Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics: On the Threshold of the Living Subject

Traditionally, Euroamerican cultures have considered that human status was conferred at the conclusion to childbirth. However, in contemporary Euroamerican biomedicine, law and politics, the living subject is often claimed to pre-exist birth. In this fascinating book Lorna Weir argues that the displacement of birth as the threshold of the living subject began in the 1950s with the novel concept of ‘perinatal mortality’ referring to death of either the foetus or the newborn just prior to, du...