Paper Short Abstract:

This paper aims at situating the viability narrative within representations of the foetus before viability itself, especially with its growth and development. It will do so drawing on interviews where the gestational age limits of Spanish abortion law are discussed with research participants.

Paper Abstract:

Foetal viability represents a crucial issue in social studies of reproduction. Its medical applications and public understanding has well-studied implications for sexual and reproductive health rights (in terms of both access and legislation), as well as on concepts of central interest to social and cultural anthropology: personhood, identity, body, life, and death. However, this paper aims at situating the viability narrative within representations and ideas of the foetus before viability itself. Specifically, with the foetus as an entity whose development and growth is central to its own mode of existence.

This paper draws on the results from the ERC-funded BAR2LEGAB mixed-methods project, on barriers to access legal abortion, as well as travels to seek abortion care, in Europe. The materials are 51 in-depth interviews with Spanish pregnant people, seeking abortion care in Spain, questioned –among other topics – about their opinion on the Spanish abortion law and on the different gestational age limits established in it. Ideas on the morality and legality of abortion, in this context, closely relate to ideas about foetal development. Foetal body features, size, growth, especially seen against the ideal endpoint of the “baby”, are all mobilized to negotiate and discuss legal limits. By analysing these discourses in the frame of different constituencies that come to define knowledge of the foetus, it will be possible to situate the concept of viability in a wider context of representations of foetal development, and explore the links between them.