This is a draft essay to be published as Mills, Catherine. 2015.

Resisting Biopolitics, Resisting

Freedom: Prenatal Testing and Choice. In Stephen Wilmer and Audrone Zukauskaite, eds.
Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political and Performative Strategies, Routledge. It has
not yet been proof-read. For citational purposes, please see the final publication.

Resisting Biopolitics, Resisting Freedom: Prenatal Testing and Choice  

Catherine Mills

Monash University

Within the context of biopower, what would resistance be? Is it possible to say

clearly what is on the side of resistance, and what is on the side of biopower? That the

notion of freedom can itself be mobilized as a modern liberal or neoliberal biopolitical

technique makes this question especially perplexing, for then the exercise of freedom

entangles one further in the very structures that it may ordinarily be understood to

challenge. As Nikolas Rose (2007, 67) argues, freedom is an artefact of government;

he writes, “[f]reedom has been an objective of government, freedom has been an

instrument or means of government, freedom has inspired the invention of a variety of

technologies of governing”. As Rose insists, though, this does not mean that freedom

is thereby illusory, or nothing more than a governmental technique that only reveals

the depths of oppression. Instead, it points to the possibility of different kinds of

freedom, or more specifically, to the possibility of practicing freedom differently. If

this is right, then it is worth examining in more detail the contours of freedom as a

mechanism of both resistance and reiteration, of liberation and entrapment, in the

context of modern biopower. In this essay I want to initiate an enquiry into the ways

that notions of individual freedom operate in the context of human reproduction, the

management of which I take to be a key axis of biopower. 1

 In contemporary practices and politics of reproduction, the principle of individual

liberty or freedom has come to hold sway over public policy debates, as well as the

moral decision-making that prospective parents and medical practitioners engage in

throughout pregnancy care. Freedom here is most consistently rendered in the terms

of individual or parental choice, and the imperative of reducing external interference

in that choice. I examine this apparatus of choice as it operates in regards to prenatal

testing, since this is a central aspect of almost all pregnancies in developed countries,

and increasingly also in developing countries. Further, prenatal testing is inseparable

from decisions about selective termination, which are essentially biopolitical

decisions about who comes into the world and who does not. As feminist and

disability scholars have often pointed out, prenatal testing technologies such as

amniocentesis and obstetric ultrasound are central to processes of medical

normalization in prenatal care (eg. Katz Rothman 1993; Rapp 2000; Tremain 2006).

Foucault’s writings on normalization have thus been significant for analysing the

social operation of prenatal technologies. However, what has remained somewhat

obscure is the relation between medical normalization and the apparatus of choice as

it operates in relation to prenatal testing in particular and reproductive decision-

making more generally. In illuminating this relation, I also try to bring out a different

ethos for the formulation and framing of choice.

Biopower and Reproduction

The concept of biopower first received significant articulation in Foucault’s work in

his 1976 lectures, later published under the title Society Must Be Defended (2003).

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The most influential statement of what Foucault sought to indicate by this term,

though, is his lapidary revision of this lecture included in Will to Knowledge (1990)

under the subtitle, “Right of Death and Power over Life”. In both these discussions,

Foucault contrasts biopower with the regime of sovereignty that it came to supplant,

and differentiates between a disciplinary power that operates at the level of the

individual body, and a biopolitics that concerns itself with the new political subject of

the population, or “man-as-a-species” (2003, 243). The notion of bio-power therefore

combines the earlier work on disciplinary power with a new form of power that

Foucault identifies as bio-politics. Thus, in Will to Knowledge, Foucault (Foucault

1990, 138) writes that “the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a

power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death”. He goes on to argue that this

new life-administering power emerged in two basic forms, beginning from the late

17th century and extending through to the 19th: discipline and biopolitics of

population. These two forms of power operate as the poles of biopower, where one

focuses on the body in order to individualize and manipulate its forces, and the other

is “centred not upon the body but upon life”, in which “bodies are replaced by general

biological processes” (Foucault 2003, 249). These two poles, Foucault insists, are tied

together through a “whole intermediary cluster of relations” at the level not of

speculative discourse but of “concrete arrangements that would go to make up the

great technology of power in the nineteenth century” (Foucault 1990, 140).

