that, with the development of contraception, abortion would no longer play more than a residual role. Yet we have seen that
this has not been the case.
Even riskier still, no doubt, is the belief that recriminalization of abortion could be accepted by a majority of citizens (since such a measure, in
democratic countries, could only be taken following the adoption of a law
by the governing bodies) without arousing considerable protest (something
like the way the 1920 and 1923 laws were adopted in France with no clear
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opposition manifested in public opinion, either from the right or from the
left). It is not hard to predict that recriminalizing abortion, if it managed to
impose itself through democratic means, which is highly improbable – or
through a politics of obstruction that would increase the obstacles to abortion in a voluntarist or even authoritarian fashion – would have no effect
but to revitalize the practice of clandestine abortion (or, for those who have
the financial means, the practice of travelling to countries where abortion is
authorized); this would bring back the evils that the 1975 law in France was
primarily designed to abolish. Abortion would disappear in the sense that
it would be shunted back into the shadows. But its actual presence in daily
life would probably be all the greater, and would take particularly dubious
forms. I should add that such an objective also seems utopian, if one limits
oneself to the observation of contemporary tendencies,6 because it would
presuppose that the understanding with the Creator – which, connected
with a monist idea of human life, is certainly the one in which abortion is
the least acceptable – would become (or become once again) preponderant,7
even while being dissociated from an understanding to which it was almost
inseparably linked in the past, that is, the understanding with the kinship
group, which tolerated the suppression by various means of a great number
of candidates for entry into humanity, as we have seen.
We can of course imagine that a new understanding may be established and substituted for the parental project, in which abortion plays a
prominent role, as we know. But one can predict that, in such a case, the
establishment, diffusion and internalization by persons of the reference to
a new type of externality might be even more favourable to the practice
of abortion than is the parental project. Without being in a position to
specify what such an understanding might look like, let us at least note that
a serious candidate is presenting itself, has indeed already been invoked
rather frequently, none other than the Earth itself, or Gaia: that is, not
simply humanity but the entire set of beings that inhabit our planet, living
beings in particular, or rather the systemic totality constituted by the interactions among animate and inanimate beings as an entity superior to the
sum of its component parts.8 From this perspective, which is that of radical
ecology, the human species, considered as predatory, has to reconsider its
relationship, and in particular its quantitative relationship, with the other
beings that it exploits or destroys. The most radical prophets who embrace
this tendency thus consider, in the name of what Dominique Bourg calls a
‘biocentric egalitarianism’, that a ‘drastic and rapid reduction in the size
of the human population’ must be envisaged (Bourg and Déléage 1996,
51–6), so as, for example, to reduce the number of humans to one or two
hundred million individuals.9 But, beyond the fact that we do not know for
the time being what agency or agencies would have the authority to set up
measures apt to lead to this result (except perhaps for the state, but then
we would be back to an understanding with the state, and presumably with
an authoritarian state), or what selective tests would allow us to determine
who has, or does not have, the right to engender and the right to be born,
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we may safely presume that such an understanding with the Earth, far from
restricting the role of abortion, would on the contrary grant it a major place
alongside sterilization and vasectomy.
But the current situation of abortion is also subject, as we know, to other
critiques formulated by the men or women who have shown themselves to
be most favourable to its liberalization. I contend that these critiques aim,
like the previous ones, although by entirely different means, to make abortion disappear, or at least to send it back into the shadows. These critiques
are oriented, essentially, in two different directions. The first consists in
denouncing the features, in the arrangements that followed from the law of
1975 in France, that limit the possibilities of aborting either by means of
rules (a specified number of weeks of pregnancy after which abortion is forbidden, a requirement that minors obtain parental approval, and so on) or
else owing to circumstantial obstacles (for example, overburdened medical
services [Memmi 2003, 190–8]). The second targets everything that, in
the current arrangements or in the attitudes of the practitioners – doctors,
nurses, counsellors, pharmacists and so on – who do the work, would tend
to ‘make women feel guilty’ by implying that abortion has an exceptional,
dramatic, even transgressive character. The arrangements provided for by
the Veil law, such as the obligatory counselling interview, the week-long
delay between the request and the act, the obligatory declaration by the services that perform the abortion, and so on, but also doctors or counsellors
whose discourse is ‘moralizing’ or ‘guilt-inducing’, have been pinpointed in
particular: they stress its character as a law of exceptions or a law of the
lesser evil. We should note that these criticisms have been partially satisfied
by the law of 4 July 2001, with the lengthening of the legal delay to fourteen
weeks after the last menstrual period, the suppression of the obligatory
character of the counselling interview (although it still has to be offered),
the obligation that pharmacists must supply ‘morning-after’ pills whether
the person requesting them is an adult or not, and so on, and, more generally, with the legalization, one might say – somewhat paradoxically, to be
sure, given that we are talking about a law – of abortion as a fact if not as
a right. But even these measures have not put an end to critiques that point
out, for example, that the legal time period for abortion is much longer in
other European countries.
Such critiques call for a ‘de-dramatization’ of abortion. They note that,
unlike the situation that prevailed during the heroic age of struggles to liberate abortion, the practice presents very little medical danger today; that it
no longer troubles women the way it might have done when they were still
under the sway of religious beliefs or social prohibitions; that abortion has
in a sense become a routine matter; and, finally, that it can be carried out
today by techniques much less onerous than aspiration. And, in fact, the
development of medicalized abortion techniques, which are also much less
costly for public health systems than techniques involving aspiration, seems
to be headed in the same direction. Medical abortion, which for some time
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has been practised mainly in hospitals in France (the patient takes a pill
under medical supervision, then returns to the hospital for the expulsion),
is becoming an outpatient procedure in which the first pill is still taken at
the hospital, but the patient then takes care of the expulsion at home and
sees her doctor afterward for a checkup. Now, one can reasonably think
that such an arrangement, if it were to become the general rule, would help
make abortion disappear as such, and help establish a sort of continuum
between contraception and abortion. Abortion would then be one of those
acts that is necessary to handle a common, minor medical problem, in this
instance a problem that could be solved more easily than many others, and
solved in a highly discreet manner in any case: it would dispense with the
face-to-face encounter between patient and doctor, make very little appeal
to language and remain almost without trace, except for the unavoidable
necessity of expelling something. Then one might suppose that it would not
be spoken of again and thus that the act would have ‘disappeared’.
The new provisions of the 4 July 2001 law ‘make it possible to envisage
that [abortions] may be handled, at least in part, by outpatient medicine, in
the framework of agreements linking an establishment authorized to practise
abortions and private practitioners under conditions set by the Conseil d’État.
Thus there could be established what are already called “home abortions”.’10
After a test period during which several hundred women were able to have
drug-induced abortions at home, under a hospital-run programme, a network
of volunteer urban doctors linked by an agreement with a hospital group that
has considerable experience with drug-induced abortions has been set up.11
In this new configuration, it is the general practioner who directs the process
(doctors are even expected to communicate their mobile telephone numbers
to patients in order to respond to concerns or emergencies) and hospitals,
according to comments by some of their representatives, risk being turned
into mere dispensaries of medication as long as mifepristone is not available in
pharmacies. In fact, at least in an initial phase, patients will continue to go to
the hospital to take the first pill under the supervision of a nurse or a doctor,
who will give them the pills to take forty-eight hours later. At that point, the
patient will have the option of either talking with a counsellor, generally on the
same day the pills are to be taken, or setting up a meeting at the hospital after
an initial consultation with her GP. (But women are not very likely to choose
this second option. It is hard to see how a woman whose essential concern is
‘thinking about it as little as possible’ would choose it when the interview is
no longer obligatory – except for minors – in the eyes of the law.) Notes will
circulate between the personal physician and the hospital centre involved in
order to handle any complications that may arise – in other words, failures of
the method – by scheduling an aspiration ten days later; anonymous reports
on these procedures are to be sent to the Department of Social Services.
‘With abortions done at home, society will no longer take responsibility
for the procedure; personal physicians are the ones who will see [the patients]
once before, once afterward, and when there is a problem the women them-
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selves will be responsible. . . . A return to thirty years ago: we’re turning the
baby back over to them’ (provincial doctor). This statement, made in passing
by a private gynaecologist in connection with a discussion about the establishment of home abortions, attests to the debate that this possibility arouses
among a segment of the medical personnel accustomed to handling abortions
in hospital family planning clinics: ‘It’s the woman who does her own abortion, she’s a direct observer’, according to a nurse in a family planning clinic
in the Paris region. Conversely, a doctor with the National Information Centre
on Women’s Rights considers that ‘drug-induced abortion eliminates all surgical aggression, which is a generalized tendency in medical practice; its use
could make abortion totally private and would free women from social and
institutional control’. This is the position defended by the National Agency
for Accreditation and Evaluation in Public Health, which maintains that
hospitalization for a drug-induced abortion is no longer justified, considering that the method is quite safe. To envisage handling it in the framework
of an agreement between a personal physician and a hospital centre in the
outpatient mode would allow many more women to be accommodated by
shortening the waiting period for appointments. That would make it possible for more women to benefit from this method; they could terminate their
pregnancies earlier, so it would reduce the number of late abortions. However,
other doctors with long experience in the practice of abortion disagree, stressing in particular the brevity of the period since the last menses – it must not
exceed forty-nine days (seven weeks): ‘The people who are militating for home
abortions say that they want to make abortion ordinary. This may well be
true for people who work in the field, but not for women who have abortions.
They compare the process to having a miscarriage, especially for drug-induced
abortions, but if you listen to women who have miscarriages, hello! There are
difficulties, the feeling that your blood is draining away’ (doctor, provincial
hospital). Other doctors deplored the virtual disappearance of the counselling interview in this type of abortion: ‘With home abortions,’ said one of
the doctors at the provincial hospital that welcomed our research, ‘which are
going to be performed partly to save money on space and personnel, under
the pretext of giving [women] free choice we’re going to be sending them back
to have their abortions all by themselves, as we did before the Veil law. And
how they’re going to manage that, knowing that there’s no third party to help
them shed their burden . . . In fact, in the absence of a counselling session, how
can they know in advance how it’s going to work? It’s an illusion. Sometimes,
the brightest girls, like, superwomen and all that, they’re the most unstrung
. . . It’s a lost opportunity to profit from the time they spend in clinics, to let
them settle down, talk a little about their experience, perhaps compare their
story to others, talk about their difficulty with contraception, finally work for
a future that’s a bit better managed . . . We know, too, that girls who have
abortions have as many children as the others, by the end of their reproductive
life. So it’s the same girls who have abortions who have children afterwards;
you don’t have girls who do this on one side, girls who do that on the other,
they’re the same. Maybe that’s why it’s worth making an investment.’
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It is possible that the doctor whose critiques of home abortion I have
just cited is wrong and that this practice may actually become integrated
into the banality of the everyday world. It is possible that the psychic difficulties experienced by most of the people we encountered both in private
interviews and in hospital settings – their sadness, their difficulty in letting
go, their unease – may be generational; the generation of women who are
between the ages of 20 and 40 today remain under the sway of ‘archaic’
representations and especially of a definition of femininity that is still tied
to motherhood,12 and that definition is about to become outdated. Such
a schema, which is often implicit in the discourse of critics who see in the
extension of possible abortion methods and in the ‘de-dramatizing’ of
abortions an important element in the pursuit of the enterprise of liberation, rests on an evolutionist conception of history that makes it possible to
distribute beliefs, attitudes and practices between the categories of past and
future, although one cannot always discern clearly what operator is used to
do the sorting.
Let us note nevertheless that this operator certainly has something to
do – as has often been the case for critiques since the seventeenth century
– with the separation between what is thought to stem from nature on the
one hand, culture on the other. But the task of interpretation is sometimes
complicated by the fact that this distinction can work in either direction.
Liberation can be conceived as an uprooting from the facticity of culture
and a return to the reality of nature (as it was often represented during
the Enlightenment period and is frequently represented today in discourse
inspired by ecological concerns). But it can also be understood as an
uprooting from the burdens and (false) constraints of nature and a shift
towards a liberated humanity in the sense that humanity would be capable
of completely defining the conditions of its self-production and its reproduction; a humanity that would be constantly in the process of remaking
itself in new ways and that, however unpredictable these innovations
might be, would be headed in the direction of its full self-realization. The
reference to nature is then considered as a cultural artefact (an ideology)
on the same basis as all the others; it has to be deconstructed so that a
design more profound and more powerful than those of nature and culture
combined can be fulfilled. Here we rediscover the schema – examined with
care by Bernard Yack (1986) – of ‘total revolution’ that is set up among
those whom Yack calls ‘left-wing Kantians’: they attempt to understand
and explain the failure of the French Revolution as a political revolution by seeking to identify something even below the level of political
conditions – something that roots human beings in a condition precluding
their achievement of full humanity – that needs to be unveiled and subverted so humans can realize their full potential and at the same time fulfil
themselves in history.13
Long confined essentially within the domain of actions of the economic
and social order, this schema has now largely penetrated the order of anthropology, sexuality and engendering (L. Boltanski 2002a). In the expressions
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of this schema that most closely resemble science fiction, it points towards
an ultimate possibility for making abortion disappear, which would be to
make engendering disappear, at least in the form it has taken up to our day,
that of sexual intercourse.14 And indeed, if engendering were to be managed
completely or partly by technological means, there would no longer be any
reason for abortions. Let us recall some themes of this utopia. Belonging
to different genders or sexes would no longer be a matter of destiny. The
sexes would continue to exist, but as modalities among which it would be
possible to choose,15 so as to control in detail the relation between sexual
practices and the requirement of maintaining continued sexual pleasure.
Sexual intercourse and engendering would be completely uncoupled.
Intercourse could then be practised as a ludic activity oriented towards
pleasure and towards the manifestation of affectivity, without having to be
concerned any longer with operations of a different nature that are aimed
at reproducing the human species and that would be handled (on the same
basis as activities aimed at satisfying other needs, such as the need for food)
by the collectivity, or by a specialized segment of the collectivity, using
sophisticated technologies. The human species would be liberated from the
constraint of sexual reproduction and, by the same token, from the costly
difference between the sexes, from the masculine domination that has
accompanied that difference from time immemorial, and thus presumably,
according to this utopia, from domination in all its forms. The species could
then be fully realized by rejecting the illusions and the ideologies that have
prevented it until now from seeing clearly and progressing.
The disappearance of contradiction?
But without pursuing that utopia to its extreme limits, those of technologized reproduction outside the human body, let us take seriously the
possibility of a world in which engendering, or getting rid of what has been
engendered, would no longer present radically different problems from
those posed very generally to human beings in the creation of a work of art
and would at all events lose its tragic dimension; let us ask ourselves what
a historical situation would look like if the conditions of engendering could
reach full transparency, that is, emerge definitively from the camera obscura
to be wholly rationalized in the order of technological efficiency and public
action, an order in which, as a result, the gap between what is ‘official’ and
what is ‘unofficial’ could be completely closed. We can get an idea of this
by pushing to the limit the consequences of the legalization of abortion on
the one hand and of the access of the foetus to public space on the other,
and, finally, the consequences of the possibility that we now have and that
may well be increased in the future of knowing the child to be born, either
through the senses (sight, hearing and so on) or through the intermediary of
technological arrangements before it comes into the world.
In such a situation, what would become of the two constraints that
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I isolated in chapter 2? The legitimacy of the first constraint (selecting,
among the beings that have come to be implanted in the flesh, the ones that
are to be adopted through speech) would be officially recognized, perhaps
even the object of a public act (something that is prefigured by the question,
which is in the process of taking on the character of a ritual, posed by the
doctor to the woman whose pregnancy has just been confirmed: ‘Do you
want to keep it?’). As for the second constraint (non-discrimination), it
would have a strong chance of fading away on its own. Indeed, if, on the
one hand, the first constraint had a public, official character, which would
incite people to justify the decision by invoking valid motives (since one of
the characteristics of a public order is to be inhabited by a requirement of
justification), and if, on the other hand, a number of the properties of each
individual foetus could be known through investigations carried out during
gestation, the selection of the foetuses adopted from among the beings
implanted in the flesh could be based on the result of tests called ‘predictive’. The selection would no longer have the arbitrary character whose
importance we have seen in the establishment of human difference. It is to a
large extent a situation of this kind that is targeted by the critique of ‘liberal
eugenicism’ (Habermas 2003). We would then see the institution of what
Marcela Iacub and Pierre Jouannet call a right to ‘judge life’ (2001), that is,
according to the proposal developed in another book by Marcela Iacub, to
replace defective foetuses with foetuses of better quality, as many times as
is necessary, in the name of the subjective interests of the ‘child to be born’,
considered as the only being endowed with an identity apt to be legally
recognized (2002b).
In such a situation, the contradiction between the two constraints
identified in chapter 2 would be in effect resolved, in the transparency of
a universe of established and consistent norms, and it would no longer be
necessary to rely on a differential between an official order and unofficial
practices. But we still need to ask ourselves about the effects that establishing a situation of this type would have on the ordinary sense of common
humanity and even to ask to what extent such a utopia could be achieved
in a lasting way.
The problem that arises is how human difference would then be
established. Difference that is instituted in an arbitrary fashion and that
traverses every human being risks being replaced by a scale for differentiation that would go from the more human to the less human. In fact,
unless we were to establish legal principles of selection applicable in all
circumstances (which would lead, more or less, to state eugenicism), selection would depend on representations – varying from person to person or
group to group – of full humanity. We can presume that, as we have seen
in the case of social classes (Boltanski 1987), dominant archetypes of what
a human being ought to be would be established, opening up the possibility of a declining spectrum going from really human humans to not very
human humans, and also the possibility of struggles for access to recognition of a better status within humanity. The notion of common humanity
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would then lose all meaning and a permanent disquietude could well arise
around the question of where the boundaries of humanity lie, or rather, no
doubt, where they ought to lie. If this approach were taken to the extreme,
belonging once and for all to humanity would no longer be self-evident for
anyone.
But, most importantly, human beings, or rather, no doubt, certain human
beings, would hold the power – the exorbitant power, it must be said – to
institute, define and redefine human difference permanently, essentially on
the basis of properties anchored in the flesh. Now we have no evidence that
this would be compatible with the normal functioning of human societies;
as we have seen, societies tolerate neither unconditional acceptance of all
beings that come to be implanted in the flesh (as animal species do) nor a
state-sponsored selection process that would favour beings corresponding to a predefined format. Human beings certainly do have the power to
make such selections, and one can predict that this power will increase, but
the question of what would authorize them to use it, that is, what agency
would give them the authority to exercise that power, remains open. Now,
the least contestable lesson that one can draw from the anthropology of
engendering is that reference to agencies that are not individual persons is
always required if one is to acquire the authority that is necessary not only
to unmake but also to make children (Godelier 2001).
The anthropological question
If we are to understand why the need to make abortion disappear from view
imposes itself so forcefully, whatever positions, favourable or indignant, are
adopted in other respects towards this practice, we have to come back to
the aspect of the ontological status of abortion that inclines people to keep
it out of sight. When abortion is exposed, it reveals the tensions that inhabit
engendering in its properly human forms, and it makes them visible in the
mode of a contradiction that is at once unsurpassable and painful; this is
why abortion may be the object, in a manner just as strangely consensual,
of efforts to shunt it into the shadows and to forget it, as one forgets a bad
memory.
Doing away with abortion thus presents itself as a necessity for those
who, looking back towards an idealized past, would like to return to a
world – which has never existed, moreover – in which one could be content
to welcome children that came in the flesh without having to take responsibility for making them or not, that is, for adopting them in such a way
as to confirm them in their humanity, while the possibility of unmaking
them would also remain on the horizon. But a requirement of the same type
seems to impose itself on those who, pursuing a different dream, this one
projected into the future, would like to see children henceforth made and
well made, the way one makes a multitude of other things, by ignoring or
pretending to ignore the conditions, inhabited by an at once inevitable and
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surmountable internal tension, that preside over the engendering of new
beings – beings that, if they are to accede to humanity, must be invested
with a character that is at once generic, classificatory and singular.
These two utopias, seemingly opposite but at bottom perhaps somewhat
similar in their pursuit of an elementary, unwounded humanity, go hand in
hand with two different ways of seeking to get rid of sexuality in its troubling reality, a reality that has to do with the equivocal relation between
sexuality and engendering. The first would consist in denying all autonomy
to sexuality and forgetting it, too, as it were, by absorbing it into a softened
vision of engendering, whose at once magical and tragic character would
be effaced.16 The second would seek to uncouple sexuality and engendering once and for all, so as to confer on sexuality an autonomy such that
the possibility of unhampered sexual pleasure could be liberated, and to
confer on engendering the quality and the reliability that one has the right
to expect, in a technological society, from any created work, whatever its
destination.
But we are not there. During the second half of the nineteenth century,
the revolt of women against the domination to which they were subjected
brought abortion out into the open and, although for quite different
reasons, the foetus became a social being among others. This historical
situation means that we have to deal with a humanity that is no longer selfevident, that is no longer simply given; nevertheless, we have not brought
ourselves to think that humanity can be deliberately and methodically
fabricated. More precisely, the emergence into broad daylight of the question of abortion and its legalization, which undoubtedly constituted one
of the determining factors that permitted the development of reproductive
technologies – for in a situation where abortion remained officially prohibited, the technological pathways that led to the manipulation of foetuses
with the possible outcome of their destruction could not have been explored
– went hand in hand with the reopening of an interrogation as to the tenor
of the humanity of human beings and its boundaries, which the reactivation
of the problematics of human rights, after the horrors of the Second World
War, appropriately sought to close off forever.
We must nevertheless beware of the twin pitfalls that we encounter in
describing processes in which we are both actors and witnesses, either in
the thematics of limitless liberation or in that of a return of barbarism.
