Life giving resources. Faithfully delivered.
FREE delivery on orders over £10
Serving over 2 million Christians in the UK
with Bibles, Books and Church Supplies
Our Buy-Now-Pay-Later accounts used
by over 4,000 UK Churches & Schools
Excellent 4.8 out of 5

Trustpilot

You now have 0 of this item in your basket

Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics

On the Threshold of the Living Subject [Paperback]

by Lorna Weir

Author
Lorna Weir
Book Format
Paperback / softback
Publisher
Taylor& Francis Ltd
Published
July 2006

Read full description

Click to expand

Today's Price

£65.95

Free UK Delivery

Available - Usually dispatched within 4 days

Buying for a school or church? Upgrade to a FREE Eden Advance Account

Enter the product quantity

Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics

Today's Price £65.95

Frequently Bought Together

Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics

by Lorna Weir

Paperback

That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation

by David Bentley Hart

Paperback

Add both to basket for £77.46

Product Description

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, during or after birth. Weir's book gives a new feminist approach to pregnancy in advanced modernity focusing on the governance of population. She traces the introduction of the perinatal threshold into child welfare and tort law through expert testimony on foetal risk, sketching the clash at law between the birth and perinatal thresholds of the living subject. Her book makes original empirical and theoretical contributions to the history of the present (Foucauldian research), feminism, and social studies of risk, and she conceptualizes a new historical focus for the history of the present: the threshold of the living subject.Calling attention to the significance of population politics, especially the reduction of infant mortality, for the unsettling of the birth threshold, this book argues that risk techniques are heterogeneous, contested with expertise, and plural in their political effects. Interview research with midwives shows their critical relation to using risk assessment in clinical practice. An original and accessible study, this book will be of great interest to students and researchers across many disciplines.