One of the principle mechanisms that tied these two poles together was, in

Foucault’s view, the deployment of sexuality. Sexuality, Foucault argues, emerged in

the nineteenth century as one of the most significant vectors of the new formation of

power because of its “privileged position […] between organism and population,

between the body and general phenomena” (2003, 252). He writes, “[i]t was at the

3
pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire political technology of life”,

tied both to the intensification and subjugation of the forces of the individual body in

discipline and applied to populations because of its consequences (1990, 145). “Sex

was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species” (1990,

146). Foucault argues that while sovereign power had prioritized the blood relation as

one of its fundamental values, the regime of biopower that emerged in the 18th and

19th century focused instead on sexuality. This shift of focus entailed the emergence

of a congeries of concepts such as heredity, progeny, degeneracy and perversion,

within which sexuality was not a symbol of power, but its object and target. Foucault

is careful to note, though, that the transition from a society of blood to one of

sexuality was not a distinct rupture, but entailed a series of “overlappings, interactions

and echoes” (1990, 149). Given this shift, however, Foucault’s fundamental point in

Will to Knowledge is that rather than discourse about sex and sexuality being

repressed in the Victorian age, it was continuously produced and incited, requiring

infinitesimal detail and giving rise to constant anxiety.

In the initial reception of Will to Knowledge, it is interesting that matters of

perversion took priority over the other foci of regulation that Foucault identified,

probably largely because queer theorists led the way in recognizing the importance of

Foucault’s text for modern sexual politics. But this has come at the cost of obscuring

other aspects of Foucault’s analysis, aspects that are now being highlighted in

feminist scholarship on the biopolitics of reproduction (Deutscher 2008; 2012).

Reproduction was a central political and social problem in the contexts of the social

transformations of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as increasing urbanism, the

decline of the aristocracy, the emergence of capital and the reproduction of the labor

force, and imperial colonialism. In his analysis of the deployment of sexuality,

4
Foucault identifies the “socialization of procreative behavior” as one of the “four

great strategic unities” that formed the mechanisms of a power focused on sex (1990,

103-4). This socialization took place, Foucault argues,

via all the incitements and restrictions, the “social” and fiscal measures brought
to bear on the fertility of couples: a political socialization achieved through the
“responsibilization” of couples with regard to the social body as a whole (which
had to be limited or on the contrary reinvigorated), and a medical socialization
carried out by attributing a pathogenic value – for the individual and the species –
to birth-control practices (1990, 104-5).

Foucault goes on to argue that the family unit was significant in the deployment of

sexuality, for it is “the interchange of sexuality and alliance: it conveys the law and

the juridical dimension in the deployment of sexuality; and it conveys the economy of

pleasure and the intensity of sensations in the regime of alliance” (1990, 108).

Of course, the management of life through reproduction in biopower has

transformed since the 18th and 19th centuries that Foucault focused on. While this

transformation is impossible to map in any detail here, several interconnected

characteristics or trends stand out as significant within reproductive biopolitics today.

Since the postwar period of the 20th century, reproduction has been subject to an

ever-increasing technologization and a correlative commercialization, both of which

take place against the backdrop of the expansion of neoliberalism and the dismantling

of the welfare state. The technologization of pregnancy predates the clinical

emergence of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the late 1970s, but IVF permits ever-

greater technological penetration into the processes of human reproduction (see

Franklin 2013). The capacity to stimulate conception outside a woman’s body and

keep an embryo ex utero for very early stages of its development has not only made it

possible for technological interventions such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis to

5
become an increasingly routine aspect of clinical reality, but has allowed for – and

required – increasing ranges of choices to be made by prospective parents.

Furthermore, the externalization of reproductive processes is intimately related to the

commercialization of human reproduction. It has permitted the development of vast

international markets in reproductive material such as gametes, and ultimately, in the

products of reproduction in commercial gestational surrogacy (see Spar 2006;

Murphy 2012; Almeling 2011). This trend of commercialization has also seen IVF

companies listed on the stock exchange: in 2013, Virtus Health was listed on the

Australian Securities Exchange, soon followed by the Monash IVF Group in 2014.

