Biopower and Reproductive Loss

Abstract

Extensive research indicates that mothers in particular grieve a variety of losses – miscarriage, stillbirth, ectopic pregnancy, induced abortions, newborn deaths – at all gestational stages, yet often find their grief invalidated. In turn, the lack of support or affirmation of these grief responses can be experienced as an exacerbation of the initial impact of death. This painful social silence that parents have expressed as part of their reproductive loss serves as the foundation for this paper, which explores both the strategic silences and discourses in the network of knowledges constituting reproductive loss in an era of biopower. The first section of the paper outlines the (bio)medicalization of the pregnant-unborn body, tracing this process through the deployment of sexuality that socialized fertility and the female body in the early eighteenth century. The second section discusses the responsibilization of the pregnant-unborn body through the technology of risk. Here I show how death infuses the discourse of state intervention in mortality rates, but as a strategic silence mobilizing the ethics of responsibility while never revealing the limits of biopower or the state's promise to foster, protect and enhance life. The third section turns to two discursive strategies tying the pregnant body and the foetal body in relation of responsibility: antenatal care and the reduction of perinatal mortality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western societies. These serve as more specific illustrations of how reproductive loss is taken up in politics of risk that remains in the biomedical understanding of pregnancy and childbirth today. I conclude with some reflections on the intercorporeality of becoming-unborn and becoming-death, connecting the struggle of parents bereaved by reproductive loss with a broader struggle to move beyond the biomedical control of life and death in an era of biopower.