The situation we inhabit today resembles in this regard the one that was
established some two thousand years ago, when the natural and inevitable
character of slavery – that is, of the distribution, held as self-evident, of
human beings into two classes endowed with radically unequal human
status – on which the functioning of a powerful empire depended, found
itself called into question. People could observe then, as we can now, the
reopening of the anthropological question, that is, the return to awareness
that what the humanity of human beings entails, far from belonging to the
order of necessity, of the given, the acquired, could always present itself
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anew, in the mode of disquietude, as a question to which a response had to
be provided.17
Now what the recent changes affecting the conditions of engendering
have led us to face is not, in this respect, without interest or value. By
turning the spotlight on what we could not see, and perhaps did not want
to see, that is, on the foetus – that uncertain being suspended between
non-existence and existence, between belonging to another and belonging
to itself, between nothing and everything, between the real and the virtual,
between the order of facts and the order of projects – these changes have
forced us to recognize the paradoxical, and therefore eminently fragile,
character not only of the conditions that preside over our entry into humanity but of our humanity itself. And they have done so in particular by
making inevitable the recognition of the tension, the contradiction, between
our existence, on the one hand, as replaceable beings without which there
would be no society capable of unfolding in time, and consequently as
equivalent beings, although in a multiplicity of different respects, and, on
the other hand, as completely singular beings, each of whom is leading or
has led an incomparable life and to whom has been given the ability to
outlive themselves, in that very singularity, but in the memory of others.
Recognition of this tension and of the need to bring it to the foreground
also implies developing social arrangements in which the tension can be
affirmed instead of being relegated to one of the two dispositions between
which it is located – either, on the one hand, uniformizing arrangements
wholly centred on the requirement of social reproduction which places little
value on individuals and thus constantly threatens their liberty if not their
lives, and, on the other hand, singularizing arrangements wholly focused
on the search for distinction, to the point of rendering problematic the very
possibility of a collective. This recognition opens the way to a sustainable
conception of a common humanity that would be neither a homogeneous
monolith nor an accumulation of singularities.
It may be objected that there was no need to make such a lengthy detour
in order to end up with this common-sense truth. But I endorse undertakings that consist in clarifying the intuitions of common sense: these are
among the principal tasks that can be assigned to sociology, in my view. For
a clarified self-evident truth does not have the same status as a self-evident
truth that is presumed to impose itself on its own, especially because the
former can be discussed, justified and extended or, conversely, critiqued and
rejected. The way I have carried out my investigation is thus an extension of
the path I followed when I undertook to clarify the common sense of justice.
Justice, too, is caught in tension between two requirements: that of ranking
human beings in situations where they interact as a function of their respective worths, and that of respecting their fundamental equality by virtue of
their participation in a common humanity. The goal of better understanding that axiom of common humanity, which played such an important role
in the work I devoted earlier to justice but was not problematized there,
was in fact one of the motives for my research. With respect to this goal, the
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The Foetal Condition
detour by way of the question of engendering, to which the recent debates
over abortion opened a particularly intriguing access route and, more generally, the detour by way of an inquiry into the foetal condition today, may
not have been in vain.
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Notes
Introduction
1 See especially Atlan et al. 1999 and Huber 2000. The ‘terrifying fiction’ with
which the latter work begins links this literature to the tradition inaugurated by
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
2 On the operations by means of which, for example, in the study of soils (pedology), researchers move progressively through a series of transformations from
the empirical soil on which everyone walks to soil samples that can be subjected
to tests and thus can be objects of scientific statements, see Latour 1993, 145–71
(the chapter devoted to a pedological expedition in the Amazonian forest).
3 Given the highly technical nature of contemporary linguistics, I hesitate to
express my debt to that discipline, fearing that my borrowings – as often
happens when schemas are imported from one discipline to another – may have
an analogical character. I shall nevertheless point out two works that were of
considerable help to me in spelling out the terms of these displacements, which
may be essentially metaphorical, as I am quite prepared to acknowledge. I
refer to Jean-Élie Boltanski 1999 and (especially) 2002. In the latter work, the
chapter devoted to Optimality theory, a rival to classic generative grammar, was
very stimulating for my research inasmuch as the grammars that rely on this
theory put conflictual requirements at the centre of language and emphasize the
existence of a finite repertory of violable and frequently incompatible universal
constraints that are ordered in an unpredictable hierarchy in each language.
Specific languages are thus described as efforts to resolve conflicts between
competing incompatible constraints, either by arranging them in a hierarchy or,
when possible, by establishing more or less fragile compromises between them.
But no solution is ever really satisfying: ‘like Freud’s metaphors, the constraints
that have been dismissed come back to knock at the door of the room from
which they have been banished’, so that there is ‘a factor of instability in every
grammar’ (J.-É. Boltanski 2002, 161).
4 See, for example, the critique that Claude Lefort, following Maurice MerleauPonty’s lead, addresses to Lévi-Strauss’s analyses of exchange (Lefort 1978).
5 In a discussion by an entirely serious historian of motherhood in the early Middle
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Notes to pp. 8–15
Ages, I recently came across the term ‘voluntary interruption of pregnancy’; it
provoked the same discomfort I had experienced when I was working on the
formation of social classes and came across well-intentioned historical works in
which the nomenclature developed in 1945–50 for socio-professional categories
was used to describe the social structure of the mid-eighteenth century.
6 Some of the people we contacted outside of hospital settings refused to speak
with us about abortion in personal interviews. One might conclude that there
is a significant bias here: for example, perhaps the people who agreed to speak
with us were more concerned about their abortions than those who refused to
do so. However, American studies on the way in which abortion is preserved in
memory by those who have experienced it tend to show, on the contrary, that
traces of abortion persist more tenaciously in those who avoid talking about
it than in those who are less reticent (Cohen and Roth 1984, cited in Maxwell
2002, 164–5).
Chapter 1 The Anthropological Dimensions of Abortion
1 ‘[W]ere anthropologists to draw up a complete list of all known types of cultural
behavior, this list would overlap, point by point, with a similarly complete list of
impulses, wishes, fantasies, etc., obtained by psychoanalysis in a clinical setting,
thus demonstrating, by identical means and simultaneously, the psychic unity of
mankind’ (Devereux 1955, viii).
2 Another study based on the Human Relations Area Files was carried out by
Clellan Stearns Ford between 1940 and 1943, more than ten years before
Devereux’s work, and republished in 1964. This study includes data on abortion
(Ford 1964, 50–3), but in a broader perspective, since this work has to do with
‘human reproduction’ in general. This study is essentially descriptive (and functionalist in inspiration, on the theoretical level): I have drawn on it for certain
information and syntheses of data.
3 I thank Philippe Descola for helping me gain access to the Area Files. I also wish
to thank his collaborators in the Laboratory of Social Anthropology for their
guidance in my research.
4 Ford makes the same observation (1964, 50).
5 For medieval societies, see especially Riddle 1992.
6 William R. La Fleur studies the practice of abortion in Japan, especially in the
so-called pre-modern and modern periods, from the vantage points of both
demography and anthropology. He relates the practice of abortion to a fluid
conception of life according to which human beings gradually leave the world of
the gods to enter into the human world; with the advent of old age, they gradually move in the other direction. Birth and death are thus conceived as social
processes spread over time and achieved partly in the human world, partly in the
world of the gods (1992, 33–4).
7 The general condemnation of abortion in most societies is confirmed by Ford’s
work (Ford 1964, 51).
8 Among the Yanowamï, in particular, there is a belief that the implantation of a
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10
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12
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child in a woman’s flesh requires not a single act of intercourse but a series of
emissions of sperm. Several men may participate in this progressive fabrication.
But one of the progenitors in this shared engendering is credited with playing a
principal role; see Alès 2002.
This is also the case, for example, among the Mataco Indians of the Chaco
region; they think that demons can penetrate women’s bodies while they are
bathing and impregnate them; see Karsten 1932, 77–8. Source: Area Files.
References drawn from these files will be identified henceforth by the initials AF.
Thus the Tinglit Indians, among whom the ancestral legacy passes in part
through the maternal line, call a fatherless child an ‘incomplete being’ that can
be compared to an unfinished wooden statue; see Kan 1989 (AF).
We may nevertheless wonder whether the fact that someone was known to
practise abortion did not enter into the packet of assorted accusations, often
associated with practices presumed to suppress fertility (of humans, soils or
domestic animals), that were directed against so-called witches. In an article discussing the numerous historical studies of the great European witch hunts in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Richard Horsley (1979) seeks to clarify the
social roles of people who were tried for witchcraft, and he presents a statistical
analysis based on depositions and accusations. He shows that people accused of
witchcraft by ecclesiastical authorities, on the basis of an official theory of demoniacal sorcery, were most often isolated elderly women, unmarried or widowed,
who worked as healers and soothsayers, typically practising a ‘white magic’ that
did not imply belief in demonic relations. Peasants might make their accusations
in response to failed healing practices, among other reasons. But no references
to diabolical practices are found in these accusations; such charges resulted
from the reinterpretation of popular healing practices in the terms of the official
theory of witchcraft. Female healers could also serve as midwives; the two roles
were not sharply distinguished. But the number of persons explicitly designated
as midwives (sages-femmes) is modest compared to the number of those designated as healers (guérisseuses). Finally, the accusation of killing newborns in
order to eat them or hand them over to the devil at birth was formulated by the
official authorities; it does not figure in the accusations made by peasants. Nor
is there any explicit reference to practices of abortion in the accusations Horsley
examined.
The Aymara Indians of Bolivia, among whom the practice of abortion is attested
and not explicitly repressed, nevertheless view it unfavourably, because they
believe it is associated with catastrophic hailstorms; see Buechler 1971 (AF).
See Bourdieu 1977 and 1972. (Translator’s note: ‘La parenté comme représentation et comme volonté’ appeared in the 1972 French edition but was not
included in the 1977 English translation.)
For a recent example, see Bourdieu 2001.
On the distinction between ‘laws of the home’ and ‘laws of the polity’, and
on the ‘secret of female society’ where ‘most births took place until the eighteenth century’, see Beaud 2001, 208–9 and 250–1. (Translator’s note: here
and throughout this book, translations from a French-language source are my
own.)
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16 Catherine Alès describes birth among the Yanowamï this way: ‘Childbirth takes
place away from the presence of men: terrorized, men systematically flee from
the sight of that scene. Except at night, women routinely go into the forest
to give birth; they go alone or accompanied by another woman, usually their
mother or, in the absence of a mother, a sister or sister-in-law (if they do not live
in the same village, wives most often return to live with their mothers towards
the end of pregnancy). They can then decide, for various reasons, to eliminate
the child immediately after giving birth’ (Alès 1998, 300n30).
17 In The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines the polity as the place where
justice can be exercised, because in a polity human beings live separately but
have access to common values that can serve as a basis for equitable distributions; in contrast, in the home, beings share too much to make justice feasible,
while in communities foreign to the polity a just order cannot be established
because there is no common measure (Aristotle 1934, V.vi.4–V.vii.5). On this
distinction, see also Arendt 1998, especially pp. 54–64.
18 Malinowski 1926, 77–80. I thank Damien de Blic for bringing this example to
my attention.
19 George Devereux gives an example of an invocation pronounced by the Rhadé
Moi, studied by Bernard Jouin (1949, 124–6) and intended to appease the anger
of the spirits of aborted foetuses ‘to whom no rice has been offered, to whom no
water has been given’ (Devereux 1955, 46).
20 Among many works, see especially Gélis 1991; for the Middle Ages, see Van der
Lugt 2004.
21 There are many icons of the Virgin that include a representation of Jesus in
the vicinity of her womb, but as a fully formed child garbed in signs of divine
kingship, referring to the symbolics of the incarnation. See the fourteenthcentury Russian icon Our Lady of the Sign, an illustration of Isaiah 7.14, in the
Chevetogne Abbey collection.
22 But when it became necessary, in the second half of the twentieth century, to find
a language to qualify the ‘embryo’ for legal purposes, experts turned towards a
fairly loose interpretation of the Aristotelian opposition between act and power
retranslated into the discourse of ‘virtuality’; see Aristotle’s De generatione et
corruptione (Aristotle 1982). For a history of the posterity of the Aristotelian
categories, see Pichot 1993.
23 It was in fact by situating human beings with respect to the horizon of mortality
and the fear of death that most of the ‘classical’ ontologies of the social were
constructed, whether it was a matter of basing the need for a sovereign (that is,
for a principle of totalization capable of putting a stop to fragmentation) on the
fear of violent death at the hands of another, as in Hobbes, or one of founding
an institution, an entity viewed by men as stronger than men themselves, on the
possibility of death as a gentle, shared and egalitarian passage; while no one
escaped this death, not even the king, the latter’s second body allowed him to
surmount the finality that governed his first body (Kantorowicz 1957).
24 Hannah Arendt was one of the few philosophers to sketch out a metaphysics of
birth as a paradigm for the temporal emergence of radically new events (1958,
246–7).
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25 See Samuel Y. Edgerton’s work on the role attributed to the paintings displayed
in courtrooms (1985).
26 See Boltanski 2012, especially part 1, ‘What People Can Do’.
27 See Foucault 1978, 25–6 and 136–45; and Le Bras 2000.
28 Studying the structure of mental categories, Rosch (1977) has shown how,
unlike the categories that appear in scholarly nomenclatures, mental categories
should not be conceived as homogeneous species bounded by frontiers, but
rather viewed in terms of focal points and periphery, with fuzzy borders.
29 On the relationship that the social sciences have maintained with the question of
singularity, a difficult one, to say the least, see Heinich 1998.
30 Let us note, however, the existence of one important work by a social scientist
that deals with the social processes of individual identity formation and manifestations of singularity: Béatrice Fraenkel’s book on the history of the signature
(1992). In this work, Fraenkel shows in particular how a signature, which bears
the trace of the signer’s very body, through the gesture from which it proceeds,
has come to confirm contracts in a lasting way in the absence of the contracting
parties and even in the absence of witnesses, by playing the role of a durable
substitute for presence.
31 With the exception – if we agree to consider it a ‘social science’ – of psychoanalysis, which equipped itself from the outset with instruments for going back
and forth between the constitution of a general architectonics and attention to
the manifestations through which persons reveal themselves in what is most
singular about them, most notably owing to the particular character of every
biographical trajectory.
32 By considering that socialization operates on an infant treated as an amorphous
substratum offered by the species to society, as it were, sociology initially sought
to combat conceptions that were intended to establish the existence of groups
on a biological basis and that consequently sought to deduce the properties
common to the members of a group from their belonging to the same race,
according to a model derived from the one independently deployed in animal
husbandry in the case of domestic animals.
33 Disciplines such as the anthropology of birth and the anthropology of reproduction have come to the fore fairly recently; their development doubtless owes a
great deal to the feminization of the profession.
34 These ancestors do not all have the same ‘kinship weight’ and are in different relations of descent with respect to this individual, depending on whether
the system is patrilinear (descent through the male line), matrilinear (descent
through the female line) or cognatic (descent without distinction by sex).
35 My description of these fundamentals of kinship is based on the one found in
Godelier and Hassoun 1996, 36–7.
36 Regarding the problem of cohesiveness in societies not organized as states
(known as ‘primitive’ or ‘simple’ societies), this model extends solutions proposed by political philosophy and later by sociology to account for cohesiveness
in societies organized as states (‘political’ or ‘complex’ societies). The question
of how human beings can avoid war of all against all comes from Hobbes:
the idea that exchange constitutes a peaceful substitute for war comes from
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38
39
40
Notes to pp. 31–5
eighteenth-century political philosophy, especially that of Adam Smith (see
Hirschman 1977); finally, the idea of cohesiveness brought about by way of
differentiation comes from Émile Durkheim (1984), although Claude LéviStrauss modified it profoundly: he eliminated one term in Durkheim’s opposition
(mechanical solidarity) so as to extend organic solidarity to ‘primitive’ or
‘simple’ societies. The cohesiveness of these societies, even if they have not developed organic solidarity through division of labour to any great extent, does not
depend solely on mechanical solidarity (through similarity), since the forms of
differentiation associated with kinship give rise to a dependency that is expressed
peacefully in the logic of exchange.
This scenario (as Maurice Godelier himself readily acknowledges), like all ‘origin
stories’ – not only those of Rousseau and the contractualists but also those told
by Freud and Lévi-Strauss – presents a hypothetical, even mythical, character,
but it makes it possible to bring to light a fundamental dimension of social
existence.
Let us note that this mythical genesis of memory and therefore of duration and
its inscription in a history, by way of the passage from a sexuality governed by
the phases of the oestral cycle to a sexuality capable of being satisfied at any
time, is depicted by Kant in ‘Conjectural beginning of human history’ (1963).
While for Rousseau sexuality plays no role in the passage from the state of
nature to the historical situation, for Kant it intervenes through the intermediary of refusals, which, since the periods during which sexual activity is possible
are no longer predetermined, can always be opposed to the desires that they
thereby render more intense and shift in the direction of the imagination. It
was for the purpose of overcoming the state of non-satisfaction pursuant to a
refusal, by using seduction to overcome the resistance to desire, that the artifices
of civilization (architecture, dress and so on) were invented and a displacement
from sensual attractions to ideal attractions was brought about, marking a
step towards ‘progress in the sentiment of the beautiful and the sublime’. But
since ‘seduction’ deployed to conquer the resistances of a refusal presupposes
‘awareness of the freedom of another’, this mythical genesis of culture is also a
mythical genesis of right and recognition (see Philonenko 1986, 155–9). I thank
Eric Vigne, who drew my attention to the role Kant attributed to sexuality in the
process of humanization.
The idea that Devereux is pursuing (but that I have not adopted in my own
interpretation) is that counter-Oedipal factors take precedence over the Oedipal
factors. For the reasons I have just given, aggressivity not only on the part of the
father but on the part of both parents towards very young children would win
out over the aggressivity of the young child towards his or her father.
There is one animal – mythical, to be sure – that combines the characteristics of
the individual and the species: the phoenix, as Béatrice Fraenkel remarked, citing
Ernst Kantorowicz (Fraenkel 1992, 88). This is why the ‘dignity’ attached to an
office is comparable to the phoenix: just as the royal seal actualizes the ‘twinship
of the royal subject’, the phoenix actualizes the coincidence ‘of the species and
the individual’. The parallel is rather apt, Kantorowicz observes, for ‘there was
always only one Phoenix living at a time’ (1957, 388); each new phoenix was
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identical to the previous one and would be identical with the one that followed.
Moreover, these birds could be seen to share ‘the privilege . . . of angels to be at
once species and individual’ (ibid., 394); Kantorowicz notes that to Baldus de
Ubaldis ‘the Phoenix represented one of the rare cases in which the individual
was at once the whole existing species so that indeed species and individual
coincided’ (ibid., 389–90).
41 Here I must cite almost in full the passage in which Lévi-Strauss synthesizes
this difference: ‘These clarifications were necessary to enable us to emphasize,
without risk of misunderstanding, the sociological and at the same time relative
nature of the notion of a species as well as of an individual. From the biological point of view, men who belong to the same race (assuming that a precise
sense can be given to this term) are comparable to the individual flowers which
blossom, open and wither on the same tree: they are so many specimens of a
variety or sub-variety. Similarly, all the members of the species Homo sapiens
are logically comparable to the members of any other animal or plant species.
However, social life effects a strange transformation in this system, for it encourages each biological individual to develop a personality; and this is a notion
no longer recalling specimens within a variety, but rather types or varieties of
species, probably not found in nature (although there is a suggestion of it now
and again in the tropical environment) and which could be termed “monoindividual”. What disappears with the death of a personality is a synthesis of
ideas and modes of behavior as exclusive and irreplaceable as the one a floral
species develops out of the simple chemical substances common to all species’
(Lévi-Strauss 1966, 214).
42 Frédéric Keck, ‘Individu et personne dans La pensée sauvage de Lévi-Strauss’,
unpublished. I thank Professor Keck, who drew my attention to Lévi-Strauss’s
text and to the distinctions he sets up.
43 Such a stubbornly counterfactual position has not failed to provoke equally
questionable reactions, moreover; on the basis of the same opposition (society
vs. the singular individual), these latter have led to enterprises intended to stress
the other term. They have often taken as their watchword the notion of ‘person’
borrowed from a definition (a weak version of the Kantian tradition) in which it
was charged with the moral values of ‘autonomy’ and ‘responsibility’. One could
then oppose the ‘autonomy’ and ‘responsibility’ of the ‘subject’ as a ‘person’ to
the ‘conformity’ of the ‘collective’, which obviously opened the way to the facile
counterattack that consists in unveiling the class prejudices (the ‘elite’ versus
the ‘masses’) underlying this version of the opposition between ‘individual’ and
‘society’; and so on.
Chapter 2 The Two Constraints on Engendering
1 John Rawls’s constructivist strategy (1971), although it is consistent with analytic philosophy, offers more than a meta-ethical clarification of our intuitive
moral judgement. Rawls seeks to establish a construction that points towards
a form of universal validity even though it is historically circumscribed. His
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3
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5
6
7
8
9
10
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Notes to pp. 39–42
starting point is a fiction that he calls the original situation, in which persons
in a state of uncertainty choose a contract that is to bind them together; at the
other end of the spectrum, after he has established the principles of justice, he
compares the results achieved to the judgements ‘that we now make intuitively’
(ibid., 19). ‘From this standpoint, as Rawls himself notes, the construction and
justification of a theory of justice are strictly analogous to the construction and
justification of a grammatical theory’ (Van Parijs 1984, 7).
On the use of the notion of ‘tangibility’ in sociology, see Bessy and
Chateauraynaud 1994.
More generally, see Descola 1994, 93–101.
To conceive of this, we can look at the way Jean-Jacques Rousseau conceives of
the inauguration of society in The Social Contract (1994). The contract binds
each individual to himself or herself, and the same empirical beings, in different
states, either disperse according to the interests that govern the personal will of
each one, or else they constitute a collective in which each turns towards the
common good, with members coordinating their individual wills so as to form
a general will. Each individual is thus traversed by the difference between the
state of citizen (the union of human beings in this state composes the collective)
and the state of private individual endowed with selfish interests (the interaction between beings in this latter state leads to the ruin of political society). See
Derathé 1970.
Infanticide is attested notably in the case of twin births, whether one or both of
the infants are killed. For an African example, see Turnbull 1965, 177–8 (AF).
The infant’s face is turned towards the earth and suffocation is then permissible.
Alfred Métraux gives an example of the same type among the Mataco Indians of
the Grand Chaco. An abandoned woman gives birth to a boy. She manifests no
interest in him and wants to kill him. But the women of her family are opposed
to this, and by exerting pressure they get her to put the child to her breast. Once
he has nursed, the child’s life is saved, because, in this society as in many others,
a woman never kills a child she has begun to nurse (Métraux 1943 [AF]).
The same is true of the Cooper Eskimos; see Ford 1964, 74.
On the selection of infants at birth in Roman society, see Rousselle 1988, 49–51.
