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Biopolitics at the Beginning of Life

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Biopolitics at the Beginning of Life EPILOGUE BIOPOLITICS AT THE BEGINNING OF LIFE The Foucauldian model of biopower emphasizes the context of modernity in which the human body has become a target and means of political strategies named biopol- itics. According to Foucault, medicine (like sexuality) serves as a hinge between the level of the private body of individuals and the body of the population or the species, both of which are policed, supervised and examined for their condition and its improvement and protection. Thus, medicine polices private bodies at the same time it regulates populations (Prainsack, 2004). This Foucauldian model has been extended and updated by different writers. For example, Nikolas Rose (2001) contends that the by now classical Foucauldian terms, are no longer relevant to “advanced liberal societies” for different reasons. Among them is the claim that biopolitics can no longer be framed in terms of the “fitness of the nation” because the care for health has been individualized. A good example is the case of reproductive genetics which is no longer coerced by the state. Rather, individual patients are expected to make “autonomous decisions” as part of their self-governance according to medical norms. Likewise Rose contends that nowadays biopolitics is driven by economic forces, a process which leads to the breaking down of traditional classi- fications between cure and enhancement (a good example is plastic surgery) and between commodities and that which is human (an apposite example is selling and buying human organs). Thus, contemporary biopolitics according to Rose disputes the value to be accorded to “life itself”, the “quality of life”, the “right to life” and so on. Likewise Giorgio Agamben (1998) claims that the fundamental biopolitical structure of modernity is the sovereign’s decision on the value or non value of life as such in different social spaces. According to him what is unique about modern politics is not merely its inclusion of the human body in the polis, but rather the fact that the hidden foundation upon which the entire political system rests is “at once excluding bare life from and capturing it within the political order” (p. 9). Whereas Foucault speaks about the management of life, Agamben speaks of the “state of exception” in which death and life interface each other. Thus, it is exactly the valorization and politicization of life that is characteristic of modernity, which inevitably implies a locus where life ceases to be politically relevant and becomes “bare life”, or the life of what he terms “homo sacer”, the person whose life can be eliminated without punishment or killed but not murdered or sacrificed. His paradigmatic example for such life, or for such a state of exception, is the life of those imprisoned in concentration camps. In the realm of medicine, the ability to manipulate the material of life through contemporary technologies has destabilized the very notion of life itself (Rabinow, 1992, 1996). Equally, the dramatic rise in the medical ability to sustain the life 147 148 EPILOGUE of the genetically abnormal, combined with the even newer ability to detect these “lives” in-uterus and hence, to prevent them, has created a social need for new definitions of “life”. However, this need has not been widely met by a comparative point of view that is sensitive to cultural differences and their interaction with contemporary technologies.1 Building on former theories concerning biopolitics and understanding repro- ductive genetics as being especially fit to be understood as a tool for deciding about the value or non value of prospected life, or as a locus for dispute about the value of “life itself” (see also Sawicki, 1999), I contend that the theories of Foucault, Rose and Agamben, with all their differences and similarities, and despite their acknowledgment that “life” is not merely a biological/scientific concept, are blind to differences between cultures. They do not draw our attention to the fact that biopower, namely the power of modern societies over life (and following Agamben, over death), manifests itself in different ways in various modern nations. Thus, claiming that former theories of biopower/biopolitics are limited in allowing a culturally-specific understanding of the workings of this power, in this book I aimed to provide a nuanced and “culturally sensitive” application of the concept of biopolitics/biopower. Thus I pointed to its cultural designation and claimed that biopower is more accurately described as dependant upon vernacular interpreta- tions of the concept of “life” itself, which dialectically constructs biopower and is regulated by it. Thus, the objective of this study has been to pursue a focused analysis of genetic reproductive technologies in Israel and Germany and their relation to local under- standings of the notion of “life”, with a special emphasis on the hegemonic concep- tualization and metaphorization of the beginning of “life”. The central questions of this study concerning the communities in question, had thus become; When does life begin? How wide is the border between pre- and postnatal life? When is life understood to be (un)worthy of living and thus, what is the purpose of life and how legitimate is the technological manipulation of life itself? Studying these questions I have claimed that the concept of “life”, and conse- quently its entitlement (or non entitlement) for care and protection, is organized according to hegemonic cultural perceptions concerning the human natural purpose, the moral standing of fetuses, society’s alleged interests, the hopes and dangers embodied in science and technology and the ideal relationship between human generations. In the following, I attempt to summarize my findings concerning the unique biopolitics of the beginning of life characteristic of the present societies in Israel and Germany. Supporting the different uses of reproductive genetic technology in Germany and Israel, this study described a matrix of social, cultural, legal, historical, 1 More comparative work has been done on end of life decisions. See for example Lock’s discussion of the concept of brain death in Japan and the US (Lock, 2002). For a comparative discussion of fetus’ personhood see Gross, 1999 and Conklin and Morgan (1996). For a comparative disussion of the quality versus the sanctity of life in the context of euthanasia, see Cohen-Almagor and Shmueli (2000). BIOPOLITICS AT THE BEGINNING OF LIFE 149 and political differences, which conditioned the formation of the two different medical-genetic fields studied. The following section points to these differences, without placing them in an hierarchical or temporal order, since this study has consistently claimed and demonstrated that cultural and theological repertoires feed the medical, legal and political systems and vice versa, in an inseparable manner. This also explains why the themes represented in the following section partly intertwine and overlap. LIFE AND ITS DISTINCT CULTURAL MEANINGS The Major Differences between contemporary Israeli and German societies, relevant to the practice of reproductive genetics and to their biopolitics of the beginning of life, can be summarized along the lines of six different themes: the importance of fertility, the moral standing of the fetus, images of the ideal relationship between generations, the notion of wrongful life, eugenic history and its lingering effects, as well as attitudes towards science and technology and their ability to manipulate “life itself”. Firstly, In Israel fertility is greatly valued and Israel’s total fertility rates are high compared to all other “advanced liberal societies” (Berkovitch, 1999; Fogiel- Bijaoui, 1999). Common explanations for this include identification with the collective goal of fighting the “demographic threat” and Arab enemies (Yuval- Davis, 1987), the threat of losing a child in war or in a terrorist attack, Jewish genocide during the holocaust (and the consequent wish to replace the dead) and Jewish tradition (Kahn, 2000), in which parenthood is an important moral command and infertility is treated as a severe disability (Marx, 2002). Consequently, NRTs are very popular and strongly supported by the state (Haelyon, 2004; Kahn, 2000). Additionally, and much like in the rest of the advanced world, pregnancy is intensely medicalized in Israel (Remennick, 2000; Sered, 2000). In contrast, Germany’s total fertility rates are among the lowest in the world and German society is often referred to by its own citizens as hostile towards children (Keller, Zach and Abels, 2005). Remaining childless (or rather choosing to stay “childfree”) is considered a legitimate personal choice in Germany, as there exists no “fertility craze”. Furthermore, while the German decline in fertility is widely understood to threaten the economy, it is not perceived as threatening the existence of the German state in its present political form (Moeller, 1993). Thus, although pregnancy is obviously also medicalized in Germany, reproductive medicine is not very “fashionable”. In fact, a lot of NRTs are prohibited and this does not raise social protest. Secondly, both the legal system in Israel and Jewish doctrine understand life to begin after birth, since fetuses are perceived as parts of their mothers with no autonomous rights (Amir, forthcoming; Gross, 1999; Jakobovits, 1967; Morag- Levine, 1994; Steinberg, 1991; Yishai, 1993). On the other hand, in Germany embryos (as well as pre-embryos) are perceived as individuals holding autonomous
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