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Abstract
With the demographic challenges facing many European states, one would perhaps expect the state to invoke a biopolitical imperative to ‘faire vivre’, as Foucault termed it, and attempt to regulate birth rates. This expectation is too simple, however, as this article shows both theoretically and empirically. In order better to understand the possible counterweights to biopolitical concerns about the birth rate, the conceptual distinction between biopolitics and governmentality is useful. Scholarly debates about biopolitics and governmentality have been surprisingly silent on what constitutes the internal relationship between the two or how they may come into conflict. The article elaborates this conceptual distinction and demonstrates its relevance in a genealogy of how fertility treatment has been problematized in Danish assisted reproduction policy. Since access to IVF treatment does not appear to follow a biopolitical imperative to ‘faire vivre’, it is interesting to explore and compare how IVF treatment – and its doctors, patients, and children – has been problematized instead. In a variety of different ways, the biopolitical concern about the low birth rate has been overshadowed by concerns about how to govern. Either the new treatment has been problematized as an unnecessary cover for private or special interests, for instance doctors’ illegitimate attempts to self-govern, or problematization has centered on prospective parents characterized as demanding or selfish. The interface between biopolitics and fertility treatment is thus only understandable with a view to problems of governing and the resulting tension between governmentality and the biopolitical imperative to ‘faire vivre'.
Notes on contributors
Lars Thorup Larsen is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University. His research focuses on health policy, morality politics, the sociology of professions, and governmentality.
ORCID
Lars Thorup Larsen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4100-5425
Notes
1 Denmark has a unicameral parliamentary political system. Although there are many parties (8–13 in this period, i.e. since 1980), government power typically shifts between minority governments led either by the center-left Social Democrats or by the major center-right party (Liberals or Conservatives). As shown in the literature on morality politics (Engeli, Green-Pedersen, and Larsen Citation2012), issues like assisted reproduction deviate from the typical conflict structure in Danish politics, which is either a left–right conflict over economic policy or in recent years also a conflict over immigration policy. As a result, political parties dispense with otherwise strong party discipline and allow individual MPs to vote freely. Unlike other countries, courts have little significance on issues such as assisted reproduction, and the Danish Council of Ethics similarly has no decision-making powers. Because there are many parties with confusing and often counterintuitive names, I refer to them only by their official (and current) name in English. E.g. the party Venstre is termed the Liberal Party or Liberals (Folketinget Citation2015), irrespective of whether their policy positions can be characterized as liberal ideologically. To simplify, I also use terms like ‘the left wing’ to characterize all center-left and far-left parties together, even though it varies whether individual parties define themselves in this conventional classification.
2 The 1953 report did, however, formalize the expression ‘artificial impregnation’ (kunstig befrugtning) as the generic term for assisted reproduction used in Danish legislation until very recently. Being understood as artificial rather than simply as assisted underlines the general skepticism against the technique, i.e. as an unnatural and perhaps even unnecessary cover for something else.
3 The only exception is the minuscule party the Christian Democrats (in Parliament during 1973–94 and 1998–2005). Although unable to achieve any of their goals for restrictive legislation on abortion and embryo legislation, the Christian Democrats did persuade the health minister (Holberg, of the Liberal Party) to include this pro-life preamble. The Minister allegedly expected the left-wing parties to remove the preamble during parliamentary negotiations (Øhrstrøm Citation2007, 62–3; interview w. Margrete Auken). They did not and indirectly let the Council of Ethics be built on a pro-life platform without revisiting their stand on abortion.
4 Private and public funding for fertility treatment had of course been discussed before this point, but only after it was allowed for all groups has this become the main conflict. It is worth adding that a private market of fertility clinics existed alongside the public ones all along, because access to fertility treatment in the public system was always conditional upon age, existing children, and number of failed attempts.