The Sedang, studied by George Devereux, declare that the child, before being put
to the breast, is ‘more or less just like a block of wood’ (1955, 51). In Annick
Tillier’s remarkable study on infanticide in Brittany in the nineteenth century,
there are indications that seem to attest to a reticence of the same nature, a
reluctance to recognize the humanity and even the quality of life in the being that
has just emerged from the womb. Thus a widow tried for infanticide, someone
otherwise known in her village as an excellent mother (she had already had
two children during her marriage), said when she was interrogated by the judge
(‘What did you do immediately after giving birth?’): ‘I put it in an old petticoat
under my bed.’ (‘Did you ascertain first whether your child was alive?’): ‘I didn’t
even look at it . . . It wasn’t crying at all’ (2001, 142–3).
Denise Paulme makes a similar observation about the Dogon. She remarks that
abortion and infanticide are frequent practices in Dogon society, especially when
the child is thought to be illegitimate, even though officially they are strictly
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forbidden. But she notes that the problem was resolved in an earlier period by
selling such children as slaves to Fulani shepherds from the plains (1940, 603
[AF]).
Meillassoux points out nevertheless that in certain medieval African societies,
captives were abducted ‘from within the same community, among relatives and
neighbors’ (1991, 143). This is what he calls ‘brigandage’, for example in the
ancient tradition of the Mande: armed bands ‘exercised their power by attacking indiscriminately and thus undermined the effectiveness of the bonds linking
those who belonged to the same society’ (ibid., 146), provoking a risk of social
disintegration. The struggle against brigandage seems to have been at the origin
of the empire of Mali, whose slave-trading enterprises were oriented towards the
outside world.
‘How is a slave defined in black Africa? The BaCongo say that a slave is mwana
gata, a “child of the village”—somewhat as we would say “a street child”, that
is, somehow “anonymous”, or better yet “public” in the sense of “fille publique”
[prostitute]. For all the others, free men, are sons of such-and-such, they belong
to a lineage, to a clan: they have a name, a kinship identity’ (Testard 1998,
31–69).
Personal communication from Jean Bazin.
‘What destiny was offered the slaves who died natural deaths?’ Memel-Fotê
asked. ‘For them, death without publicity, death without washing and without
display, death without a crowd and without expense, neither of time nor of food.
Death without tears, except for the unofficial private tears of free young men and
women, their familiars, a death without funeral rites, in the manner of social
non-beings, newborns, such was their lot’ (1996, 48).
‘Society is split in two: on one side, men and women who respect their bodies
and their honor, pudor; on the other, men and women of whom sexual services
may be asked because they are notoriously without honor, impudici. These
latter are not limited to notorious prostitutes. There are all the house slaves and
also the freedmen. Free men of the higher classes have sexual personnel at their
disposal. Some are purchased solely for this purpose: these are the ministri who
serve at the pleasure of the master or of the free men of the household. Nothing
out of the ordinary. They are called concubinus or concubine, “the one [male or
female] who shares the bed”’(Dupont and Éloi 2001, 140).
Thus it was taken for granted by the Greeks that slaves who had sexual intercourse with free citizens could engender human beings, whose status then had to
be specified. It is precisely because nothing distinguished free human beings from
slaves that their union had to be proscribed: ‘it is inconceivable in Athens that
an Athenian woman should marry a slave’ (see Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1985,
141; more generally, see especially Vidal-Naquet 1985). The same tendency is
apparent in the Roman practice of awarding freedom, which brought the freed
slave from the ‘status of object’ to that of a ‘subject of law’ and invested him
or her thus unambiguously with the status of ‘human being’, in particular by
endowing him or her with a kinship group (see Finley 1980, 96–7).
Recalling Aristotle’s definition of man (zôon logon ekhon – ‘a living being
capable of speech’), Hannah Arendt writes: ‘Aristotle only formulated the
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20
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22
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current opinion of the polis about man and the political way of life, and
according to this opinion, everybody outside the polis – slaves and barbarians –
was aneu logou, deprived, of course, not of the faculty of speech, but of a way
of life in which speech and only speech made sense’ (Arendt 1958, 27).
These examples also indicate that operations that deprive human beings of the
symbolic dimensions constitutive of their humanity, as in the case of slavery,
are never, or almost never, the result of spontaneous movements that could be
accomplished effortlessly; rather, they require a specific effort to dehumanize.
This is no doubt the case, as the Lévinassian paradigm suggests (see Lévinas
1969), because human beings have faces; they can face up to those who do not
acknowledge their humanity and consider them by resting their gaze on them. In
the testimony of Jewish deportees, one sometimes finds a narrative of moments,
presented as especially troubling, during which their executioners forgot – as in
Freudian slips – to deny the humanity of those they had characterized as subhuman: for example, when a German doctor at Auschwitz entered the room where
a female deportee sent to the camp hospital was undressing, the doctor hastily
backed out with an apology. Such recollections are marked with the shame that
accompanies compromise, when the victim has acknowledged the act of recognition (for example, by returning a glance) and has drawn an advantage from it or
has had his or her life saved (see Pollak 1990). In the concentration camps where
dehumanization was pushed to its most extreme limits, indeed to the point of
absurdity, the very horror of the sadistic behaviour with which the masters
treated the detainees shows how hard it was for them not to acknowledge the
humanity denied their victims. In fact, such sadistic behaviour would have been
without foundation if the power of the SS had been exercised on things or even
animals (although treatment of this type can be applied to animals; but then
it is necessary to credit them with some human aspect, as when one speaks of
the ‘imploring’ look of the animal one is about to butcher; see Rémy 2004).
The various types of authority correspond to various ways of conceiving of the
entity that has symbolically been put in the originary position invoked by the
holders of authority in order to legitimize the credit from which they benefit; see
Ricoeur 2007.
In his conclusion, Mauss writes: ‘Things sold . . . are still followed around by
their former owner, and they follow him also’ (2002, 84).
The idea of the mother’s adoption of the being she bears within her is present in
quasi-explicit form in many cultures. Thus in central Thailand it is said, in cases
of miscarriage, that ‘the mother ate her child’ (Hanks 1963, 34 [AF]).
‘By promising, I give myself a new obligation, and this is not a secondary (perlocutionary) consequence of my words, since one cannot attribute meaning to
them prior to this creation of obligation’ (Ducrot and Todorov 1979, 344).
To clarify the relation between the autonomy possessed by the mother (who
may or may not acquiesce to what is happening to her in the wake of sexual
intercourse) and the transmission to a new being of a singularity that will contribute to engaging that being in humanity, we can reconsider and extend the
analogy introduced earlier between promising and what I am calling here the
act of confirmation. If we follow Paul Ricoeur in The Course of Recognition
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(2005, 127–34) and agree to see a promise as ‘a paradigmatic example of ipseity’
(ibid., 127), since making a promise entails ‘the more fundamental promise . . .
of keeping one’s word in all circumstances’ and, binding self to self with this
‘promise that precedes any promise-making’ (ibid.,129), then one acknowledges
by the same token the permanence of one’s identity as singular (even if one’s
being changes with respect to ‘sameness’, as a result of ageing, for example).
What I have called the confirmation given by the mother also contributes, as a
promise, to confirming the ipseity or sameness, and thereby the singularity, of
the one who, through this act of confirmation, transmits her own singularity to
another being. (Ricoeur’s text, published – unfortunately for me – after I had
nearly completed my work, sheds light on many aspects of the effort I am sketching out here.)
25 On ‘missing women’ in India (around 30 million) and in China (around 38
million), see Sen 2000, 124.
26 The term ‘institution’ is used here in the sense in which Marcel Mauss used it
when he said he meant to ‘understand institutions, that is, public rules of action
and thought’ (Mauss 1968, 25).
27 It is moreover by relying on this argument that I proposed, in The New Spirit of
Capitalism, to define ‘exploitation in the strong sense’ by the fact that persons in
a certain world (the industrial world, in this case) are treated in such a mutilating
way that the possibility of acceding to worth in a different world is no longer
available (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, 372).
Chapter 3 Understandings
1 Thus, for example, a female slave cannot confer on her child a singularity that
she herself does not possess. I am seeking to develop elsewhere the idea that
this constraint has a general character and would consequently also be valid for
animals, plants and objects.
2 The power to confirm beings that have come in the flesh or to deny them confirmation, either through abortion or, in many societies, through infanticide,
constitutes an essential element of women’s unofficial power, a power that is
thus dominated (rather than dominating), if it is weighed against men’s official
power. Catherine Alès (1998) shows that, among the Yanowamï, whose theories
of procreation prioritize the father’s role (or the fathers’ roles, for the Yanowamï
recognize multi-paternity) with the belief that the spirits – ‘without which the
child could not be brought to term and be viable . . . transit exclusively through
the paternal seed’ (ibid., 295), women, who are ‘excluded from the use of visible
or concealed life-destroying weapons, still have the power of life and death, the
one they exercise over newborns at the moment of birth. They do not hesitate
to use it, moreover, in avenging themselves on men who have mistreated or
abandoned them’ (ibid., 300).
3 There is an undeniable link, although it has not been explicitly studied, between
this typology and at least four of the six polities presented in On Justification
(Boltanski and Thévenot 2006), namely, the inspired polity for type (a), the
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domestic polity for type (b), and a compromise between the civic and industrial
polities for type (c); as for the polity of fame, based on reputation, it doubtless
comes into play in the construction of type (b). Finally, type (d), presented in
chapter 4, is directly inspired by the intentional polity outlined in The New Spirit
of Capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). No correspondence to the market
polity is apparent in the construction presented here. But such a correspondence
could probably be sketched out by taking into account recent debates over the
costs of child-rearing and the question of who, in an insurance-focused logic,
must bear the costs for supporting a handicapped child whose birth has been
allowed. These debates, associated with the appearance of predictive diagnostic
methods, are beginning to take place in the United States, but they have not yet
been sufficiently developed in Europe for me to have found it necessary to take
them into account.
The relation between understandings regarding engendering and polities, in
the sense they have in On Justification, is nevertheless problematic. A simple
explanation would consist in saying that the various understandings propose different definitions of what constitutes the worth of the child to be born. But one
cannot push the analogy to the point of considering that abortion, infanticide
or abandonment would intervene following a test of worth, for these practices
never have a legitimate character (even when they are legal, as we shall see). If
we want to maintain a reference to the notion of test, we must consider that it is
displaced onto the progenitors and onto the conditions of legitimate engendering, with the alternatives of either engendering a being endowed with properties
that inscribe it in humanity or not engendering at all.
Throughout this paragraph I am following Anita Guerreau-Jalabert’s remarkable
article ‘Spiritus et caritas: le baptême dans la société médiévale’ (GuerreauJalabert 1995).
On this point Guerreau-Jalabert 1995 cites Bloch and Guggenheim 1981.
In the Roman world, ‘the mere fact of physical birth’ did not suffice to insert the
new human being in a common humanity; for that, ‘[i]ts father must lift it from
the floor. If not, the little bundle of ensouled matter, as much a fetus as if it were
still in its mother’s womb, must wait for others to collect it from a place outside
the father’s house. The fetus could be aborted in the womb’ (Brown 1988, 28).
Things were different in Christian late antiquity: ‘Nor did the products of sexual
intercourse lie any longer in a neutral zone, waiting for the family to decide
whether they were relevant or not to human society. . . . By the sixth century,
the ancient right of the Roman father to decide whether or not he would accept
a newborn child was spoken of as a custom that belonged to a distant, pagan
age. As Tertullian put it, with lapidary brevity: “What will be human is human”’
(ibid., 438).
Translator’s note: the moment known as ‘quickening’ in English is called animation in French, from the Latin animare, ‘to fill with breath or soul’.
In addition to valuable information I have received from Jérôme Alexandre,
I am drawing here on a book titled L’enfant à naître (Congourdeau 2000),
a collection of texts by Tertullian, Gregory, Augustine, Maxim, Cassiodorus
and pseudo-Augustine (especially the editor’s excellent introduction), and on a
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classic work titled Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic
Theologians and Canonists (Noonan 1966).
One of the stakes in the dispute was the question of the transmission of original
sin.
Relying on McLaren 1984 (especially pp. 102–7), I shall return later to the role
played in the criminalization of abortion by doctors’ abandonment of the idea
that quickening constituted a pertinent threshold in foetal development.
Barbara Duden devotes a chapter to the importance attributed, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the moment of quickening (the moment when
pregnancy could be made public). She relies especially on an anecdote reported
in Samuel Pepys’s journal concerning the ‘king’s mistress’, who let it be known
during a dinner party that she was pregnant and that she had felt the child stir in
her womb (1993, 79–82).
Very interesting examples are found in Claverie and Lamaison 1973; this study
focuses on a ‘household’ society (à ousta) in the Gevaudan during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
As Jacques Rossiaud explains: ‘In most of the cities of the Southwest there was
a prostibulum publicum, built, maintained, and governed by the public authorities, princely or municipal. . . . The prostibulum, which had generally been built
with common funds, i.e., with public money, was contractually leased to an
abbess or a lessee who theoretically had a monopoly on the profession. These
people were responsible for recruiting the girls – accepted or not by an officer of
justice – and making them respect certain rules; sometimes they supported the
girls, and they always enforced order in the little female community. In case of
need – in case the abbess departed or died during the lease term, for example –
the consuls did not hesitate to manage the house themselves’ (1976, 290).
Many examples can be found in Claverie and Lamaison 1973.
In another text, Flandrin notes that 80 per cent of the rapes that left traces in the
judicial archives ‘were collective and almost public rapes, by gangs of bachelors
– servants, journeymen, apprentices, clerks, sons of craftsmen or of merchants’.
The woman was forcibly removed from her home at night, beaten and raped.
She was often obliged to accept money, as evidence that she had become a
prostitute (1980, 31).
I owe to remarks by Cyril Lemieux the idea that an ideal and a fiction can be
treated as different descriptions of a single provision.
Cited in Flandrin 1979, 180. On the belief that ‘immorality’ – that is, making
love too often while taking too much pleasure in it, or making love in the context
of illegitimate relations – is, where women are concerned, a cause of sterility, see
also Darmon 1981, 27–30.
The practice of coitus interruptus, initiated under the Old Regime among the
upper classes, became increasingly widespread during the Revolution and the
Empire; see Le Roy Ladurie 1979, especially pp. 239–54.
On the history of contraceptive techniques, see in particular McLaren 1984.
In the context of the understanding with the kinship group, infanticide seems
most often to come in the wake of failed abortion attempts; see Tillier 2001,
337–40.
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21 Murders of newborns, which numbered 600 in trial records in Brittany between
1825 and 1865, according to Annick Tillier, most often featured single women
or illegitimate couples. ‘It was very rare, among the affairs that were brought to
the attention of the judicial system and that led to trials, for stable, legitimate
couples to be involved . . . Crimes of infanticide were motivated by the illegitimate character of the children who were its victims. The accused were largely
single (86.37%). Next came adulterous married women (6.99%), then widows
(6.64%)’ (2001, 201). Peter Charles Hoffer and N. E. H. Hull, who carried out
a statistical study of infanticide in England and in New England between the
late sixteenth century and the early nineteenth, made similar observations. Thus,
studying 139 cases of accusations of infanticide in Essex, Middlesex, Hertford
and Sussex that came to trial between 1558 and 1623, they found that the victim
was an illegitimate child in 85.6 per cent of the cases and that the accused (a
woman in 89.2 per cent of the cases) was most often either single or a widow (79
per cent) (Hoffer and Hull 1981, 96–7).
22 As in the case of polygamy among nobles in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
especially in the south of France; see Harsgor 1975. Mikhaël Harsgor shows
how the position of the Catholic Church was caught between rejection – since
the very existence of these illegitimate offspring ‘was a permanent reminder of
scandal’, there was an inclination to get rid of them – and recognition – since
these beings belonged by right to common humanity, so that, for example,
they were ‘admitted to the sacrament of marriage under the same conditions as
legitimate children’ (1975, 325–6; cited in Tillier 2001, 41).
23 The fact remains that infanticide itself is often difficult to establish, as pregnancies are often concealed, with childbirths taking place in secret. Among many
other examples, Ambroise Tardieu attests to this in his Étude médico-légale de
l’infanticide: ‘In the immense majority of infanticides, the pregnancy was carefully concealed and the birth took place in clandestinity, so all the circumstances
that surrounded it were enveloped in mystery, and the expert charged with
assessing these had only, in his search for clarity, allegations too self-interested
not to have been often orchestrated according to the needs of the defence, or
even absolutely false’ (1976, v; cited in Tillier 2001, 41).
24 François Lebrun makes similar remarks concerning France: ‘abortion is rarely
pursued in court’. For example, ‘the criminal division of the Parlement of
Rennes had to deal with only six affairs of this type during the entire eighteenth
century’, whereas ‘recourse to abortive practices was common in the world of
prostitution, from lofty courtesans to women of the streets’ (1975, 140).
25 On the way in which farm workers, artisans and small farmers lost the places
they had occupied in local society and, between 1790 and 1830, came to rejoin
the ‘industrial’ masses around cotton manufacturing plants, see Thompson
1964, especially part 2. During the same period, these ‘masses’ were envisaged in
a global way, in terms of ‘populations’, by Malthus, and their living conditions
were conceived by economists in terms of ‘subsistence’ and ‘biological laws’; see
Polanyi 2001, 130–62.
26 The phenomenon seems to have begun somewhat earlier in England; see Laslett
1977, 108–30.
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27 It was in this context that maternity clinics were developed, serving as sites of
welcome, and often death, for abandoned young women and for the children
they bore; see Beauvalet-Boutouyrie 1999 and Fuchs 1992.
28 For a detailed comparative analysis, see Laslett, Oosterveen and Smith 1980.
29 On this mechanism, see Žižek 1992, 39–41. Referring to the great collective
ceremonies held in states under Communist regimes, Slavoj Žižek writes:
‘[R]itualized spectacles followed one after another in which no one “really
believed” and everybody knew that nobody believed, but the Party bureaucrats
were nonetheless uncommonly frightened by the possibility that the appearance
of belief would disintegrate. They perceived this disintegration as a total catastrophe, as the dissolution of the entire social order. The question to be asked
here is simply: if nobody “really believed”, and if everybody knew that nobody
believed, what was then the agency, the gaze for whom the spectacle of belief
was staged?’ (ibid., 40).
30 ‘One would also place scandal among the sentiments characteristic of hierarchical relationships, for it was never an inferior who scandalized his superior but
always the latter who scandalized the former. . . . In fact, . . . the inferior . . . had
no power to correct his superiors’ (Flandrin 1979, 148).
31 See also Le Bras 2000, especially the editor’s foreword, pp. 9–54.
32 On the homology, especially in Durkheim, between ‘society’ and nation-state,
see Wagner 1994.
33 According to this model, in the last analysis it is the state that has to settle the
question of which lives deserve to be lived and which do not; see Agamben 1998,
136–53.
34 The meritocratic principle then enters into tension with inherited property. But,
at the same time, once persons are detached from their membership in kinship
totalities and local associations, property becomes necessary in order, as Robert
Castel aptly puts it, to ‘“ballast” an individual who is no longer inscribed in
these assigned statuses’. The ‘vagabond’ then becomes the least of men, because
he ‘is not the man of someone who could protect him’, nor is he the owner of
anything but his own body (Castel and Haroche 2001, 36–40).
35 The link between the politics of education and the politics of procreation
becomes evident when one reconstitutes, as Laurent Thévenot has done, the
genealogy of studies of social mobility – where the educational factor is considered as preponderant – that are rooted in Galton’s eugenicist construction of
social value (Thévenot 1990).
36 On Bénedict-Augustin Morel’s theory of degeneration, published in 1857, see
Foucault 2003b, 315–18.
37 Among many studies, see especially Nye 1984.
38 See Teitelbaum and Winter 1985, 18–35, for the years 1870–1958 (in France,
the emphasis is mainly placed on ‘quantity’; in England, ‘quality’ is stressed).
39 Adolphe Pinard, one of the great promoters of puericulture in France early
in the twentieth century, thus proposed to add the following formula to the
Declaration of Human Rights: ‘Every healthy adult citizen has two great duties
to accomplish: the first is to produce, that is, to work; the second is to reproduce,
and to reproduce well’ (cited in Carol 1995, 201).
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40 The idea of state control of access to sexual union and to procreation according
to the biological quality of the candidates seems to have been introduced in a
systematic way by the German physician Johann Peter Frank, whose monumental work Système d’une police médicale complète was published in six volumes
between 1779 and 1819; see Hick 2001, 41–59.
41 The idea of sterilizing individuals deemed unfit to reproduce had broad echoes, in
the first third of the twentieth century, especially in the United States, Germany
and Sweden. The eugenicist use of vasectomy – to sterilize criminals who were
repeat offenders, as well as ‘degenerates’ – seems to have originated in the early
twentieth century in the United States, in a penitentiary in Indiana. Female
sterilization began at roughly the same time. Even though the figures may seem
significant in retrospect (for example, 500 vasectomies among young prisoners
in Indiana between 1909 and 1912), such measures still seem hard to imagine
on a large scale, even though that is what a number of eugenicists (notably
Charles Richer) were advocating. Legislative measures providing for voluntary
or forced sterilization were adopted most notably in the period between the wars
(in the Swiss canton of Vaud in 1928; in Denmark in 1929; in Sweden in 1935).
No measure of this type was adopted in France, where the numerous projects
for improving the quality of the population through forced sterilization ran up
against vigorous resistance. Eugenic sterilization was massive in Nazi Germany
after its legal institution in 1933; it affected 400,000 persons. See Giami and
Leridon 2000; for the history of sterilization before the 1930s, see especially the
contributions of Michel Erlich and André Béjin in the same volume, and, for the
following period, those of Jean-Paul Gaudillière and Benoît Massin.
42 Flandrin thus recalls that in the nineteenth century the Bavarian state had proposed laws forbidding the poor to marry (Flandrin 1979, 179). The project of
‘excluding from marriage individuals who did not correspond to certain conditions of age, beauty and health’, and to deliver authorizations for marriage,
appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was not carried out,
except in the form of the prenuptial certificate issued by Vichy. See Carol 1995,
24ff.
43 Much more rigorous criminal measures were applied to those who performed
abortions (especially in cases where the woman died) than to the women who
underwent the procedure, when they survived.
