Technics over life: risk, ethics and the existential condition in high-tech antenatal care

Abstract

The subject of this paper is the problem of selective abortion brought about by advanced techniques of foetal diagnosis. The issue of abortion today is analysed as an outcome and illustration of the emerging ‘vital politics’. The paper explores the technicality of this new form of bio-power, and the ethical practice and forms of subjectivity it imposes. Two main points are raised. First, it is argued that the implementation of state-of-the-art foetal diagnosis in clinical practice and maternity care is underlain by the rationales of control and experimentation. The ideas of risk and the dividual are introduced as the epistemic cornerstones of this practice of high-tech reproductive medicine according to the above rationales. Second, the paper argues that foetal diagnosis in antenatal care is characterised by an ethical split. This emerges when the machinery of reproductive health care withdraws into a position of technical responsibility and leaves the choice, and the ethical responsibility, concerning medical operations (selective abortion, in particular) to the pregnant woman. This suggests that high-tech biomedicine tends to individualise risks and to impose a form of ethical individuality characterised by the demand for reflexivity through personal risk assessment, producing the anxiety generated by existential responsibility.