On Abortion and Biopolitics

Well, it’s happened: Roe V. Wade has been overturned. 15 states have abortion bans ready to go into effect, with many making no exception for rape or incest (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/abortion-laws-roe-v-wade.html ); others have enacted restrictions that in practice will pretty much ban the practice (many restrict abortion to before 6 weeks of pregnancy, when most people don’t yet know that they are pregnant). In response to Justice Alito’s leaked draft of this decision earlier in the year, many pointed out contradictions in the so-called pro-life position:

There is very little support for children and families once a child is actually born (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/09/republicans-scramble-pretend-they-care-women-children/).

Our childcare system is deeply broken. While Republicans have begun to acknowledge the problem, they have no concrete plans to fund any changes (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/upshot/child-care-republicans-democrats.html).

The US has woefully inadequate Family Leave policies compared to other countries (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/upshot/child-care-republicans-democrats.html).

The Build Better Back bill that would have provided greater economic support for the poor failed miserably (https://www.vox.com/2022/3/16/22955410/build-back-better-scenarios).

All of these problems effect women of color and poor women most (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2022/05/09/the-war-on-abortion-drugs-will-be-just-as-racist-and-classist/).

Little attention is being paid to the health effects on pregnant people when abortion is not a legal option (https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/abortion-restrictions-health-implications/).

These examples suggest that the “pro-life” movement is not so much focused on promoting life as such: the lives of pregnant people, of the poor, of women of color, and of children themselves seem to take a back seat to the lives of fetuses. (And that’s not to mention the Supreme Court’s recent decision overturning New York’s gun restrictions, which would enable even more school shootings than we have seen recently.) How is it possible to pro-life and yet not? I want to suggest that Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower can help make sense of these seeming contradictions.

In Security, Territory, Population Foucault describes biopower as a form of power aimed at administering and managing “life.” Biopower is, he says, “the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die,” which he distinguishes from the sovereign (monarchical) form of power that preceded it, the power of taking life or letting live. The goal of this form of power becomes managing the health, safety, and security of society overall, with a focus on the flourishing of the popular overall rather than on any individual member thereof. We became concerned with things like birth and death rates, birth control use, sexual behaviors and practices (teen pregnancy rates, for instance), public hygiene, disease rates, and trajectories, etc. The goal is to promote a flourishing, well-managed society that is efficient and productive through “state control of the biological.”

To promote health and safety requires managing and perhaps eliminating risks and threats to them, both internal and external; these threats, too, are understood in biological terms. Consider the rise of eugenics: if the population is to be healthy, then threats to its health must be identified and managed. Individuals who are considered mentally or physically “deficient” on this view pose a threat to the overall health of the population, because of their lack of contribution to society overall, their need to be cared for by others, and because they may perpetuate their deficiencies by passing them on to the next generation. Hence the move to regulate the reproductive capacity of different subpopulations: women of color, poor women, and women who were considered to be mentally disabled were subject to forced sterilization by the state until fairly recently; men convicted of sex crimes are still subject to forced castration in some states in the US. The justification of these practices is not that they benefit the recipients, but that society overall benefits from having fewer poor people and people with mental deficiencies or physical differences. Thus, preventing these individuals from reproducing benefits society overall, even if doing so tramples on their rights as citizens. The threat posed by these individuals is seen as biological, rather than, say, moral. If one is seen as morally deficient and hence as a certain threat to others—being a bad influence, etc.—then education may be the proper response. If one is seen as biologically deficient, however, then there is no possibility for redemption—one’s nature determines one’s lived possibilities. If one is incapable of being otherwise than a drain on the social body, then the only “solution” is containment or elimination. A healthy, secure population, then, requires monitoring and surveilling various subpopulations as internal threats to that health. This monitoring, containing, and in some cases killing, of subpopulations is what Foucault terms state racism:

What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer.

As the “wrong” people should not be allowed to reproduce lest they poison the genetic pool, so the “right” people should be encouraged (perhaps required?) to reproduce, which ensures that the gene pool remains robust, healthy, and, well, white.

It becomes difficult on this analysis not to see abortion bans as part of the reemergence of an unapologetic racism. Such racism requires white, middle-class women to make babies to save the nation from increasing racial and cultural diversity, even if it means giving up the hard-won gains of the past 50 years or so. The same system, on the other hand, punishes women of color and poor women for making babies, perpetuating cycles of poverty that maintain unjust social hierarchies by refusing state aid for poor families, by refusing to reform a broken health care system that makes giving birth unaffordable, by keeping childcare and education costs out of reach, all of which contributes to ongoing poverty. While abortion bans will not directly kill poor women and women of color, they will do so indirectly: the US has the highest maternal mortality rate among “developed” nations, with higher rates among women of color. (I also wouldn’t be at all surprised if arguments for forced sterilization were to rear their ugly heads on the back of this decision.)

It makes sense to see abortion bans not as being about saving the lives of “unborn babies,” but rather as mechanisms for managing women’s reproduction to further the goals of a eugenicist, white supremacist state.

Further reading:

Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended,” Lecture at the College de France, March 17, 1976, pp.74-75. In Biopolitics: A Reader, edited by Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).

Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978 (Picador Press, 2009).

Judith Jarvis Thompson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1971 (reprinted in many places!).

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, McClelland and Stewart, 1985.

Rosalyn Diprose and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, Arendt, Natality, and Biopolitics: Toward Democratic Plurality and Reproductive Justice, Edinburgh University Press, 2019.