44 To take just one example, a speech made in the Reichstag in 1905 dealt with
the relation between hereditary defects and alcoholism in a way that pointed
towards controls over sexual intercourse and procreation: ‘The Association
against the Abuse of Alcoholic Beverages argued in 1905 that as alcohol-induced
hereditary degeneracy resulted in economic losses and burdens on the Poor
Law, the state ought to intervene. Since the state was responsible for the care
of minors, the mentally subnormal, the deaf, the dumb and the blind, it ought
to tackle these problems at the root by controlling alcoholism. State support for
welfare clinics meant that a network was established to locate and select the
diseased for institutionalization and treatment. Such clinics could be turned to
eugenic ends’ (Weindling 1989, 186).
45 François-André Isambert thus notes that ‘the wave of medico-legal and medico-
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social studies produced in the period before the outbreak of war in 1914’ led
to ‘practical conclusions’ aiming ‘most often to make repression more effective
through systematic identification and severe condemnation of women who
abort’. For these social hygienists, it was thus a matter of ‘protecting women
against themselves and against back-street abortionists. Children are rarely
mentioned in this literature’, Isambert adds: ‘the notion of abortion as a “social
scourge” places abortion on the same level as alcoholism or traffic accidents and
all the massive irrational behaviours through which citizens destroy themselves
and that it is fitting to avoid and to sanction, for sanctions can play a dissuasive
role’ (1982, 365).
Concerning England, see Keown 1988, 21, and McLaren 1984, 114; for France,
see Le Naour and Valenti 2003, 14.
As Tillier does for France, Reagan takes the years 1840–50 for the United States
as the period in which many professional abortionists appeared – and advertised
in newspapers in scarcely veiled terms (Reagan 1997, 10).
In England, they achieved their goals in 1828 and 1837 with modifications of the
1803 law, so that abortion was criminalized whether it took place before or after
quickening; see McLaren 1984, 138–43.
The idea, widespread in the nineteenth century, that abortion ‘damaged’ women
and thus harmed their reproductive capacities already appears in Malthus. In the
expanded edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population, in a chapter titled
‘Of the checks to population among the American Indians’ (book 1, chapter
4), Malthus writes: ‘This state of depression and constant labour, added to the
unavoidable harshness of savage life, must be very unfavourable to the office of
child-bearing: and the libertinage which generally prevails among the women
before marriage, with the habit of procuring abortions, must necessarily render
them more unfit for bearing children afterwards’ (1986, 30–1).
Therapeutic abortion was recognized in France in 1852, but it seems to have
been defined more narrowly in France than in the Anglo-Saxon countries. The
validity of this act was recognized by the Academy of Medicine and its practice
was tolerated without being explicitly legalized. The operation was performed
under conditions of ‘openness’: ‘the family was notified, the consent of the
mother obtained and the surgical act took place only after the doctor had consulted with two other practitioners’ (Le Naour and Valenti 2003, 29–36).
Before the development of predictive tests and foetal medicine, doctors tended
to treat cases of abnormality or deformity in newborns by practising discreet
forms of infanticide, again under cover both of concertation among several
doctors and of medical secrecy. Legalization of this practice – known as euthanasia – in France was sought starting in the early twentieth century (see Carol
1995, 246).
On the consistent Catholic opposition to eugenicism from the nineteenth century
on, see Pichot 2009, 122–5 and 179. On the use of Darwinism as an instrument
of the innovating elites in the struggle against Catholicism, see Pick 1989, 29.
For Weimar Germany, see Weindling 1989, 464–9.
This distinction was also intended to reduce poverty, since defective persons,
owing to natural selection, were reputed to be more numerous among the poor
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and biologically healthy individuals more numerous among the rich. In spite of
everything, the project of state control of sexual intercourse was to be above
the consideration of social conditions and based only on objective biological
data. Thus the theoreticians of eugenicism came around to acknowledging the
existence of poor people who were nevertheless competent to engender and rich
people who were nevertheless degenerate. This came about because the social
logic of kinship and inheritance had up to that point unjustly won out over the
logic of natural selection.
55 In particular by extrapolating from cases in which women were treated in hospitals for accidents that had occurred during abortions.
56 One of the studies was based on records from the tribunal correctionnel of
the Seine department concerning women who had aborted and who had been
indicted and tried between January 1956 and March 1957; the other was based
on medical records of women who had been hospitalized in 1960 for postabortion complications in the department of obstetric gynaecology of the hôpital
de la Pitié in Paris.
Chapter 4 The Parental Project
1 This is the case for a great number of women who make pilgrimages to a site
where the Virgin is said to have appeared; see Claverie 2003.
2 See article 27 of the 4 July 2001 Aubry law: this law provides, under very
restrictive conditions, for the possibility of sterilization for ‘persons in whom
the alteration of mental faculties’ has justified placement under guardianship
or trusteeship, when an ‘imperious medical motive’ can be invoked (such as
a ‘formal counter-indication of contraceptive methods or the impossibility of
implementing them effectively’). The procedure has to be authorized by the
judge responsible for guardianships after he or she has received an opinion
from a committee of experts and heard testimony from the person in question
‘in order to be assured of the reality of his or her consent’ (memorandum DGS/
DHOS no. 2001–467, 26 September 2001, concerning the implementation of
the provisions of the 4 July 2001 law dealing with contraception and the voluntary termination of pregnancy).
3 For a striking expression of this modernist historical vision, see Gauthier 2002,
26–42.
4 The effectiveness of contraceptive techniques seems to have contributed to
the development of an ethos towards engendering that encourages recourse to
medically assisted reproduction. Certainty that one can have sexual intercourse
without the risk of expecting a child leads to the assumption that all one has to
do to become pregnant is to interrupt contraception. When pregnancy is delayed
more than a few months, many women tend to become increasingly worried;
fearing that they may be sterile, they place their hopes in medical treatment.
According to some experts, this medicalization of pregnancy may be responsible
for the increase in the number of multiple births in recent years.
5 ‘In fact, Planned Parenthood was an educational movement in favour of
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contraception; it sought to give women and couples a notion of responsible
parenthood that would produce wanted, “planned” children. The emphasis
was on fostering responsibility rather than liberating women. When the MLF
[Women’s Liberation Movement] came along, abortion and contraception were
placed on the same plane. This was when people started to talk about “abortioncontraception: a child if I want one, when I want one”. Now, what we wanted
on the initial Planned Parenthood team was contraception rather than abortion,
until ’67. On the sociological and philosophical level it was completely different’
(excerpt from an interview with a woman doctor at Maternité heureuse [Happy
Motherhood], the predecessor of Planned Parenthood in France).
Similarly, François-André Isambert and Paul Ladrière show, in the study they
devoted to analysing the debate on abortion in the popular press between 1965
and 1974, that ‘the hope of seeing contraception replace abortion’ was one of
the main arguments in favour of liberalizing abortion, considered as destined to
become a marginal practice (1979, 78).
All the names included in the interviews have been modified, along with the
names of places when these would have made it possible to identify the persons
we met in hospitals or who spoke to us in other contexts.
On the shift from the inscription of the child in a marriage defined with reference
to kinship to a relation of a new type in which the quality of ‘good parents’ is
supposed to be revealed in a particularly obvious way in the ordeal of a breakup, see Théry 1993, 140–7.
This expression was popularized in particular by its use in the 1994 bioethics
laws in France. Thus one could speak henceforth of ‘supernumerary embryo
without a parental project’ to describe embryos created in the context of medically assisted reproduction that were not reimplanted and that were kept alive
by freezing while awaiting possible later use. For an analysis of the notion of
‘parental project’ in the 1994 bioethics laws, see Edelman 1999, 461–9.
Here we relied in particular on Chalvon-Demersay 1996.
Certain of the themes developed in The New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanski and
Chiapello 2005) originated in an analysis of 1990s management literature.
The most complete synthesis of works devoted to the changes in the family over
the last several decades can be found in Théry 1998.
The ‘survey of family situations’ carried out in 1985 but published only in 1994
showed that two million children lived apart from their fathers, even though
scarcely 2 per cent had never lived with them. The large number is thus not
related to the fathers’ abandonment of pregnant mothers but to the separation
of the parents; the survey showed that separations were occurring earlier and
earlier in children’s lives, multiplying the years lived after the break-up of the
family. The study considered that the probability of living in a blended family
had doubled in just a few years. Beyond that, 3 per cent of the children born
from 1966 to 1970, then 8 per cent of those born from 1971 to 1975 and 11 per
cent of those born from 1976 to 1980 had lived through two family break-ups
in five years (Sullerot 1997, 187ff.).
Henri Leridon estimates that 250,000 abortions are performed in France every
year, including the estimated number of undeclared abortions: according to him,
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16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
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Notes to pp. 100–4
these add up to one abortion for every three births, or for every four pregnancies
(1995, 130).
These figures and those that follow are excerpted from data published by INED
for 1996 and established on the basis of declared abortions for which a statistical
report was filed (162,792 reports in 1996 for 220,000 estimated abortions).
On the way these paths of upward mobility have been more or less dismantled
in recent decades, see Boltanski and Chiapello 2005.
The bond between parents and children is one of the rare bonds that cannot be
treated as strictly contractual in a liberal individualist society; see Singly 2003,
55–8.
See Fiche d’actualité scientifique 2000; Toulemon and Leridon 1998, 114–20,
and Leridon 1998, 435–8.
Toulemon and Leridon 1992, 1–45 (based on INED surveys conducted in 1978
and 1988).
Among historians, the debate has focused especially on a book by Philippe
Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (1960); many of the author’s conclusions have
been challenged. For a recent example, see Alexandre-Bidon and Lett 1999,
54. Contrary to what Ariès believed he had shown, the feelings that medieval
mothers had for their children were very strong. Numerous documents allow us
to see traces of affection and tenderness.
This sentence is from the presentation of a documentary film on newborns published in Télérama 2001.
But its inverse double, the aborted foetus, may be sacrificed to it. Durkheim used
the figure of the inverse double to account for the formation of the opposition
between the sacred and the profane.
An excerpt from a counselling interview with a student couple, age 19: ‘You’ve
talked about this with people you’re close to?’ ‘No, we agreed that it would
be easier to have the abortion if we didn’t talk about it to anyone . . . so we
wouldn’t be judged and also so people wouldn’t talk to me about it years later,
wouldn’t remind me of it.’ Similarly, a 30-year-old woman, a pharmacist,
declared: ‘No, I haven’t talked about it, because not talking about it means I’m
less sad; this way, I talk about other things’ (Paris hospital).
In the paragraphs that follow I shall rely heavily on this excellent work, which is
based on a study involving 73 women of whom ‘53 had abortions and 20 went
ahead with the pregnancy’ (Bajos 2002, 20).
It is only starting from this date that reasonably reliable statistics could be established by INED, since abortions had been decriminalized and were provided for
by the state.
These data are reproduced in Bajos 2002, 1–5. They originated with INED. Let us
note, however, that the term ‘contraception’ – depending on whether it is used by
a demographer seeking statistical exhaustiveness and is concerned with accounting for everything that may resemble a ‘method’, however distantly or closely
and however artisanal it may be, or by a doctor who is writing a prescription
– refers to categories that overlap only in part. The same is true, consequently,
for the evaluation of errors or misfires in contraception. Thus for many doctors,
withdrawal, abstinence or the so-called basal body temperature method cannot
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be considered true contraceptive methods. Similarly, from a medical perspective,
only a pregnancy that occurred while a woman was taking the pill (and did not
forget to take it, and did not lose it owing to a gastric upset) or a pregnancy in the
presence of an IUD represents a real failure of contraception, that is, one attributable to the contraceptive technique itself; statistically, this is not very probable
(about one case in a thousand). As for condoms, laboratory testing notwithstanding, it is very difficult to ascertain how they are going to be used. There is one
approach (the Pearls indicator) that quantifies the number of pregnancies per year
per 100 women as a function of the type of contraception used. For condoms,
without taking into account whether they are used rigorously or not, the estimate
is from 1 to 12 breaks a year per 100 women (naturally, not all the breaks lead
to pregnancies) and from 1.3 to 3 pregnancies a year per 100 women. As for the
pill, provided it is never forgotten, there would be 0.1 pregnancy per year per 100
women; for the IUD, 0.3 to 1.8 pregnancies per year per 100 women.
In events coded as ‘failures of contraception’, it is hard to separate the technical
failures that can be imputed to the contraceptive procedure itself (like a defective
condom or a pregnancy with an IUD in place) from failures attributable to the way
the contraceptive is used (a carelessly used condom, a ‘forgotten’ pill and so on).
This is doubtless in part because initial acts of intercourse often take place
unexpectedly, under the impetus of an emotional attraction; women who have
this experience will not have protected themselves in advance, that is, at the
beginning of their cycle, by taking the pill.
I should specify, however, that not every badly controlled contraceptive (forgotten pill or misused condom) that leads to an aborted pregnancy automatically
signals a split between desire for pregnancy and desire for a child. These errors
may translate into acts a tension that escapes control and is most often recuperated in speech after the fact as a desire ‘not to have a child’: ‘It was an accident,
but in fact I didn’t want it.’
‘The events of women’s bodies, “female” bodies, such as menses, intercourse,
pregnancy, childbirth, abortion, are moments of opening onto strange phenomena, perhaps because they bring to a woman’s mind her relation to her mother.
It is frequently noted that, on the occasion of these events when reality sets in,
women experience subjectively something like a parasitic physical proximity to
their mothers, through flashes, intuition, visions or haunting’ (Chatel 1993, 57).
During a counselling interview, a student, age 23, thus declared: ‘[My mother]
isn’t really in favour of my keeping it, because she says she won’t be able to help
me, she’s so far away . . . and then she had an abortion when she was 23 under
very painful conditions.’ Aother student, age 19, said similarly: ‘I took it well,
my mother is very open, it’s OK, I’m not afraid to be here, my mother, the same
thing happened to her at the same age, the same thing.’
To the question, during the counselling interview: ‘Would you want to tell your
mother you’re pregnant?’, a student, age 23, from Ivory Coast, answered: ‘But
it isn’t possible in my country, it wouldn’t be understood, even though I have a
very good relationship with my mother.’
We could then speak, paraphrasing Françoise Héritier, of incest of the third type.
In fact, in a society such as ours where the relevance of the entire set of lines of
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35
36
37
38
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Notes to pp. 116–26
descent is recognized, when the intervention of the father is erased (a situation
that differs, for example, from one in which the father recognizes the child and
then dies) and the maternal grandmother takes his place and adopts his role, it
is as if the child had been born of two beings who share in a single substance, so
that in them a ‘plurality of sameness’ is achieved. See Héritier 1999, 239–64.
A 37-year-old woman, an assistant director, said during the counselling interview: ‘The man I had this child with is a married man, he has two children . . .
he doesn’t want to leave his wife; he’s never promised me anything, I know, but
I had hoped he’d leave his wife or that he’d make more of a commitment to me,
but when we talked about the abortion, he said: “No, I’m not going to budge”’
(provincial hospital).
A student, age 29, thus said: ‘I didn’t hear another word from him; we’ve known
each other since the end of January, we didn’t get along too well, and anyway, I
had made the decision before I talked to him. He turned out to be irresponsible,
and he even tried blackmail: “If you’re doing this so I’ll stay with you and then
later it doesn’t work out . . . ” I told myself I was lucky; this had let me see who
he really is’ (Paris hospital).
There are inverse situations, however, in which the male progenitor wants to
have the child, while the woman who is carrying it does not want to bring it into
the world. But such situations, very frequent in the understanding with kinship
groups, seem rare in the understanding through projects, in part because in the
latter situation the responsibility for controlling contraceptive techniques falls
to the woman. The cases of this sort that figure in our interviews almost all
involved couples in which the male progenitor was from North Africa or subSaharan Africa. This was the case with Ourdia, who is of Nubian origin. Age 28
and employed at the time of the interview, she had had an abortion three years
earlier. The man who got her pregnant and with whom she was living, although
they did not share an apartment, ‘absolutely’ wanted ‘to keep it’, she said. But
she discovered around this time that her partner had ‘a double life at every level’,
and she decided to break with him. She ‘wanted to have that child’, but not to
‘take sole responsibility for it’.
‘We’re happy, my husband and I, and we told each other that we didn’t see what
one more child was going to bring in the way of more happiness. No, I don’t
see the extra happiness. Everything is fine, and we’re starting to be able to go to
the mountains, for example, with our youngest, and to call everything back into
question, no, when everything is going well in my family’ (age 32, professional
advisor, married, two children) (Paris hospital).
As Annie Bachelot does, for example, in the article cited above (2002).
For a psychoanalytic approach to the problems evoked here, see Bydlowski and
Gauthier 1997.
Chapter 5 Constructing Foetal Categories
1 On the implicit taxonomies, see Berlin, Breedlove and Raven 1968.
2 Speaking (in connection with mana) of these ‘principles of judgements and
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of reasonings’, which he calls ‘categories’, Marcel Mauss notes the following: ‘Constantly present in language, without necessarily being explicit, they
usually exist rather in the form of habits that guide consciousness, while being
unconscious themselves’ (Mauss 1968, 28).
3 See, for example, Martino 1985, Le Bébé est une personne. Tony Lainé and
Gilbert Lauzun, who wrote the book’s preface, had produced a much-discussed
television programme under the same title. The first chapter (‘Voyage au centre
de la mère’ [Voyage to the centre of the mother]) is devoted to the description
of foetal capacities for perception and even interaction. Foetuses ‘hear’, they are
‘capable of communication’, they ‘remember’ and ‘never forget anything’, one
can enter into ‘dialogue with them’ by means of ‘haptonomy’ (by touching the
mother’s belly), and so on.
4 In Happening, Annie Ernaux describes a clandestine abortion, in the 1960s,
performed in the third month of pregnancy: ‘I was seized with a violent urge to
shit. I rushed across the corridor into the bathroom and squatted by the porcelain bowl, facing the door. I could see the tiles between my thighs. I pushed with
all my strength. It burst forth like a grenade, in a spray of water that splashed
the door. I saw a baby doll dangling from my loins at the end of a reddish cord.
I couldn’t imagine ever having had that inside me. I had to walk with it to my
room. I took it in one hand – it was strangely heavy – and proceeded along the
corridor, squeezing it between my thighs’ (2001, 74–5).
5 Since 1988, when sale of the pill known as RU-486 was authorized in France, it
has been possible to perform abortions using a medical technique that consists
in taking a dose of mifepristone and, after 48 hours, a dose of misoprostol, provided no more than seven weeks have passed since the last menstrual period. In
principle, the first pill stops the development of the pregnancy while the second
causes the uterus to contract; expulsion takes place after two days, sometimes
a little bit later. Earlier, the medical abortion method had been used exclusively
in hospitals, public or private, with three hours’ minimum hospitalization after
the second pill was taken. Let us note in passing that, for the woman, this
implies making an appointment as quickly as possible. Yet this does not always
happen, far from it, since only half of the women who decide to interrupt their
pregnancy before the time period prescribed for this method can benefit from
it. Since 1993, about 500,000 women in France have had abortions using this
method. Medical abortion is often preferred to the aspiration approach, which
is considered more invasive owing to the need to spend time in the surgery wing
(with local or general anaesthesia); according to the doctors we interviewed,
the availability of RU-486 sometimes pushes women who would have preferred
a longer period of reflection to make a hasty commitment; they focus all their
attention on the choice of method to the detriment of the decision to interrupt
their pregnancy, in an effort to put the painful episode behind them. In fact, in
clinics that are particularly overburdened with requests for appointments, the
counselling interview that ought to allow, in so far as possible, for a thorough
exploration of the psychological context for the request sometimes takes place
on the same day as the administration of the first pill, which terminates the
pregnancy.
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Notes to pp. 130–4
6 During the sonogram that precedes an abortion, the doctor may have a different
attitude, but this attitude is related to the same norm. One of the women we met
complained that during the sonogram the doctor described to her what he was
seeing (the heart beating and so on), which she interpreted as a sort of ‘cruelty’,
if not ‘sadism’, intended to make her feel guilty.
7 See especially Bourdieu and Boltanski 1975; Bourdieu 1984; and Boltanski
1987.
8 To be complete, the analysis ought to explore the double-entry table formed
by the set of intersecting critiques; these can be formulated, for example, by
showing how the foetus of the project-based understanding can also be critiqued
from the standpoint of the arrangement with the Creator or how the state foetus
can be critiqued from the standpoint of the understanding through kinship, and
so on. However, I have not attempted to produce this demonstration: besides
being a tedious exercise, it would attribute too much importance to critical
modalities that are not very common today.
9 In a study devoted to pro-life movements, Fiammetta Venner describes the
ideology of these groups by associating it both with ‘traditionalism’ and with
a discourse whose references are biological: ‘The embryo is viewed as a person
at its conception, for from the moment of fertilization it possesses the genetic
potential that allows it to develop. This was Jérôme Lejeune’s reasoning when
he evoked before the United States Senate the humanity of the foetus from the
moment of conception . . . The zygote may not be a human person but because it
has the capacity to become one, it must be considered as such. This position can
be associated with that of the Ethics Committee, which, to evoke the embryo,
speaks of the “potential person”. This status of the embryo leads to viewing the
recourse to abortion as criminal . . . The traditionalists assert that the fact of
interfering with an embryo is an attempt to transform and despoil the work of
God, the negation of its character of perfection. By aborting, or by using a means
of contraception, the woman not only “kills” her child, she assassinates God’
(1995, 68–9).
10 The textual environment in which the barbarian foetus is deployed is often
devoted to a critique of the patriarchy as a social order under the domination
of a ‘rule of the father’ which is presented as a norm imposed on everyone,
although it recognizes as fully human only adult males. This domination of
forebears over descendants and of men over women is practised in privileged
fashion through the device of filiation. In sexual intercourse, it is manifested
by the predominance given to the penis and by the requirement of penetration,
with the resulting servitude of women, who are reduced to the status of wives
and mothers and condemned to bear the constraints of obligatory maternity.
For a discussion of the literature on the patriarchal order, see Thompson 2001,
especially 59–63.