In the context of these transformations of human reproduction and its

management in the 20th and early 21st century, individual freedom has become the

preeminent moral value and guiding politico-legal principle. While the eugenics

typical of 19th and early 20th century biopolitics involved state regulation of

reproduction – ranging from enforced sterilization to prevent the birth of those

deemed unfit to their outright murder (in the Nazi T4 program for instance) – this is

no longer the predominant mode of biopolitical management. Rather, today

individuals themselves are responsible for the enactment of biopolitics in

reproduction. Foucault saw this trend emerging in the 19th century, where the family

was integral to a “political socialization achieved through the ‘responsibilization’ of

couples with regard to the social body as a whole” (Foucault 1990, 104-5). Thus, if

late 20th century biopolitics involves a “flexible eugenics” (Taussig, Rapp and Heath

2005) enacted through individual decision-making, this is not entirely new. But the

extent of this individual responsibilization is probably unprecedented.

This kind of individualized responsibility is evident in contemporary bioethics

discourse for instance. Bioethical approaches to reproduction often insist on the

6
preeminent value of reproductive freedom, while also elaborating the obligation on

the part of parents to have the best child possible, or at least take measures to avoid

the birth of the abnormal or anomalous. In general, in this context, individual freedom

is understood as a matter of non-interference; the principle of reproductive freedom or

liberty requires that neither institutions, such as the state, nor other people limit the

exercise of individual freedom, except in circumstances where choices would result in

harm to others. Even more prosaically, it is understood as being permitted or enabled

to make one’s own choices in regards to reproduction. Given this, how might we

think about individual choice in the context of contemporary biopower?

Normalizing Reproduction

While arguing that sexuality held a privileged position in regards to the individual

body and the population, Foucault also goes on to identify another element that

circulates between these two poles of biopower: norms. Foucault gives a central role

to norms and normalization as the principal form of social and political regulation,

suggesting at one point that “[a] normalizing society is the historical outcome of a

technology of power centred on life” (Foucault 1990, 144). While always maintaining

this centrality of norms, across his discussions of normalization in various texts,

Foucault nevertheless presented various accounts of the specific role and operation of

normalization within biopower. For instance, in Discipline and Punish, he suggests

that disciplinary techniques such as norms have “swarmed” from their originating

institutions, such as the prison, to take over the entire social field (Foucault 1977). In

Society Must Be Defended, though, he rejects this as “a first and inadequate

7
interpretation” and argues instead that “[t]he normalizing society is a society in which

the norm of discipline and the norm of regulation intersect along an orthogonal

articulation” (Foucault 2003, 253). Later, Foucault refines his view to suggest that

normalization works in opposing ways in discipline and a biopolitics of population.

In the former, infractions of the norm are produced as a consequence of the

application of the norm understood as an idealization; this means that the phenomenal

particularity of an individual is identified and calibrated through the application of an

ideal. Consequently, as Foucault states (Foucault 1977, 184), normalization produces

individuals as the necessary mode and counterpart of the operation of norms, that is,

as a material artefact of power. In a biopolitics of population, Foucault suggests that

norms are mobilized in exactly the opposite way, insofar as “the normal comes first

and the norm is deduced from it” (2007, 63). Biopolitics of populations and the

apparatuses of security that Foucault identifies as crucial to it, involve:

a plotting of the normal and the abnormal, of different curves of normality,

and the operation of normalization consists in establishing an interplay

between these different distributions of normality and [in] acting to bring the

most unfavorable into line with the most favorable (Foucault 2007, 63).

This is a more strictly statistical concept of the norm, in which the norm is derived

from empirical phenomena though it may not be strictly identifiable with any

particular empirical being.

In light of this, how might we understand prenatal testing, which assays the fetus

and, where diverges from norms are found, requires reproducing agents to decide on

the continued existence or otherwise of that fetus? To what extent is Foucault’s

8
account of normalization in biopower helpful for understanding the operation and

social effect of prenatal testing? And can his work guide us in understanding possible

modes of resistance to fetal normalization? To address these questions, I focus on the

technology of obstetric ultrasound, since it is a kind of “frontline” of normalization,

acting as a threshold technology that either provides reassurance of normality on the

one hand, or identifies possible and actual malformation and shunts prospective

parents into channels for further normalization and potential elimination of the fetus.

