Terminating pregnancies, grieving lives ? - The remaking of death at the beginning of life, in the welfare state of Denmark

Abstract

In 2017 the Danish health authorities published an information leaflet to pregnant women that accepted the offer of free prenatal screening in week 12 and 19. In the leaflet the Association of Infant Death, is the only organization designated to provide counselling to those expecting parents, that after a prenatal screening had their fetus diagnosed with a malformation. Pointing to only the one organization that focuses on bereavement of infant death, the presumption in the text is that the diagnosis will lead to a second trimester abortion, and the death of the fetus/child is perceived as infant death. The perception of the fetus or child as a life that simultaneously can be ended and grieved, may seem surprising in lieu of abortion controversies around the world. This made us ask:How does the prenatal screening program initiated by the Danish Welfare State impact the remaking of death at the beginning of life, and what biopolitics are involved in the practices of abortions and grieve?

Drawing methodologically on Donna Haraway’s notion of the imploded knot we follow how the fetus/child emerge from the diagnosis takes place, the abortion is granted in the Danish abortion council, during the abortion, and right after the induced birth has taken place. To unpack this we include observations, interviews, legal regulations, medical guidelines, media stories, as well as information material. In Charis Thompsons words, this takes place as an ontological choreography, as the fetus/child first is perceived as a pregnancy to be ended, and following becomes a dead child to be grieved. At the same time as we tell this narrative, we also unpack how prenatal screening technologies and biopolitics of the Danish State are entangled by discourses on disability, grief and perceptions of women’s reproductive bodies.

Bio:

Stine Willum Adrian is an Associate Professor in sociology of health, welfare and qualitative methods at Department of the Social Sciences at UiT- The Arctic University of Norway. Adrian is a sociologist by training and holds a PhD in feminist STS and cultural analysis. Adrian’s work has always been interdisciplinary joining ethnography of medical technologies with cultural analysis, ethics and law. Her research interests lie in questions concerning, reproductive technology, technologies of death and dying at the beginning of life, gender, intersectionality, feminist materialisms, the entanglement of technologies and ethics, and ethnographic and qualitative methods. Adrian has previously done several comprehensive ethnographic studies on fertility clinics and sperm banks in Denmark and Sweden looking at IVF, insemination, fertility travelling, cryo-technologies, sperm banking, sperm depositing, and she is currently engaged in researching technologies of death and dying at the beginning of life.

Lien zoom : https://unil.zoom.us/j/5325862929