11 Rights connected with reproduction and genetic health were defined in the action
programme of the International Conference on Population and Development
held in Cairo in September 1994, a programme designed ‘to help couples and
individuals meet their reproductive goals in a framework that promotes optimum
health, responsibility and family well-being, and respects the dignity of all
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13
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persons and their right to choose the number, spacing and timing of the birth
of their children’ (www.un.org/popin/icpd/conference/offeng/poa.html, accessed
11 Oct. 2011). The charter published in 1996 by the International Planned
Parenthood Federation spells out twelve rights, including, alongside the classic
human rights (such as the right to ‘liberty’ and ‘security’), the ‘right to choose
whether or not to marry and to found and plan a family’ and the ‘right to decide
whether or when to have children’ (www.ipas.org/Publications/asset_upload_
file83_3785.pdf, accessed 11 Oct. 2011). The inclusion of the right to abortion
among reproductive rights is the object of heated controversy. It is usually not
explicitly mentioned in the charters, even if some articles can be interpreted as
favourable to its recognition (see United Nations Population Fund 1998).
Abortion, authorized in Romania under the Communist regime, was banned
in 1996, shortly after Nicolae Ceaus¸escu took over, with the explicit goal of
increasing the population; it had the effect of very significantly increasing the
number of clandestine abortions (see Kligman 1998).
Roser Cusso’s excellent thesis on the place of demography in the World Bank
offers a great deal of information about the way in which the connections
between access to development and demographic control have been constituted
as political and scientific dogma (2001, especially pp. 32–47).
In an article devoted to the problem of eugenics, Pierre-André Taguieff examines
positions that critique prenatal diagnosis for threatening to introduce a new
form of eugenicism; he sees them as expressions of an ‘ideologized phobia’ that
amalgamates eugenicism ‘with practices of extermination that essentially characterized National-Socialism, which was itself positioned as a totalitarian regime
par excellence’ (1989, 102). He sees in this attitude a ‘mythologizing’ of ‘genetic
manipulations’ that gives rise to ‘an anti-science position that is as reductive as
it is dogmatic’. Indeed, he posits ‘that not all eugenics is of the particularist type
(national or racial, nationalist or racist), and that a universalist orientation of
the eugenic idea can be in harmony with respect for individual will. Thus not all
eugenics’, he adds, ‘is of the interventionist and authoritarian type, and eugenics
is not condemned to constitute an essentially totalitarian biopolitics’ (ibid., 100).
While he condemns authoritarian eugenics, he deems legitimate ‘the project of
a eugenics that respects individual liberties’: ‘for a modern mind that does not
expressly reject the entire set of beliefs forming the ideology of progress, the
idea of an indefinite self-perfecting of the human species, through action on the
environment or intervention in the genetic patrimony, cannot appear as bad in
itself’ (ibid., 112). On the discussions that followed this article (especially with
the biologist Jacques Testart), see also Roussel 1997.
The most complete discussion of liberal eugenics and its most convincing
critiques are found in Habermas 2003, especially pp. 44–53. One of Jürgen
Habermas’s most interesting arguments has to do with the irreversible character
of genetically selected or modified properties as opposed to the properties linked
to social origin or education. In fact, while it is always possible for a person
to resist the effect of social predeterminations and even to rebel against them,
genetically manipulated determinations are part and parcel of the body of the
person who is condemned to assume what the preceding generation decided on
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17
18
19
20
Notes to pp. 137–8
his or her behalf. By the same token, ‘the parents’ eugenic freedom’ enters into
conflict with the ‘ethical freedom of their children’.
Medical abortions in this restricted sense account for fewer than 2 per cent of all
abortions in France.
Jacques Milliez (head of a department of obstetrics and gynaecology) raises the
question of the boundary between medical interruption of pregnancy and infanticide, between ‘foetal euthanasia’ and ‘neonatal euthanasia’. ‘Thus we accept
foetal euthanasia until the pregnancy reaches full term. But then, if we accept
euthanasia, medically justified, of course, for a foetus person, why would we
not accept it also for a newborn person? What distinguishes a nine-month-old
foetus from a child who has just been born? . . . In what way is the newborn a
person and in what way is the full-term foetus not one? The immediate affective
responses invested in it by its parents do not suffice to make it a person, nor to
challenge euthanasia, since in the circumstances under which the question of
euthanasia arises, let us say in the case of a severe or incurable malformation, the
parents themselves do not want their child to survive’ (1999, 158–9).
Medical interruption of pregnancy is practised when, according to the law,
there is a ‘strong probability that the child to be born will be afflicted with a
particularly serious condition, recognized as incurable at the moment of the
diagnosis’. Cases of this type have multiplied with the development of prenatal
diagnostic testing. The decision belongs to the parents, who are informed of the
diagnosis during a conversation with the doctor. Their consent is complemented
by a certificate signed by two doctors, one of whom is an expert qualified to
testify in court. Beyond twenty-two weeks of amenorrhoea, a lethal substance is
injected into the foetus during a sonogram, so as to prevent a live birth. Labour
is initiated by administration of prostaglandins (Carbonne 1999).
Funeral services may be organized if the parents so wish. In France it is also possible now, under certain conditions, to declare the birth of the child and thus be
able to mention its existence in the official family records (ibid.). At the time of
the medical interruption of the pregnancy, the parents have often already chosen
their child’s name. Some parents, like those cited by Frédérique Authier-Roux,
a psychoanalyst working in a big maternity hospital in the Paris region, have
already got ‘a head start’ with their baby by practising ‘haptonomy’ (AuthierRoux 1999, 36).
Marc Grassin poses the problem to which his book is devoted in the following
terms: ‘I shall interrogate the possibilities of a justification for ending resuscitation efforts and for “ending life” in the context of neonatal resuscitation. The
justification is based on the idea that under certain conditions a programmed
death may not only be justified, but also be declared ethical in the interest of
the patient, in the name of medical responsibility. This moral justification presupposes recognition and maintenance of the transgressive character of these
practices. The way moral ambiguity (recognition of the transgression) will be
maintained and experienced at the very heart of these practices will condition
the ethical legitimization of the act. In this sense, recourse to ending life cannot
be justified in the strict sense, or simply accepted as a normal practice. It has to
have been conceptualized in the light of a responsibility that seeks out and takes
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on the human, social, moral and medical complexity of situations, even in the
ambivalence and paradox of transgression’ (2001, 13). For a sociological analysis of the way doctors make such decisions, see Paillet 2002.
21 The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has manifested great
discomfort, going so far as to refuse to resolve the dilemma posed by declaring
itself incompetent to rule, when it has been called upon to interpret article 2 of
the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights concerning the
right to life in connection with affairs in which prenatal life was in question:
for example, in cases of charges against third parties responsible for traffic
accidents that led to ‘loss of the unborn child’. The same discomfort has been
manifested over the interpretation of article 3, which deals with torture, corporal
punishment and mutilation. Thus in the H. C. Norvège affair, ‘the plaintiff, a
“potential father” of an aborted foetus, deemed that the voluntary interruption
of pregnancy had caused the foetus to suffer in a way incompatible with article
3. . . . The Commission did not identify “any appearance of violation of article
3”, “given the modalities described for the abortion in question”.’ The plaintiff
was thus unsuccessful, but ‘the turn of phrase makes it possible to recognize
the benefits of article 3 as applicable to the embryo’. And this, according to the
author, ‘would not be without major consequences’. In fact, the invocation of
the modalities according to which the abortion was carried out may leave open
the possibility of thinking that the foetus is indeed a being apt to be a beneficiary
of article 3, even if in this particular case the court did not judge that the foetus
in question had been the object of measures ‘calling into question the dignity of
its person’, according to the terms of that article. See Maurer 1999, 348–70 and
380–9.
22 As I was finishing this book, the dispute was revived by the adoption in the
French National Assembly, on 26 November 2003, of the Garraud amendment,
designed to amend a proposed law on organized crime by creating ‘an offence
of involuntary interruption of pregnancy’ when the interruption in question is
caused ‘by clumsiness, imprudence, inattention, negligence or failure to fulfil
an obligation of safety or prudence’ (Coignard 2003). The creation of this
offence came in the wake of two decisions rendered by the Cour de cassation
(Court of Appeals) in 2001 and 2002. Examining the request of a couple whose
unborn child, a six-month-old foetus, had died in utero following an automobile
accident cause by a reckless driver, the Cour de cassation had initially ruled, in
July 2001, that incrimination for involuntary homicide could not be applied to
an unborn child. This decision had been confirmed in 2002 by a ruling of the
criminal chamber of the same court. It annulled the conviction of a gynaecologist
and a midwife who had been sued for professional misconduct that had led to
the death of a foetus. These rulings had been based on the fact that in civil law
personhood is acquired at birth, even as the court deplored the absence of any
clear judicial text (the penal code speaks only of damage caused to ‘others’). The
Garraud amendment, which was presented as a measure that would reinforce
the rights of women, here specifically women as mothers, was immediately interpreted by groups attentive to the defence of abortion rights as an instrument of
war aiming to weaken the legitimacy of abortions by drawing attention to the
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23
24
25
26
27
28
Notes to pp. 138–46
tension between a law that punishes involuntary termination of pregnancy and a
law that authorizes its voluntary termination. In the face of numerous protests,
the amendment was withdrawn.
On lawmakers’ concern with preventing the contradiction between texts from
becoming too striking and on the way they try to avoid ‘leaving too much incoherence in the scattered actions of human beings’, see Latour 2010, especially
p. 266, and more generally pp. 263–6.
For an analysis of the legal debates in France over the status of the embryo, see
especially Hermitte 1990 and Hermitte 2000. The latter text analyses in particular the way the 1994 bioethics laws inscribe in the civil code for the first time the
category of ‘non-person human being’, giving the category a general significance
henceforth.
Thus, for example, in a discussion of ‘in vitro fertilization and embryo transplants’, ‘research on embryos’, ‘gene therapy’ and ‘reproductive cloning’, Lucien
Sève asks: ‘What humanity do we want to be? This question invites us to assume
a responsibility quite different from choosing a pre-existing political or moral
camp: the invention of new universal values’ (2000, 4).
Translator’s note: The ‘constitutional bloc’ is a set of principles and rulings that
must be respected by lawmakers and enforced by the Conseil constitutionnel.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the United Nations on 20
November 1989, takes it to be a fundamental principle that ‘the child, by reason
of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth’ (www2.ohchr.org/
english/law/crc.htm, accessed 12 Oct. 2011). As Alain Renaut remarks, ‘this
document implicitly invites us to reflect on the rights of the child to be born,
potentially up to and including the rights of the embryo’. The ‘mention that
every human being may lay claim to all the rights and all the freedoms inscribed
in the Declaration of Human Rights’ points in the same direction, linking the
Convention on the Rights of the Child to the 1948 Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. One can then easily argue that the foetus is indeed a ‘being’
and that this being is indeed ‘human’, even if the intent – as is the case with the
constructions stemming from moral philosophy that we shall examine in chapter
6 – is to establish the sturdiest possible border between the quality of ‘human
being’ and that of ‘human person’ (2002, 337–40).
For an application of the thematics of networks and flow to a reinterrogation of
the validity of all such taxonomic distinctions, see Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
(Haraway 1991b), a book that had a broad impact in the 1980s and 1990s. In
a summary version of this ‘cyborg manifesto’, published in a French journal in
the mid-1990s, we find the following: ‘The dichotomies that separate mind from
body, animals from humans, organisms from machines, public from private,
nature from culture, men from women, primitive from civilized, all these are in
question ideologically . . . The cyborg is a sort of postmodern personal and collective self, disassembled and reassembled. It is the self that the feminists have to
encode. Communication technologies and biological technologies are the crucial
tools that remake our bodies . . . The frontier that separates tools from myths,
instruments from concepts, historical systems of social relations from historical
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anatomies of possible bodies, objects of knowledge included, is permeable. In
fact, myths and tools designate each other mutually. Moreover, communication science and modern biology are constructed by a common movement – the
translation of the world into a coding problem, the quest for a common language
in which all resistance to the control of instruments disappears and in which all
heterogeneity can be subjected to disassembling and reassembling, to investment
and to exchange’ (Haraway 1992, 175–6).
To ask oneself to whom human rights may apply, or even, as will become clearer
at the end of chapter 6 when we examine the philosophical justifications for
abortion, to ask what kind of properties a being must possess to be able to claim
entry into the field of human rights, is to reopen the critique of human rights. In
fact, this critique, if one does not want to appear to be challenging the ‘liberal’
framework (which is currently the basis for ‘political correctness’), cannot target
‘rights’ in the name of tradition (Burke), of a providential history (de Maistre)
or of a materialist historicism (Marx). The only possible strategy thus consists in
taking on the other term of the relation, that is, human beings. But the ideological necessity of respecting the liberal framework means that this operation itself
cannot follow the path of an explicit anti-humanism, or even that of ‘deconstruction’. The only path that remains open is the idealist approach that consists in
subjecting these entities (human beings) to thought experiments, so as to pin
down their definition and then, in a second phase, put to the test a collection
of empirical beings – presumed to belong to the human species, or not – so as
to judge whether or not they may be qualified to enter into the field of ‘human
rights’. This is the approach adopted, for example, by the utilitarian movement,
especially in its ‘anti-specist’ version, whose best-known representative today is
Peter Singer. (On the history of the critique of human rights, see Binoche 1989.)
Among the various objections to certain changes provided by the Aubry law, this
article presents the following argument: ‘Must we go beyond twelve weeks? . . .
For us, the technological and psychological problems would be hard to manage.
Technologically, it becomes harder to use aspiration on an embryo after twelve
weeks beyond the last menstrual period, and, psychologically, since the embryo
has taken on human form, the abortion would resemble a foeticide with all the
emotional charge that that would represent’ (Podevin et al. 2000).
‘You understand that we don’t like it at this stage because, to make sure there’s
nothing left, we follow the sonogram during aspiration and we see everything
we’re taking out, and with the sonogram you see, we, we see . . . and it’s hard;
and at this stage, I don’t like it, because if some trophoblasts or embryo parts
remain, we’re the ones who have trouble’ (doctor 2, provincial hospital).
Commenting on a post-abortion sonogram, another doctor pointed out, after
the fact and with critical distance on his own formulation, that he had surprised
himself by saying: ‘Everything is back to normal’, adding: ‘As if being pregnant
weren’t normal.’
In conclusion, see below, pp. 242–3, regarding home abortions.
Marilyn Strathern offers a more elaborate version of this argument: with the
passage from the foetus to the image, whether medical or documentary, either
the mother disappears or she is treated as an environment or even as a resource.
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35
36
37
38
Notes to pp. 150–2
But the reason for this, Strathern says, is that in our society we are unable to
conceive of the relation between two beings except in the mode of relationship,
interactions between two beings viewed as if they were independent of one
another; we do not think in terms of inclusion or interdependence (we shall
return to this point in chapter 7). See Strathern 1992, 47–53.
Numerous books and articles have been devoted to the task of deconstructing
photographs of foetuses. This type of critique seems to have taken off decisively with the publication of an article on foetal images by Rosalind Pollack
Petchesky (1987). Other texts devoted to this topic include Condit 1990, chapter
5, ‘Constructing visions of the fetus and freedom’; Tong 1997, 150–2; and
Franklin, Lury and Stacey 2000, 30–43. The arguments tend to be quite similar
from one text to another. The most comprehensive approach is developed by
Karen Newman in Fetal Positions (1996), a book with photographic illustrations. (I thank Bruno Latour for introducing me to this book and for welcoming
the work Valérie Pihet and I did on the polemics surrounding representations
of foetuses in the context of the Iconoclash exhibition he organized at the
Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media in May 2002.)
In an often polemical fashion, sociology has propagated the watchword according to which ‘everything is social’, meaning that, in the wake of culturalism, (a)
there is no human behaviour that is not dependent on the meaning conferred
on it by people in society (a postulate of symbolism as opposed, for example,
to the naturalism of biology) and (b) there is no human behaviour that is not
dependent on the link, explicit or not, that connects it with other practices; the
set of behaviours and beliefs within a given group is viewed, depending on the
school of thought, either as linked by the type of proximity that defines a style
or as constituting a system. Without calling these postulates into question, one
can nevertheless note that a quality attributed to everyone is not very interesting to explore. If everything is social, using the term ‘social’ to qualify a being,
a practice and so on teaches us practically nothing. Let us add that the social
thus defined is such for an external observer, not for the persons engaged in
the society in question; at least until recent times, a period marked precisely by
the influence of this type of social science, people rarely if ever considered that
everything in their lives was ‘social’.
I use it in a sense close to the one Bruno Latour developed in Politics of Nature
(2004), although here I am taking into account only human beings in the
‘composition of the collective’.
Among the authors who have undertaken to ‘deconstruct’ the foetus, the
historian Barbara Duden is probably the one who has most clearly established
the historicist foundations of such an enterprise. In Disembodying Women
(1993), she presents her task as the following: ‘to show historically that the
human fetus, as conceptualized today, is not a creature of God or a natural
fact, but an engineered construct of modern society. I shall discuss the manylayered process involved in the synthesis of this fetus’ (4). As is often the case
in this sort of deconstructionist enterprise, it is hard to identify the normative
position from which the critique is carried out. For to say that one is critiquing
current representations of the foetus because they are synthetic or artificial – in
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other words, products of history – might imply that one is placing oneself at a
vantage point from which the foetus would not be mere semblance, since the
use of the term ‘artificial’ refers immediately back to its counterpart, which is
the term ‘natural’. But obviously this cannot be the case, since it is precisely the
idea that the foetus could have something ‘natural’ about it that is at the heart
of the critique.
39 I do not mean to say that the tumoral foetus and the authentic foetus ‘do not
exist’, but that they exist as social objects dependent upon the same physical
object through the device of conventions. These conventions bring into correspondence, according to Searle’s definition as taken up by Frédéric Nef, ‘the
physical object simpliciter and the physical object qua social object’. In the case
that concerns us, there is, in Nef’s vocabulary, a ‘supervening’ of two social
objects upon a single physical object. There would be nothing rare about this
case and it would not pose a particular problem (it is the case, evoked in On
Justification, of any object whose conventional identity varies radically according to the ‘world’ in which it is immersed) if, in the situation that characterizes
the foetal condition, one of the conventions (the one that sees the foetus as a
tumour) did not entail the necessity of destroying the physical object on which
a different convention converges (the one that sees the foetus as a child to be
born, a being endowed with incommensurable worth). For a critique of naive
constructionism and for a discussion of what may be meant by ‘realism’ with
regard to social objects, see Nef 2002.
40 On the linguistic basis of the predicates of beings in Aristotle, see especially
Benveniste 1971, 55–64, ‘Categories of thought and language’.
41 I am relying here on the analysis of Aristotle’s categories developed in Aubenque
1997, especially pp. 134–9.
Chapter 6 The Justification of Abortion
1 On the notion of ordinary morality as a basis for justification and critique, see
Walzer 1987. On the relation between morality and law, see Canto-Sperber
2008, 63–6. Canto-Sperber uses abortion as an example.
2 The question of the articulation between the order of legal justification and that
of moral justification lies at the heart of Paul Ricoeur’s reflection on justice:
Ricoeur sees the law as a mediator between the fields of morality and politics
(2000 and 1991).
3 If ordinary persons did not pass judgement on legal decisions, no one would
ever have found anything to criticize, for example, in the rulings – impeccable in
strictly legal terms – that were formulated under the Vichy regime by the Conseil
d’État to deal with questions concerning ‘Jewish property’.
4 As a full bibliography would require several pages, I shall cite just a select few
source texts here: Le Naour and Valenti 2003, especially chapter 7; Picq 1993;
Gauthier 2002; Mossuz-Lavau 1991, especially pp. 75–133. Among works
contemporary with the abortion liberalization movement and works that have
sought to assess that movement, see especially Pingaud 1975 and Ferro, Tournier
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5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Notes to pp. 161–5
and Voldman 1986. These studies also provide bibliographical documentation
on specific aspects of the abortion issue.
In this respect, there is a striking difference, for example, between the feminist
movement for legal abortion and the labour movement for social rights (the
eight-hour day, the five-day week, paid vacations, union representation and so
on).
In France, the so-called ‘Manifesto of the 343’, published in the magazine Le
Nouvel Observateur on 5 April 1971, played a major role in the actions that led
to decriminalization. This text was signed by 343 women, many of them very
well known, who publicly affirmed that they had had clandestine abortions (see
Gauthier 2002, 119–34). Two years later, the manifesto of 3 February 1973,
in which 330 doctors asserted that they practised abortions, also had great
symbolic importance, as did a manifesto signed by 206 well-known members of
the National Association for the Study of Abortion, who declared on 7 February
1973: ‘We have performed abortions; here’s why.’ Anne-Marie Dourlen-Rollier
was one of the association’s founding members; Nobel Prize winners François
Jacob, Jacques Monod and Alfred Kastler were also members (Le Naour and
Valenti 2003, 223 and 240–4).
According to Xavière Gauthier, there was a tacit agreement between the
Catholic hierarchy and Giscard d’Estaing’s administration not to campaign
against the adoption of the Veil law (Gauthier 2002, 172–3). Since the 1960s,
large numbers of Catholics on the so-called left had been in favour of at least
softening the 1920 law so as to limit the ravages of clandestine abortions. This
was the position of the Catholic journal Esprit, for example, in the early 1970s.
Journal officiel (27 November 1974): 7010.
Jacques-Antoine Gau during the Assembly debate on 26 November 1974 (ibid.,
7005).
We know, for example, that the 1920 and 1923 laws on abortion did not
produce negative reactions on the left; see Le Naour and Valenti 2003, 164.
Thus, for example, in 1975 Pier Paolo Pasolini, who expressed a position very
hostile to the legalization of abortion in various newspaper articles (1976,
143–9), recognized that the only argument that could work in favour of that
measure was ‘the demographic tragedy, which, in an ecological perspective,
appears to be the most serious threat to the survival of humanity’ (ibid., 147).
For a critical analysis, see Le Bras 1994 and Ross 1998.
Among the most influential works, see, for example, Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1990.
Stimulated most notably by publications of the Club de Rome; see Delaunay and
Meadows 1972.
In Contraception et avortement (1979), François-André Isambert and Paul
Ladrière analysed the debate over abortion in the mainstream French press
between 1965 and 1974. In a later essay, ‘Une sociologie de l’avortement est-elle
possible?’, Isambert notes on the one hand that the demographic argument does
not appear nearly as often as the argument invoking ‘respect for life’, and on the
other hand that, when it is brought up to support liberalization, ‘it is used almost
exclusively with respect to external cases, aimed at the overpopulated countries’
(1982, 363).