It is, I think, a particularly interesting technology since it operates in a context of

inherent epistemic uncertainty and calculation of risk, while being simultaneously

bound to moral and affective economies that shape the very experience of pregnancy,

and thus, the lives of women. In its mobilization as a prenatal screening technology,

obstetric ultrasound is, to use the helpful phrase proposed by Timothy O’Leary (2010,

172), an “apparatus of experience”.

While I think there are various ways in which ultrasound may be construed as a

biopolitical technology, one of these is the way in which it contributes to and is

integrated within the normalization of the fetus. However, ultrasound is not obviously

a disciplinary measure as conceived by Foucault, in that it does not entail the

application of an idealized conception of the normal to the fetal body – there is no

ideal fetus from which actual fetuses depart in varying degrees. Rather, ultrasound

relies upon detailed measurements derived from actual fetuses, which allow for the

perception of a more or less flexible normal range for a variety of indicators. For

example, the Australasian Society for Ultrasound Medicine (ASUM), which is one of

the main professional bodies for the regulation of obstetric ultrasound practice in

Australia and which provides guidelines for clinical use of ultrasound in obstetric

care, has generated a policy document called the “Statement on Normal Ultrasonic

9
Fetal Measurements” (ASUM, 2001). This document sets out charts for fetal

measurements based on the Australian population, for use in the reporting of obstetric

measurements in Australia and New Zealand. The charts are the outcome of 11,600

measurements of fetal parameters across 3,800 pregnancies. They include normal

range measurements for head circumference, abdominal circumference, femur length

and biparietal diameter, to name a few. Clearly, this is more in line with the operation

of normalization in a biopolitics of populations, wherein the norm is derived

statistically from pre-existent bodies. To be sure, there is a sense in which the

application of the norm thus derived reveals a phenomenal particularity in the manner

suggested by discipline – but the norm in this formation is supposed to be ideal only

in the sense of being a statistically identified ‘empirical ideal’.

Further, ultrasound necessarily operates within a context of the medical

management of risk and uncertainty on the one hand, and the political management of

population wellbeing on the other. For instance, in Australia, one of the main –

though certainly not the only – tasks of the first trimester scan is to contribute to the

generation of a risk calculation for the likelihood of a fetus having Down Syndrome.

This is done through the measurement of the nuchal fold at the back of the fetus’

neck, which is subsequently combined with maternal age and blood results to generate

a risk assessment. Note that this test is not diagnostic – it cannot say definitively

whether the fetus has Down Syndrome, but can only track certain markers for it and

give an indication of likelihood. If the risk calculation yielded for any particular fetus

is sufficiently high – typically, a greater than 1 in 300 chance – then further diagnostic

testing may be recommended. This particular cut-off point trades off various factors

such as detection rates, false positive rates and economic costs (Schwennesen and

Koch 2012, 290), to arrive at a way of distributing access to health resources that

10
strives to track, if not limit, the appearance of the abnormal within a population. Both

the individual woman and the population are asked to live with a certain risk of

abnormality in the context of the distribution of limited health resources, but when

that risk is deemed too high, further intervention may be required. The reification of

this particular ratio means, though, that it becomes naturalized and the medico-

political calculation behind it is almost entirely obscured.

Importantly, the norms that underpin ultrasound practice do not in themselves

require the eradication of the abnormal. Rather, the eradication of the abnormal points

not to an intrinsic aspect of norms so much as to their location and operation within

moral and affective economies of the normal. What makes normalization especially

dangerous is what Eva Kittay (2006) has identified as the “desire for the normal”. For

Kittay, norms that are simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive are analytically

desirable, whereas purely descriptive statistical norms become the basis of social

norms and institutions that enforce distinctions between the functionally valuable and

devalued. Further, following Canguilhem, Kittay speculates that even mere statistical

frequency ultimately appears as an expression of value, insofar as it means that a trait

is normative within a particular kind of life. This point links the norm with

conceptions of health and wellbeing, and more generally, with ideas about the good

life. Oftentimes, the eradication of the abnormal, or even anomalous, is justified not

by the need to maintain or protect the normal, but by concerns that deviation from the

normal will undermine prospects of wellbeing and the capacity to live a good life, that

is, to flourish. In this way, concerns about biological normality are made inextricable

from concerns about ways of living well.

