The Inversion of Exceptionality: Foucault, Agamben, and “Reproductive Rights”

Abstract

Since it has not to date arisen as a question, is it possible to open a debate with Giorgio Agamben concerning the role of women's bodies in the politicization of life? The woman about whom a ruling is passed forbidding an abortion is sometimes figured as a potentially murderous competing sovereign whose self-interest would thwart the intervening motivations of the state concerned with the interests of a threshold life. She is attributed with a pseudo-violent decision that this fetal life is not to be lived. Neither zoē, bios, bare life, nor homo sacer, the fetus is rhetorically and varyingly depicted as all of these, in an imitation of these patterns as they take place around zoē, bios, and the production of bare human life as vulnerable excess to which political life can be reduced. Agamben's analyses illuminate the way in which fetal life can come to be considered, particularly in antiabortion contexts and erroneously as a politicized bare life exposed to sovereign violence. Moreover, women's potential reducibility to naked life intertwines with their reducibility to reproductive life. If the fetus is falsely figured as homo sacer, it might be argued that this simultaneously reduces the woman to a barer, reproductive life exposed to the state's intervention. As she is figured as that which exposes another life, is she herself gripped, exposed, and reduced to barer life?

The Blasphemy of Europe/The Europe of Blasphemy

“…Agamben's distinction can turn the laboratories of cryopreservation into a "zone of contested and intensified political stakes around the threshold between what some would consider 'prelife' and what is to be identified as nascent human life, meaningful human life, and/or rights-bearing life." 17 The contestation about the exceptionality of the healthier embryos is amplified in the manner the neo-liberal market, as the "organizing and regulative principle underlying the state" 18 appropriates the niche of reproductive medicine.…”

The Semiotic Fractures of Vulnerable Bodies: Resistance to the Gendering of Legal Subjects

“…Coming back to the link between mercy and vulnerability highlighted in the previous section, Penelope Deutscher outlines a similar dynamic in abortion laws, where the vulnerable body of the pregnant woman calls forth the mercy of the 'compassionate' sovereign. By intensifying the vulnerability of the pregnant body, one is able to suspend the law that usually criminalises and/or restricts abortion to allow the mother to kill the foetus [26].…”

La maternidad subrogada como laboratorio de la Biopolítica

“…La maternIdad subrogada como una "técnIca" para resoLver un probLema de saLud Una primera forma en que la "maternidad subrogada" aparece (re) presentada en los discursos es como una "técnica de reproducción asistida" que permite resolver problemas de salud como la esterilidad o la inferti-9. Estudios en que se analiza el control de natalidad, el aborto, el diagnóstico fetal y las tecnologías reproductivas desde la óptica de la biopolítica son los siguientes: Mills, 2017;Deutscher, 2008;Chetouani, 1995;Memmi, 2003aMemmi, , 2003bMemmi, , 2006Taïeb, 2009;Angeloff, 2015 , que conserva dicho precepto con el mismo tenor. La "maternidad subrogada" es abordada también en relación con las técnicas de reproducción asistida en las legislaciones de los escasos países de la Unión Europea que la han admitido (Reino Unido, Grecia, Portugal), siempre que motivos de salud impidan a las "madres genéticas" llevar a cabo la gestación o la hagan desaconsejable; y es considerada como una técnica de reproducción asistida en las iniciativas legislativas que en España se han planteado para su legalización 10 .…”