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16 Thus, among numerous examples, the 330 doctors who signed a manifesto in
February 1973 asserting that they had performed abortions were not subject to
judicial pursuit (see Le Naour and Valenti 2003, 240–3).
17 Partly for strategic reasons, this argument is at the heart of the defence Simone
Veil presented on behalf of her proposal before the French National Assembly:
‘[The current situation] is bad because the law is openly flouted, or worse,
mocked. When the gap between the infractions committed and those that
are subject to judicial pursuit is such that there is no longer any enforcement
properly speaking, the citizen’s respect for law and thus for the authority of the
State are at issue. When doctors break the law in their offices, when prosecutors, before pursuing charges, are expected to refer each case to the Ministry of
Justice, when the social services of public agencies supply women in distress with
information that facilitates abortion, when trips abroad are openly organized
to the same ends, even on charter flights, then I say that we are in a situation
of disorder and anarchy that cannot go on’ (Simone Veil, speaking before the
National Assembly, 26 November 1974: Journal officiel, 1974–5, no. 92 A N
[17 November 1974]: 6998).
18 Unlike the Choisir [Choose] association, chaired by Gisèle Halimi, which was
pressing Parliament to adopt a law, the MLAC [Movement for the Liberation
of Abortion and Contraception] and the MLF [Women’s Liberation Movement]
were opposed to adopting a law; they sought complete liberalization of abortion,
arguing that it should not be subject to the authority of either the state or the
medical establishment; see Le Naour and Valenti 2003, 245–7.
19 As Isambert very pertinently remarks, with the adoption of the Veil law ‘abortion is henceforth taken over by the law, which prescribes what happens when
it is to take place . . . So it is no exaggeration to say that in this case abortion is
becoming an institution’ (1982, 373).
20 ‘I refuse to go into scientific and philosophical discussions when the commission’s hearings have shown that they posed an insoluble problem. No one now
challenges the fact that on a strictly medical level the embryo bears in itself
definitively all the potentialities of the human being that it will become. But it is
still in a state of becoming; it will have to get past many hazards before reaching
full term, a fragile link in the transmission of life’ (Simone Veil, speaking before
the National Assembly, 26 November 1974: Journal officiel, 1974–5, no. 92 A
N [17 November 1974]: 7000).
21 Similarly, abortion was not ‘completely decriminalized by the Abortion Act of
1967 in Great Britain’ (Isambert 1982, 369).
22 No doubt, in particular, in order to undermine the accusations made during the
Assembly debate by Jean Foyer, who claimed that the legalization of abortion
went against the law (‘ratified by the President of the Republic and published in
the Journal officiel of 4 May 1974’) authorizing the ‘ratification of the European
convention safeguarding human rights and basic liberties’, which included ‘in
the front rank of human rights the right to life’. Now, Jean Foyer added, ‘by
virtue of article 55 of the Constitution, the convention has a force superior to
that of the laws. We are henceforth obliged, under threat of potential censure
by the Constitutional Council, to which sixty of you, my dear colleagues, can
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23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
Notes to pp. 168–71
henceforth submit the matter, to respect the obligations that result from that
international commitment’ (Journal officiel [27 November 1974]: 7010).
The notion of ‘indication’ ‘extends [the notion] that medical practice had already
established with regard to therapeutic abortion . . . To the justification by danger
to the mother’s life are added dangers to the woman’s physical and also mental
health, and finally the “situation of distress” that sums up economic and familial
impasses while remaining within the medico-social framework’ (Isambert 1982,
366).
It is in just this mode that Simone Veil, minister of health in the Chirac administration, presented the law to the National Assembly on 26 November 1974:
‘I would like to say this to you, finally: during the discussion, I shall defend this
text, in the name of the administration, without reservations, and with my full
conviction, but it is true that no one can feel deep satisfaction in defending such
a text – the best one possible, in my opinion – on such a subject: no one has ever
denied, and the minister of health least of all, that abortion is a failure, when it
is not a drama’ (Journal officiel [27 November 1974]: 7002).
Here and in the following passage I draw on Sfez 1999, especially pp. 317–23.
The raison d’État¸ as the ‘right to exemption from the law’ in certain ‘circumstances’ under pressure of ‘necessity’, is thus the extreme form of reference to a
logic of the lesser evil; see Sfez 2000.
A commentary on the Abramowicz vs. Lefkowitz trial can be found in Schulder
and Kennedy 1971.
The Bobigny trial has been the object of a large number of militant narratives;
see especially Halimi 1973.
In the Abramowicz vs. Lefkowitz case, the police had entered an apartment
where a 17-year-old girl was undergoing an abortion and had interrupted
the operation. Several persons were summoned before a grand jury in the
Bronx because they had supplied addresses. In the case of the Bobigny trial, a
16-year-old girl, who had been subjected to ‘brutalities’ (not qualified as rape)
by a boyfriend, had an abortion with the support of her mother and two of
her mother’s co-workers. The girl was denounced to the police by the person
responsible for her pregnancy. Her case was heard on 11 October 1972 by the
Children’s Court in Bobigny and she was released. Her mother and the two
co-workers who had helped her by providing addresses, including that of the
abortion provider, were tried on 8 November. The co-workers were exonerated.
The mother was fined 500 francs; her sentence was suspended. The woman who
performed the abortion was fined and sentenced to one year in prison.
On the origins and pertinent features of the affair form as a mode of mobilization and political action, see especially Claverie 1998 and Boltanski 2012,
167–258.
In the case of the Bobigny trial, for instance, Jacques Monod, a Nobel Prize
winner in medicine, and Paul Milliez, a doctor and professor of medicine, testified in court in favour of the accused. Professor Milliez’s testimony played a
particularly important role because he was known as an active practitioner of
Catholicism, whose authorities condemn abortion. If the logic of an affair is to
unfold, the victim’s defenders have to be able to be viewed as ‘impartial’, that is,
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as expressing themselves in the name of a general interest (that of humanity as
a whole), not on behalf of a particular group. This manifestation of impartiality
is never more convincing than when someone who is undertaking to exonerate
the accused opposes the positions and interests of a group to which he or she
belongs.
The American declaration of human rights of 1776, which is included in the
Declaration of Independence and thus incorporated into the Constitution,
confers rights that allow citizens to protect themselves against encroachments
by the state and the law, and to challenge a law even if it has been adopted by
majority vote.
To summarize, the affair form – of which the Dreyfus case constitutes the
paradigm – consists in relying on the defence of a victim accused, unjustly,
of an act held to be ‘scandalous’, in order either to challenge the institutional
procedures of accusation that allowed charges to be brought against an innocent
victim or else to contest the claim that the act of which the victim was accused
was unlawful.
The Supreme Court includes eight members and a chief justice, all named for life
by the president of the United States with the consent of the Senate. It rules on
the constitutionality of the laws adopted by Congress, and it arbitrates disputes
between states, between a state and the federal government, and also between a
citizen and the federal government.
Another way to limit self-ownership is to consider that certain practices pose a
threat to the ‘dignity’ of the human species as a whole every time they are carried
out in particular circumstances by a particular individual, even if that individual
has given ‘formal’ consent. We saw this in the preceding chapter along with the
virulent protests it provoked on the part of legal experts seeking an extension of
the framework of liberal individualism.
Sintomer cites Judges O’Connor, Kennedy and Souter on behalf of the majority in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey: see http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/
getcase.pl?court=US&vol=505&invol=833, accessed 17 Oct. 2011.
Supreme Court, United States Reports, vol. 410, p. 180, cited in Isambert 1982,
371.
On the history of the conflicts over the legalization of abortion in the United
States, see in particular Solinger 2001, Tribe 1990, Olasky 1992, Rudy 1996 and
Petchesky 1984.
In the United States, anti-abortion activist movements (whose members call
themselves ‘rescuers’) are quite extensive. They have used a register of protest
extending from non-violent actions, such as sit-ins (some 400,000 persons are
thought to have participated in sit-ins in the early 1990s), to acts of violence
(bombing abortion clinics, attacking doctors); actions falling between these
extremes, such as picketing or blocking access to clinics, have occurred much
more frequently. These actions are facilitated by the fact that 83 per cent of
abortions in the United States are performed in clinics, 60 per cent of which
exist exclusively for this purpose, so that the sites where abortions take place
are easy to identify and target. As compared to especially violent actions (138
incidents per year between 1984 and 1986), those consisting of blocking entry
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40
41
42
43
Notes to pp. 175–6
to clinics have been far more numerous: around 8,000 instances per year were
recorded between 1997 and 2000. In 1997, 54 per cent of the abortion clinics
in the United States and Canada were picketed at least once a week. According
to field studies carried out by anthropologists of the contemporary world (and
especially according to monographs based on studies conducted in Fargo, North
Dakota, by Faye Ginsburg and in St Louis, Missouri, by Carol Maxwell), the
anti-abortion militants who lead these actions – women in 60 per cent of the
cases – seem not to be significantly different in terms of professional, ethnic,
socio-economic or even religious characteristics from the militants active in
pro-choice movements (contrary to the conclusions of the first study of this type
carried out by Kristin Luker in the early 1980s). These actions, which include
sit-ins and picketing, are illegal and lead to police intervention, but arrests have
not had a strong deterrent effect; indeed, the reverse is sometimes true, since the
‘rescuers’ see the fact of challenging the law and being arrested as initiatory rites
for becoming part of these movements (see Maxwell 2002, especially pp. 19–25
and 72–89). For earlier monographs, see also Ginsburg 1989 and Luker 1984.
This was the Helms–Hyde human rights bill, which proposed a revision of
the Fourteenth Amendment that would have made the foetus a person under
the Constitution (see White 1984). Those who called for introducing this new
amendment into the Constitution relied on biological (rather than legal) considerations to defend the idea that the embryo is a ‘person’ from conception on
because it possesses a specific genetic code that makes it a unique being.
An excellent presentation of the various positions that have been adopted on
this point, particularly in a liberal framework, is found in Archard and Macleod
2002.
During the debate that the Supreme Court settled with the Roe vs. Wade decision,
the judges discussed the relevance to abortion of the Fourteenth Amendment of
the Constitution, which states that no State ‘shall deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law’. American legal scholars were
able to show without difficulty that in using the word ‘person’ the lawmakers
had meant beings already born. A study of American jurisprudence concerning
abortion before its legalization also shows that the word ‘person’ had not been
used to refer to a foetus (Glantz 1984). In this sense, one can readily defend the
idea that the foetus is not ‘a constitutional person’ (see Dworkin 1993). In fact,
a ‘constitutional person’ is characterized precisely by the fact that it has interests
and holds ‘rights’ that derive from the declaration of human rights included in
the Declaration of Independence.
This is the line of argument Ronald Dworkin adopts, for example (1993, especially pp. 50–67). The path he follows in searching for a compromise solution,
by justifying a pro-choice position in terms that would be acceptable for holders
of the pro-life position, consists in recognizing that the foetus cannot lay any
claim to the status of constitutional person (and consequently that it has no
rights that could be opposed to those of the mother) but also in recognizing ‘the
intrinsic value of human life’ (ibid., 50), and that in this sense it deserves to be
protected, for premature death is a bad thing in itself even if it does not affect
any particular person. He adds that pro-choice and pro-life proponents agree
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45
46
47
48
49
50
51
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that the life of a human organism has intrinsic value, and that, beyond their
oppositions, they can meet on this point. Dworkin uses the example of works of
art to illustrate the idea of the ‘intrinsic’ value (as opposed to the idea of value in
terms of utility) of a being that is not a person.
Thus for James Griffin, who defends the orthodox liberal position in the case
of the debate mentioned earlier over children’s rights, ‘[h]uman infants (and
animals and human foetuses and the severely mentally handicapped and sufferers from advanced Alzheimer’s disease) are not agents’ (2002, 21). Now, while
human agents (that is, beings capable of agency) have ‘a kind of natural equality’
among themselves, whether they are men or women, black or white, and so on,
this equality is problematic, according to Griffin, citing Locke, in the case of the
distinction between infants and adults (ibid., 21–2). He moves from there to the
question of whether infants, although not autonomous, could have rights that
would be based on their capacity to become agents and concludes in the negative, by virtue of the fact that if one wants to avoid a ‘backward proliferation of
rights’ (ibid., 22) – and he is clearly thinking of the case of foetuses – one has to
consider that a right is violated only if there is, at present, someone to hold it.
On the notion of agreement through convergence on salient points, see Schelling
1960, 53–81.
This approach associates Tooley with the so-called ‘anti-species’ tendencies
(which are quite diverse, moreover) of which Peter Singer is the leading representative. For the questions debated here (abortion and infanticide, but also
euthanasia administered with consent or to persons too handicapped to give
their consent), see especially Singer 1994. For a discussion of Singer’s positions,
see Dombrowski 1997.
Tooley borrows this criterion from the utilitarian tendencies, with which he has
many affinities.
This argument has undergone considerable development in more recent years.
See especially Purdy 1966, 124–7.
Tooley acknowledges that such capacities can be developed to a greater or lesser
extent. Thus he recognizes the existence of ‘quasi-persons’ who possess these
properties to a weak degree and whom he contrasts with persons with full rights,
that is, ‘normal human beings’ who, unlike quasi-persons, have a full right to
life.
Tooley determines the moment at which infants become persons by relying on
psychological and neurophysiological data concerning human development.
After associating self-consciousness with language acquisition, in the second
or third year of life, he attenuates this test by suggesting that it is possible that
a non-verbal self-concept emerges during the first months after birth (this also
allows him to suggest that higher animals to whom articulated language is not
available might have access to the status of persons).
Let us note, however, that Tooley’s conclusions about infanticide are challenged
by other authors from the same camp who share the same premises and follow
the same approach by and large but refuse to treat birth as irrelevant; these
authors develop arguments aiming to give greater credit to the cognitive capacities of infants (stressing in particular their ability to enter into interactions with
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52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
Notes to pp. 180–5
others) so as to problematize at the very least the idea that they would not have
a right to life (see especially Bermudez 1996).
On the notion of evolution, see Gilson 1984.
In the work of Laura Purdy, whose positions are fairly close to those of Michael
Tooley, we find a somewhat different argument, challenging the ‘potentiality principle’ (1996, 128–31). Purdy asks why it seems to us, intuitively, that
a woman must have better reasons to abort to get rid of a seven-month-old
foetus than to do the same with a two- or three-month-old foetus. She suggests
that this intuition is not based on the ‘potentiality principle’ (the possibility of
becoming a person would be more manifest in a seven-month-old foetus than in
a three-month-old foetus) but on the fact that we know that women are rational
beings and not ‘capricious creatures’ and that they are thus capable of taking
into account, in their acts, their earlier investments. A woman who has ‘invested
seven or eight or nine months in a pregnancy’ is less disposed to lose this investment than a woman who has invested only two months. Thus she needs better
reasons to decide to give up this investment (ibid., 131).
Tooley’s examples of infanticide always concern cases of handicapped children.
Nevertheless, his argument, based on cognitive tests, has a more general validity.
See Audard 1999, especially vol. 3, in which contemporary authors are presented and discussed.
Warren cites in particular Paul and Anne Ehrlich, whose numerous works have
been warning Western authorities for the last several decades about the dangers
of the ‘population bomb’ (Warren 1997, 220–3).
Among the abundant commentaries on the paradigm set up by Thomson, see
especially the work of Frances Myrna Kamm (1992), who extends the paradigm
to other situations, euthanasia in particular; she relies on the ‘famous violinist’
defence and examines euthanasia from a non-consequentialist moral position.
Another philosopher, Holly Smith, presents a similar argument that is closer to
the foetal situation (1984). The story this time concerns a foetus whose mother
is dead and that can survive only if a surrogate mother is found. But no woman
is to be found. The question is then whether any woman has a moral obligation
to volunteer to play the role of surrogate mother. The answer is that, according
to our moral intuitions, this is not the case.
Let us note that neither Thomson nor Smith seems to acknowledge the principle
of symmetry (killing and allowing to die are equivalent), which plays such an
important role in Tooley’s argument, as we have seen. In fact, in Thomson’s
example, the woman does not kill the violinist. She denies him the means –
which, it must be said, are excessively constraining – that would be necessary for
him to remain alive. Smith considers, similarly, that it is improper to say that a
woman who has an abortion ‘kills’ the foetus; rather, one should say that she
removes it from her own resources because they are inadequate, and this leads to
the foetus’s death. She thus insists on the need to maintain a distinction between
‘kill’ and ‘allow to die’.
In the context of liberal individualism, assistance to a person in danger is not an
obligation imposed by law. A discussion of American jurisprudence on this question and an analysis of the problem in moral terms is found in Tunc 1966. For
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62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
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a discussion of the moral literature on the obligation to help a person in danger,
see L. Boltanski 1999, especially pp. 7–17.
The best presentation of the theme of recognition in Hegel (which is often
reiterated in sociology or in moral philosophy without being made adequately
explicit) is found in Honneth 1995.
On the critique of human rights in Bentham, see Binoche 1989, 25–34.
See, for example, the positions defended by Philippe Roqueplo at the colloquium
of the Centre catholique des médecins français [French physicians’ Catholic
center], Avortement et respect de la vie (1972, 93–123); for a commentary, see
Ladrière 1982.
These themes have been sketched out from the 1970s on, notably by authors
such as Shulamith Firestone or Kate Millett, who left their mark on the
feminist movements that appeared in connection with the events of May 1968.
Transposing Marxist schemas, these critical analyses stressed the objectification
of women in the patriarchal family, where women are defined strictly in terms of
the procreative function and treated as capital that men exploit in order to reproduce themselves; they are thus blocked from achieving full humanity. According
to a schema that also stems from the thematics of ‘total revolution’, men are
no less alienated than women by the sexual oppression they impose on women,
so that the feminist revolution will liberate not only women, as the oppressed
sexual class, but humanity as a whole. As early as 1970, in The Dialectic of Sex,
Firestone anticipated this liberation by a change in the mode of reproduction
that would benefit from the development of techniques of artificial reproduction,
so as to place the burden of gestation and child-rearing on society as a whole; see
Castro 1990.
We know that Peter Singer has sought this extension for a long time. On the
rights of monkeys, see Cavalieri and Singer 1993.
Singer in particular has extended the arguments along these lines; see especially
Singer 1994, and for politics, Singer 1999. The latter work in particular has the
goal of reinserting recognition of the fact that there are natural inequalities into
the political programmes of the left; for Singer, this condition must be met if aid
programmes for the ‘weak’ and the ‘poor’ are to be effective.
A very thorough treatment of these critiques is found in Nef 2002.
Ian Hacking thus observes, in the work cited earlier devoted to the discussion of
constructionism, that it would not be very appealing to undertake to show that
anorexia is ‘socially constructed’ because the young women who suffer from it
are usually not trying to free themselves from this malady (1999).
The project of emancipation with respect to relations of personal dependency
occupies a central place in the modern conception of what Laurent Thévenot
and I called, in On Justification, the ‘civic world’, especially in Rousseau.
In Rousseau’s work, attention to the unhappiness of beings that are entirely
subjected to recognition by others is a constant theme that also runs through
the philosopher’s personal writings, especially the Confessions; see Starobinski
1988.
The same remarks obviously hold true for demands for ‘world citizenship’ (for
example, in Hardt and Negri 2000, 400–7); these demands take into account
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Notes to pp. 192–4
the growing number of stateless persons and seek to palliate the dependencies
that result from the identification – pointed out several decades ago by Hannah
Arendt – in the political conceptions that grew out of the Revolution, between
human rights and the rights of a citizen of a particular state (Arendt 1951,
268–87).
71 Holly Smith defends a counter-argument, pointing out that one can put a piece
of jewellery in a box and declare that it will be for one’s child even if one does
not yet have a child (Smith 1984, 34).
72 I should mention another argument, used by the opponents of liberalizing abortion, that relies on the theme of discrimination, a very lively issue in the United
States. To justify abortion by referring to the fact that the foetus is in the womb
of a woman who does not desire its presence is to invoke a contingent fact, since
the foetus could just as well be elsewhere; this amounts to discriminating on the
basis of place of residence, which is against the law (Alcorn 1984, 45–6).
73 This is also the position defended by Carol Gilligan in In a Different Voice
(1982). Let us recall that, in this work, to define an ethic of care, Gilligan relies
heavily on interviews with women who are in the situation of having to abort.
In the wake of this seminal book in the field of social psychology, the ethics of
care has been transported into the realm of political philosophy. The goal of
this tendency in feminist political philosophy is thus to outline a political order
that would circumvent the notions – central ones in political philosophy with a
liberal bent – of autonomy, impartiality and detachment (the point of view from
no place) and a watertight separation between the public realm and the private
realm that tends to exclude women from the legitimate political order. This feminist current in political philosophy seeks, conversely, to establish the conceptual
bases that would make it possible to found a political order on interdependence
and on a requirement of care for others, and most particularly others who are
near and dear, even while forging a compromise with an impartial conception
of justice based on principles valid for all (whether they are close at hand or far
away) and with the recognition of rights based on a constitutional guarantee.
The problem, as we can see, is how to reconcile the recognition of the fact of
dependency (which plays a central role in traditional society) with the requirements of equality, transitivity and freedom that are at the heart of the idea of a
democratic society. See especially Tronto 1993.
Chapter 7 The Experience of Abortion
1 For an examination of this type of critical argument, especially in the writings of
feminist legal scholars (Catharine MacKinnon in particular), see Dworkin 1993¸
50–60.
2 The long history of the idea of moral autonomy is recounted in Schneewind
1998.
3 The requirement of detachment with respect to kinship bonds is central in
liberal theory, as it enables the constitution of a social bond with reference to a
common good. Especially pertinent in this regard is the way Adam Smith seeks,
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5
6
7
8
9
10
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in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, to establish the basis for a political society
founded on the relation between a suffering being and an impartial spectator,
who has no kinship bond nor even a bond of the communitarian order with the
sufferer (2002).
I thank Sébastien Laoureux for introducing me to the work of Michel Henry.
Laoureux’s thesis on Henry, published as L’immanence à la limite: recherches
sur la phénoménologie de Michel Henry (2005), is a major contribution.
I rely especially on this article, which is an excellent introduction to the leading
themes of a work developed over several thousand pages. For a longer introduction, see Henry 2008.
‘I am for myself, or better, I am myself without having any responsibility for this
“being-myself”, I test myself without being the source of this test’ (Henry 1994,
305).