This brings to the fore difficult issues about the confluence of individual desires

for the normal with the biopolitical structuration of reproductive choice. It seems

11
reasonable to suppose that prospective parents using prenatal testing technologies are

not typically making decisions based on biopolitical notions of what is good for the

social body; rather, their interest lies in ensuring the wellbeing of their own future

child (though this is not to say that this is their only interest). Nevertheless, the

structuration of choice in the context of normalization means that the aggregation of

individual choices coincides with biopolitical aims, such as those of ensuring

population wellbeing. Further, the confluence of conceptions of wellbeing and the

normal make such decisions unavoidably biopolitical. Several quick points can be

made here. First, this suggests that the salient issue is not simply the choices made by

any given individual or couple, but the “meanings and cultural tensions of the choices

made available by the increasing number and routinization of prenatal testing” (Press

2000, 217; emphasis added). Second, there is also the matter of the various subtle

ways that particular “choice architectures” foster certain attitudes, decisions and

actions, while denying or rendering others improbable if not impossible (Thaler and

Sunstein 2008).2 Finally, as Nancy Press (2000, 225-7) outlines, people may hold

quite contradictory beliefs about the desirability of the normal and notions of

wellbeing. For instance, they may simultaneously hold positive (often romanticized)

notions of disability conditions such as Down Syndrome when considered in general,

but be distressed by the prospect of their own child being diagnosed with the

condition in prenatal testing. These points reveal a complex nexus of affect, ethics and

normalization surrounding the apparatus of choice in individualized biopolitics. A

detailed analysis of this nexus is beyond the scope of this essay, but it clearly provides

productive material for further investigation of the ways in which biopower operates

today. Rather than extending this analysis here, though, let me return to the original

question of resistance.

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 Resisting Reproductive Choice?

Given this context, how might one think about resisting biopolitics? What is it about

biopolitics that warrants “resistance”, and what would resistance look like? These

questions are difficult to respond to in a context that involves desires for the future

wellbeing of (possible) others, where wellbeing has become tied in various ways to

conceptions of the normal, as well as longstanding political struggles over the scope

of women’s freedom, overwhelmingly figured in reproduction in terms of

autonomous choice. Foucault was clear that the possibility of resistance was intrinsic

to relations of power, since otherwise, such relations would constitute domination

rather than power per se. Power relations, he insisted, required a degree of freedom

for those involved in them in order to be considered power relations. Further, in a

brief reflection upon efforts to resist the management of life in biopolitics, he argues

that such efforts relied upon the very thing in which that power was invested, that is,

“on life and man as a living being” (Foucault 1990, 144). This, he suggests, is the

case even if those struggles against biopolitics were cast in terms of rights, such as the

right to health and to self-expression for example. While it would not be desirable, or

perhaps even possible, to specify models of resistance to reproductive biopolitics, the

relation between life and power may point toward a kind of desideratum for a new

approach to prenatal testing in the context of reproductive biopolitics.

I argued in the previous section that the notion of reproductive freedom is

itself harnessed to the biopolitical management of life through the responsibilization

of individuals in reproductive choice. Individual choice then becomes the matrix

13
through which the desire for the normal is channelled, and through which the excise

of the abnormal itself becomes increasingly normal. However, it would be too hasty

to suppose that as individual choice is part of the operation of biopolitics in

reproduction, it should therefore be constrained or eliminated. For one, the notion of

choice has been central to feminist efforts in regards to the politics of reproduction,

and its mere rejection would entirely miss the important ways that the mobilization of

this notion has contributed to achieving gender justice. Further, a simple rejection of

choice would align too easily with anti-abortion campaigns that seek to restrict

reproductive freedom. What appears to be required, then, is a continued commitment

