The Foetal Condition: A Sociology of Engendering and Abortion

Abortion is a contentious issue in social life but it has rarelybeen subjected to careful scrutiny in the social sciences. Whilethe legalization of abortion has brought it into the public domain,it still remains a sensitive topic in many cultures, often hiddenfrom view and rarely spoken about, consigned to a shadowyexistence. Drawing on reports gathered from hospital settings and in-depthinterviews with women who have had abortions, Luc Boltanski setsout to explain the ambiguous status of this social practice.Abortion, he argues, has to remain in the shadows, for it reveals acontradiction at the heart of the social contract: the principle ofthe uniqueness of beings conflicts with the postulate of theirreplaceable nature, a postulate without which no society wouldachieve demographic renewal. This leads Boltanski to explore the way human beings areengendered and to analyze the symbolic constraints that presideover their entry into society. What makes a human being is not thefoetus as such, ensconced within the body, but rather the processby which it is taken up symbolically in speech - that is, itssymbolic adoption. But this symbolic adoption presupposes thepossibility of discriminating among embryos that areindistinguishable. For society, and sometimes for individuals, thearbitrary character of this discrimination is hard to tolerate. Thecontradiction is made bearable, Boltanski shows, by a grammaticalcategorization: the “project” foetus - adopted by itsparents, who use speech to welcome the new being and give it a name- is juxtaposed to the “tumoral” foetus, an accidentalembryo that will not be the object of a life-forming project. Bringing together grammar, narrations of life experience and anhistorical perspective, this highly original book sheds fresh lighton a social phenomenon that is widely practised but poorlyunderstood.