‘[I]t is I who am affected and I am affected by myself in the sense that the content
that affects me is still myself – and not something else, not something felt,
touched, wanted, thought, etc. – but the auto-affectivity that defines my essence
is not my doing. And thus I do not affect myself absolutely, but I am self-affected
and in this way engendered as a self in the auto-affectivity of life. “Myself”
ultimately designates this character of being self-affected by the singular self that
I am’ (ibid.).
Henry finds in Maine de Biran the construction of the self as a ‘fundamental I
Can’.
We know that Henry’s relation to Freud’s work was difficult, to say the least.
He saw this work not as the origin of a new anthropology centred on the notion
of the unconscious but rather as the last stage in the history of consciousness
as it developed in Western philosophy (see Henry 1993; the passages cited here
are from the introduction to this work). Freud is thus for him a ‘belated heir’
(ibid., 1) and psychoanalysis the last avatar of the ‘philosophy of consciousness’,
that is, of a conception that understands ‘experience’ as ‘the general rapport
between subject and object’ based on an ‘ontology of representation’ (ibid., 3).
In fact, according to Henry, the Freudian unconscious is defined as opposed to
‘representational consciousness’ (ibid.) and as that which escapes it. And yet this
concept, constructed in a reactive way, leads to ‘an unavowed return to a metaphysics of representation’, for example in the conception of the affect as ‘the
drive’s psychical representative’ (ibid., 6). The unconscious, posited as ‘afterworld’ (ibid., 8), thus borrows most of its characteristics from consciousness.
The aim of the concept of auto-affectivity of the flesh is precisely to surmount
this opposition between unconscious and consciousness.
Berque, who devoted part of Écoumène to Japanese culture (and especially to
the Japanese landscape), associates the cho–ra with the notion of place (basho)
in Nishida Kitarô, a philosopher who seeks to go beyond mere attention to the
relation between two objects. A place is not in relation solely with the object it
contains. ‘The being is subsumed in the place which it cannot do without if it is
to be.’ This ‘logic of place’ is also a ‘logic of predication’. The subject is ‘swallowed up’ in the predicate. Berque makes this clear by means of the following
pseudo-syllogism: ‘“The Earth is round; now, an orange is round; thus the
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12
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Notes to pp. 200–2
Earth is an orange”, in which the identity of the predicate “is round” subsumes,
respectively, the identities of the subjects “the Earth” and “an orange” to the
point of swallowing up the subject in the predicate’ (Berque 1998, 24–5).
The cho–ra is inscribed within the problem of the difference between the perceptible and the intelligible. ‘The cho–rismos instituted by the cho–ra hollows out the
initial gap between forms and their copies’ (Mattéi 1996, 208). In fact, without
mediation, and if the perceptible were only a copy of the intelligible, the two
would be indistinguishable. The cho–ra is thus presented as ‘a cosmic instance of
differentiation in which meaning is elaborated in advance during the inscription
of the intelligible in the perceptible’; this happens ‘instantaneously’ and without
any appeal to becoming. The cho–ra is thereby the ‘womb of dreams’ (to which is
assimilated the operation of fragmenting the One into the multiple) and also that
of ‘myths’ as ‘sources of the symbolic images that anchor thought in archetypes’.
It is ‘comparable to a camera oscura in which Forms come to inscribe their
traces’ (ibid.; more generally, see pp. 191–216).
On the Platonic origin of the notion of contrée in Martin Heidegger, see Mattéi
1996, 199–200. The topology of the contrée is revisited and developed in
Sloterdijk 2011.
‘The cho–ra is thus not space as an infinite void: it appears rather as something
spatial that allows the constitution of a phenomenon by giving it consistency, as
the womb is a piece of space that allows the generation of a foetus by supplying
it with the food it needs’ (Brisson 1974, 214).
On the distinction between cho–ra and topos, see in particular Casey 1997, especially pp. 23–49.
Thus – to borrow an image from Augustin Berque – when I contemplate a hill,
with the house that is on it, the house is part of the hill just as the hill is part of
the house. If I take this house and move it to the adjacent plain (as one would a
mobile home), the hill is no longer itself. And the same thing holds true for the
house. Berque uses this image to break with a conception of space as topos, that
is, as a place that would be ‘separable from the thing, which is mobile whereas
it [place] is not’. On the contrary, says Berque, ‘the cho–ra is a place that participates in what is found in it; and it is a dynamic place, on the basis of which
something different comes into being, not a place that encloses a thing in the
identity of its being’ (Berque 2000, 24–5).
A place does not hold what occupies it as an object (which would be implied
if one said ‘the hill contains a house’). Similarly, a place is not the predicate
of what occupies it (which would be implied if, to specify which house one is
talking about, one said ‘the house on the hill’).
This operation – the passage from cho–ra to topos – is also the one that will unite,
with virtually indissoluble bonds, the liberal subject and the ideal of mobility.
In Ricoeur’s language, it is a matter of the ‘prereflexive imputation of myself’:
‘The task of our analysis is to elaborate an aspect of the project which we might
call the prereflexive imputation of myself. This implies a self-reference which is
not yet self-observation, but rather a certain way of relating oneself or of behaving with respect to oneself, a non-speculative or, better, non-observant, way.
It is an implication of the self rigorously contemporaneous with the very act
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of decision which in some sense is an act with reference to the self. . . . French
expresses this double and indivisible relation to the self and to the object of an
intention by transitive verbs of pronominal form: “je me décide à . . . ” (I decide
to or I make up my mind”, “je me souviens à [sic] . . . ” (I remember), “je me represent” [sic] (I imagine), “je me réjouis de . . . ” (I rejoice at). For the moment let
us neglect the diversity of self-relation implied in these expressions, themselves
diverse – this must be linked to the diversity of intentional relation. It is already
apparent that this self-reference, whatever it may be, is not isolable from reference to the project, to whatever is represented, remembered, or rejoiced over. . . .
As our point of departure we need to take an aspect of the project which we have
stressed above – to decide is to designate a personal action. The “myself” figures
in the project as that which will do and that which can do. Prior to all reflection
about the self which I project, the myself summons itself, it inserts itself into the
plan of action to be done; in a real sense it becomes committed’ (1966, 58–9).
19 Let us recall that in Mead’s theory of the ‘self’ (very close, in certain respects,
to ‘sympathy’ in the sense in which Adam Smith develops this concept in The
Theory of Moral Sentiments), the self is distributed among a plurality of ‘roles’.
‘The self, as that which can be an object to itself, is essentially a social structure,
and it arises in social experience.’ This makes communication between persons
possible to the extent that that internalized plurality allows them to put themselves, through the imagination, in the place of another. But then the question of
the unity of the self arises. The ‘generalized other’ is ‘the organized community
or social group which gives to the individual his unity of self’ (Mead and Morris
1934, 140 and 154).
20 I owe the distinction between excuses and other forms of justification found in
these narratives to Cyril Lemieux’s commentaries on a first draft of this text.
Discussing J. L. Austin’s ‘A plea for excuses’ (1979), Sebastian McEvoy recalls
two important properties of excuses: they are characterized by their particularly
marked defensive dimension, in response to what is presented implicitly not only
as a critique but as a threat; and they rely less on moral principles expressed
in a positive form (as is the case for justifications) than on external constraints
independent of the will of the actor; one can show how these latter lead to the
failure of the action in question – thus Austin can maintain that an action can fail
in as many different ways as there are modalities of excuses (see McEvoy 1995).
21 Plenitude and disquietude play roles here that are similar to the role of suffering
and jouissance in Michel Henry’s analyses, as limit states in the process whereby
life manifests itself to itself. In the ordinary course of events, the auto-affectivity
of the flesh that generates the ‘self’ is transparent to itself because it is immanent
to the ‘self’, which itself coincides with the ‘I’. The phenomenon of ‘experiencing
oneself’ thus flows passively into the phenomenon of experiencing oneself in life.
This is the reason why Henry places so much stress on the ‘extreme cases’ constituted by suffering and jouissance grasped as sentiments, starting from affectivity,
through which the auto-affectivity of life reveals itself to itself. The test of suffering, which does not express itself, is then manifested as ‘speech’ (here I am
drawing on Sébastien Laoureux’s essay ‘Vers un régime de l’auto-affection?
Remarques sur la possibilité de formaliser un régime de passivité’ (2000).
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Notes to pp. 208–28
22 Introducing an essay devoted to imperfect rationality, Jon Elster offers the following example: ‘Ulysses was not fully rational, for a rational creature would
not have to resort to this device; nor was he simply the passive and irrational
vehicle for his changing wants and desires, for he was capable of achieving by
indirect means the same ends as a rational person could have realized in a direct
manner’ (1979, 36).
23 For example: ‘In certain cases, everything appears self-evident: the obstinacy
of a woman, of a sterile couple wanting a child at any price; a hasty decision to ask for an abortion. And yet . . . one reads in a file: “wanted child”.
The woman says: “I want it! Oh, I want it!” What are we seeing? A woman
who is vomiting uncontrollably, caught between the desire to keep and to
reject, between two contradictory desires, between desire and fear’ (Revault
d’Allonnes 1976a, 49).
24 In his autobiography, Gandhi tells how, while he was still in high school, under
the influence of a friend fascinated by the customs of the English occupiers, he
decided to try eating meat. ‘The goat’s meat was as tough as leather. I simply
could not eat it. I was sick and had to leave off eating. I had a very bad night
afterwards. A horrible nightmare haunted me. Every time I dropped off to sleep
it would seem as though a live goat were bleating inside me, and I would jump
up full of remorse’ (Gandhi 1957, 22).
25 On the question of substances and of the trace of the father in the mother’s body,
see Héritier 1999.
26 The possibility of associating the regime of agape and the auto-affectivity of the
flesh in Michel Henry was suggested to me by Sébastien Laoureux (see Laoureux
2005).
27 For an analytics of love, see Kierkegaard 1995.
28 Rosalie, age 25, a student, who had had three abortions (at ages 18, 20 and 23),
spoke this way about her reactions when she looked at the sonogram on the
occasion of her third abortion: ‘The last time, I saw the embryo. With the first
two, we didn’t see anything, but with the last one, I saw a little bean and I fell
in love with it. I would really have liked Jacques [her boyfriend] to come with
me to see it, because it made me feel weird. Even if it doesn’t have the form of a
child, you still tell yourself that there’s something, and I think that’s also why I
felt sadder the last time.’
29 Karine spoke of the conversation with her counsellor: ‘What bothered me was
that in the psychological interview, before the abortion, they really tried to pin
things down by saying: “It’s not a sickness, it’s an abortion, you’re pregnant, it’s
a child that you’re carrying”; in the end, I didn’t want them to tell me all that.
As I’m saying, perhaps they had to say it because it might be useful, but for me I
think that even if the approach of the woman who saw me was open, she wasn’t
trying to make me feel guilty at all, I still experienced it as an attempt to make
me feel guilty, which I think it wasn’t.’
30 Bydlowski and Gauthier make a similar observation about the more general case
of the birthdate, which is often interpreted in a logic that is ‘commemorative of
another past event’. It may involve the date of a traumatic event; in one of their
examples, it was the birthdate of a previous child who was stillborn, or the birth-
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date of one of the parents of the pregnant woman, often her mother (Bydlowski
and Gauthier 1997, 111–15).
31 Abortion may then be presented as a sort of rite of passage, referring to what
the parents did at the same age, as if in order to succeed in having children and
a marital union one had to reproduce the path followed by those to whom one
‘owed one’s life’. Responding to the question ‘How did you react when you
learned of the pregnancy?’, a student couple thus declared, during the counselling interview: ‘We had a sonogram done right away, we reacted well, a bit
destabilized, we told our parents right away, because both our mothers, at the
same age, had had abortions, and then later our parents had beautiful children
. . . It was before we came along and they had decided not to get married for
that, but our parents are still together’ (provincial hospital).
32 On the back-and-forth movement between the analysis of the interpretations
that persons make of their own practices and the constructivist approach
intended to establish a grammar of these practices, see Benoist and Karsenti
2001, and especially Trom 2001, 65–82.
Conclusion: Forgetting Abortion
1 See also the editors’ introduction in Morgan and Michaels 1999, 1–9, for a
general overview of the topic.
2 We know that, for Lévi-Strauss, myths ought to supply a logical model for
resolving contradictions, notably through a progressive mediation consisting
in inserting intermediate categories between the poles of the contradiction. See
Lévi-Strauss 1981, especially pp. 628–9.
3 See especially Festinger, Riecken and Schachter 1956, and, for an overview of
American social psychology from 1930 to 1950, see the excellent collection of
articles in Maccoby, Newcomb and Hartley 1958. An article by Leon Festinger
in this volume (156–63) summarizes the theory of ‘cognitive dissonance’.
4 One could speak in this case of ‘paternal constructions’ in the sense that Erving
Goffman gives this category (1974, 99–102).
5 One can deplore certain practices and seek to ensure that they will no longer be
carried out, or will be performed as little as possible, by using means that do not
necessarily involve legal prohibition. This can be seen, for example, in the cases
of smoking and alcohol abuse. The same kind of discussion takes place around
soft drugs.
6 According to a periodic survey of ‘French values’, in 1999 the proportion of
the French who deemed abortion condemnable in all circumstances was 13 per
cent. It had diminished by 7 points (from 20 per cent) between 1981 and 1999.
Although those who condemn abortion are still more numerous in older cohorts,
their share diminished between the two dates in all age classes. See Bréchon
2000, 49–51 and 157–63.
7 For an analysis of the decline of Catholic culture in its traditional forms and
especially in its relation to sexuality and procreation in contemporary France,
see Hervieu-Léger 2003, 215–47.
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Notes to pp. 240–4
8 For a discussion of the constraints that weigh on the manufacture of new human
beings in relation to a moral requirement whose ultimate principle would be the
will of Gaia, see Heyd 1994, 203–10.
9 The hypothesis of a radical diminution in the number of human beings appears
entirely plausible to Françoise Héritier. Commenting on an article by Max
Singer (2000), she declares: ‘I would willingly endorse the hypotheses set forth
by the American demographer Max Singer, who, far from subscribing to the
catastrophic hypotheses of unbounded world population growth during the 21st
century owing to the unregulated fecundity of the poor countries, thinks that
with the extension of contraceptive techniques, the development of women’s
education, the decline in infant mortality and the increasing power of the notion
of well-being, we may on the contrary be confronted with a decline in world
population. It will take time, but evolution is headed in the direction of women’s
emancipation, all the more so since world economic interests are going in the
same direction’ (Héritier 2001, 91–2).
10 See title 1, article 3, of law no. 2001–588 of 4 July 2001 and the decree of application no. 2002–796 of 3 May 2002. The legal arrangements are established
as follows: when abortions do not take place in a health care facility, they can
only be performed in the framework of a formal agreement between a public or
private hospital and a personal physician who regularly performs abortion in
health care facilities, in conformity with the standard agreement provided by the
2002 decree. These arrangements do not apply to women whose blood type is
Rh-negative. The procedures carried out in the framework of such an agreement
are performed exclusively via medication in conformity with the recommendations validated by the National Agency for Accreditation and Evaluation in
Public Health (ANAES). It is the doctor’s responsibility to obtain the written
consent of women for whom the duration of the pregnancy and the medical and
psychosocial condition permit drug-induced abortion at home. A post-procedure
checkup takes place ten to fifteen days after the abortion.
11 According to this agreement, the application procedures intended for the
patients have to fulfil a certain number of conditions prescribed by a protocol
(validated by the ANAES) respecting legal conditions such as the time period
for reflection, the patient’s written consent to the termination of her pregnancy
and to the fact that this will take place without hospitalization, along with a
certain number of criteria: the pregnancy must not have progressed more than
forty-nine days after the last menstrual period, the patient’s lodgings must
satisfy minimum characteristics of comfort (there must be a bathroom and a
telephone) with a trusted person present during a period of several hours, and it
must be located less than an hour away from a hospital prepared to accept her
in an emergency. Minors would presumably be excluded from these agreements
(although the decree does not seem to specify this), along with women pregnant
with two or more foetuses, women presenting medical problems that might lead
to complications and ‘psychologically fragile’ women.
12 Such, for example, is the conclusion of a recent study carried out in the context
of a master’s programme; based on a series of interviews with women who had
undergone abortions, this study notes that the ‘guilt’ manifested by the persons
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14
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16
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questioned in the contemporary period remained stable or even increased, as
compared to that of persons interviewed prior to the passage of the 1975 law.
The author concluded that traditional representations of motherhood had been
reinforced; see Albenga 2002. I thank Rose-Marie Lagrave for providing me
with this study.
A properly political change can be conceived, under these conditions, as the
mechanical result of total revolution, not as its origin. The aspiration to total
revolution thereby takes on a historicist character. Every phenomenon, to be
understood, must be associated not with human nature but with its historical
context. Each historical moment possesses its particular ‘spirit’, which isolated
independent actions are powerless to change. Only global action can transform
the world. But global transformation is itself subordinated to a theoretical effort
to identify what constitutes the principal source of inhumanity in the historical
world as it unfolds.
For an analysis of this utopia, and in particular of its expressions in films and
on television, one can refer to the work of ethnologist and psychiatrist Marika
Moisseeff, especially the article in which she describes an obviously imaginary
‘ethnic group’, the Dentcico, in which new human beings are created ‘outside of
mothers’ wombs’ (2000).
The possibility of sequential changes in sexual orientation is central to queer
theory and its political extensions. The positions of the queer type that appeared
in the 1990s (especially in Judith Butler’s work) seek to call radically into
question the belief according to which heterosexuality has a normal, natural
character, and in so doing they aim to rethink the body, desire, family relations,
the public–private opposition and the distinction between what belongs to the
realms of sexuality and politics respectively. Queer attitudes have thus arisen
in opposition to earlier forms of feminist and gay assertions, especially in that
they tend to dissociate the problematics of sexuality from the problematics of
gender. Against the forms of sexual identities associated with political demands
for identity-based recognition, whose categorial stabilization in archetypes is
considered politically useful even as it is criticized as ‘essentialist’, queer theory
(which identifies itself with poststructuralism) stresses the fragmentation and the
fluidity of identities, and especially sexual identities as they are manifested and
realized in the shift among orientations or among different sexual objects. (For a
discussion of queer theory, see Richardson 2000, especially pp. 35–50.)
Faye Ginsburg, an anthropologist who studied the conflicts around the abortion
movement in Fargo, North Dakota, in the mid-1980s, shows that the militants
of the pro-life movement in the United States who identify with feminism – and
a great many of them do – develop the argument according to which easy access
to abortion diminishes women’s power by allowing men to engage in sexual
activity free of all emotional and financial responsibility with respect to its
reproductive consequences, and consequently allows them to avoid taking into
account the interests of the women with whom they have sexual intercourse.
These militants thus see in the uncoupling of sexual intercourse and engendering
that is favoured by free access to abortion a manifestation of masculine domination that inclines towards selfish individualism, of which, for example, the
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Notes to p. 249
increase in women bringing up children on their own, especially in impoverished
African-American contexts, would be a clear sign. Thus these militants aim to
reconstruct a context in which the sense of proximity between sexual intercourse
and engendering would be re-established, at least in the cognitive mode (see
Ginsburg 1989, 214–15).
17 On the profound changes of the anthropological order that accompanied the
spread, in the Roman Empire, of Jewish and Christian universalism, see Brown
1988. These changes bore not only on the question of slavery or the situation
of infants, as we have already seen, but also on the female suffering that was
hidden by Roman patriarchal ideology: ‘All this is a world known to us from a
resolutely male viewpoint. There was much in the world around them that educated Greeks and Romans did not wish to see or to articulate. The exquisite ideal
of marital concord deliberately stared past the grief, pain and illness associated
with childbirth. It aimed to absorb marriage into the greater order of the city.
Yet, in the city’s dogged battle with death, women in their twenties fought in the
first line . . . It was left to Christian treatises on virginity to speak in public on
the physical state of the married woman – on their danger in childbirth, on the
pain in their breasts during suckling, on their exposure to children’s infections,
on the terrible shame of infertility, and on the humiliation of being replaced by
servants in their husbands’ affections’ (Brown 1988, 24–5).