to freedom, but one that insists that freedom be practiced differently than in choices

that align with hegemonic norms and conceptions of health and wellbeing, that is,

with the normal. Interestingly, there is evidence to suggest that women who choose

not to undertake prenatal testing or to not terminate their pregnancy when fetal

malformations are detected often find themselves at odds with the institutions of

normalization (see for example, Tankard Reist 2006). This is not to say that these

decisions should necessarily be taken as models of resistance to biopolitical

normalization – though they might constitute possible forms of such resistance. More

particularly, though, there is something in the spirit of these choices that may point

toward a different practice of reproductive freedom.

Two paths for interpreting matters of resistance to biopolitics that may have

some bearing on prenatal testing emerge in Foucault’s work – the first evident in

Foucault’s interpretation of the work of Georges Canguilhem, and the second hinted

at in a comment by Canguilhem on the development of Foucault’s work. In his essay

on Canguilhem, Foucault argues that at the center of the problems which preoccupy

Canguilhem resides “a chance occurrence […] like a disturbance in the informative

14
system, something like a ‘mistake’”, in short, “error”; Foucault states, “life – and this

is its radical feature – is that which is capable of error” (Foucault 1998, 476).He goes

on to suggest that, for Canguilhem, the errancy internal to life proves to be the radical

contingency around which the history of life and the development of human beings

are twined. Further, Foucault locates error at the centre of the relation of life and

knowledge as understood by Canguilhem; he writes,

if one grants that the concept is the reply that life itself has given to that
chance process, one must agree that error is the root of what produces human
thought and its history. The opposition of the true and the false, the values
that are attributed to the one and the other, the power effects that different
societies and different institutions link to that division – all this may be
nothing but the most belated response to that possibility of error inherent in
life (Foucault 1998, 476).

Thus, it is through the notion of error that life is placed in a relation of contiguity and

contingency with truth and structures within which it is told. “Error”, or the inherent

capacity of life to “err”, both establishes the relation of life to truth and undermines

that relation by disentangling man from the structures of truth and power that respond

to the potential for error. Hence, “with man, life has led to a living being that is never

completely in the right place, that is destined to ‘err’ and to be ‘wrong’” (Foucault

1998, 476).

In terms of considering resistance in the context of prenatal testing, there is a

sense in which this particular view brings out the intrinsically recalcitrant aspect of

life insofar as it continually produces errors in the face of normalization.

Normalization does not ultimately override the errancy of life, and the continual

production of error ensures that life constantly escapes or exceeds the techniques that

govern and administer it (Foucault 1990, 143). However, while this may be so, the

15
continual production of error also ensures the continued enforcement of

normalization. It is because life is subject to errancy that systems of normalization

attain their apparent justification and appeal. Indeed, as I have suggested elsewhere,

biopolitics thus appears as the modern response to the vital possibility of error (Mills

Forthcoming; 2013, 89). Furthermore, while some theorists have attempted to

interpret Canguilhem’s valorization of error within the socio-political sphere, it is

difficult to see just how it would provide a model for, or even yield insight into,

political resistance. For here, it seems that what is at stake is not simply the inherent

errancy of life, but the response to that errancy. Can the response to error be anything

other than a modality of biopower? Must such a response take the form of

normalization? Or, how might one respond to errancy other than through desire for

the normal?

This leads us to the second approach to resistance, which plays on the ambiguity

of the concept of life to locate resistance in bios, or particular forms of life, rather

than in biological life itself. In considering the tendency to posit a conceptual break

between the two “stages” of the History of Sexuality series, Canguilhem was

prompted to comment, “[i]t was normal, in the properly axiological sense, that

Foucault would undertake the elaboration of an ethics. In the face of normalization

and against it, Le Souci de soi” (1997, 32). According to Canguilhem, the project of

the later volumes of History of Sexuality did not present so much a rupture from

earlier work, but its “completion, precipitated, perhaps, by a premonitory anxiety”.

