Abortion is a contentious issue in social life but
it has rarely been subjected to careful scrutiny in the
social sciences. While the legalization of abortion has
brought it into the public domain, it still remains a
sensitive topic in many cultures, often hidden from view
and rarely spoken about, consigned to a shadowy
existence. Drawing on reports gathered from hospital
settings and in–depth interviews with women who have had
abortions, Luc Boltanski sets out to explain the
ambiguous status of this social practice. Abortion, he
argues, has to remain in the shadows, for it reveals a
contradiction at the heart of the social contract: the
principle of the uniqueness of beings conflicts with the
postulate of their replaceable nature, a postulate
without which no society would achieve demographic
renewal. This leads Boltanski to explore the way human
beings are engendered and to analyze the symbolic
constraints that preside over their entry into society.
What makes a human being is not the foetus as such,
ensconced within the body, but rather the process by
which it is taken up symbolically in speech – that is,
its symbolic adoption. But this symbolic adoption
presupposes the possibility of discriminating among
embryos that are indistinguishable. For society, and
sometimes for individuals, the arbitrary character of
this discrimination is hard to tolerate. The
contradiction is made bearable, Boltanski shows, by a
grammatical categorization: the “project” foetus –
adopted by its parents, who use speech to welcome the
new being and give it a name – is juxtaposed to the
“tumoral” foetus, an accidental embryo that will not be
the object of a life–forming project. Bringing together
grammar, narrations of life experience and an historical
perspective, this highly original book sheds fresh light
on a social phenomenon that is widely practised but
poorly understood.
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