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BOLTANSKI FOETAL 9780745647302 PRINT.indd 316
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Index
abandonment 77, 103
abnormality
and evil spirits 53, 72–3
hereditary defects 83, 86, 87, 266n44,
267n51, 267n54
and morality 180, 183, 275–6nn15–18
testing for abnormality 135, 138,
276n18
and therapeutic abortion 45, 135,
136, 145, 189, 220, 246, 262n3,
267n51, 288n54
abortion
failure of 214
late 136, 243
legal limit on 92, 137, 147, 167, 241
medicalization 166, 283n18
see also criminalization; emotional
aspects of pregnancy and
abortion; legalization; legitimacy;
liberalization; prohibition
abortion, clandestine 127, 166, 176, 239,
273n4, 275n12, 282n6, 282n7
abortion, eugenic 86, 89, 90, 267n51
see also eugenics
abortion, spontaneous 214
abortion, therapeutic 85–6, 135, 137,
275n14, 284n23
abortion, voluntary 13–14
Abortion Act, 1967 (Britain) 283n21
abortion clinics 285–6n39
abortion methods 14
aspiration 147, 241, 279n30, 279n31
medical 14, 127–8, 130, 147–9, 241–4,
273n5, 296n10
home 169, 296n11
abortion quotas 169
abortion rates 19, 99–100, 104,
269–70n14
BOLTANSKI FOETAL 9780745647302 PRINT.indd 317
abortionists 84–6, 266n45, 267n47
doctors 84, 242
attitude to unwanted pregnancy 130,
146–7, 274n6, 279n32
France 267n50, 283n16–17
who performed illegal abortion
85–6, 161, 166, 282n6, 283n16–17
midwives 84, 253n11
abortions, multiple 19, 99–100, 104,
269–70n14
Abramowicz vs. Lefkowitz 171, 284n29
absolutism 179, 181
accidents 277n22
see also pregnancy, accidental
accusation 17–18, 65, 253n11
Achuar people 40
action, giving meaning to 225–30
action, regime of 218
Adam 67, 68, 70
adolescence 109, 112–14
adoption 48–54, 76, 129, 136, 216–17,
220–1, 260n22, 264n22
affectivity 214
auto-affectivity 199–200, 204, 218–19,
231–2, 291n7, 293n21
affirmation 131
Africa 42, 109, 259n12, 259n13, 271n32,
272n36
African-Americans 298n16
alcohol 138, 172, 266n44, 295n5
Alès, Catherine 261n2
Aline 93
ambiguity 23–4, 167–8, 176, 276n20
ambivalence 71–2, 105, 208–10, 294n23
amenorrhoea 70, 71
American Constitution 172, 285n32
ancestors 30, 63, 73, 253n10, 255n34
‘angel-makers’ 85
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The Foetal Condition
animals 15, 179, 182, 183, 189
Anna 108
anorexia 289n190
anthropology 11–38, 244, 247–50,
255n33
Anyi people 43
Aquinas, Thomas 70, 176
Arendt, Hannah 164–5, 254n24,
259–60n18, 289–90n70
Aristotle 70, 155, 200, 254n17, 254n22,
259–60n18
art 18, 21
Association against the Abuse of
Alcoholic Beverages 266n44
attitude to unwanted pregnancy/abortion
148, 204–8, 295n6
doctors 130, 146–7, 274n6, 279n32
men 15, 121–2, 204–5, 211, 226, 227,
229–30
Aubry law (4 July 2001) 147, 169, 241,
242, 268n2, 279n30, 296n10
Aurillac, France 74
Austin, J. L. 293n20
authenticity 101, 119
see also foetuses, authentic
authoritarianism 134, 275n14
authority 47–8, 62–4, 68–9, 93,
260n20
autonomy 132, 172–3, 176, 201
see also freedom
Aymara Indians 253n12
babies, female 53
babies, handicapped 135, 136, 275n15,
276n18
see also abnormality
babies, premature 136, 137–8, 178
babies, wanted see foetuses, authentic
Bachelot, Annie 105
‘bad faith’ 4, 22, 65–6, 78, 226
Bajos, Nathalie 104, 105
baptism 67–8, 72
Bataille, George 50
Bazin, Jean 42
belief in a fiction 75, 78–9, 265n29
Bentham, Jeremy 185
Berque, Augustin 200, 201, 291n10,
292n15
Bible 70
biopolitics 25, 104, 165
biotechnology 2, 132, 135, 136, 137,
142, 151–2, 178, 233
see also foetuses, techno-; reproduction,
medically assisted
birds 35
BOLTANSKI FOETAL 9780745647302 PRINT.indd 318
birth 1, 16–17, 20, 45, 177–8, 179, 188,
215, 254n24, 287–8n51
birth quotas 134
births, multiple 268n4
Blank, Robert H. 139
Bobigny trial 171, 284n28, 284n29,
284n31
bonding 98, 101, 103, 270n16, 270n20
Boswell, John 77
Bourdieu, Pierre 4, 16, 26, 65, 115
Bourg, Dominique 240
Boyle, Mary 188
Brazil 71, 73, 102
breast-feeding 41–2, 258n7, 258n10
Breton, André 228
Britain 78, 264n21
and abortion 76, 84, 85–6, 92, 137,
267n48, 283n21
Brittany 264n21
Buddhism 19
Bydlowski, Monique 223, 294–5n30
Canada 102
Casper, Monica 139
categorization 125–57
Catholicism 86, 162, 186, 264n22,
282n7, 284n31
Cayla, Olivier 144
Cécile 197
censuses 82
Champenois-Rousseau, Bénédicte 129
change, social 178, 190, 289n190
changelings 72–3
childhood mortality 77, 296n9
child-rearing, cost of 262n3
children
and eugenics 82–3, 183
parent–child relationship 95, 103,
270n16, 270n20
socialization of 25–6, 29, 255n32
children, abandoned 77, 103
children, handicapped 72–3, 145, 180,
288n54
see also abnormality
children, wanted see foetuses, authentic
children’s rights 145–6, 175, 176, 177–8,
278n27, 287n44
chimpanzees 32
China 14, 53
Chloé 110, 149, 226
choice 91, 101, 225–6, 234, 243
Choisir association 283n18
cho–ra 200–1, 208, 213, 214, 232,
291–2n10–11, 292n13, 292n15,
292n17
25/02/2013 11:36
Index
Christianity 16, 19, 69, 70, 176–7, 233,
262n6, 298n17
Christin, Olivier 162
Christine 119
citizenship 81, 161, 173, 174, 175, 176,
191, 265n39, 289–90n70
classifications 34–5, 39, 40–1
equivalence class 51, 55, 218–19, 238
social class 26–9, 83, 102, 248, 255n28
cloning 1, 142
closing eyes to 4, 18, 21, 22–3, 65–6, 75,
76, 236, 238
cohabitation 94, 98–9, 100
cohesiveness 30–1, 255–6n36
coincidences 228–9
coitus interruptus 76, 92, 102, 263n18
commitment 94–6, 97, 99, 100–1, 106,
107–8, 208, 220
Communism 89, 134, 265n29, 275n12
comparatist approach 11–14
compensation claims 137, 277n21
‘competition of victims’ 238
compromise 170, 236–7
computers 179, 189
concentration camps 47, 260n19
concubines 77
condemnation 14–16, 17, 19, 69, 74, 88,
162, 295n6
condoms 102, 270–1n26
confirmation
and engendering 61, 66
and fatherhood 62–4, 262n6
and motherhood 45–50, 62–4, 73, 91,
93, 260n24, 261n2
preconfirmation 66–8, 69, 73, 87, 91,
93
and kinship 132, 133
and parental project 96, 106, 110,
132, 140
and religion 67–8, 69
and speech 45–50, 54–5, 61, 66–7
conformation 179
connectionism 97, 98–101
conservatism 132
‘constitutional bloc’ 144, 278n26
constructionism 233
deconstruction 23, 151–7, 187–9, 190,
280n38, 281n39
constructivism 7, 39, 125–57, 257–8n1
contraception 172, 268–9n4–6
contraceptive failure 92, 104–8,
270–1n26
to prevent pregnancy 33, 76, 102, 225,
239, 268n4, 296n9
and stable relationships 115, 120
BOLTANSKI FOETAL 9780745647302 PRINT.indd 319
319
contraceptive techniques see individual
methods
contradiction 4, 5, 22–3, 234–9, 295n2
contrée 200, 201, 213
control, loss of 210
control, will to 199, 202, 204, 214–22,
225, 230–1
Convention on the Rights of the Child
278n27
correspondences 225, 227–30
counselling 121, 155, 166, 221, 223, 241,
242, 243, 273n5, 294n29
counsellors 149
Cour de cassation 42, 277n22
creationism 70
Creator 67, 90, 132–3, 162, 240
criminalization 64, 84, 159, 171, 263n10
and Britain 84, 267n48, 283n21
decriminalization 64, 90, 158–9,
160–4, 166–74, 283n21
and France 84, 87–9, 160, 161, 167,
268n56
recriminalization 239–40
criminals 266n41
culture 11–12, 26, 187, 244, 252n1
women’s 19, 70, 71, 76
cyborgs 278n28
Danièle 197–8
Darbel, Alain 115
Darwinism 86, 187
dates 228, 229, 294–5n30
death see funerary rites; mortality
Declaration of Human Rights 278n27
democracy 190, 290n73
demography 24–5, 134–5, 165, 176, 186,
282n15
see also population control
denial 195, 221
Denmark 266n41
Descola, Philippe 40
desire see control, will to; flesh, will of
the; legitimize, will to
desire, sexual 32, 256n38, 271n29
desire for a child 105–6, 115, 186–7,
205, 207, 208, 294n23
desire to exist 180
destiny of children 225
determination 157, 231
Devereux, George 11–14, 17, 18, 33,
254n19, 258n10
difference 40–1, 246
dignity 76, 141–2, 144–5, 256–7n40,
285n35
disability see abnormality
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The Foetal Condition
discretion 21, 124, 169, 222, 242
see also secrecy
discrimination 290n72
non-discrimination 54, 61, 125, 137,
221, 246
disquietude 195, 203–8, 209, 211, 213,
214, 218, 231, 293n21
distress 167, 168, 169, 195, 209, 284
divorce 95–6, 98, 99, 100
doctors 84, 242
attitude to unwanted pregnancy 130,
146–7, 274n6, 279n32
France 267n50, 283n16–17
who performed illegal abortion 85–6,
161, 166, 282n6, 283n16–17
Dogon people 258–9n11
domestic service 77, 78, 163, 175
domination see power
donation 62–3, 111, 132–3
Dourlen-Rollier, Anne-Marie 88, 282n6
dreams 117, 121–2, 197–8, 212, 292n11
Dreyfus case 285n33
drugs 138, 172, 196–7, 295n5
Duby, Georges 235
Duden, Barbara 280–1n38
Dumézil, Georges 235
Dupont, Florence and Éloi, Thierry 43,
259n16
Durkheim, Émile 3, 11, 224, 234,
255–6n36
Dworkin, Ronald 185, 286–7n43
ecology, political 165, 181–4
economic development 135, 165
economics 106, 186, 221, 224, 226, 227
ecstasy 199
Edelman, Bernard 144, 190
education 81–4, 265n35
Elster, Jon 208, 294n22
emancipation 132, 191, 289n69, 296n9
embryos, ‘pre-embryo’ 130–1
embryos, superfluous 132, 140–2, 157
emotional aspects of pregnancy and
abortion 50, 193–232, 241,
294n29, 296–7n12
see also individual emotions
‘emplotting’ 6, 198, 219
engendering 7, 23–4, 37, 39–59, 63
and confirmation 61, 66
and sexual intercourse 46–7, 65, 67–8,
75–6, 91–2, 191
uncoupling of 33, 61, 245, 248,
297–8n16
spiritualization of 67–8, 71–2
entertainment, sexual intercourse as 33
BOLTANSKI FOETAL 9780745647302 PRINT.indd 320
epidemiology 82, 84, 160
equivalence 51, 55, 218–19, 238
Ernaux, Annie 127, 273n4
Eskimos 42
ethics see morality
eugenics 82, 83, 160, 165, 266n41,
266n44, 267–8n54, 275–6n14–15
eugenic abortion 86, 89, 90, 267n51
and prenatal diagnosis 135, 246–7,
267n51
Europe, Western 73, 78
European Court of Human Rights 137,
277n21
euthanasia 137, 172, 182, 189, 267n51,
276n17
evil 235, 237–8
lesser evil, politics of 168, 169–70,
174, 192, 237–9, 284n26
see also spirits
evolution 180, 187
excuses 224, 226–7, 237–9, 293n20
expectation 71, 116, 120–1
experiential approach 5–6, 230–2
exploitation 175, 188–9, 289n64
Fabienne 195–6, 223
factory workers 77
fairness 236
families 80, 82
blended 99, 269n13
single-parent 74, 99, 100, 108,
264n21
see also kinship
Fascism 89, 134, 145, 165, 275n14
fathers see men; paternity issues
feminism 289n64, 290n73, 297–8n16
and the foetus 173, 192, 193
and support for abortion 92, 158,
161–2, 174, 193, 208, 282n5
Ferrand, Michèle 105
fertility 50, 85, 90, 105, 115, 253n11,
267n49
infertility 90, 215, 298n17
fertility rates 99, 135
fertility rites 90
Festinger, Leon 235
filiation 30, 31, 274n10
Filmer, Robert 175
Fine, Agnès 85
Firestone, Shulamith 289n64
Flandrin, Jean-Louis 68, 75, 79, 263n15,
266n42
flesh, will of the 199, 213–22, 230–1, 232
Florence 110–12, 207
‘foetal euthanasia’ 137, 276n17
25/02/2013 11:36
Index
foetal rights 141–6, 167, 175–8, 184–6,
191–2, 194, 278–9n28–9,
286–7n40–4, 290n71
biotechnology 136, 137, 143
United States 138, 143, 150, 286n40–2
foetal surgery 139
‘foetus in acts’ 157
foetuses
as human beings 20, 132–3, 136, 174
personhood 127, 176–86, 188, 189,
193, 231, 273n3, 274n9, 287n46,
287n49–50
see also foetal rights
level of development/gestation 92, 137,
178, 179, 180, 241, 288n53
and women 184–5, 288n53, 288n58,
288n59
foetuses, authentic 125, 131, 153, 202,
214, 281n39
and techno-foetuses 136, 141, 156
wanted babies 126–7, 128, 129–30,
185–6, 196–8, 213, 224, 232
foetuses, barbarian 126, 132, 133–4,
274n10
foetuses, conservative 126, 132
foetuses, defective see abnormality
foetuses, essentialist 132, 133
foetuses, naturalist 132
foetuses, techno- 126, 136, 139–46, 153,
156–7
see also biotechnology; reproduction,
medically assisted
foetuses, totalitarian 126, 132, 134–5,
275n14, 275n15
foetuses, tumoral 125, 126, 127–31,
185–6
and justice 153, 154, 155, 281n39
and techno-foetuses 136, 140, 141
and will 202, 204, 214, 232
foetuses, unwanted see foetuses,
tumoral
Ford Foundation 135
foundlings see children, abandoned
Fourteenth Amendment 173, 286n40,
286n42
Foyer, Jean 162, 283n22
Fraenkel, Béatrice 255n30
France 2, 77, 102, 140–1, 165, 295n6
abortion rates 19, 99–100, 104,
269–70n14
criminalization of abortion in 84,
87–9, 160, 161, 167, 264n24,
268n56
doctors 267n50, 283n16–17
and eugenic abortion 86, 90
BOLTANSKI FOETAL 9780745647302 PRINT.indd 321
321
and humanization 141, 167, 186–7,
283n20
and illegitimacy 43, 69, 78, 99
and infanticide 42, 264n21, 267n51
legalization of abortion in 92, 161,
162–71, 174, 282n6, 282n7
legislation regarding abortion 102,
144, 172, 239–40, 242–3, 277n22,
282n10, 296n11
Aubry law (4 July 2001) 147, 169,
241, 242, 268n2, 279n30, 296n10
Veil law (1975) 142, 165, 166, 167,
168, 170, 241, 282n7, 283n19
and marriage 98–9, 266n42
and prostitution 74, 263n13, 264n24
and sterilization 90, 102, 266n41,
268n2
and therapeutic abortion 136, 267n50,
276n16
Frank, Johann Peter 266n40
freedom
object of 190–1, 289n69, 289n70
personal 144, 145, 163, 170–1, 172,
174–5
see also liberation
French Academy 47
Freud, Sigmund 186, 235, 291n9
funerary rites 19, 20, 137, 254n19,
276n19
and slavery 43, 259n15
future time 202, 203, 209
Gaia 240–1
Galton, Francis 82
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand
294n24
Gardiner, A. H. 34–5
Garraud amendment 277n22
Gau, Jacques-Antoine 162–3
Gaullists 170–1
Gauthier, Xavière 282n7
gender issues 161–2, 175, 245, 297n15
general practitioners 242
Germany 42, 86, 266n41, 266n44
gestation 1, 16–17, 29, 92, 137, 178, 179,
180, 241, 288n53
Gilligan, Carol 290n73
Ginsburg, Faye 285–6n39, 297–8n16
girls 53, 83–4, 134
Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 170–1, 282n7
Gnosticism 70
God see Creator
Godelier, Maurice 31–2, 33
Goffman, Erving 163, 235, 238
goodness 235–6, 237
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grammatical approach 5, 37, 39–59,
230–2
grandmothers 228, 229–30
Grassin, Marc 137, 276–7n20
Greeks, ancient 14, 69, 259n17
grief 121–2, 221, 223
Griffin, James 287n44
Grimmer, Claude 74, 76–7
Guerreau-Jalabert, Anita 68
guilt 195, 197, 208, 221, 223, 230, 241,
294n29, 296–7n12
Habermas, Jürgen 275–6n15
Hacking, Ian 22–3, 153, 190, 289n190
happiness see plenitude
Hassoun, Jacques 31
health, damage to 89, 268n56
Hegel, Georg 185
hekeshi 18
Helms–Hyde human rights bill 286n40
Henry, Michel 199, 291n6, 291n7,
291n9, 293n21
Herder, Johann Gottfried 156–7
hereditary defects 83, 86, 87, 266n44,
267n51, 267n54
see also abnormality; eugenics
Héritier, Françoise 296n9
history, personal 121, 228, 229–30,
295n31
Hobbes, Thomas 255–6n36
home space 16, 17, 42, 175, 254n17
homosexuality 43, 173, 259n16, 297n15
Hopi Indians 14, 19
Human Relations Area Files 12–13,
252n2
human rights 134, 248, 274–5n11,
283n22
children’s 145–6, 175, 176, 177–8,
278n27, 287n44
foetuses’ 137, 141–6, 150, 175–8,
185–6, 191–2, 277n22,
278–9n28–9, 286–7n40–4, 290n71
non-persons’ 189, 289n65
reproductive rights 145, 275n11
in United States 138, 172, 175, 285n32
women’s 138, 145, 174–5, 189–92,
193, 194, 208, 216, 277n22
human species 146, 179, 257n41,
287n46
humanity 236, 244, 274n9, 278n25
common humanity 57, 145–6, 190,
246–7, 249–50
humanization 53, 154–5
dehumanization 47, 248, 260n19,
298n17
BOLTANSKI FOETAL 9780745647302 PRINT.indd 322
and slavery 28, 53, 155, 191, 248,
259n16, 259n17, 259n18, 260n19,
261n1
and funerary rites 43, 259n15
and kinship 42–4, 47, 258n11,
259n12, 298n17
and speech 40, 41–7, 54–5, 216–17
humanization of foetuses 20, 136, 138–9,
166, 174
France 141, 167, 186–7, 283n20
personhood 176–86, 188, 189, 193,
231, 274n9, 287n46, 287n49,
287n50
and photographs 133, 150, 279–80n34
rights of 137, 141–6, 150, 175–8,
185–6, 191–2, 277n22,
278–9n28–9, 286–7n40–4, 290n71
United States 138, 172, 175, 285n32
Huxley, Aldous 251n1
hypocrisy 65–6, 78, 89, 160
‘I’ 199–200, 202, 203–4, 208, 213–15,
216, 219, 226, 230–2, 293n21
Iacub, Marcela 45, 141–3, 145, 246
identity 26–9, 34–5, 37, 44, 72, 97, 195,
255n30
and kinship 29, 42–3, 49, 73
ignorance see closing eyes to
illegitimacy 15, 43, 73–9, 258–9n11,
264n22
and France 43, 69, 78, 99
see also legitimacy
illness 204, 209–10
incest 15, 17, 19, 31–3, 61, 110, 271n33
India 53
individualism 181, 297–8n16
liberal 144, 163, 170, 173–4, 176,
193–4, 201, 288–9n60, 290–1n3
individuation 28, 31, 32
inequalities 161–2, 175, 190, 245,
289n66, 297n15
infanticide 76, 103, 180–1, 264n23,
287–8n51
and abnormality 53, 276n17
historically and culturally 18, 53, 68,
71–2, 258n5, 258n7, 258n11,
264n21
France 42, 258n10, 264n21
by women 19, 41–2, 261n2
inheritance 20, 73, 81, 265n34, 268n54
insanity 183
INSERM (National Institute for Health
and Medical Research) 105
Institut national d’études démographiques
(INED) 100
25/02/2013 11:36
Index
International Conference on Population
and Development 274–5n11
International Planned Parenthood
Federation 274–5n11
Inuit 53
‘investments in forms’ 238
Isadora 206, 228, 230
Isambert, François-André 171, 266–7n45,
282n15, 283n19
Italy 77
IUDs 102, 270–1n26
Japan 14, 18, 19, 53, 252n6, 291–2n10
Jeanine 92, 118, 128
Jivaro people 15
Joelle 112, 208, 228, 229–30
Jolivet, Muriel 19
jouissance see plenitude
Judaism 69
Julie 95–6
Juliette 207, 228
July 1939 decree 88
justice 56, 168, 218, 235, 249, 281n3
justification 61, 62–4, 153–4, 158–92,
202–3, 220–1, 222–5, 237–8,
293n20
Kabyl people 16
Kant, Immanuel 244, 256n38
Kantorowicz, Erst 44–5
Kappa 18
Karine 209–10, 294n29
Keown, John 85
kidnap 42
killing versus allowing to die 185,
288n59
‘king’s two bodies’ 45
kinship 16, 17, 30–3, 68–9, 73–8, 240
and barbarian foetuses 132, 133–4,
274n10
detachment 176, 290–1n3
and families 80, 82, 101, 110–11,
271–2n33
and identity 29, 42–3, 49, 73
and marriage 30, 60–1, 73–4, 90, 95–6
and state control 69, 80–1, 162, 163–4
see also families
Kitarô, Nishida 291–2n10
knowledge, common 14, 65–6
labour movement 162, 282n5
Lainé, Tony and Lauzun, Gilbert 273n3
language 130–1, 218–19, 274n6, 287n50
Laslett, Peter 78
Latour, Bruno 151
BOLTANSKI FOETAL 9780745647302 PRINT.indd 323
323
Laure 224, 228
legal action 76, 264n24
‘legal fiction’ 44, 155
legalization 1–2, 92, 127–8, 158–74, 239,
245–6
and biotechnology 2, 136, 142, 233
France 92, 161, 162–71, 174, 282n6,
282n7
legislation, abortion 20
Britain 267n48, 283n21
France 144, 172, 239–40, 242–3,
277n22, 282n10, 296n11
Aubry law (4 July 2001) 147, 169,
241, 242, 268n2, 279n30, 296n10
Veil law (1975) 142, 165, 166, 167,
168, 170, 241, 282n7, 283n19
and legitimacy 158–9, 168, 172, 174–7
legitimacy 97
of abortion 21, 124
and biotechnology 132, 233
and human rights 145, 189–92,
208
and legislation 158–9, 168, 172,
174–7
and morality 233, 237–9
of engendering 61, 62–4, 65, 68, 85,
245–6
see also illegitimacy
legitimacy, ‘scientific’ 25
legitimize, will to 199, 202–3, 222
Leila 93, 94–5, 117
Lejeune, Jérôme 274n9
Leridon, Henri 269–70n14
Lévinas, Emmanuel 260n19
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 34, 131, 235,
255–6n36, 257n41, 295n2
liberalization 178, 189–90, 193, 241,
282n15, 283n18
liberation 132, 244, 297n13
see also freedom
Life magazine 149–50
Liliane 118, 149, 227
ling