Reproducing Narrative

This work is a collection of reproductive discourses. It analyzes the 19th-century campaign to criminalize abortion and considers the female subject positions constructed within the debates around the Abortion Act of 1967, the Alton Bill 1987 and the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act 1990.

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This work is a collection of reproductive discourses. The author claims these discourses exist as one of the many sites or technologies through which gender is constructed. The primary narrative focuses on gender and the author argues that within reproductive discourses and practice there are strong narratives of gender - narratives that may be read as representing a "social relation". The secondary narrative concerns medical power and the relationship between these two narratives. It begins in part one with an analysis of the 19th-centry campaign to criminalize abortion, locating the campaign within the context of the occupational assertion of medicine, its transition from occupation to profession. To highlight the role of gender within these discourses, medical opposition to abortion is juxtaposed with medical opposition to female higher education. The discursive patterns regarding gender highlighted in part one are reconsidered in part two in considering elements of the English abortion debate in the latter half of the 20th century.
The author considers the female subject positions constructed within the Parliamentary debates around the Abortion Act of 1967, the Alton Bill 1987, and section 37 of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act 1990. Part three extends the analysis of industrial foetal protection policies. The development of corporate policies and legislation broadcast is aimed at the exclusion of women from toxic workplaces on the basis of perceived foetal vulnerability is open to analysis.