This positing of a more or less strict continuity in the conceptual concerns that

Foucault was working with is worth considering for a moment, for it is not

immediately obvious what Canguilhem means in his comments. First, the axiological

sense that Canguilhem wants to emphasize brings to the fore the way that a study of

16
ethics is logically an extension of the study of normalization – it is part and parcel of

the study of norms and of value. But Canguilhem also says more than this. About

what is Foucault supposedly anxious, for instance? In what sense is an ethics “in the

face of normalization and against it”? Here, Canguilhem appears to be indicating that

the particular formulation of ethics that Foucault offers may be seen as a working out

of a form of resistance to normalization. Various versions of this interpretation have

been common in commentary on Foucault’s work, but I think at the least we can say

that it is not the whole story.

For one, with the view that a consideration of ethics is an axiological extension of

the study of normalization in mind, there are at least two moments or modalities at

issue in the ethics of the self that Foucault proposes. First, an ethics of the self

involves the integration of norms that one finds in one’s culture into one’s own ethical

subjectivity. Thus, it may explain the ways that norms and values – such as the value

of individual freedom, for instance – are taken up and made the object of ethical

experience, that is, how they are integrated into one’s own becoming as an ethical

subject. In short, even as a biopolitical technique, freedom has normative force;

indeed, “the force of individual freedom as a moral norm is inseparable from it being

a norm of subjection” (Mills 2011, 50). Second, though, Foucault does seem at times

to be reaching for an understanding of how those same norms might be dislodged,

lived differently, suspended or even transformed. In this way, the ethics of the self

understood as a practice of freedom can also be seen as moving toward a freedom that

is not already delimited by the norms of political and moral liberalism and the version

of individual freedom offered therein. His work gestures, at times, to a different way

of practicing freedom. In the context of homosexual relations, Foucault pointed

toward the possibility of friendship as a model for practicing freedom differently.

17
There is, however, no good reason to suppose that the same way of practicing

freedom will constitute resistance in different contexts or across various domains.

Prenatal testing and reproductive choice require yet another way of practicing

freedom.

This could take the form of a freedom based on an ethos of fostering a certain

spirit of uncertainty, a willingness to embrace errancy and the surprise of the other

that attends it. This suggests the ethico-political importance of an ethics of the self

that embraces the chance event, the unpredictability of errancy, and responds to error

with an openness to alterity. To be clear, this does not have to equate to the kind of

“ethics of the gift” proposed by the communitarian, Michael Sandel, in his critique of

the expansion of reproductive choice through genetic technologies. Sandel (2007, 45)

argues that an ethics of the gift is enlivened by the “openness to the unbidden” as

outlined by theologian, William F. May. He writes, “[t]o appreciate children as gifts is

to accept them as they come, not as objects of our design, or products of our will, or

instruments of our ambition.” The problem with this argument is that it too readily

yields to an anti-abortion politics, in that prospective parents are obliged to simply

accept whatever comes. However, there are often good reasons to terminate a

pregnancy on the basis of fetal malformation, and there are different ways in which

such decisions can be made. Instead, then, I have in mind an ethos enlivened by the

recognition that the lives of others are not determined by the calculations of

normalization, that subjectivity exceeds such calculability by virtue of singularity,

that who one is cannot be determined by what one is deemed to be.

To conclude, I have tried to throw light on the relation between normalization

and freedom understood as choice as they are mobilized within contemporary

reproductive practices. I have argued that the apparatus of choice plays a significant

18
role in reproductive biopolitics, and that focusing on this reveals a complex nexus of

affect, ethics and normalization at work in regards to prenatal testing. Rather than

reject the apparatus of choice on the basis of its implication within the operation of

biopower, though, I have suggested that a desideratum for resistance to normalization

in prenatal testing would be an ethos that embraces vital errancy and the surprise of

the other that it entails. It must be noted, though, that these reflections are necessarily

limited and preliminary. Considerable analysis – both conceptual and empirical – is

still required to illuminate the politics and ethics of choice in reproductive biopower

today.

19
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1
The research for this chapter has been supported by funding from the Australian
Research Council (DP110100752).
2
Note that I do not wish to endorse the ideas of nudging or the doctrine of liberal
paternalism, simply the insight that choices are shaped, often less than consciously, by
the contexts in which they are made.

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